plugged nickel

An obviously plugged 1792 US one-cent piece. A coin with a bust of a Native-American man bearing the words “Liberty Parent of Science & Indus.” on the obverse, and on the reverse, a laurel wreath with the words “United States of America,” “One Cent,” and “1/100.” A round hole has been punched through the middle and then refilled.

20 April 2022

Plugging is one of many ways to debase the value of a coin. Most commonly, a hole is punched in it and then filled with a base metal, such as lead. Alternatively, the coin could be cut in half, the valuable metal extracted from the center, and then filled and welded back together. While the practice of plugging dates to antiquity, use of the word plugged to describe a coin that had been adulterated in this fashion is an Americanism dating to the first half of the nineteenth century. While any denomination of coin could be plugged, the phrase plugged nickel would come to refer to the value of any worthless thing.

We can see a literal use of plugged in this advertisement offering a reward for the return of stolen goods found in the Massachusetts New-Bedford Mercury of 30 August 1822. The inventory of stolen items includes:

A much-more skillfully plugged 1795 US dollar coin. A US dollar coin with a bust of a woman, presumably Lady Liberty, with the word “Liberty” and bearing a date of 1795. The plug, a round circle about the “T” in “Liberty,” can just barely be detected.

About 10 dollars in silver change, among which was one plugged dollar. Whoever will secure the thief or thieves, so that they may be brought to justice, and return the goods, shall be entitled to the above reward, or one half for the goods alone.

The use of plugged nickel as a term for something that is worthless appears about a half century later. We have this description of the boxer John L. Sullivan that appears in Tennessee’s Knoxville Daily Journal on 7 July 1889:

Why, old man Gladstone, Bismarck, Harrison and James G. Blaine all rolled into one would not have received such worship. At that moment, Sullivan could have bought New Orleans, including the Louisiana state lottery and Generals Beauregard and Early for a plugged nickel.

Nowadays, of course, coins rarely contain any significant amount of precious metal, so plugging and other methods of debasing them have fallen out of use. And the phrase plugged nickel is a fossilized relic of an age long past.

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Sources:

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2006, s.v. plugged, adj.

“Sunday Chit-Chat.” Knoxville Daily Journal (Tennessee), 7 July 1889, 2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“Thirty Dollars Reward.” New-Bedford Mercury (Massachusetts), 30 August 1822, 3. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Photo credits: US one-cent coin: Stack’s Bowers auction catalog, unknown date. US one-dollar coin: unknown photographer. Fair use of copyrighted images to illustrate the topic under discussion.

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Sources:

Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd Edition.

grandfather clause

18 April 2022

A mob of armed, white supremacist insurrectionists posing outside the burned-out offices of the Wilmington, North Carolina Daily Record, the state’s only Black-owned, daily newspaper following the successful coup against the city's government in November 1898.

In present-day use, the phrase grandfather clause seems innocent enough. It refers to a rule that exempts current cases from changes in the rules; any new rule would only apply to future cases. But the phrase has its roots in the white supremacist politics of the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The original grandfather clause exempted men who could vote, or whose ancestors could vote, in 1867 from new restrictions on the franchise. In effect, the law denied the vote to Black men without impacting the ability of white men to vote.

The fifteenth amendment to the US Constitution, ratified in February 1870, prohibited states from denying the vote to any citizen on account of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” In short, the amendment gave Black men the right to vote. As a result, Blacks began to be elected to offices throughout the US south. But with the end of Reconstruction and the withdrawal of federal troops from the south in 1877, whites again reasserted control in most, but not all of the south.

One of the exceptions was Wilmington, North Carolina, the largest city in the state and a majority Black one. Black businesses—including the state’s, and perhaps the nation’s, only Black-owned daily newspaper—thrived in the city, and the local political offices were mostly held by Black officeholders.

White resentment of this situation grew, and on 10 November 1898, some 2,000 white men staged a violent coup, removing the city government from power, destroying Black businesses, and killing an unknown number of Black citizens, probably numbering in the hundreds. The coup was successful in that it returned control of the city to white men and the insurrectionists were not punished. It is said to be the only successful coup on US soil.

To prevent what happened in Wilmington from recurring, the state legislature, now dominated by white supremacists, sought not to punish the insurrectionists, but to prevent Blacks from voting and holding office. To skirt the fifteenth amendment, they proposed a literacy test, but exempted those whose fathers or grandfathers could vote in 1867 from the test. While the restriction was not explicitly based on race, it had the effect of disenfranchising Black men, while leaving the ability of white men to vote unaffected.

The phrase grandfather clause appears by 7 February 1899 in relation to a proposed amendment to the North Carolina constitution in the Charlotte Daily Observer:

Your correspondent to-day had a chat with State Chairman Simmons, in regard to the franchise amendment to the constitution. Chairman Simmons said: “There is no division of opinion in the caucus to reporting the amendment favorably. There is some little difference as to details; but all these will quickly be agreed on and then the amendment will pass with practical unanimity. The only difference of view is as to the limitation of the ‘grandfather clause.’

