pull the wool over one's eyes

April 29, 2022

Caricature of a barber powdering a wig. A drawing of a man with a comb behind his ear and scissors in his pocket is applying powder to a man’s wig that is on a stand.

29 April 2022

To pull the wool over someone’s eyes is to deceive or hoodwink them. The phrase is an Americanism dating to at least the early nineteenth century, and the metaphor underlying it would seem to be that of pulling someone’s wig down over their eyes in order to obscure their vision. The wig in question would have been a powdered wig; such wigs were going out of fashion when the phrase first appears in print.

The phrase is recorded in the Vermont Gazette of 11 November 1828:

MARK THIS.—Why did the Hall, Forbes, and Bates caucus of Vermont select republican men for the Electoral Ticket? was it not expressly intended as a political stratagem to divide Republicans, and “pull the wool over their eyes”? And has it not succeeded to a charm? the candidates are not at liberty to vote with the Republican majority of the Union, if they would?

Another early use can be found in the Pittsfield Sun of Massachusetts on 5 November 1835:

Now, the sole drift of all this in Massachusetts, fellow-citizens, is, and has long been, not to affect the election of President, but to give the aristocrats of Massachusetts a chance to pull the wool over your eyes, to gull you, to pick your pockets, to pay you in kicks instead of coppers, to enslave you by the indirect plunder of unequal laws, to rob you of the profits and comforts of life, and to fatten quietly out of the state crib.

Powdered wigs had already started to go out of fashion by the time the phrase was recorded. In 1795 the British parliament imposed a tax on wig powder, which engendered a shift in fashion. And in Revolutionary France, wigs were seen as a symbol of the old aristocracy. They hung on for a while longer in North America, but even there by the time the phrase was set down in writing the fashion trend was pretty much over.

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Sources:

“The Laborer.” Pittsfield Sun (Massachusetts), 5 November 1835, 1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“Mark This.” Vermont Gazette (Bennington), 11 November 1828, 3. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

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

Image credit: Charles Joseph Traviès de Villers, nineteenth century. Wellcome Collection. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

ketchup / catsup

April 27, 2022

An almost-empty bottle of Heinz Tomato Ketchup alongside a single-serving foil packet and two “Dip & Squeeze” packages of the sauce

27 April 2022

We know ketchup, or catsup, as a thick sauce made from tomatoes, vinegar, sugar, and other spices. The name comes to us from Chinese and Malay, which is surprising as tomatoes, the main ingredient, originated in the Americas. In Hokkien, a dialect of southeastern China and Taiwan, kôe-chiap is a fish-based sauce, kôe (fish) + chiap (sauce), and the Malay kecap is a type of soy sauce.

The name of the condiment made its way to Europe via the usual trade routes in the seventeenth century, and it is recorded in English by 1682. And ketchup, with various spellings, became the name for a variety of sauces. From a pamphlet published that year titled The Natural History of Coffee, Thee, Chocolate, Tobacco in a section extolling the virtues of chocolate:

And Adam is commanded in Paradise to Encrease and Multiply, therefore I hope this little excursion is pardonable, being so adequate to this Treatise of Chocolate; which if Rachel had known, she would not have purchas’d Mandrakes for Jacob. If the Amorous and Martial Turk should ever taste it, he would despise his Opium. If the Grecians and Arabians had ever try’d it, they would have thrown away their Wake-Robins, and their Cuckow-Pintles; and I do not doubt, but you London Gentlemen, do value it above all your Cullises and Jellies, your Anchoves, Bononia Sawsages, your Cock, or Lamb-stones, your Soys, your Ketchups and Caveares, your Cantharides, and your Whites of Eggs, are not to be compared to our rude Indian; therefore you must be very courteous and favourable to this little Pamphlet, who tells you most faithful Observations.

And the following year, a cookbook titled The Young Cooks Monitor mentions ketchup as an ingredient in a number of recipes. Here is one:

To Stew Pidgeons.
Split them in halves, then lay them in a deep Pewter-dish, and put to them an equal quantity of Wine and Water, as much as will keep them from burning, the seasoning must be a little Cloves and Mace, a few corns of whole Pepper, and a little Salt, and when they are Stewed enough, beat up a little butter thick in the Liquor they were Stewed in, and serve them to the Table, if you have any Ketchup you may put in half a score drops.

