envelope / push the outside of the envelope

Chuck Yeager standing next to the Bell X-1 rocket plane, “Glamorous Glennis,” named for his wife, in which he became the first pilot to exceed the speed of sound in 1947. A man, wearing a leather jacket, with a parachute over his shoulder and holding a helmet, stands in front of the open hatch of a rocket plane.

13 April 2022

The phrase to push the envelope, or to push the outside of the envelope, generally means to extend the realm of what is possible. The phrase comes out of aeronautical engineering circles and entered common parlance due primarily to Tom Wolfe’s 1979 book The Right Stuff and the 1983 movie based on the book.

The verb to envelop is from the Anglo-Norman envoluper (to wrap around, to cover). The French word is cognate with the Italian verb invilluppare and the noun viluppo (a bundle), but the roots volup- and vilip- do not satisfactorily correspond with any known Latin word, so the ultimate origin is a bit of a mystery. The verb appears in English in the late fourteenth century. For example, in this passage from Chaucer’s The Pardoner’s Tale the pardoner has finished telling his story and invites Harry Bailey, the host of the group of pilgrims, to come and buy some of the religious relics that the pardoner has already identified as counterfeit:

I rede that oure Hoost heere shal bigynne,
For he is moost envoluped in synne.
Com forth, sire Hoost, and offre first anon,
And thou shalt kisse the relikes everychon,
Ye, for a grote! Unbokele anon thy purs."

(I advise that our host here shall begin,
For he is most enveloped in sin.
Come forth, sir Host, and offer first right now,
And you shall kiss every one of the relics,
Yea, for a fourpence! Unbuckle right now your purse.)

It would take a few centuries for the noun envelope to appear. It’s recorded in the 1715 edition of John Kersey’s Dictionarium Anglo-Britannicum:

Envelope, (F.) a Cover for any thing; In Fortification, a Work of Earth rais’d either in the Ditch of a Place, or beyond it.

To Envelope, to cover, to wrap, or fold up, to surround, to hem in, or beset.

By the late nineteenth century, a mathematical sense of envelope had developed. In mathematical circles an envelope was an area defined by a series of curves (or lines—in mathematics, lines are “curves”). From Isaac Todhunter’s 1871 Treatise on the Differential Calculus:

The locus of the ultimate intersections of a series of curves is called the envelop of the series of curves.

1944 hand-drawn diagram showing the curves that define a flight envelope

By the 1940s, aeronautical engineers were using the term flight envelope to refer to the mathematical description of the limits of an aircraft’s ability to sustain controlled flight. This definition, and accompanying diagram, of a flight envelope appeared in the November 1944 issue of the Journal of the Royal Aeronautical Society:

The best known of the envelope cases is the “flight envelope,” which is in general use in this country and the United States. [...] The “flight envelope” covers all probably conditions of symmetrical manœuvring flight instead of the few isolated points specified in the previous system. It is based on the previously mentioned fact that the loads sustained in symmetrical manœuvres are mainly functions of the normal acceleration n and the flight speed V. Other variables, such as pitching acceleration, have only a secondary importance. We can therefore specify the whole range of symmetric manœuvres by drawing a diagram which defines the range on n and the range of V. Such a diagram, which is called an n-V diagram, is illustrated in Fig. 1. The line AB represents the highest expected normal acceleration: BC represents the highest expected speed, and point D the highest normal negative acceleration at low speed. The curved lines OA and OD represent the stall—it would be impossible to achieve a value of n above the line OA or below the line OB, because the wing would be beyond its stalling incidence.

Test pilots adopted the jargon to push the envelope or push the outside of the envelope to refer to taking an aircraft to the limits of what it was capable of doing, and perhaps a bit beyond. The phrase is recorded in print by 1970, when it appeared in the March issue of Air Line Pilot:

We expect to push the flight envelope out to Mach 2 sometime this spring.

Tom Wolfe’s 1979 book The Right Stuff, about test pilots and the Mercury 7 astronauts, brought the phrase to the attention of the general public. From that book:

One of the phrases that kept running through the conversation was “pushing the outside of the envelope.” The “envelope” was a flight-test term referring to the limits of a particular aircraft’s performance, how tight a turn it could make at such-and-such speed, and so on. “Pushing the outside,” probing the outer limits, of the envelope seemed to be the great challenge and satisfaction of flight test. At first “pushing the outside of the envelope” was not a particularly terrifying phrase to hear. It sounded once more as if the boys were just talking about sports.

