Texas

Replica of the 1690 Mission San Francisco de los Tejas constructed in 1935 by the Civilian Conservation Corps and located in the Mission Tejas State Park. A building in a wooded area, constructed of logs and mortar with a small steeple with a cross mounted on it.

11 February 2022

The name Texas comes from the Caddo word /táyšʔ/ meaning friend, ally. The terminal /s/ in the Spanish and English spelling represents the Spanish plural. The name was applied by the Spanish to the people of the Hasinai Confederacy, a Caddo-speaking nation, when the Spanish founded the Mission San Francisco de los Tejas near what is now Weches, Texas in 1690.

Other indigenous people who dwelled in what is now Texas prior to European contact included the Alabama, Apache, Atakapan, Bidai, Aranama, Comanche, Choctaw, Coushatta, Jumano, Karankawa, Kickapoo, Kiowa, Tonkawa, and Wichita.

The Spanish began exploring and claiming what is now Texas starting in 1528, but permanent European settlement did not begin until the closing years of the seventeenth century. Mexico, including Texas, gained independence from Spain in 1821. In 1836, Texas seceded from Mexico, and after a brief period of independence became the twenty-eighth state of the United States in 1845.

The earliest use of the name Texas that I have found in an English-language text is in a 1759 translation of Miguel Venegas’s A Natural and Civil History of California. The use here, however, is not yet Anglicized:

It is true, that this was in some measures impeded by two conquests, which the government of Mexico had undertaken with great vigour: the first was the garrison of Panzacola, on the Gulf of Mexico, in the province of Florida [...] The second was that of the province of Los Tezas, lying North of New Mexico, in 95 degrees west longitude, or in 265 eastern longitude, from the same common meridian; and in 38 degrees north latitude. In the first conquest, above a million of dollars was expended in the 1700, only Panzacola might not fall into the hands of other nations. Great advantages were also expected from the conquest of Los Texas, which was carried on without any regard to the expence.

The name is fully Anglicized by the end of the eighteenth century. For example, Texas appears in Jedidiah Morse’s 1797 The American Gazetteer, both on a frontispieces map and in an entry for San Antonio:

ANTONIO, ST. a town in New-Mexico, on the W. side of Rio Bravo River, below St. Gregoria. Also, the name of a town on the river Hondo, which falls into the Gulf of Mexico, N.E. of Rio de Brava; and on the eastern side of the river, S. by W. from Texas.

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Sources:

Bright, William. Native American Placenames of the United States. Norman: U of Oklahoma Press, 2004.

Everett-Heath, John. Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Place Names, sixth ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2020. Oxfordreference.com.

Morse, Jedidiah. The American Gazetteer. Boston: S. Hall, et al. 1797. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Venegas, Miguel. A Natural and Civil History of California, vol. 1 of 2. London: James Rivington and James Fletcher, 1759, 275–76. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Photo credit: Larry D. Moore, 2014. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

phony / phoney

Image of the Phony War at the start of WWII in Europe from September 1939 to May 1940 when there was little actually fighting on the western front. Two British soldiers sitting beside two French airmen outside a dugout labeled “10 Downing Street.”

10 February 2022

Phony, also commonly spelled phoney, means something not genuine, a fake, a sham. It is an Americanism, dating to the end of the nineteenth century, but it has its origin in the Irish fáin(n)e, meaning ring, as in a piece of jewelry.

The journey from jewelry to a false article is by way of a confidence game, the fawney-rig, that started to be practiced in the late eighteenth century. George Parker’s 1781 A View of Society and Manners in High and Low Life describes the scam:

THE FAWNEY RIG.

A RING-DROPPER; a fellow has gotten a woman’s pocket, with a scissars [sic], some thread, a thimble, and a housewife with a ring in it, which he drops for some credulous person to pick up.

As soon as he has got some gudgeon to bite at his hook and to pick up his pocket, he claims halves for being present, and they begin to examine it.

The Fawney says, “I dare say some poor woman has lost her pocket. Good gracious! here’s a ring, and her wedding-ring too, for here’s a poesy;” then reads, “Love me and leave me not,” or some such thing.

He then comes the stale story of, “If you will give me eight or nine shillings for my share, you shall have the whole.”

If you accede to this and swallow his bait, you have the ring and pocket, worth about sixpence; for tho’ the ring itself cost as much, yet the intrinsic value of it is not a halfpenny.

Queer as this rig may appear, there is a large shop in London were these kind of rings are sold, for the purpose of going on the Fawney.

Someone who practiced this con might also be called a fawney-dropper or fawney-bouncer.

The shift to the <ph-> spelling occurred when the word crossed the Atlantic. As a name for the confidence game, the term did not gain a purchase on American soil, but the more general sense of not genuine or fake did. Phony, in the sense we know it today, is clearly in place by the 1890s, but there are a few ambiguous early uses.