And the 1699 slang dictionary New Dictionary of the Canting Crew has this entry:

Catchup, a high East-India Sauce.

The fact that the Natural History pamphlet and the Young Cooks Monitor don’t bother to explain what ketchup is indicates that the sauce was already familiar by the end of the seventeenth century, but it was evidently not all that familiar because the 1699 Canting Crew dictionary did feel the need to define it. Furthermore, the use of the plural ketchups in the Natural History pamphlet indicates that there were a variety of different sauces using that name. These early ketchups were not the tomato-based concoction that we’re familiar with today, and various ketchups using mushrooms, walnuts, oysters, and anchovies as the main ingredient are recorded in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

We don’t see references to tomato ketchup until the turn of the nineteenth century. There is this advertisement that appeared in the Boston Gazette on 4 December 1800:

Bohea, Souchong, and Hyson TEAS;
Tomata [sic] Ketchup, in bottles, from the West Indies:
Coffee, white and brown Sugars; [for family use;
Excellent Tamarinds, in pots and kegs, in small quantities
English Mustard, in bottles; Figs, Raisins and Grapes, with
a variety of other articles in the Grocery line.

By the end of the nineteenth century, tomato ketchup had become the primary form of ketchup in the English-speaking world. Many of those other sauces still exist, only under different names.

Catsup is simply an alternative spelling and does not indicate a substantive distinction. Catsup is more commonly found in North America than elsewhere, but even there ketchup is the dominant spelling.

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Sources:

“Rappee and Macouba Snuff,” (advertisement). Boston Gazette, 4 December 1800, 4. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

B.E. A New Dictionary of the Canting Crew. London: W. Hawes, P. Gilbourne, and W. Davis, 1699, s.v. catchup, n. Early English Books Online.

M.H. The Young Cooks Monitor. London: William Downing, 1683, 67–68. Early English Books Online.

The Natural History of Coffee, Thee, Chocolate, Tobacco. London: Christopher Wilkinson, 1682. 18. Biodiversity Heritage Library.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, January 2018, s.v. ketchup, n., catsup, n., tomato, n. and adj.

Photo credit: David Wilton, 2022. Licensable under a licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

avocado / guacamole

April 25, 2022

Avocados growing on Réunion island. Two green avocados hanging from a tree, a third is in the background.

25 April 2022

The avocado (Persea americana) is a fruit native to Central America. The word comes into English via Spanish, which acquired it from the Nahuatl word āhuacatl. The Spanish rendered the word as avocado, an old form of the present-day abogado, meaning advocate or lawyer, almost certainly because the Spanish word approximated the sound of the Nahuatl one. Spanish use of the word dates to the sixteenth century.

Avocado appears in English by 1697, when the plant is described in William Dampier’s A New Voyage Round the World:

The Avogato Pear-tree is as big as most Pear-trees, and is commonly pretty high; the skin or bark black and pretty smooth; the leaves large, of an oval shape, and the Fruit as big as a large Lemon. It is of a green colour, till it is ripe, and then it is a little yellowish. They are seldom fit to eat till they have been gathered 2 or 3 days; then they become soft, and the skin or rind will peel off. The substance in the inside is green, or a little yellowish, and as soft as Butter. Within the substance there is a stone as big as a Horse-plumb. This Fruit hath no taste of its self, and therefore ’tis usually mixt with Sugar and Lime-juice, and beaten together in a Plate, and this is an excellent dish. The ordinary way is to eat it with a little Salt and a rosted Plantain, and thus a man that's hungry, may make a good meal of it. It is very wholsome eaten any way. It is reported that this Fruit provokes to lust, and therefore is said to be much esteemed by the Spaniards; and I do believe they are much esteemed by them, for I have met with plenty of them in many places in the North Seas, where the Spaniards are settled, as in the Bay of Campechy, on the Coast of Cartagena, and the Coast of Carraccos; and there are some in Jamaica, which were planted by the Spaniards, when they possessed that Island.