The 1983 film based on Wolfe’s book further popularized and cemented the phrase in the general vocabulary. In this quotation from the film, astronaut Gordon Cooper, played by Dennis Quaid, talks about test pilots, and specifically about Chuck Yeager, the first pilot to exceed the speed of sound and prime exemplar of “the right stuff”:

And some of them are...they're still out there somewhere, doing what they always do. Going up each day in a hurtling piece of machinery...putting their hides out on the line...hanging it out over the edge...pushing back the outside of that envelope and hauling it back.

And this line, spoken by Yeager’s wife Glennis, played by Barbara Hersey, describes to her husband the life of a test pilot’s wife and uses the phrase with a vague sexual allusion:

We never had any insurance except a couple months' pay. I always hated all that talk about insurance. The government spends all kinds of time and money teaching pilots how to be fearless. But they don't spend a penny teaching you how to be the fearless wife of a test pilot. But I guess I liked it. I guess I liked the kind of man who could push the outside of the envelope. Flyboy.

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Sources:

Davies, Mark. Corpus of Historical American English (COHA). Accessed 13 April 2022. https://www.english-corpora.org/coha/

Chaucer, Geoffrey. “The Pardoner’s Prologue, Introduction, and Tale.” The Canterbury Tales. lines 6.941–45. Harvard’s Geoffrey Chaucer Website.

Google Ngrams, accessed 13 April 2022.

Kaufman, Philip. The Right Stuff (film). Warner Brothers, 1983.

Kersey, John. Dictionarium Anglo-Britannicum, second edition. London: J. Wilde for J. Phillips, et al., 1715, s.v. envelope. Eighteenth Century Collections Online.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. envolupen, v.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2007, s.v. push, v.; draft additions March 2003, s.v. envelope, n.; second edition, 1989, s.v. envelop, v., flight, n.1.

Todhunter, Isaac. A Treatise on the Differential Calculus, seventh edition. London: Macmillan, 1875, 359. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Tye W. “Factors of Safety—or of Habit?” Journal of the Royal Aeronautical Society (Aeronautical Journal), 48.407, November 1944, 488.

Wolfe, Tom. The Right Stuff. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1979, 12.

Image credits: US Air Force, c.1947, public domain image; W. Tye, Journal of the Royal Aeronautical Society, 1944. Fair use of a copyrighted image to define the concept under discussion.

salary

A 1947 paystub for bassist Milton Hinton from Cab Calloway, for a gross pay of $140 and a net pay of $92.80

11 April 2022

Salary is one of those words which has an oft-told origin story. Unfortunately, that well-known story has no evidence to support it.

What we do know about the origin of salary is that the English word comes to us from the Anglo-Norman salarie, and that in turn comes from the Latin salarium, meaning a regular payment of some sort. The Anglo-Norman word is recorded in the middle of the fourteenth century, and salary appears in English by the end of that century. It is almost certainly older, in both languages, but any manuscript evidence of older use hasn’t survived.

An early example of the word in English can be found in the late fourteenth-century poem Piers Plowman, by William Langland. In this passage the sin of sloth is confessing:

If I bigge and borwe aught, but if it be ytailed,
I foryete it as yerne, and yif men me it axe
Sixe sithes or sevene, I forsake it with othes;
And thus tene I trewe men ten hundred times.
And my servaunts som tyme, hir salarie is bihynde:
Ruthe is here rekenyng whan we shal rede acountes,
So with wikked wil and wrathe my werkmen I paye!

(If I buy and borrow anything, unless it is recorded,
I soon forget it, and if people ask me for it
Six or seven times, I deny it under oaths;
And thus I injure honest men ten hundred times.
And my servants sometimes, their salary is overdue:
Sorrow is to their reckoning when we shall settle accounts,
So with wicked will and wrath my workmen I pay!)

The oft-told origin is that Roman soldiers were given a stipend, a salarium, to buy salt, or that they were actually paid in salt. The story is recorded by many reputable sources, most notoriously by Lewis and Short’s Latin Dictionary, but the story appears to be a nineteenth-century fabrication. Salarium did indeed mean a regular payment in classical Latin, and the word’s root is indeed sal (salt), but how salt is connected to monetary payments is simply not known. The story about Roman soldiers is a plausible hypothesis—a starting point for an investigation—but if it were true, we would see some evidence to support it. which we don’t. See Peter Gainsford’s analysis for details.

