Connecticut

4 March 2022

c. 1650 map of eastern Long Island showing the “Cannitticutt” shoreline

The US state is named after the Connecticut River, which in turn takes its name from the Algonquian *kwən- (long) + *-əhtəkw (tidal river) + *-ənk (place).

At the time of contact with Europeans numerous Indigenous tribes dwelled, both seasonally and year-round, in the territory that now comprises the state, but the largest groups were the Mattabesic in the east, the Pequot-Mohegan in the southwest, and the Nipmuk in the northwest. Currently, the Mashantucket Pequot Tribe and the Mohegan Tribe of Indians of Connecticut have federal recognition. The state of Connecticut further recognizes the Eastern Pequot Tribal Nation, the Golden Hill Paugussett, and the Schaghticoke Tribal Nation.

Europeans started arriving in what is now the state of Connecticut in 1614. The first of the Europeans to arrive were Dutch explorers and fur traders. The first settler-colonists there were the English, starting in the 1630s.

The name of the river enters into English discourse by 1639, when it appears in the Fundamental Orders, a constitution of the three English settlements at Windsor, Hartford, and Wethersfield. The Fundamental Orders are said by some to be the first written constitution in the Western tradition and gave rise to the state’s nickname of The Constitution State:

For as much as it hath pleased Almighty God by the wise disposition of his divine providence so to order and dispose of things that we the Inhabitants and Residents of Windsor, Hartford and Wethersfield are now cohabiting and dwelling in and upon the River of Connectecotte and the lands thereunto adjoining; and well knowing where a people are gathered together the word of God requires that to maintain the peace and union of such a people there should be an orderly and decent Government established according to God, to order and dispose of the affairs of the people at all seasons as occasion shall require; do therefore associate and conjoin ourselves to be as one Public State or Commonwealth

And the use of Connecticut to designate the region dates to the same year, when Puritan minister Richard Mather uses it in his tract Church Government and Church Covenant Discussed, although this document was not published until 1643:

If you hold that any of our parishionall Assemblies are true Ʋisible Churches, and that the Members thereof are all, or some of them (at least) members of true visible Churches, then whether will you permit such members (at least) as are either famously knowne to your selves to be godly, or doe bring sufficient Testimoniall thereof from others that are so knowne, or from the Congregation it selfe whereof they were members here, to partake with you in all the same Ordinances, and parts of Gods true worship in any of your Congregations (as by occasion they may be there) in the same manner, and with the like liberty, as you would permit any that might happily come unto you from any of the Churches of Geneva, France, the Low-Countreyes, or yet from any one Church to another among yourselves: Suppose from some Church about Connecticut, or that of Plimouth, &c. Vnto the Church at Boston, New-Towne, Dorchester, &c. Or if not, what may be the Reason thereof?

Discuss this post

---

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.

“Fundamental Orders,” 14 January 1639. Avalon Project: Colonial Charters, Grants and Related Documents, Lillian Goldman Law Library. Yale Law School.

National Conference of State Legislatures. “Federal and State Recognized Tribes,” March 2020.

Mather, Richard. Church-Government and Church Covenant Discussed. London: R.O. and G.D. for Benjamin Allen, 1643, 3. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Image credit: unknown cartographer, c.1650? Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

pizzazz

2 March 2022

The two-page spread in the March 1937 Harper’s Bazaar that launched the present-day sense of pizazz. Watercolor images of female models showing off the latest fashion accompanying a short article titled “This Thing Called Pizazz.”

Pizazz, as it is commonly used today, is a slang term for zest, energy, vitality, and glamor. It’s commonly found in reference to show business or fashion, but it can be used in just about any context. The origin of the term is unknown, but it is a bit odd in that in its early uses, in the phrase on the pizazz, it meant something quite the opposite, that is on the outs, an undesirable state. The origin is unknown, but it’s likely a nonsense word, similar to and possibly influenced by the earlier razzmatazz and like words.

There is an early, anomalous use of pizzazz in an article about a magic show in the 17 January 1898 issue of the Saint Paul Globe:

Two petite and shapely young women and two active and enthusiastic colored boys constituted Mr. Dixey’s only visible assistants. One of the colored boys, whom Dixey has christened “Pizzazzes,” borrowed the rings, watches and handkerchiefs from the audience, and the shapely young women in page costumes adorned the stage in the first part, and obediently and mysteriously vanished in mid-air upon subsequent occasions.

This use may be a one-off use, unconnected to the later slang term.

The phrase on the pizazz, often spelled on the pazazz, makes its appearance a decade later. From an article in the Cincinnati Enquirer of 15 November 1907 about a play titled The Chorus Lady:

The first act shows Patricia returning home from a tour of “imitation towns” with the “Moonlight Maids.” She explains that the manager “got chilblains” in the box office and that the show has gone on the “pazazz.”

And Rose Stahl, who played the character of Patricia O’Brien in The Chorus Lady in its London run is quoted using the phrase to refer to periods in her own career. From Vancouver, British Columbia’s Daily Province of 19 June 1909:

I started as a leading lady, and while I have had my ups and downs, while I have known what it is to be “on the pazazz” (out of work, stranded) as “Patricia O’Brien” would say, I have been a leading lady ever since.

A year earlier, on the pazazz is applied to a very different situation, a practical joke. From the Trenton Evening Times of 8 June 1908:

A water bomb will do the very trick. When I think of that fellow getting a douse of cold water on a freezing morning like this, it makes me larf already. Do you remember how we put that glee club’s practice on the pazazz that night below our window—gee, they never knew what struck them!

That next year, we see on the pazazz applied to the prospects of baseball teams. From the Nashville Tennessean of 31 May 1909:

At this stage of the milling the western clubs, Cleveland, St. Louis and Chicago, touted as Detroit’s most formidable foes, are all strictly on the pazazz and swiftly veering out of the running.

