Ohio

Detail of a map by George Washington that accompanied his 1753 “Journal to the Ohio.” A hand-drawn map showing a portion of the course of the Ohio River.

25 March 2022

The name Ohio is from the Seneca (Iroquoian) name for the Allegheny-Ohio River, ohi:yo, literally meaning good river. The Seneca name came to English via French.

The name appears in English-language discourse in reference to René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle’s 1669 expedition, although historians today are skeptical of the claims that La Salle actually ever reached the Ohio River valley. Regardless of the truth of the claim, the name Ohio, in reference to the river, appears in a 1698 translation of Louis Hennepin’s A New Discovery of a Vast Country in America. Hennepin had accompanied La Salle on the expedition. It first appears with the spelling Hohio:

The Savages came to meet us, repeating often this Word Otchitagon, meaning by it, that the Bare-foot was return’d from the great Voyage he had undertook, to visit the Nations that are beyond the River Hohio and Meschasipi; and tho’ our Faces were burnt by the Sun, and my Clothes patch’d up with wild Bull-Skins, yet they knew me, and carry’d me with my two Men into one of their Officer’s Cottages.

Later in the book, in a section titled “An Account of M. la Salle’s Voyage to the River Mississippi,” it is spelled Ohio:

The Country between the Lake of the Illinois and the Lake Erie, is a row of Mountains for a hundred Leagues together, from whence spring a great number of Rivers, which run to the Westward into the Lake of the Illinois, to the North into the Lake Huron, to the East into the Lake Erie, and to the South into the River Ohio.

Use of the name Ohio to refer to the region was in place by the middle of the eighteenth century. It appears in an account of treaty negotiations between the English and the Iroquois at Lancaster, Pennsylvania on 2 July 1744. The name appears in reference to a discussion of the deaths of three Indigenous people at the hands of settler-colonists and is also of interest because of the formalities of the discussion and the use of wampum belts as commemorative items and records of the event:

Brother Onas,

These Things happen frequently, and we desire you will consider them well, and not be too much concerned. Three Indians have been killed at different Times at Ohio, and we never mentioned any of them to you, imagining it might have been occasioned by some unfortunate Quarrels, and being unwilling to create a Disturbance. We therefore desire you will consider these Things well, and to take the Grief from your Heart, we give you this String of Wampum.

Which was received with the usual Ceremonies.

The reply by George Thomas, deputy governor of Pennsylvania reads:

Brethren,

I have considered this Matter well before I came from Philadelphia, and I advised with the Council there upon it, as I have done here with the honourable the Commissioners of Virginia and Maryland. I never heard before of the Murder of the three Indians at Ohio; had Complaint been made to me of it, and it had appeared to have been committed by any of the People under my Government, they should have been put to Death, as two of them were, some Years ago, for killing two Indians.

The territory that now forms the state of Ohio was acquired by the British from the French in 1763, following the French and Indian War (Seven Years’ War). Ohio, formed out of the Northwest Territory, became the seventeenth state in 1803.

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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.

Hennepin, Louis. A New Discovery of a Vast Country in America. London: M. Bentley, et al., 1698, 275, 311–12. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2004, s.v. Ohio, n.

A Treaty Held at the Town of Lancaster, in Pennsylvania, by the Honourable the Commissioners of the Provinces of Virginia and Maryland, with the Indians of the Six Nations, in June 1744. Philadelphia: Benjamin Franklin, 1744, 27, 28. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO). [The title of the work says June, but the portion from which the quotations are taken is dated 2 July 1744.)

Image credit: George Washington, 1753. Library of Congress. Public domain image.

poop / poop deck

The poop deck of the replica ship HMS Surprise, a re-creation of 24-gun Royal Navy frigate housed at the Maritime Museum of San Diego. A view looking aft on a replica of an eighteenth/nineteenth century frigate.

23 March 2022

When children learn that the raised deck at the stern of the ship is known as the poop, they, and some adults as well, cannot help but giggle. Poop, of course, is also nursery verb meaning to defecate and a noun meaning fecal matter. But the two senses are from quite different sources. And complicating things, poop can also mean information, especially high-quality, reliable rumor from a knowledgeable source. (There are other sense as well, but for now I’m restricting this entry to these three.)

Poop, meaning the stern of a ship, comes from the Middle French pupe, and that in turn eventually comes from the classical Latin puppis, although the trail from Latin to French is muddy, perhaps passing through the Italian poppa or the Old Occitan popa. In Britain, the word is recorded in Anglo-Norman from 1338 in an inventory of a nautical storehouse:

Un grant ankre apelle le tyntawe, un pere vambras feble, un powpe ove le fforechastiell pour les ministraux partenauntz a la barge del hostiel notre tres redoubte (Seigneur le Roi), un petit barell de gonpouder le quart’ plein.

(A great anchor called the tyntawe, a pair of poor/damaged vambraces, a poop together with the forecastle for piloting/commanding belonging to the barge from the household of our very redoubtable lord king, a small barrel of gunpowder a quarter full.)

Tyntawe is mysterious; it may be a reference to the name of the foundry that made the anchor.