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Sources:

Gainsford, Peter. “Salt and Salary: Were Roman Soldiers Paid in Salt?” Kiwi Hellenist, 11 January 2017.

Langland, William. The Vision of Piers Plowman (B-text), second edition. A.V.C. Schmidt, ed. London: Everyman, 1995. lines 5:423–29, 84.

Lewis, Charlton T. and Charles Short. A Latin Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1879, s.v. salarius, n.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. salary, n.

Image credit: Oberlin Conservatory Library, 2016, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

Maine

The Portland Head Light Station on Cape Elizabeth, Maine. A rocky shore with a white, brick lighthouse and surrounding red-roofed buildings.

8 April 2022

Maine is the northern- and easternmost US state on the eastern seaboard. It is the traditional land of a number of indigenous peoples, including the Passamaquoddy, Maliseet, Penobscot, Abenaki, Androscoggin, and Kennebec. Additionally, Micmac people migrated into the region after European contact. Indigenous peoples still dwell on the land, and the federally recognized tribes are the Aroostook Band of Micmac Indians, the Houlton Band of Maliseet Indians, the Passamaquoddy Tribe, and the Penobscot Nation. Collectively these peoples are known as the Wabanaki (People of the Dawnland).

The name Maine is of uncertain origin, but there are two primary hypotheses. The first is that was so named by French settlers to Acadia in 1604 after the province in France, which in turn is named for the Mayenne River. The second hypothesis is that Maine is a reference to the mainland, as opposed to islands, initially called that by English fishermen prior to English colonization.

The English colony dates to 1622, and the land was fought over by the English and French until 1740, when it fell under British control for good. Governance of the territory was split between New York and Massachusetts, becoming solely part of Massachusetts in 1691. Maine became the twenty-third state in 1820 in exchange for admitting Missouri into the union as a slave state.

The name Maine appears in the 10 August 1622 grant of the land to Fernando Gorges and John Mason by King James I of England (James VI of Scotland):

Now this indenture witnesseth, that ye said President and council, of their full, free and mutual consent, as well to the end that all the lands, woods, lakes, rivers, waters, islands and fishings, with all other the traffics, profits and commodities whatever to them or any of them belonging, and hereafter in these presents menconed may be wholly and entirely invested, appropriated, severed and settled in and upon ye said Ferdinando Gorges and Capt. John Mason, their heyers and assignee forever [...] the said Sr. Ferdinando Gorges and Capt. John Mason, with the consent of ye President and Councill, intend to name to name The Province of Maine.

Another early use of Maine to refer to the land is from 1624 by Christopher Levett, who attempted to establish a colony near what is now Cape Elizabeth. The colony would fail, but Levett’s record of the name lends credence to the idea that the name Maine stems from mainland:

And now in its place I come to Quack, which I haue named Yorke. At this place there fished divers ships of Waymouth this yeare.

It lyeth about two leagues to the East of Cape Elizabeth, it is a Bay or Sound betwixt the Maine and certaine Ilands which lyeth in the sea about one English mile and halfe.

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Sources:

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

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

A Grant of the Province of Maine to Sir Ferdinando Gorges and John Mason (10 August 1622). The Avalon Project, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Levett, Christopher. A Voyage into New England. London: William Jones, 21 August 1624, 7. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2000, s.v. Maine, n.2

Photo credit: Anonymous photographer, 2009. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

posh

Caroline Astor and her guests at a 1902 ball. Black and white drawing of an elegantly dressed and bejeweled woman surrounded by other well-dressed women and men.

6 April 2022

The origin of posh is not known for certain, but there are two likely sources. The word has two meanings, and it may be two distinct words with different etymologies. Posh can mean money, and more specifically a halfpenny or other low-denomination coin. But it can also be an adjective meaning stylish, luxurious, or even pretentious.

One possible origin is that posh comes from the Angloromani posh or Welsh Romani påš, meaning half. The monetary link comes in with the terms posh-hórri or påš xåra, meaning a half-penny. The hórri or xā̊ra is a borrowing from the German heller or haler, the name of a low-denomination coin of Central Europe. (Cf. dollar)

The other possible origin is that it is from the Urdu safed-pōš, safed = white and pōš = covering, which means dressed in white, well-dressed, and affluent. Personally, I favor the idea that the monetary sense comes from the Romani word, while the stylish sense comes from the Urdu, likely a transfer via the British military occupying India.