The OED has a citation from an 1862 US Civil War letter that reads:

They keep skirmishing along the line. I will tell you of a phoney scrape and also a serious one, too.

But phoney here may be a variant spelling of funny.

Another ambiguous use is from the Detroit Plaindealer of 4 April 1890, in an article telling of two telephone operators who were married to each other over the telephone. The phoney marriage is clearly a play on telephone, but what is not clear is whether the sense of not genuine is also there as half of a double entendre:

Minnie Worley, aged 22, Telephone Exchange operator at South Bend, and Frank Middleton, aged 25, in a like position at Michigan City, became acquainted over the wires during their night watches. Finally Middleton proposed in fun that they get married by telephone, and Minnie consented. A Michigan City justice was called in and performed a legal ceremony, but without the necessary state license. It was passed off as quite a “phoney” joke; but it grows serious, when eminent legal council pronounce it valid and that Justice Dibble who performed the ceremony is liable to imprisonment for doing so without the necessary license.

But there is an unambiguous use of phony in a description of a baseball game in Washington, DC’s Evening Star of 7 May 1892:

Chamberlain’s home run that won the 7 to 2 game for the Cinncinnatis from Washington was a little on the phony order. Ordinarily it would have been a rattling good single, but Donovan, in left, knew that a single meant a run, and he took a dying chance to get it. He jumped forward to get it upon the fly, but it hit right in front of him and went on clear down to the hand ball court and four runs were scored.

That’s the genuine origin.

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Sources:

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2022, s.v. phoney, n.1.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2006, s.v. phoney, adj. and n.; second edition, 1989, s.v. fawney, n.

“Quite ‘Phoney.’” Plaindealer (Detroit), 4 April 1890, 2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Parker, George. A View of Society and Manners in High and Low Life, vol. 2. London: 1781, 166–67. Eighteenth Century Collections Online.

“Weekly Ball Talk.” Evening Star (Washington, DC), 7 May 1892, 12. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Photo credit: Geoffrey Keating, War Office photographer, 28 November 1939. Imperial War Museum (IWM O 344). Public domain image.

Iowa

Detail of an 1844 map of Iowa

9 February 2022

Iowa originally referred to an Indigenous people who spoke Chiwere, a Siouan language. The name was applied to the Iowa River and subsequently to the surrounding territory. The origin of the name Iowa is uncertain, but like the names of many North American Indigenous peoples, it was probably first applied to them by outsiders and then adopted by the people themselves. It may come from ayúba, meaning sleepy ones in the Santee Dakota, another Siouan dialect, or it may come from an Algonquian form such as the Miami-Illinois /aayohoowia/. The Iowa people today often use the spelling Ioway in reference to themselves to differentiate themselves from the state, although their official name remains Iowa.

The first Europeans to explore the area that is now the state of Iowa were Louis Jolliet and Jacques Marquette in 1673. Originally claimed by France, the territory was ceded to Spain in 1762 by the Treaty of Fontainebleau following the end of hostilities in the French and Indian War. France regained the territory from Spain in the 1800 Treaty of San Ildefonso, in which Napoleon traded territory in Tuscany for Louisiana—Napoleon was trying to re-establish French power in North America. But following the collapse of the French attempt to re-establish control of what had been the economic powerhouse of French colonies in the Americas, Saint-Domingue (Haiti), Napoleon sold Louisiana to the United States in 1803. The United States formally established the territory of Iowa in 1838, and it became the twenty-ninth state in 1846.

The name Iowa appears in English in 1797 as the name of the Iowa River. From Jedidiah Morse’s The American Gazetteer of that year:

IOWA, a river of Louisiana, which runs south-eastward into the Mishiippi, in N. lat. 41° 5´, 61 miles above the Iowa Rapids, where the E. side of the river is the Lower Iowa Town, which 20 years ago could furnish 300 warriors. The Upper Iowa Town is about 15 miles below the mouth of the river, also on the E. side of the Missisippi, and could formerly furnish 400 warriors.

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Sources:

“About Us.” The Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska. Accessed 31 December 2021.

Bright, William. Native American Placenames of the United States. Norman: U of Oklahoma Press, 2004, s.v. Iowa.

Everett-Heath, John. Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Place Names, sixth ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2020, s.v. Iowa. Oxfordreference.com.

Morse, Jedidiah. The American Gazetteer. Boston: S. Hall and Thomas and Andrews, 1797, s.v. Iowa. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Image credit: J. Calvin Smith (John Calvin), 1844. Library of Congress. Public domain image.

peloton / platoon

A peloton of bicyclists. A pack of cyclists on a leg of the 2005 Tour de France. Lance Armstrong is in the center of the photo, wearing the yellow jersey. Armstrong would win the tour, his seventh victory in the race, only to later have the title stripped from him because of doping.