“In the first draft of the amendment the date after which anybody who cannot read the constitution would be barred from voting, that is, after coming of age, was put down as 1902. Some favor making it 1904. It is urged that it will promote education and that there is no excuse for any young white man being unable to read and write[.] It is contended, on the other hand, that, in the west particularly, there are some white men who oppose education and who do not permit their children to attend school.”

But the phrase was being used as a term-of-art in the political deliberations. Two days later, Georgia’s Augusta Chronicle uses the phrase and gives the texts of the proposed amendments:

The trouble at Wilmington, N.C., last year, growing out of negro control of the offices, has resulted in the determination of North Carolina to follow the lead of Mississippi and Louisiana, and so amend their state constitution as to eliminate the mass of negroes from participation in elections. It is proposed to require an educational qualification for the right of suffrage, but to relieve white men from this requirement. It will require amendment of the suffrage clauses of the constitution, and the propositions that are now under discussion are thus set forth in the Raleigh News and Observer:

“Section 5. No male person who was on January 1, 1867, or at any time prior thereto, entitled to vote under the laws of any state in the United States wherein he then resided, and no sone or grandson of any such person not less than 21 years old at the date of the adoption of this amendment of the Constitution shall be denied the right to register and vote at any election in this state by reason of the educational qualification prescribed in this article, provided he shall have registered prior to December 1, 1902, in accordance with the terms of this article, and no person shall be allowed to register under this section after that date.”

Senator Justice, at the Friday night caucus offered the following as a substitute for the above section:

“Section 5. No male person who was on January 1st, 1867, or at any time prior thereto, entitled to vote under the laws of any state in the United States wherein he then resided and no lineal descendent of any such person shall be denied the right to register and vote at any election in this state by reason of his failure to possess the educational qualification presented in section four of this article.”

It will be seen that the committee required a time to be fixed when sons and grandsons could register and take advantage of the “grandfather clause.”

Other southern states followed North Carolina’s lead, but not without controversy. And in 1915 the US Supreme Court ruled literacy tests, and the associated grandfather clauses, unconstitutional.

By 1919 we start seeing grandfather clause used in contexts divorced from both race and the franchise. For example, the 1919 Michigan Technic published an article that used grandfather’s clause in reference to the licensing of engineers:

The need was recognized of a “grandfather’s clause” in any bill in order to avoid an ex post facto law and in order not to work hardship upon anyone now in the practice of the profession.

Today, grandfather clause is often used without knowledge of its origin and without any racist intent. It is often also received, by white audiences at least, as innocent. But to those who know its origins and who have suffered racial discrimination, its use can be a reminder of those offenses suffered.

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Sources:

Drayer, C.E. “Engineer License Bills.” The Michigan Technic, vol. 32, 1919, 47. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

“The Local Option Bill Up.” Charlotte Daily Observer (North Carolina), 7 February 1899, 2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2015, s.v. grandfather clause, n.

“Suffrage in North Carolina.” Augusta Chronicle (Georgia), 9 February 1899, 4. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Photo credit: unknown photographer, 1898. Public domain image.

pony / pony up

A Fell pony; Fell ponies are a breed of horse from northwest England. A black pony with a long mane standing on a snow-swept hillside.

15 April 2022

To pony up is a, mostly American, slang phrase meaning to pay what is owed or due. The phrase is common and well understood, but it’s not obvious how a word for a small horse came to be associated with paying debts. And while we know quite a bit about the development of the phrase, there are two mysteries in its early years.

The noun pony, meaning a small horse, is from French, but exactly when it was borrowed is uncertain. It may come from the Anglo-Norman pulein, a word meaning a foal or colt. The word was reasonably common in Anglo-Norman, but its English reflex is rarer. The word appears in English in two fifteenth century texts, including one later manuscript of Chaucer’s The Squire’s Tale, and it appears somewhat more commonly as a surname. The present-day pony could descend from this, the gaps being explained by the word being primarily used orally and by the many medieval manuscripts that have not survived.

The other leading explanation is that it is our current word does not descend from the Anglo-Norman one and its Middle English reflexes. Those were forgotten, and our present-day word is a mid seventeenth-century borrowing from the Middle French poulenet (little foal). The present-day French poney (1752) postdates the appearance of the English word, although unattested earlier use may have influenced the English. Alternatively, the French poney could be a reborrowing into French from English. The Irish pónaí and the Scottish Gaelic pònaidh are borrowings from English.

