white elephant

Nineteenth-century, Thai painting (pigment on wood) of Prince Vessantra, a pre-incarnation of the Buddha, delivering the white elephant, named Peccaya, who had the ability to bring rain, to eight brahmins from the neighboring state of Kalinga who greedily desired it. Vessantra was exiled for giving Peccaya away. A man, Vessantra, riding a bejeweled, white elephant with a handler behind, pours a bottle of water on seven men (brahmins), while an eighth watches from nearby.

22 April 2022

A white elephant can be one of two things. It can be a literal elephant with pale skin, or it can metaphorically refer to a supposed benefit or gift that entails ruinous costs. But how did the literal meaning evolve into the metaphorical?

Some Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) are born with pale skin. (Contrary to popular belief, they are not true albinos, just light skinned.) And in Southeast Asia, especially Thailand, they have been traditionally revered. Ownership of them was restricted to royalty, and those that were owned were not put to work but lived a life of relative luxury and indulgence.

The phrase white elephant first appears in English in Richard Eden’s 1555 account of a voyage to Ethiopia. Here the reference is, though, to African elephants:

The other Ethiope cauled [Et]hiopia Interior (that is) the inner Ethiope, is not yet knowen for the greatnesse therof but only by the sea coastes. Yet is it described in this maner. Fyrste from the Equinoctiall towarde the south, is a greate region of Ethiopians which bryngeth furth whyte elephantes, tygers, and the beastes cauled Rhinocerontes.

An English-language reference to white Asian elephants, with a reference to ownership by royalty, appears a few decades later in a 1579 version of the travels of Marco Polo:

The wilde Elephantes feede vpon grasse, and vpon the trees of the fields. He that hathe charge of them, ruleth them with a rodde of yron, or a ring whiche he putteth round about his head. The Elephants haue so much prouidence, that manye with their feete, pull away the Speares from their enimies, for that they shoulde not hurt those that be vpon their backes. The King rideth vpon a white Elephant, which hath a chayne of golde about his necke, being long vnto his féete, set full of many precious stones.

A decade later, we get a 1588 account of a war fought between Pegu (i.e., now Bago in Myanmar) and Siam (Thailand) over a white elephant. This war will continue to be referenced in English writing over the course of the next several centuries:

Running fro[m] this kingdome of Malaca by the north & northwest cost is the mightie kingdome of Pegu, the which is in bignes greater thē Samatra, & equall in riches, especially of pearls and al sorts of stones, & very fine christall: there is great store of prouision and an infinite number of people, and the king thereof is mightie: to who[m] (as we haue said) ye king of Cyan doth pay tribute, because he ouercame him in a battaile which he had w[i]t[h] him, in the yeare 1568. according vnto the common opinion: the occasion was, that vnderstanding, how that the saide king of Syan had in his power a white Elephant (whome those of the kingdome of Pegu do worship for God) the king sent to buy the same, and to giue for it so much as he would esteeme or value it: but he vtterly denied the same, and saide that he would not let him haue it for all that he had in his kingdom: the which caused so great anger vnto the king, that hee called together all the souldiers that he could make, with determination to get by force of armes, that which he could not by faire meanes and great ritches: in the which he did so great diligence, that in a fewe dayes hee had ioyned together an armie of a million and sixe hundreth thousande of men of warre, with whome hee departed vnto the saide kingdome of Syan, which was from his kingdome two hundreth leagues, and did not onely performe his pretence in bringing away the white Elephant, but did also make the king tributarie, as he is vnto this day, as hath bin declared vnto you.

And Jeremy Collier’s 1721 encyclopedia tells how the white elephants owned by the king of Thailand were cared for and indulged, at great expense to the treasury:

Those of Bengal worship a white Elephant, which is so uncommon, that they reckon it a holy Creature. The Indian Kings often fight bloody Battels to make themselves Masters of them: ’tis said there is none to be found but in the Kingdom of Siam, and that the Kings of this Country have treated the Elephants, time out of Mind, with as much Respect as they would do some neighbouring Princes, who made them a Visit. M. L’Abbé de Choifi reports in his Travels, that in the second Court of the King of Siam’s Palace, he saw the famous white Elephant, the getting of which cost 5 or 6000 Men’s Lives, between this Prince and the King of Pegu. This Animal, as he relates, is considerably large, strong made, but old and wrinkled, and that he has four Mandarins, or Indian Lords, to fan him. They are likewise furnished with Branches of Leaves to drive away the Flies, and Umbrellas to shelter him from the Sun when he walks abroad. This Elephant is always served in gold Plate, and Monsieur Choifi saw two Vessels of Gold before him, the one to eat, and the other to drink in. The Water he drinks has been kept six Months, for the older ’tis the more wholsom. ’Tis said when this old Elephant drops off, there is a young one ready to succeed him.

That same year we see white elephant being used in an extended metaphor for the cost of war in a 9 December 1721 letter to the London Journal. The anonymous writer, using the pseudonym Cato, opines that martial honor and victory are empty and not worth the cost of blood and treasure that war entails:

White Elephants are rare in Nature, and so greatly valued in the Indies, that that King of Pegu hearing that the King of Siam had got Two, sent an Embassy in Form, to desire one of them of his Royal Brother, at any Price: But being refus’d, the thought his Honour concern’d to wage War for so great an Affront. So he enter’d Siam with a vast Army, and with the Loss of Five Hundred Thousand of his own Men, and the Destruction of as many of the Siameses, he made himself Master of the Elephant, and retrieved his Honour.

