Mexico / New Mexico

Map of Mexico in 1824, shortly after its independence from Spain, showing the state of Nuevo México, as well as the territory of the United States and of British North America.

28 February 2022

The name of the country and the US state is a borrowing from Spanish, which in turn is a borrowing from Nahuatl. The name originally referred to what is now Mexico City, but eventually came to refer to the entire country.

The more common Nahuatl name for what is now Mexico City was Tenochtitlan, meaning either Place of the High Priest Tenoch or Place of the Fruit of the Cactus. But the Spanish took to calling it by a less-used Nahuatl name, Metztlixihtlico. The origin of this Nahuatl word is uncertain. One origin gives it as mētztli (moon) + xictli (navel/center) + -co (place), or Place of the Center/Navel of the Moon. Alternatively, it could be associated with Mexitli, one of the names for the Aztec god of war.

Hernán Cortés began the conquest of the Aztec Empire in 1519 and completed it in 1521 with the seizure of Tenochtitlan and the establishment of the of colony of Nueva España (New Spain), renaming the capital as Ciudad de México (Mexico City). The Spanish ruled Mexico until 1821, when the country achieved its independence.

The name of New Mexico is a calque of the Spanish Nuevo México. The Spanish colony, whose full name was Santa Fe de Nuevo México (Holy Faith of New Mexico), encompassed most of present-day New Mexico, as well as portions of what are now Texas, Colorado, Kansas, and Oklahoma. The Spanish colony lasted from 1598–1821, after which it was a Mexican state until 1846, when it was seized by the United States during the Mexican-American War. New Mexico became the forty-seventh state in 1912. The Indigenous people dwelling there include the Pueblo, Navajo, Apache, and Comanche peoples.

The name Mexico appears in English-language writing by 1555. From Pietro Martire d’Anghiera’s The Decades of the New Worlde:

Newe Spayne is that parte of the continent or firme lande that lyeth West and South frome the lande of Floryda. This was subdued to thempire [sic] of Castile by the ryght noble gentelman Ferdinando Cortese the marquesse of the vale of Quaxaca. In this lande are many provinces co[n]teynyng in the[m] in mauer [sic] innumerable cities, amonge which that is the chiefe which the India[n]s caule Mexico or Temixtitan.

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Sources:

d’Anghiera, Pietro Martire. The Decades of the New Worlde. London: William Powell for Edward Sutton, 1555, 315. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

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, s.v. Mexico, Mexico City, New Mexico. Oxfordreference.com.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2001, s.v. Mexican, n. and adj.

Image credit: Gigette, 2013, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

pipe dream

1881 drawing of a New York opium den from Harper’s Weekly. Several people sit and lie on cots smoking opium. An Asian man has entered the room carrying a tray.

25 February 2022

A pipe dream is an unrealizable hope or plan, a fantasy. The underlying metaphor is straightforward and, once you think about it, rather obvious. A literal pipe dream is an opium-induced hallucination.

The phrase is an Americanism that first appears in print on 11 December 1890, but co-locations of the two words can be found earlier describing literal opium-induced hallucinations. For instance, there is this article, dateline 28 August 1832, in the New-York Commercial Advertiser:

If, then, morning slumbers and day-dreams are so pleasant, what a charming life a Turk must lead, with his pipe, his opium, and his houris! Happy dog! He is never really awake, but passes his life in visions of beauty and glory;—but stay:—his visions perchance may end where he might rather wish them to begin!

And there is this in a letter by naturalist Henry Mouhot to his sister-in-law, dated 21 December 1861:

I have blank paper, which I fill as I best can; it is an amusement, at least; and if it turn out of no other use than to serve to amuse you all, I shall be satisfied, for I am not ambitious. I dream as I smoke my pipe, for I must confess that I smoke more than ever.

And this item, “Sensations After an Opium Smoke,” was reprinted in a number of American newspapers starting on 16 November 1879:

De Quincey’s “Confessions of an Opium Eater” do not describe those of an opium smoker, although the feeling must be somewhat similar. The strongest dreams overtake the unconscious sleeper, the pipe falls from his hands, his face becomes livid, and the visions that pass before his drugged fancy are simply delicious. No dream of pleasure, no fancied beauty, can equal the scenes and forms called up in the visions of the opium smoker.