This later attestation of pony appears in the 18 June 1659 diary of Scotsman Andrew Hay:

About 12 acloak I dyned wt my wiffe who was very unweel all this day. After denner I walked to the mosse & found that the peats were not yet dry. I caused bring home the powny & stugged him. Therafter I did read a litle French book against melancholy becaus my spirit was sad.

(About 12 o’clock I dined with my wife, who was very unwell all this day. After dinner, I walked to the bog & found that the peat was not yet dry. I had the pony brought home and stugged him. Afterward, I read a little French book to counter melancholy because my spirit was sad.)

Stugged, here, is a bit of mystery too. The verb typically means to stab, jab, or poke, which doesn’t make much sense in this context.

Pony would come to mean a sum of money. But how the word for a horse came to be associated with money is the second mystery. The sense may have arisen in gambling circles, from betting on horses, but if so, its development is oral and unattested.

Another plausible and interesting, but in my estimation less likely, explanation is that it is from the phrase legem pone, literally meaning to establish the law but metaphorically meaning a cash payment. This metaphorical meaning comes from the Vulgate Psalm 118:33 (or 119:33 depending on which version of the Bible you consult). The verse reads:

He. Legem pone mihi Domine viam justificationum tuarum et exquiram eam semper.

(He. Establish the law for me, Lord, the way of your justice, and I will always seek it out.)

Psalm 118 is divided into sections, each one headed by a Hebrew letter. Verse 33 starts the fifth section, headed by the fifth letter ה (he). In the monthly psalter cycle, this verse starts the reading for Matins on the twenty-fifth day of the month. And in the sixteenth-century fiscal calendar, the twenty-fifth of each quarter, starting in March, was a date when debts became due. So, the first two words of the fifth section of that psalm, legem pone, became associated with payments due on the twenty-fifth. This is a rather tortuous path of numerological connections, which is why I deem it unlikely, but it is a fascinating explanation nonetheless.

English use of legem pone to mean such a monetary payment dates to the sixteenth century. From William Hendred’s 1508 The Booke of the Pylgrymage of Man:

Yet and nexte hym is moste of power.
A noble Shyryffe and a myghty.
That is callyd bothe fere and nere.
Master legem pone.

One still sees legem ponere in legal usage meaning to propound a law or pay in cash.

The use of pony to mean a sum of money, often twenty-five pounds or guineas—another twenty-five—dates to the late eighteenth century. From Mary Robinson’s 1797 novel Walsingham:

“O! I don’t claim the honour of her friendship,” replied the young adventurer; “I want nothing from her but her rouleaus: and she is so d——d cunning, there is no touching her, even for a poney*.”

And the marginal note reads:

*Half a rouleau, or twenty-five guineas.

And the word is recorded in the 1811 slang dictionary the Lexicon Balatronicum:

Poney. Money. Post the poney; lay down the money.

(Green’s Dictionary of Slang says this usage is in the 1796, third edition of Grose’s Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, but that seems to be confusing the different editions of Grose. The Lexicon Balatronicum is a later version of Grose by an anonymous editor.)

And we see the verbal phrase to pony up, meaning to pay, appear in the United States a few years later. From an article in the May 1819 Rural Magazine and Farmer’s Monthly Museum:

The afternoon, before the evening, the fovoured [sic] gentlemen are walking rapidly into the merchant-tailors shops, and very slowly out, unless they ponied up the Spanish.

The Spanish is a reference to the Spanish peso, a.k.a. piece of eight, that was common currency in the Colonies and early United States. (Cf. dollar)

That’s it. Pony is a borrowing from French, but of an uncertain date. And the association with money may come from gambling on horse races, or it may come from numerological association between the liturgy of the psalter and the fiscal calendar. The phrase pony up is an Americanism dating to the early nineteenth century.

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Sources:

Anglo-Norman Dictionary, 2017, s.v. pulein, n..

Black’s Law Dictionary, eleventh edition. Bryan A. Garner, ed., 2019. Thomson Reuters Westlaw.

Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue (up to 1700). Dictionaries of the Scots Language, 2002, s.v. stug, v.  

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2022, s.v., pony (up), v., pony, n., legem pone, n.

Hendred, William. The Booke of the Pylgrymage of Man. London: 1508, 21.8–11. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

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

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. polein(e n.2.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2006, s.v. pony, n.1 and adj., pony, v.; September 2006, s.v. poleyn, n.2; March 2016, s.v. legem pone, n.

Reid, A.G. “Excerpts from the Diary of Andrew Hay.” Notes and Queries, 3 March 1883, s6.7.166, 163 (18 June 1659).

Robinson, Mary. Walsingham; or, The Pupil of Nature, vol. 2 of 4. London: T.N. Longman, 1797, 97. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

“The Social Companion.” The Rural Magazine and Farmer’s Monthly Museum, May 1819, 125. ProQuest Magazines.

Photo credit: anonymous photographer, 2008. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

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.