Darius (I think it was Darius the Mede) found his Honour concern’d to chastize the Scythians for invading Asia, a Hundred and Thirty Years before; and lost a great Army to vindicate his Honour, which yet was not vindicated; that is, he missed the white Elephant. For,

In short, Honour and Victory are generally no more than white Elephants; and for white Elephants the most destructive Wars have been often made. What Man free, either by Birth or Spirit, could, without Pity and Contempt, behold, as in a late French Reign he frequently might behold, a Swarm of slavish French men, in wood Shoes, with Hungry Bellies, and no Clothes, dancing round a May-pole, because their Grand Monarque, at the Expence of a Million of their Money, and Thirty or Forty Thousand Lives, had acquir’d a white Elephant, or in other words, gain’d a Town or a Victory.

Instances are endless, or else I could name other People, who have employed themselves several Years in catching white Elephants by Sea and Land.

The idea of white elephants being a ruinous gift arises in the West by the mid nineteenth century. Thai kings bestowing white elephants as gifts to courtiers was never an actual practice—white elephants were too highly prized to give away.

A 23 July 1851 letter by Geraldine Endsor Jewsbury uses a metaphorical white elephant to refer to a man whose efforts to help her cause more trouble than they are worth. The idea of a gift is implicit, but she does use the term bankrupt. The passage indicates that the metaphor of a white elephant as a ruinous gift was in circulation at the time:

If —— were not so frightened of doing wrong, he would oftener do right, and anyway be less of a bother. His services are like so many white elephants, of which nobody can make use, and yet that drain one’s gratitude, if indeed one does not feel bankrupt.

The idea of white elephant as a gift is explicitly stated in the preface of an anonymous 1859 volume of poetry. Here the locale is not Thailand, but the Kingdom of Ava, in what is now upper Myanmar. Pegasus here is being used to refer to he poetic impulse:

Indeed, the most eminent Poets of all lands and all ages have been the most eminent in their different professions or avocations—for you will find very few instances of a man who has been all his life a Poet, an entire Poet, and nothing but a Poet. In fact, that would be impossible, unless he had inherited broad acres or buoyant consols; for Pegasus is very much like the white elephant which the King of Ava presents to obnoxious courtiers,—he confers an inestimable honour upon the possessor, but he is a terribly expensive animal to keep, and would soon eat a man of moderate means out of house and home.

There is a pithy little bit of advice once bestowed by Mr. Punch upon “Persons about to Marry,” which would apply equally well to persons about to poetize: it is contained in one word—“Don't!”

So, while white elephants, the literal kind, were indeed revered and kept at great expense by the kings of Thailand, the notion that they were bestowed as gifts is a Western invention. But a metaphor does not need historical veracity to become ensconced in the language, and the metaphorical white elephant as a ruinous gift does indeed come from the false idea that Thai kings used them this way.

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Sources:

(I’m indebted to Peter Jenson Brown’s two blog posts on the phrase for providing the historical framework of the development of the metaphor.)

Brown, Peter Jensen. “Two-and-a-Half Idioms—The History and Etymology of ‘White Elephants,’” Early Sports and Pop Culture History Blog. 23 June 2014.

———“The Gift of the Nabob—A Regular-Old Elephant Update of the ‘Gift of the White Elephant,’” Early Sports and Pop Culture History Blog, 30 October 2014.

Collier, Jeremy. An Appendix to the Three English Volumes in Folio of Morery’s Great Historical, Geographical, Genealogical and Poetical Dictionary. London: George James, 1721, s.v. elephant.

Eden, Richard. “The Seconde Vyage to Guinea.” In Peter Martyr d’Anghiera, The Decades of the Newe Worlde. Translated by Richard Eden. London: William Powell, 1555, 356v. Early English Books Online.

Jewsbury, Geraldine Endsor. Letter 116, 23 July 1851. Selections of the Letters of Geraldine Endsor Jewsbury to Jane Welsh Carlyle. Edited by Anne Elizabeth Nicholson Ireland (pseud. Mrs. Alexander Ireland). London: Longmans, Green, 1862, 414.

de Mendoza, González. The Historie of the Great and Mightie Kingdome of China. Translated by R. Parke. London: I. Wolfe for Edward White, 1588, 395–96. Early English Books Online.

The Most Noble and Famous Trauels of Marcus Paulus. London: H. Bynneman for Ralph Newbery, 1579, 142. Early English Books Online.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2015, s.v. white elephant, n.

“To the Author of the London Journal.” The London Journal, 9 December 1721. Gale Primary Sources: Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Nichols Newspapers Collection.

A Volume of Smoke in Two Puffs, with Stray Whiffs from the Same Pipe. London: Arthur Hall, Virtue, 1859, x.

Image credit: Anonymous artist, late nineteenth century. Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, Maryland. Public domain image as a mechanical reproduction of a public domain work of art.

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.