But as stated, the phrase with its metaphorical meaning appears on 11 December 1890. Coincidentally, two Chicago papers use pipe dream, in different contexts, on that day. Primacy must go to the article in the Daily Inter Ocean, which while printed on 11 December, carries a dateline of 7 December:

The Herald has been busy grinding out poetry, which the Bee, Journal and Tribune sing. It is worse than fighting Indians to listen to—
“All silent lies the village on the bosum of the vale,
So I’ll squeeze another pipe dream, and grind out another tale.”

The lines of poetry given here appear to be original to the Daily Inter Ocean. They are a commentary on poetry printed in the other newspapers, not a quotation from them.

The second 11 December 1890 article is about aviation in the Chicago Daily Tribune:

“When a man begins to talk about aerial navigation,” said E.J. Pennington of Mount Carmel, Ill., at the Grand Pacific yesterday, “he might just as well own up that he is crazy and a fit subject for the strait-jacket. It has been regarded as a pipe-dream for a good many years, yet people don’t seem to be aware that it is an accomplished fact, and has been since 1852. There was a man of the name of Gifford in England who arranged an oiled silk balloon with a lifting power sufficient to counterbalance the weight of a steam engine, with boiler, coal, and all. The engine weighed 300 pounds to the horse power, and the propeller was relatively small. Yet, even with that, he made seven and one-half miles an hour.”

While it is of limited utility today, Pennington wasn’t far off in his prediction about lighter-than-air aviation. Ferdinand von Zeppelin would go on to patent the first of his airships in 1893, and the heyday of zeppelins and blimps would last into the 1930s, before being supplanted by the airplane. He was right; by 1890 aviation was no longer a pipe dream.

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Sources:

“Building Airships of Aluminum.” Chicago Daily Tribune, 11 December 1890, 9. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

“From Our Correspondent” (28 August 1832). New-York Commercial Advertiser, 31 August 1832, 2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“The Hostiles” (7 December 1890). Daily Inter Ocean (Chicago), 11 December 1890, 6. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Mouhot, Henri. Letter to Madame Charles Mouhot, 21 December 1861. Travels in the Central Parts of Indo-China (Siam), Cambodia, and Laos, vol 2. London: William Clowes and Sons, 1864, 253–54. Nineteenth Century Collections Online (NCCO).

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2006, s.v. pipe dream, n.

Image credit: J.W. Alexander, “American Opium-Smokers—Interior of a New York Opium Den.” Harper’s Weekly, 8 October 1881, 684. Public domain image.

Utah

Detail of an 1844 by John C. Frémont showing the Great Salt Lake and the territory of the Ute people

23 February 2022

The name yuta was given by the Spanish to the people now known as the Utes, a people speaking a language in the Numic (Uto-Aztecan) language family. The Spanish acquired the name from yúdah, a word in an Athabaskan language, perhaps Navajo or Western Apache, meaning high, a reference to mountainous land. The Ute people dwell and have traditionally dwelled in what is now the state of Utah and surrounding territory.

English-language references to the Ute people, using the name Utah, date to at least 1807, when Zebulon Pike recorded the following in his journal:

26th February, Thursday.—In the morning was apprized by the report of a gun, from my lookout guard; of the approach of strangers. Immediately after two Frenchmen arrived.

My sentinel halted them and ordered them to be admitted after some questions; they informed me that his excellency governor Allencaster had heard it was the intention of the Utah Indians, to attack me; had detached an officer with 50 dragoons to come out and protect me, and that they would be here in two days.

Mormon settler-colonists arrived in what would become the state of Utah beginning in 1847. The United States acquired the territory in 1848, following the Mexican-American War, and the official Territory of Utah was created in 1850. Utah became the forty-fifth state in 1896 after the Mormon Church in the territory officially renounced polygamy.

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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.

Pike, Zebulon M. An Account of the Expedition to the Sources of the Mississippi. Philadelphia: C. & A. Conrad, 1810, 201. Nineteenth Century Collections Online (NCCO).

Image credit: John C. Frémont, 1844, Library of Congress. Public domain image.

pig

A smug and self-satisfied pig in its sty

23 February 2022

(28 February: updated with mention of Heywood’s wordplay)

Pig apparently comes from the Old English *pigga. The asterisk indicates that the Old English word is not found in the extant corpus but is thought to have existed. The evidence for its existence is from an entry in the Antwerp glossary, an eleventh-century Latin-Old English glossary that is written in the margins of a copy of Donatus’s Ars maior, a Latin grammar. The manuscript, Antwerp, Plantin-Moretus Museum, MS 16.2, was once bound with London, British Library, MS Add. 32246, and together they are commonly referred to as the Antwerp-London Glossaries. The relevant line in the Antwerp glossary reads:

Glanx glandis picbred.

