pneumatic / Mae West

1954 photo of Mae West being presented an inflatable life vest with her name stenciled on it and inscribed with signatures of servicemen. The vest is being presented by Maj. George Gaines, US Air Force.

2 May 2022

Pneumatic is a seventeenth-century borrowing from the Latin pneumaticus and the Greek πνευματικός. The Latin word is originally also a borrowing from the Greek, but English takes the word from both languages directly. In ancient Greek, the word referred to the air, wind, or breathing, but in Hellenistic (e.g., New Testament) Greek it also acquired a sense of the spirit or soul. This semantic pattern is repeated in the Latin, referring to air pressure in the classical period but expanding to include the spirit in the fifteenth century.

The earliest appearance of the word in English that I have found is as an adjective describing a person, presumably someone with some sort of pulmonary affliction such as asthma. It appears in a 1612 translation of Thomas de Fougasse’s Generall Historie of the Magnificent State of Venice:

This man whosoeuer he was, dealt with one named Calergo, the Pneumaticke, and hauing set before him the entire dominion of the Island, perswaded him to kill all those, who did continue in the Venetians obedience; and for this purpose to draw great numbers of Greekes to his partie. This Calergo consented thereunto, and came first of all to Mopsilla, a pleasant countrey house, where he assailed Andrea Cornari, and slew him.

(As far as I can tell, there is no French equivalent to pneumatic in Fougasse’s original. The word is an addition in the English translation.)

But a little more than a decade later, pneumatic was being used to refer to things spiritual or related to the church. (The root of spirit relates to breath, also giving us words like aspiration and respiration.) Here is a use of pneumatic to refer to the hierarchy of the church, from another translation, this time in a 1624 rendering of George Goodwin’s Babels Balm, an anti-Catholic satire:

All things are iudg'd by the Spirituall man:
Ergo, iudge Popes, pneumaticke-Lords, none can.

(I have not been able to locate the original Latin text to see if the word appears there.)

And by 1654 pneumatic was being used to refer to the physical mechanics of air. From Walter Charleton’s Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendo-Charltoniana:

The Reasons of Rarity and Density thus evidently Commonstrated, the pleasantness of Contemplation would invite us to advance to the examination of the several Proportions of Gravity and Levity among Bodies, respective to their particular Differences in Density and Rarity; the several ways of Rarifying and Condensing Aer and Water; and the means of attaining the certain weights of each, in the several rates, or degrees of their Rarifaction and Condensation; according to the evidence of Aerostatick and Hydrostatick Experiments: but in regard these things are not directly pertinent to our present scope and institution, and that Galilaeus and Mersennus have enriched the World with excellent Disquisitions upon each of those sublime Theorems; we conceive ourselves more excusable for the Omission, than we should have been for the Consideration of them, in this place. However, we ask leave to make a short Excursion upon that PROBLEM, of so great importance to those, who exercise their Ingenuity in either Hydraulick, or Pneumatick Mechanicks.

In the opening years of the twentieth century, however, pneumatic acquired a new sense in American slang; it began to be used to refer to large-breasted women. The slang term was probably inspired by the pneumatic tires that were starting to appear on bicycles and automobiles. This sense appears in a 1905 O. Henry short story, The Girl and the Graft, in a passage about the utility of women in a confidence game:

“Ladies?” said Pogue, with western chivalry. “Well, not to any great extent. They don’t amount to much in special lines of graft, because they’re all so busy in general lines. What? Why, they have to. Who’s got the money in the world? The men. Did you ever know a man to give a woman a dollar without any consideration? A man will shell out his dust to another man free and easy and gratis. But if he drops a penny in one of the machines run by the Madam Eve’s Daughters’ Amalgamated Association and the pineapple chewing gum don’t fall out when he pulls the lever you can hear him kick to the superintendent four blocks away. Man is the hardest proposition a woman has to go up against. He’s a low-grade one, and she has to work overtime to make him pay. Two times out of five she’s salted. She can’t put in crushers and costly machinery. He’d notice ’em and be onto the game. They have to pan out what they get, and it hurts their tender hands. Some of ’em are natural sluice troughs and can carry out $1,000 to the ton. The dry-eyed ones have to depend on signed letters, false hair, sympathy, the kangaroo walk, cowhide whips, ability to cook, sentimental juries, conversational powers, silk underskirts, ancestry, rouge, anonymous letters, violet sachet powders, witnesses, revolvers, pneumatic forms, carbolic acid, moonlight, cold cream and the evening newspapers.”

And it appears in a T.S. Eliot poem, Whispers of Immortality, from 1919:

Grishkin is nice; her Russian eye
   Is underlined for emphasis;
Uncorseted, her friendly bust
   Gives promise of pneumatic bliss.

The idea here, of course, is that breasts are inflated. The same metaphor appears in the World War II slang term Mae West, referring to an inflatable life vest worn by airmen. The was well known for her busty figure, and Mae West appears in print early on in the war. It probably is older in spoken use by fliers, though. From the magazine The Listener of 11 January 1940 in an article about Royal Navy pilots:

Full flying kit consists of a combination suit like the skin of a teddy bear. On top of that goes a windproof combination suit with a high collar lined with fleece. Then comes a life-saving waistcoat. This can be inflated in a few moments by the wearer, and for some obscure reason is known technically as a “Mae West.”

These slang uses of pneumatic and Mae West were figurative. It would be a few decades before silicone implants made artificial “inflation” of breasts a reality.

Discuss this post

---

Sources:

Charleton, Walter. Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendo-Charltoniana, or, a Fabrick of Science Natural. London: Thomas Newcomb for Thomas Heath, 1654, 256–57. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013, s.v. pneumaticus, adj. Brepolis: Database of Latin Dictionaries.

Eliot, T.S. “Whispers of Immortality.” Ara Vus Prec. London: Ovid Press, 1919, 21. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Fougasse, Thomas de. The Generall Historie of the Magnificent State of Venice. Translated by W. Shute. London: G. Eld and W. Stansby, 1612, 217. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

———. Histoire Generale de Venise. Paris: Abel l’Angelier, 1608. Google Books.

Goodwin, George. Babels Balm: or the Honey-Combe of Romes Religion. Translated by John Vicars. London: George Purslowe for Nathaniel Brown, 1624, 32. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Henry, O. (pseud. William Sydney Porter). “The Girl and the Graft.” The Pittsburgh Gazette (Pennsylvania), 28 May 1905, Sect. 3, page 2. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Lewis, Charlton T. and Charles Short. A Latin Dictionary. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1879, s.v. pneumaticus, adj. Brepolis: Database of Latin Dictionaries.

“The Navy that Flies.” The Listener, 11 January 1940, 56. Gale Primary Sources: Listener Historical Archive, 1929–1991.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2006, s.v. pneumatic, adj. and n.; March 2000, s.v. Mae West, n.

Image credit: Unknown photographer, 1954. Fair use of a presumably copyrighted image to illustrate the topic under discussion.

pull the wool over one's eyes

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.

Discuss this post

---

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

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.

Discuss this post

---

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

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

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.

Discuss this post

---

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.