This nautical sense of poop appears in English by the beginning of the fifteenth century.

The sense meaning to defecate got its start as an echoic term, poop being likened to the sounding of a horn. This use has cognates in Dutch and Middle Low German and appears in English by the end of the fourteenth century, one example being in Chaucer’s The Nun’s Priest’s Tale. In the passage in Chaucer’s tale, the fox has caught the rooster, Chauntecleer, and is running away with him in his mouth. The entire farmyard is aroused and gives chase:

Of bras they broghten bemes, and of box,
Of horn, of boon, in whiche they blewe and powped,
therwithal they skriked and they howped.
It semed as that hevene sholde falle.

(They brought trumpets of brass, and of box-wood,
Of horn, of bone, in which they blew and pooped,
And with that they shrieked and they whooped.
It seemed as if heaven should fall.)

By the end of the seventeenth century, this sense had evolved to also mean to fart. From the 1689 lexicon Gazophylacium Anglicanum:

To Poop, from the Belg. Poepen, to fart softly; both from the sound.

And the nursery sense meaning to defecate is first recorded in an 1882 Cornish dictionary by Frederick Jago:

Poop, or Poopy. To go to stool. (Said by children.)

(A few years later, Jago would mistakenly attribute this use of poop to “ancient Cornish.”)

The sense of information originates in the slang of the US Military Academy at West Point. There it meant information that was to be learned by rote, presumably to be regurgitated on demand. As such, it may come from the sense of blowing a horn, as mindlessly intoning words without any regard to meaning. From a glossary in the 1904 West Point yearbook The Howitzer:

Poop—To spec blind; to memorize completely.
Poop Deck—A small porch on the guard house used as a point of observation by the O.C. [i.e., Officer in Charge]

The inclusion of the naval poop deck is interesting, given the army source, and may or may not be related to the verb to poop. And there is this entry from the 1907 edition of the yearbook that explains spec and adds some additional information about what poop meant:

poop, v. To memorize a subject (including commas). Syn., spec.
poop-deck, n. The O.C.’s observation station.

[...]

speck, v. (from Lt. “specio,” to look at). To absorb print, to commit something to memory without understanding it.

From West Point, it entered US Army slang, and the general sense of poop meaning information appears in print during World War II. From Charles Bond’s A Flying Tiger’s Diary, the entry for 25 February 1942. The Flying Tigers, officially the First American Volunteer Group, were American pilots who flew combat missions against the Japanese in China during 1941–42; the Flying Tigers were integrated into the US Army Air Forces shortly after US entry into the war:

We do things over here that would surely draw court-martials at home. Also we are flying aircraft that would be condemned back in the States.

We’re sending Bill Bartling to Kunming with complete poop on the situation here for the Old Man. We want some P-40 replacements that will not drop 200 RPM on one-magneto check before takeoff. Some of the pilots have gone to Cairo, Egypt, to pick up P-40E replacements for us. Hope they bring them here. But I have an idea that Chennault will re-equip the Third Squadron with them and rotate us and replace us with that squadron.

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Sources:

Anglo-Norman Dictionary, s.v. powpe.

Bond, Charles R. and Terry Anderson. A Flying Tiger’s Diary. College Station, Texas: Texas A&M UP, 1984, 109–10.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale.” The Canterbury Tales, lines 3398–3401. Harvard’s Geoffrey Chaucer Website.

Gazophylacium Anglicanum. London: E.H. and W.H., 1689, sig. T3v. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

“Glossary.” Howitzer. US Military Academy, 1907, 309.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2022, s.v. poop, n.2, poop, n.4, poop, v.2.

Jago, Frederick. W.P. The Ancient Language and the Dialect of Cornwall. Truro: Netherton and Worth, 1882, 322. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

———. An English–Cornish Dictionary. London: Simpkin, Marshall, 1887. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. poupen, v., poupe, n.(2), tintawe.  

Nicolas, Nicholas Harris. A History of the Royal Navy, vol. 2 of 2. London: Richard Bentley, 1847, 476. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2006, poop, v.1, poop, n.1 and int., poop, n.2, poop, n.5.

“West Point Slang.” Howitzer. US Military Academy, 1904, 222.

Williams, Robert. Lexicon Cornu-Britannicum: A Dictionary of the Ancient Celtic Language. of Cornwall. London: Trubner, 1865, 40. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Photo Credit: BrokenSphere, 2009. Used under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

Nebraska

21 March 2022

An 1843 map of the “Nebraska or Platte River,” as it flows through what is now Nebraska and Wyoming

The state of Nebraska takes its name from the Indigenous name for the river, Nibraska (Omaha) or Nibrathka (Otoe), from /ɳi/ (water) + /braska/ or /bráθge/ (flat/shallow), that is “shallow river.” The French translated the Indigenous name as the Rivière Platte (Platte River), the name the river bears in English to this day.

Indigenous peoples who have lived in present-day Nebraska include the Omaha, Missouria, Ponca, Pawnee, Otoe, Apache, and Lakota. Currently, the federally recognized tribes in Nebraska are the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska, Omaha Tribe of Nebraska, Ponca Tribe of Nebraska, Sac & Fox Nation of Missouri, Santee Sioux Nation, and the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska.