Glans is Latin for an acorn or a similar nut, so picbred would be an acorn, or literally pig-bread. Pig also appears in some late-Old English/early Middle English surnames and placenames, such as Aluricus Piga (1066), Wulfric Pig (c.1133), Johannis Pig (1186), Jordanus Pigman (1190), Ricardus Pyg (1268), and Pyggeuorde (1296; Pickford, Sussex), giving further evidence to the word’s early existence.

Detail of the marginal gloss in the Antwerp Glossary that contains the line “Glanx glandis picbred”

The usual Germanic word for the animal is a variation on swine, and pig seems to be isolated to English. The only possible relation is the Dutch big, meaning piglet, but in borrowing between English and Dutch the <p> sound is usually preserved; we don’t expect it to change to <b>. Still some sort of relationship is more likely than the two words arising coincidentally, but we don’t know how they might be related.

Pig starts appearing with any frequency in the written record starting in the mid thirteenth century. One of the earliest appearances of the word is in one version of the Ancren Riwle (a.k.a. Ancrene Wisse), a manual of sorts for anchoresses, nuns who enclosed themselves, becoming hermits:

Þe Suwe of giuernesse; þet is, Glutunie, haueð pigges þus inemned. To Erliche hette þet on; þet oðer to Estliche; þet þridde to Urechliche; þet feorðe hette to Muchel; þet fifte to Ofte; ine durnche, more þen ine mete. Þus beoð þeos pigges iueruwed. Ich specke scheortliche of ham; uor ich nam nout ofdred, mine leoue sustren, þet ge ham ueden.

(The sow of greed, that is Gluttony, has pigs thusly named: the first is called Too Early; the second Too Delicious; the third Too Voracious; the fourth is named Too Much; the fifth Too Often, in drink more than in food. Thus are these pigs farrowed. I speak of them briefly, for I am not afraid, my dear sisters, that you feed them.)

In early uses like this one, pig is used to refer to the young of the animal, to a piglet. This is a rather common pattern in terms for animals, starting out as terms for the young, and over time generalizing to include all ages. This passage also shows that pigs have been associated with greed and gluttony for a very long time.

The sense of pig meaning a greedy or otherwise unattractive person dates to the sixteenth century. The following is from a collection of proverbs assembled by John Heywood in 1546. The lines in question are a brief exchange between a woman and a man:

What byd me welcom pyg. I pray the kys me.
Nay farewell sow (quoth he) our lorde blys me
From bassyng of beasts of bear bynder lane.

(What, bid me welcome, pig. I pray you kiss me.
No, farewell sow (said he). Our Lord bless me
From the baying of the beasts of Bearbinder Lane.)

These lines are especially interesting as in the sixteenth century pig was also a term of endearment, a clipping of pigsney (pig’s eye). Heywood is engaging in wordplay with the two meanings.

The idea of an odious person being a pig eventually extended to using pig to refer to police officers. Today we often associate this use with the slang of the 1960s counterculture, but it’s much older. It dates to at least the early nineteenth century and the formation of the first organized police forces. It appears in the Lexicon Balatronicum, a slang dictionary from 1811:

Pig. A police officer. A China street pig; a Bow-street officer. Floor the pig and bolt; knock down the officer and run away.

These uses of pig to refer to people are unfair to the animal.

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Sources:

Heywood, John A Dialogue Conteinyng the Nomber in Effect of All the Prouerbes in the Englishe Tongue. London: Thomas Berthelet, 1546, sig I.3v. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Lexicon Balatronicum. London: C. Chappel, 1811, s.v. pig. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Liberman, Anatoly. Word Origins...and How We Know Them. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005, 183–86.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. pigge, n.

Morton, James. The Ancren Riwle. The Camden Society 57. London: J.B. Nichols, 1853, 204. HathiTrust Digital Archive. London, British Library, Cotton MS Nero A.14.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2006, s.v. pig, n.1, pigsney, n.

Porter, David W. The Antwerp-London Glossaries, vol. 1 of 2. Publications of the Dictionary of Old English 8. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2011, 26. Antwerp, Museum Plantin-Moretus 16.2, fol. 12r.

Photo credits: Pig: Steven Lek, 2006, Plantin-Moretus Museum, public domain image as a mechanical reproduction of a public domain work.