8 February 2022

A platoon is a small unit of soldiers. In early English use, it referred to a detachment of musketeers that could be used to strengthen weak points in a defense, but in current use platoon refers to an infantry unit, which in the US Army consists of about thirty-five soldiers, divided into three squads, and led by a lieutenant. In non-infantry units, a platoon is a similarly sized unit; an artillery platoon, for example, might consist of three howitzers and their crews, and an armor platoon might consist of four tanks and their crews.

Like many military terms, platoon comes into English from French, specifically the French peloton, literally meaning a little ball. The literal sense of peloton appears in Middle French by 1417, and by 1572 the variant ploton was being used to refer to a unit of soldiers, a small “ball” of soldiers. Both forms were borrowed into English, and ploton was further transformed into platoon.

Platoon, with the spelling platton, appears in English by 1547 when Edward Seymour, lord protector of England during the minority of his nephew King Edward VI, used it in a description of military organization:

These Squadrons make up a Brigade, to be drawn up as followeth, viz. Ten Corporalships of Musqueteers being 34 Rots, divided into five Plattons, every Platton being nine or so in front, led by a Major, and every division by a sufficient Commander.

The platoon spelling is in place by the beginning of the eighteenth century when it, along with peloton, appears in a 1702 military dictionary:

Platoon, or rather Peloton. A small square Body of Musketiers, such as is us’d to be drawn out of a Batallion of Foot, when they form the hollow Square to strengthen the Angles. The Granadiers are generally thus posted. Peloton is the French Word, from which we took it, and the vulgar corruption has brought it to be pronounc’d Platoon.

Military use of peloton faded away in favor of platoon, but the French word was reintroduced into English via the world of cycling, where it refers to the main pack of cyclists in a race, a metaphorical “ball” of racers. This use appears by 1893 when it is used in a description of a bicycle race in Paris:

No sooner, however, had the pacemakers, Girardot and Willaume on their tandem, taken the lead, than the pace was quickened, and Stéphane, Huzelstein, and Lumsden led the “peloton” round the third lap in 31 1-5sec.

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Sources:

“Cycling in Paris.” New York Herald (European Edition, Paris), 25 September 1893, 3. Gale Primary Sources: International Herald Tribune Historical Archive, 1887–2013.

A Military Dictionary. Explaining All Difficult Terms in Martial Discipline, Fortification, and Gunnery. London: J. Nutt, 1702, s.v. platoon. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2005, s.v. peloton, n.; June 2006, platoon, n.

Seymour, Edward (1547). In David Lloyd. State-Worthies, or, the States-Men and Favourites of England Since the Reformation. London: Thomas Milbourne for Samuel Speed, 1670, 174. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Photo credit: anonymous photographer, 2005. Public domain photo.

Jersey / New Jersey

A cranberry harvest in New Jersey. Men standing waist-deep in a cranberry bog loading cranberries onto a conveyer belt.

7 February 2022

“Old” Jersey is one of the Channel Islands, a crown dependency of the United Kingdom. A Roman text titled Antonine Itinerary (c. third century CE) dubbed it Caesarea, but the current name comes from Old Norse, Geirr + ey (Geirr’s island). The Norse name is recorded as early as c.1025. The name has had various spellings over the centuries, including Gersoi, Jersoi, and Gerseie.

The state of New Jersey in the United States is named for the Channel Island. The state forms the bulk of the territory known as Lenapehoking (land of the Lenape people). The Lenape were the Indigenous inhabitants of the territory at the time of European colonization. Decimated by diseases brought by Europeans and with the land claimed, often duplicitously, by European settlers, most of the Lenape had been driven from New Jersey by the eighteenth century, although some remain on the land to this day.

In 1638, the Swedes were the first Europeans to colonize what is now New Jersey, settling along the Delaware River as far north as what is now Camden and Philadelphia. The Dutch took control of the colony of New Sweden in 1655 and incorporated it into their colony of New Netherland. The English took control of New Netherland in 1664. The Dutch briefly regained control in 1673 but lost it again to the English the following year.

In 1664, Charles II granted the territory of what had been New Netherland to his brother, the Duke of York, who would later become King James II. The duke subdivided the territory of New Jersey and granted proprietorship of the eastern half to George Carteret and the western half to John Berkeley. The name New Jersey was chosen because Jersey had been both the birthplace of Carteret and the place where Charles II, then in exile, had been proclaimed king following the regicide of his father, Charles I, in 1649.