Perhaps because of the existing French name for the river, the name Nebraska makes its way into English discourse relatively late. Reference to the river appears in Washington Irving’s 1836 Astoria; or, Enterprise Beyond the Rocky Mountains:

On the 28th, they breakfasted on one of the islands which lie at the mouth of the Nebraska or Platte river; the largest tributary of the Missouri, and about six hundred miles above its confluence with the Mississippi.

Use of Nebraska as a name for the territory appears by 1843 in a map created by John C. Frémont and in 1844 in a report by the US War Department, ten years before the territory was formally organized:

A territorial organization of the country, and a military force placed on the very summit whence flow all the great streams of the North American continent either into the Gulf of Mexico, or the Pacific Ocean, would no longer leave our title to the Oregon Territory a barren or untenable claim. Its possession and occupancy would thenceforth not depend upon the naval superiority on the Pacific ocean. Troops and supplies from the projected Nebraska Territory would be able to contend for its possession with any force coming from the sea.

The United States acquired the territory that is now Nebraska from the French in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 created the organized Territory of Nebraska, which originally included the territory that is now the state plus most of what is now Wyoming and Montana and portions of Colorado and North and South Dakota. Over the next decade, the Colorado, Dakota, and Idaho territories were formed, reducing the Territory of Nebraska to its present size. Nebraska became the thirty-seventh state in 1867.

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Sources:

[22 March 2022: Corrected a source.]

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.

Irving, Washington. Astoria; or, Enterprise Beyond the Rocky Mountains, vol. 1 of 3. London: Richard Bentley, 1836, 262. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2003, s.v. Nebraskan, adj. and n.

“Report of the Secretary of War,” 30 November 1844. In Message from the President of the United States to the Two Houses of Congress, Doc. No. 2, House of Representatives, 28th Congress, 2nd Session, Washington: Blair and Rives, 3 December 1844, 124. Google Books.

“Report of the Secretary of War.” Alexandria Gazette (Virginia), 6 December 1844, 2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Image credit: John C. Frémont, 1843. Library of Congress. Public domain image.

Arizona

Saguaro cactus on the campus of the University of Arizona in Tucson

18 March 2022

The name Arizona comes from the Oʼodham arizonac, meaning little spring or few springs. Oʼodham is an Uto-Aztecan language of southern Arizona and northern Sonora. The language is also known as Papago-Pima, but the Tohono Oʼodham people have rejected the name Papago as being insulting. That name is a Spanish variation of the Pima name for the people, Ba꞉bawĭkoʼa, meaning “eating tepary beans.”

The earliest use of the name Arizona in English that I have found is from the New Orleans Weekly Delta of 23 June 1849. The article indicates why the territory was attractive to the United States:

The silver mines of Sonora are also said to be of unequaled richness. It is alleged that lumps of pure silver have been discovered at Arizona weighing three thousand five hundred pounds (?)

Many believe the name Arizona comes from the Spanish arida (dry) + zona (area). While this is not the origin, this Spanish combination influenced the form and adoption of the word in both Spanish and English.

The territory of what is now the state of Arizona was once part of the Mexican state of Sonora. The United States acquired the territory north of the Gila River during the Mexican-American War of 1846–48 and the area south of the river in the Gadsen Purchase of 1854.

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Sources:

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

Harder, Kelsie B. Illustrated Dictionary of Place Names: United States and Canada. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1976. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

“Tohono O'odham (Papago) Literature.” Indigenouspeople.net, 2019.

“Later from Mexico and California.” New Orleans Weekly Delta, 23 June 1849, 5. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Photo credit: David Wilton, 2018.

poker

Four sailors aboard the aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman playing Texas Hold ‘Em, a variant of poker. Four men sitting around a table gambling on a card game.

16 March 2022

The name of the card game poker is probably from either the French poque, a bluffing card game that dates to the mid eighteenth century, or directly from the French word’s source, the German Pochen, a similar game. The -er ending may be from the French verb poquer, to place a bet in the game, or it may be an American attempt to pronounce poque with two syllables. The OED plumps for the borrowing from French, but given that poker is an American invention and given the large number of German immigrants to the United States in the early nineteenth century, a direct borrowing from the German is plausible.

The earliest reference to the game that I can find is from a commentary on US Senator Henry Clay in Washington, DC’s newspaper The Globe on 3 September 1832:

Who challenged and shot at Humphrey Marshall, a distinguished member of the Kentucky Legislature?

Who is notorious for his skill and dexterity at Lieu, poker and Kentucky Brag?

Egad, now, if you call that morality; we are “quite used up.”—Centre County (Pa.) Democrat.

This is obviously reprinted from the Centre Democrat from a slightly earlier date, but unfortunately that paper is not digitized, nor does it exist in any libraries that I have access to. So, I cannot confirm an earlier appearance.

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Sources:

“Communication.” The Globe (Washington, DC), 3 September 1832, 2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2006, s.v., poker, n.4.

Photo credit: David Finley, 2009, US Navy photo. Public domain image.