Guacamole, the dish of avocados mixed with onions, tomatoes, chili peppers, and seasoning, is also from Nahuatl via American Spanish; in this case the Nahuatl word is ahuacamolli, ahuaca[tl] (avocado) + molli (sauce).

It is often claimed, sometimes by reputable dictionaries, that avocado is or comes from the Nahuatl word meaning testicle. This is false but has a germ of truth. The claim first appears in the 1571 Spanish-Nahuatl dictionary by Alonso de Molina, Vocabulario en Lengua Castellana y Mexicana, in which Molina defines the Nahuatl word as follows:

Auacatel. fruta conocida, o el compañon.
(Avocado. known fruit, or the companion.)

Compañon was sixteenth-century Spanish slang for testicle. No other Nahuatl source, past or present, uses āhuacatl in this sense. Frances Karttunen’s 1983 (republished in 1997) An Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl uncritically repeats Molina’s centuries-old definition, and this work would seem to be the source for present-day English-language dictionaries when they repeat the claim. The more common Nahuatl words for testicle are cuitlapanaatetl or atetl, both literally meaning rock or stone.

What we have is a single, sixteenth-century source claiming the word had a secondary sense of testicle. We don’t know how common this slang sense of āhuacatl was, or even if it was only used by the Spanish. If it did have currency, it certainly didn’t survive into the present day, and the primary meaning of the Nahuatl word has always been the fruit.

Why someone would associate avocados with male gonads is rather obvious—they do resemble a human testicle. When Dampier writes the avocado “provokes to lust,” it is obvious that the resemblance is the source of its supposed aphrodisiacal quality. The association of avocados with testicles has always existed, at least among Europeans, but that does not mean the Nahuatl word carries that sense.

Discuss this post

Sources:

American Heritage Dictionary, fifth edition, 2011, s.v. avocado, n.

Dampier William. A New Voyage Round the World. London: James Knapton, 1697, 203. Early English Books Online.

Hansen, Magnus Pharao. “No Snopes.com, the Word Guacamole Does Not Come from the Nahuatl Word for ‘ground testicles or avocados.’” Nawatl Scholar, 10 February 2016.

Karttunnen, Frances. An Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl. Austin: U of Texas Press, 1983, s.v. ahuacatl, n.

Molina, Alonso de. Vocabulario en Lengua Castellana y Mexicana. Mexico City: Antonio de Spinosa, 1571, 9r. Internet Archive.

Online Nahuatl Dictionary, 2000–present, s.v. ahuacatl, n., ahuacamolli, n.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. avocado, n., guacamole, n.

Photo credit: Bruno Navez, 2008. Used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

sanitation / sanitary / sanitorium

April 24, 2022

A patient undergoing treatment for tuberculosis at the Municipal Sanitarium, Chicago, Illinois, 1941. A doctor and a nurse stand over a patient who is lying on a treatment table in a medical facility. A chest x-ray is hanging from the wall.

24 April 2022

Today, we associate sanitary and sanitation with cleanliness, refuse collection, and sewer systems. But it was not always that way. Originally, these words referred to health and medicine, especially to public health measures and disease control. These are modern words, coined in the early nineteenth century from the classical Latin noun sanitas, meaning health, and the medieval Latin verb sanare, meaning to heal or cure. Over time, however, the meaning of sanitary and sanitation have specialized, usually referring to cleanliness, which is just one aspect of disease control. Likewise, the word sanitorium, or sanitarium, originally just meant hospital. Over time the meaning of that word also narrowed to refer to a place that specialized in the treatment of a particular affliction or range of afflictions. Sanitoriums became hospitals for those with tuberculosis or with mental illness.

The adjective sanitary is recorded in 1806, referring to quarantine regulations intended to control the spread of the plague. We see it in an 1806 English translation of Paolo Assalini’s description of the plague in Egypt:

When the Franks residing in Egypt are assured that the plague has broken out in the place where they live, they retire into their houses, shutting all their doors, and having no intercourse with any one until the 23d of June, the eve of St. John. Not only are their doors closely shut, but they block up with care even the smallest holes, in order to prevent any animal entering their dwelling; and if by chance a cat should creep in, they immediately pursue and kill it. For this purpose they have loaded muskets always in readiness, and springs set in the suspected parts of the house. The cats of the family are shut up in cages, like fowls; and if, unfortunately for them, they chance to leave their prison, and make their escape, on their return they are killed without mercy, according to the sanitary laws; in case they should, during their absence, have contracted the poison of the plague, and brought it home attached to their tail, or hair of their skin.