The word, however, first appears as a fictional surname or nickname in early nineteenth-century literature. This use of posh as a name, however, may be unrelated to the later slang uses. But the earliest use I’ve found, in George Colman’s 1801 play The Poor Gentleman, uses the name in a passage that makes an oblique reference to a stylishly dressed man, although the person named Posh is not that stylish person:

Thank you, good sir, I owe you one.—Churchwarden Posh, of our town, being ill of indigestion, from eating three pounds of measly pork at a Vestry dinner, I was making up a cathartick for the patient, when who should strut into the shop but Lieutenant Grains, the Brewer—sleek as a dray-horse—in a smart scarlet jacket, tastily turn’d up with a rhubarb-colour’d lapelle.

We get the sense of posh meaning money a few decades later. It is recorded in the court proceedings of the Old Bailey in London, during the trial of a certain Charles Wells for theft on 8 July 1830:

JOSEPH PLUMMER. I have known the prisoner some time. On Monday evening, the 7th of June, I went with the Policeman—I had heard of the robbery: on the Tuesday afternoon, about twelve o'clock, I went by myself into old Fleet-market, and met the prisoner: I said, "Charley, have you been home yet?" he said Yes; I said, "You have stolen your master's watch?" he said, "Go on with you;" I asked if he had pawned the watch, and if he had, to give me the ticket—he said he had not pawned it, but sold it, but he had not got the posh (which means money) yet; I wished him to come home with me—he would not; I then told him the Policemen were after him, and if he would come home with me, and give his master his property, he would not be hurt; but if not, his master said he would prosecute him; he said it was a lie—I told him his mother was fretting about him; he said, "Tell my mother not to fret, for I am going out of town, and shall not see her any more;" I asked if he was going to give me any thing to drink; he said, "Don't I tell you I have not got the posh yet;" I said, "Well, Charley, when shall I see you again?" he said, "You won't see me any more, for I am going out of town;" he said, "Good bye Joe;" I said, "Good bye Charley;" that is all I recollect.

Cross-examined. Q. You understand what posh means very well? A. Yes; I live with my parents; I was never turned out of doors by my mother for bad behaviour; I have been in the workhouse, and left there suddenly—I was never in the Penitentiary, nor in custody.

The association of posh with style comes by the end of the nineteenth century. Barrère and Leland’s 1890 slang dictionary records the monetary sense, but adds that it also means a dandy, or well-dressed man. (This dictionary gets part of the etymology wrong, i.e., the association with hāro or copper.) Barrère and Leland seem to think the dandy sense is from the same root, but this may not be correct:

Posh (society), modern term for money, originally used for a halfpenny or small coin. From the gypsy pash or posh, a half. In Romany poshero, the affix ero being corrupted from hāro, copper, i.e., a copper or a penny. Posh an’ posh, half and half, applied to those who are of mixed blood, or half gypsy. Also a dandy.

The use of posh as an adjective meaning stylish appears in the early twentieth century. Its first recorded use may be in a P.G. Wodehouse short story, L’Affaire Uncle John. This epistolary story was first published in Public School Magazine in 1901, but the word posh does not appear in this initial edition. The passage in question appears in a letter from a schoolboy to his father:

He kept asking leading questions about pocket-money and holidays, and wanted to know if my master allowed me to walk in the streets in that waistcoat—a remark which cut me to the quick, “that waistcoat” being quite the most stylish thing of the sort in Cambridge.

The word stylish was changed to push in a 1903 edition of the story. Despite the different spelling, it is very likely that posh was intended. The different spelling could have arisen because: the spelling of the slang term had not yet standardized; Wodehouse spelled it incorrectly; or it’s a hypercorrection by the editor or printer. Later editions have emended it to posh. Similarly, the fact that posh does not appear at all in the 1901 edition may be due to the editor determining it was too unfamiliar, or perhaps Wodehouse had not yet learned the word in 1901 but by 1903 had determined it was just the thing for this story—which also fits the idea that he misspelled a word he had only heard and not read. We just don’t know.