And later that year, the mayor of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania jocularly bans the wearing of straw hats after Labor Day, claiming that anyone who commits such a fashion faux pas is on the pazazz. From the Wilkes-Barre Times Leader of 14 September 1909:

WHERAS, Hay lids and straw hats are beginning to look like last year’s birdsnests, not to say what is technically known among good dressers as being “on the pazazz.”

And an “interview” with a chicken at a poultry show in Washington, DC’s Evening Star of 19 January 1912 has this:

“Cluck, cluck,” said a big barred Plymouth Rock, “this show business is on the pizazz. I have been caged up here three days, deprived of the society of my own dear wives and others, kept awake by staring people and street cars, and all I get out of it is that,” said the rooster, pointing with his bill to a bit of blue ribbon on the cage.

Being on the pizzazz enters the world of prescriptive linguistics in a tongue-in-cheek article in Ohio’s Mansfield News about the Clean Language League of America:

The Clean Language League of America, which is plum nuts about being dead set against slang, cuss words, risque stories, purple ragtime and wriggly cabaret shindigs—not because it cares a whoop, but because such things always sound like heck to strangers—held a wild-eyed jamboree in Chicago recently and, according to the New York Telegraph, cooked up plans for a grand hallelujah campaign to induce everybody to climb into the pure words wagon and swear off on throwing the lowbrow lingo. Quite a considerable bunch of language bugs took the splurge and the enthusiasm was all to the velvet.

According to the dope that was passed out by one of the high moguls, Tommy Russell, the main doings was to pick out a publicity gang which would have the job of throwing this line of bull into every state in the union, being particularly strong on the schools and colleges and not passing up the educational hang-outs for skirts. The side show of the movement will be to go after the kind of music that you hear in the all-night dumps and at public hog-rassles. Brother Russell declared, bo, that his crowd had already framed it up with some of the big guys in the music world to put the kibosh on this line of junk, and that it was only a question of time before they would have such pieces as “When I Get You Alone Tonight” completely on the pizzazz.

Use of on the pazazz extends into the 1930s. From the San Francisco Examiner of 24 February 1934 in an article about the opera Tannhauser:

The Lordly Landgrave plans a singing match, pledging Elizabeth to be the catch of him who shall intone the noblest lay. Toward Tannhauser the lady’s heart doth sway; but, while the others songs of virtue sing, our hero does a rather awful thing—he loudly shouts an air of ribald jazz that promptly puts the show on the pazazz!

But these early uses are all in the negative. Being on the pizazz is a bad thing. But around 1915, a positive meaning of pizzazz starts to develop. It first appears with the meaning of an expert or prime example. An article in the 16 August 1915 Kansas City Star has this headline about newspaper columnist George Ade, who was famed for his use of slang:

The Main Pazazz of the Quick and Ready Chatter Holds Up His Right Wing and Warbles “Never Again!”

We also see a reference to a racehorse named Pizazz in the San Francisco Chronicle of 9 October 1934. It is not uncommon for slang terms to make early appearances in the names of racehorses. The problem with these names, however, is that it’s difficult, if not impossible, to know what was intended by the use of the name. But racehorse names almost always carry positive connotations, and a sense of vitality and energy is plausible speculation.

But the earliest definitive use of pizzazz in print in its current sense is in the March 1937 issue of Harper’s Bazaar. It appears in a two-page spread advertising stylish fashions from various designers.

This thing called Pizazz

Pizazz, to quote the editor of the Harvard Lampoon, is an indefinable quality, the je ne sais quoi of function; as, for instance, adding Scotch puts the pizazz into a drink. Certain clothes have it, too.

No one has been able to locate a use of the word in the Harvard Lampoon, and the reference may be to a something spoken by one of its editors. The Harper’s Bazaar piece was widely quoted in newspapers, and immediately following, this sense of pizzazz starts appearing in print with great frequency. It’s clear that the Harper’s Bazaar piece put pizzazz on the map.

Discuss this post

---

Sources:

“Actress Tells of First Success.” Daily Province (Vancouver, British Columbia), 19 June 1909, 5. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

“As Fowls See It.” Evening Star (Washington, DC), 19 January 1912, 10. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“At the Theaters.” Saint Paul Globe (Minnesota), 17 January 1898, 4. Library of Congress: Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2022, pizzazz, n. https://greensdictofslang.com/

“Jamaica Racing News.” San Francisco Chronicle, 9 October 1934, 18H. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“Nix on the Slang Stuff .” Kansas City Star (Missouri), 16 August 1915, 14. NewspaperArchive.com.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2006, s.v. pizzazz, n. and adj.

“Proclamation.” Wilkes-Barre Times Leader (Pennsylvania), 14 September 1909, 1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Rice, Grantland. “Sportograms.” Nashville Tennessean, 31 May 1909, 10. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

“Stageland Gossip.” Cincinnati Enquirer (Ohio), 15 November 1907, 9. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

“Stories of the Town and Times” Mansfield News (Ohio), 7 December 1912, 8. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

“‘Tannhauser’ in Entirety Broadcast by Metropolitan Opera Stars Today.” San Francisco Examiner, 24 February 1934, 8. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

“This Thing Called Pizazz.” Harper’s Bazaar, 70.2693, March 1937, 116–117. ProQuest Magazines.

“Water Cure Put Peddler to Rout.” Trenton Evening Times (New Jersey), 8 June 1908, 3. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Image credit: Harper’s Bazaar, March 1937. Fair use of a copyrighted image to illustrate the topic under discussion.

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.

Discuss this post

---

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.

Discuss this post

---

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.

Discuss this post

---

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.