Sanitation appears by 1826 in the context of quarantining ships prior to their entry into a port. A lengthy article critiquing the British government’s quarantine policy was published that year. It’s a rather remarkable piece when read today in that it encapsulates many of the objections to present-day measures to control the spread of Covid. It opines that the regulations are overly burdensome to trade and commerce, and it accuses the government bureaucrats of being “cosmopolite” elites:

This invaluable trade, as an object of English benefit, which only required our liberal and enlightened ministers to let it alone, if they would not encourage it, has been almost annihilated, or at least rendered so unproductive to the ship-owner, as not to be worth carrying on; and how, it may be asked, has this been effected? Why by the aid and operation of the quarantine laws—a code of laws and regulations which, if contagion could be introduced into this climate, would insure its admission; but even the laws themselves are emanations of light and good sense, as compared with the intolerable mode of enforcing them, by the cosmopolite imbeciles, who have the direction of their administration.
It is obvious that Liverpool must be the great entrepot of the cotton imported into England, from its local position as to the consumption. Taking it for granted, then, that the quarantine is necessary, as this is not a place to discuss that subject, it obviously became the duty of the government to ascertain where and how the ships could be placed so as to perform this performance in the safest and least expensive way to themselves and cargoes. Now, a reference to the map would have shewn them one of the noblest estuaries in England, in which ten times the number of ships could ever by any possibility be congregated for the purpose of this legal sanitation, might be moored with perfect safety within a distance of three miles from the place of their final discharge.

And the next year, 1827, we see mention in a Bury St. Edmonds newspaper of a hospital bearing the name of Sanitarium that was established in India:

A very excellent Institution has been opened at Calcutta by the Bengal Government. It is called the Sanitarium, and it is intended for the accommodation of Officers repairing to the Presidency on sick certificate. It is placed under the charge of one of the Company’s Surgeons, who is also directed to afford medical aid to all Officers of the General Staff of his Majesty’s and the Hon. Company’s service at the Presidency, and to all officers and European soldiers residing out of, and not attached to, the garrison of Fort William.

The older, more general sense of these words meaning health is rarely encountered nowadays. Sanitation and sanitary are almost always references to cleanliness and control of pests and vermin, and sanitorium almost always refers to a mental health facility. But one can still find the general sense in jargon, especially in legislation, regulations, and in the fossilized names of sanitary commissions and the like. And still, the primary reason for undertaking even the narrower cleanliness measures encompassed by sanitation is to control the spread of disease.

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Sources:

Assalini, Paolo. Observations on the Disease Called the Plague. Translated by Adam Neale. New York: T & J. Swords, 1806, 73–74. Gale Primary Sources: Sabin Americana: History of the Americas, 1500–1926.

Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013, s.v. sanare, v. Brepols: Database of Latin Dictionaries.

Lewis, Charlton T. and Charles Short. A Latin Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1879, s.v. sanitas, n. Brepols: Database of Latin Dictionaries.

Observations, Addressed to the Shipping, the Agricultural, and the Commercial Interests on the Impolicy of the Free Trade System Pursued by his Majesty’s Ministers. (25 July 1826). Newcastle, England: Edward Walker, 1826, 6. Gale Primary Sources: The Making of the Modern World.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. sanitary, adj., sanitation, n., sanatorium, n., sanitarium, n.

“Sunday’s Post.” Bury and Norwich Post (Bury St. Edmonds, England), 12 December 1827, 1. Gale Primary Sources: British Library Newspapers.

Image credit: Lee Russell, 1941. Library of Congress, Farm Security Administration—Office of War Information Photograph Collection. Public domain photo.

white elephant

April 22, 2022

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.

Discuss this post

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.