The 1664 grant to Carteret and Berkeley reads (the spelling here may have been modernized, but I have been unable to locate a facsimile of the original to check):

Now this Indenture witnesseth, that his said Royal Highness James Duke of York in hand paid by the aid John Lord Berkley and Sir George Carteret, before the sealing and delivery of these presents, the receipt whereof the said James Duke of York, doth hereby acknowledge, and thereof doth acquit and discharge the said John Lord Berkley and Sir George Carteret forever by these presents hath granted, bargained, sold, released and confirmed, and by these presents doth grant, bargain, sell, release and confirm unto the said John Lord Berkley and Sir George Carteret, their heirs and assigns for ever, all that tract of land adjacent to New England, and lying and being to the westward of Long Island, and Manhitas Island and bounded on the east part by the main sea, and part by Hudson's river, and hath upon the west Delaware bay or river, and extendeth southward to the main ocean as far as Cape May at the mouth of the Delaware bay; and to the northward as far as the northermost branch of the said bay or river of Delaware, which is forty-one degrees and forty minutes of latitude, and crosseth over thence in a strait line to Hudson's river in forty-one degrees of latitude; which said tract of land is hereafter to be called by the name or names of New Caeserea or New Jersey: and also all rivers, mines, mineralls, woods, fishings, hawking, hunting, and fowling, and all other royalties, profits, commodities, and hereditaments whatever, to the said lands and premises belonging or in any wise appertaining

The name Jersey is also used attributively for items associated with the Channel Island and with the US state. The island was famed for its cloth production, and Jersey worsted wool was a thing. From Phillip Stubbes Anatomie of Abuses, a 1583 tract complaining about the popular culture of the era and the “kids these days”:

Then haue they nether-stocks to these gay hosen, not of cloth (though neuer so fine) for that is thought to base, but of Iarnsey worsted, silk, thred and such like, or els at the least of the finest yarn yt can be.

And in the nineteenth century, Jersey worsted gave its name to the tunic often worn by athletes. From an 1837 translation of Aristophanes’s The Knights:

But though you saw poor People here
     Was old, and weak, and pursey,
And had no flannel-waistcoat, ne’er
     Have you given him a jersey
In winter-time.—Come, pocket it!
     Here is the thing I mention.
[Presents a woollen under-waistcoat to PEOPLE, who takes off his coat, and puts it on with signs of great satisfaction.

And Jersey cattle are a breed of dairy cow originally bred on the island. From the 1843 Guide to Jersey and Guernsey:

The English reader need scarcely be told in what great estimation the Jersey Cows and Heifers are held. They are better known in England as Alderney cows, but they are mostly sent from Jersey—the former island exports comparatively few;—they are, however, of a similar character. The Guernsey cow, though good of its kind, is altogether a different animal. The Jersey cow is small and slender in its make, with short crumpled horns, having a resemblance to the finest formed Ayrshire cows; the Guernsey is larger, more like the mixed Devonshire and Holderness: the former gives by far the richer milk, the latter the larger quantity

A Jersey barrier. A concrete road barrier, wide at the bottom and tapering to the top.

And you’ve probably seen Jersey barriers as you’ve driven along the highway, so named because they were invented in New Jersey. From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch of 5 November 1969:

The 32-inch-high concrete divider has a two-foot-wide base and narrows to six inches at the top.

Called the New Jersey barrier because of its initial use on the turnpikes of that state, the median is designed to minimize the impact of vehicles, whose tires “scrub” and tend to ride up the side of the divider, dissipating their force and decelerating their speed.

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Sources:

Aristophanes. “The Knights.” The Comedies of Aristophanes. Benjamin Dann Walsh, trans. London: A.H. Baily, 1837, 2.4, lines 881–83, 215. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Gaffiot, Félix. Dictionnaire Latin-Français. Paris: 1934, s.v. Caesarea, n. Brepols: Database of Latin Dictionaries.

Everett-Heath, John. Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Place Names, sixth ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2020. Oxfordreference.com.

“Grant to Carteret and Berkeley” (1664). New Jersey Charters and Treaties. New Jersey State Library.

A Guide to Jersey and Guernsey, second edition. London: Simpkin, Marshall, 1843, 94. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Mills, A. D. A Dictionary of British Place Names, revised ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011. Oxfordreference.com.

“New Median on Lindbergh Reduces Impact of Crash.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 5 November 1969, 2-N. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2003, s.v. New Jersey, n.; second edition, 1989, s.v. jersey, n.1, Jersey, n.2.

Stubbes, Phillip. The Anatomie of Abuses, part 1 of 2. London: John Kingston for Richard Jones, 1583, sig. E3v. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Image credits: Cranberry bog: Keith Weller, a.2004, US Department of Agriculture, public domain image; Jersey barrier: CorreiaPM, 2008, public domain image.