Alaska

21 February 2022

A 1774 English translation of the map of the Aleutian Islands, originally made by Jakob von Stæhlin, inaccuately depicting the Alaskan peninsula as an island bearing the name Alaschka

The name Alaska comes from the Aleut alaxsxix̣, meaning mainland, originally only a reference to the Alaska Peninsula, from which the Aleutian Islands extend. Later it was applied to the entire territory that would eventually become the state.

Russian explorers were the first Europeans to visit Alaska in the 1730s and again in 1741 when Vitus Bering led a Russian expedition there. The territory was colonized by the Russians in the late eighteenth century, mainly by fur traders. The United States purchased the territory from Russia in 1867. It became a state in 1959.

The first appearance of the name Alaska in an English context is on a map found in a 1774 translation of Jakob von Stæhlin’s An Account of the New Northern Archipelago. On the map, the Alaska Peninsula is depicted as an island and bears the name Alaschka I.

The name appears in the 1778 edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica in the entry for Kamchatka, in a section describing the Fox Islands, the part of the Aleutian chain closest to the mainland:

According to the reports of the oldest inhabitants of Umnak and Unalaska, they have never been engaged in any war, either amongst themselves or with their neighbours, except with the people of Alashka, the occasion of which was as follows. The son of the toigon or chief of Umnak had a maimed hand; and some inhabitants of Alashka, who came to visit upon that island, fastened to his arm a drum, out of mockery, and invited him to dance. The parents and relations of the boy were offended at this insult: hence a quarrel ensued; and from that time the people have lived in continual enmity, attacking and plundering each other by turns. According to the reports of the islanders, there are mountains upon Alashka, and woods of great extent at some distance from the coast. The natives wear cloaths made of the skins of reindeer, wolves, and foxes; and are not tributary to any of their neighbours. The inhabitants of the Fox-Islands seem to have no knowledge of any country beyond Alashka, which is one of the most easterly islands yet discovered in these seas, and is probably not far distant from the continent of America.

It appears again in 1780 in William Coxe’s Account of the Russian Discoveries Between Asia and America:

About 20 versts from the North East promontory of Aghunalashka lie four islands: the first, Akutan, is about half as big as Umnak; a verst further is the small island Akun; a little beyond is Akunok; and lastly Kigalga, which is the smallest of these four, and stretches with Akun and Akunok almost from N. to S. Kigalga is situated about the 61st degree of latitude. About 100 versts from thence lies an island called Unimak*, upon which Captain Krenitzin wintered; and beyond it the inhabitants said there was a large tract of country called Alashka, of which they did not know the boundaries.

[...]

* Krenitzin wintered at Alaxa, and not at Unimak.

And the spelling Alaska is in place by 1784, when James Cook and James King’s A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean is published. It appears in a section penned by King in October 1779, after Cook’s death:

It is here to be observed, that the most considerable and valuable part of the fur-trade is carried on with the islands that lie between Kamtschatka and America. These were first discovered by Beering, in 1741, and being found to abound with sea-otters, the Russian merchants became exceedingly eager in searching for the other islands seen by that navigator, to the South East of Kamtschatka, called, in Muller's Map, the Islands of Seduction, St. Abraham, &c. In these expeditions they fell in with three groups of islands. The first about fifteen degrees to the East of Kamtschatka, in 53° North latitude; the second about twelve degrees to the Eastward of the former; and the third, Oonalashka, and the islands in its neighbourhood. These trading adventurers advanced also as far East as Shumagin's Islands (so called by Beering), the largest of which is named Kodiak. But here, as well as on the continent at Alaska, they met with so warm a reception in their attempts to compel the payment of a tribute, that they never afterward ventured so far. However they conquered and made tributary the three groups before mentioned.

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Sources:

Cook, James and James King. A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean, vol. 3. London: G. Nicol and T. Cadell, 1784, 371–72. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Coxe, William. Account of the Russian Discoveries Between Asia and America. London: J. Nichols for T. Cadell, 1780, 166–67. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

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

“Kamchatka.” Encyclopædia Britannica, second edition, vol. 6. Edinburgh: J. Balfour, et al. 1778, 4017. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2020, s.v. Alaskian, adj.; July 2020, s.v. Alaska, n.; September 2019, s.v. Alaskan, adj. and n.

von Stæhlin, Jakob. “Map of the New Northern Archipelago Discovered by the Russians in the Seas of Kamtschatka and Anadir.” An Account of the New Northern Archipelago. London: C. Heydinger, 1774, 44–45. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Image credit: Alaska State Library, Historical Collections. Public domain image as a mechanical reproduction of a work created before 1925.