But we see an unambiguous use of posh in E. Charles Vivian’s 1914 The British Army from Within:

The cavalryman, far more than the infantryman, makes a point of wearing “posh” clothing on every possible occasion—"posh” being a term used to designate superior clothing, or articles of attire other than those issued by and strictly conforming to the regulations. For walking out in town, a business commonly known as “square-pushing,” the cavalryman who fancies himself will be found in superfine cloth overalls, wearing nickel spurs instead of the regulation steel pair, and with light, thin-soled boots instead of the Wellingtons with which he is issued. It is a commonplace among the infantry that a cavalryman spends half his pay and more on “posh” clothing, but probably the accusation is a little unjust.

The fact that by 1914 posh was an established slang term in the British Army lends credence to the idea that the stylish sense of the word is from Urdu, transferred to English by occupying troops.

Of course, we can’t leave the discussion of posh without touching on the false acronymic origin. Popular etymology has it that the word is an acronym for Port Out, Starboard Home. Supposedly, this acronym was printed on first-class tickets issued by the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company going from England to India. The port side on the trip out would have the coolest cabins (or alternately the cabins with the best view). The same would be true of the starboard cabins on the return trip. The sense of the term meaning swank, elegant, or fashionable supposedly sprang from this use. While it is an excellent story, no tickets with posh stamped on them have ever been found and company records reveal no sign of the phrase. And this explanation doesn’t even appear until 1932, well after posh was established in the language. It is clear that this explanation was invented after the fact to explain the word

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Sources:

Angloromani Dictionary, Romani Linguistics and Romani Language Projects, University of Manchester,

Barrère, Albert and Charles G. Leland. A Dictionary of Slang, Jargon, and Cant, vol. 2 of 2. London: Ballantyne Press, 1890, 146. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

“Charles Wells. Theft: Theft from a Specified Place. 8th July 1830.” Old Bailey Proceedings Online.  

Colman, George, the Younger. The Poor Gentleman (1801). London: Longman and Rees, 1802, 1.2, 16. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2022, s.v. posh, n.1, posh, n.2, posh, adj.

Grosvenor, Lady Arthur (née Helen Sheffield), “Whiter’s ‘Lingua Cingariana.’” Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, New Series, 2.2, October 1908, 161–79 at 164. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2006, posh, adj. and n.4, posh, n.1, posh, n.3, posh, v.

Taylor-Blake, Bonnie. “Re: [ADS-L] Earlier Instance of Etymological Myth for ‘Posh.’” ADS-L, 27 March 2022.

Tréguer, Pascal. “The Probable Origin of the Word ‘Posh’” Wordhistories.net, 22 November 2016.

Vivian, E. Charles. The British Army from Within. New York: George H. Doran, 1914, 82. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Wodehouse, P.G. “L’Affaire Uncle John (A Story in Letters).” Public School Magazine, 8, 1901, 152. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Image credit: Unknown artist, 1902. Public domain image.

Vermont

Detail of a 1780 map showing the state of Vermont

4 April 2022

What is now the state of Vermont is the traditional home to the Abenaki, Mahican, and Pennacook peoples. The state of Vermont officially recognizes several Abenaki groups: Elnu Abenaki Tribe, the Nulhegan Band of the Coosuk Abenaki Nation, the Koasek Abenaki Tribe, and the Mississquoi Abenaki Tribe.

The name Vermont comes from the French vert (green) + mont (mountain). The Appalachian Mountains in the state are known as the Green Mountains after the coniferous trees covering them. Some sources credit Samuel de Champlain with the French coinage in 1647, but I have not found evidence substantiating that.

In 1776, the settler-colonists of Vermont declared their independence from Britain separately from the other colonies, at first calling their territory the Republic of New Connecticut before officially adopting the name Vermont shortly after. The republic retained its independence until 1791, when it became the fourteenth state. The official name change is documented in the Connecticut Courant and Hartford Weekly Intelligencer of 30 June 1777:

And whereas this convention have been informed that a district of land lying on the Susquehannah river, has been heretofore and is now known by the name of New Connecticut, which was unknown to them until sometime since the declaration of Westminster aforesaid, and as it would be inconvenient in many respects for two separate districts on this continent to bear the same name:

RESOLVED therefore unanimously, That the said district described in the preamble to the declaration of Westminster aforesaid, shall ever hereafter be called and known by the name of VERMONT.

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Sources:

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

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

“State of Vermont. In General Convention, Windsor, June 4th, 1777. Connecticut Courant and Hartford Weekly Intelligencer, 30 June 1777, 1. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Image credit: John Bew and John Lodge, 1780. Library of Congress. Public domain image.