fan fiction / fanfic / slash / K/S

A “deep fake” digital manipulation by a Star Trek fan of frames from the original television series to show the characters of Kirk (played by actor William Shatner) and Spock (Leonard Nimoy) kissing.

11 May 2022

Fan fiction is a work of literature written by an admirer using the characters and setting of an existing, professionally written work or series of works. Fan fiction is most often found in the genres of fantasy and science fiction. The compound dates to the 1930s.

The earliest known appearance, that I’m aware of, is in an advertisement appearing in the 6 August 1938 issue of the fan magazine Science Fiction Collector:

The second issue of SCIENCE ADVENTURE STORIES out soon! 64 pages of good fan fiction. Only 15¢ a copy, four issues for 60¢. Soon to go bi-monthly.

The clipping fanfic appears some thirty years later. It appears twice in the 2 December 1968 issue of the fan magazine Beabohema. The first is in a review of other recently published fan zines. In this passage, Ned Brooks is the editor of one of those other fan magazines:

Dean Koontz wants to make science fiction respectable...ho hum. Directly after that, Ned Brooks advocates spitting in people’s eyes...violent, isn’t he? Snicker. Fanfic. And he’s got four covers...not hero, tho.

And the second appears in a letter a fan wrote to Beabohema:

"The Minatory Mimosa" hit a sour note with me, perhaps because so many other zines are doing satires, aprodies (parodies in English) and funny pieces on the interesting theory that a short humorous thing is easier to do than a short, serious thing. Corn, maybe, is easy to write, but true humor takes talent, REAL talent.

Of course, so does a short-short serious piece, or any sort of ultra-short writing. This places the editor in position of having to decide whether or not to accept corn, serialize, or maybe drop fanfic altogether. MY worthless opinion is that a magazine that comes out maybe four times a year is no place to put a serial, and most zines have budgets that are too skimpy to allow fifty-odd pages of story, aside from the charges of favoritism that would result if one author got so much space.

One particular sub-genre of fan fiction is that of slash fiction, in which the characters who appear in the canonical stories are depicted as having a sexual, especially homosexual, relationship. The slash comes from the labeling of the two characters’ names, separated by a slash. The prototypical slash fiction is Kirk/Spock, or K/S, fiction referring to the characters in the original Star Trek television series.

The genre dates to at least 1977, when it is referred to the August issue of Obsc’zine:

I am not trying to attack a Kirk/Spock sexual relationship in general.

And the K/S abbreviation appears the next year, in the May 1978 issue of the zine Scuttlebutt:

It’s heavy on the K/S relationship, and will delight K/S fans.

And the use of the word slash to denote this sub-genre more generally appears by 1984, when it is used in the January issue of fanzine Not Tonight, Spock!:

Recommended Book List […] to include gay books, other slash zines, or media zines with good K/S stories.

(And if you haven’t already, be sure check out the wonderful Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction, created and edited by Jesse Sheidlower. It’s a treasure trove of words and phrases like these ones.)

Discuss this post

---

Sources:

Advertisement. Science Fiction Collector, 4.3, August 1938. Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction.

Sheidlower, Jesse. Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction, 2022, s.v. fan fiction, n., fanfic, n., slash, n., K/S, n.

Oxford English Dictionary, draft additions September 2004, s.v. fan, n.2; draft additions June 2003, s.v. slash, n.; third edition, September 2003, s.v. K/S, n.

Strang, Patrick. “Cum Bloatus” (Letter). Beabohema, issue 2, December 1968, 48. Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction.

“Ten Mags to Doomsday.” Beabohema, issue 2, December 1968, 36. Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction.

Image credit: Shadows and Flame, 2015. The original, unmanipulated images are from Star Trek, by Desilu Productions and Paramount Television. Fair use of a copyrighted image to illustrate the topic under discussion.

sawbuck

A US 1861 ten-dollar demand banknote, with pictures of Abraham Lincoln, Lady Liberty, and an eagle on the obverse side and a large “X” on the reverse.

9 May 2022

A sawbuck is a wooden trestle with two X-shaped pairs of legs connected by crossbars, on which a piece of lumber to be cut can be laid. It is also slang for a US ten-dollar bill. The literal sense of word is a borrowing from either the Dutch zaagbok or the German sägebock (saw-goat), and the slang sense comes from the large Roman numeral X (ten) which was printed on early US ten-dollar banknotes, wordplay on both the X and buck meaning a form of currency.

A clipped buck, referring to the trestle, appears as early as 1816 in a letter by James Kirke Paulding:

The poor duke gradually descended into the vale of poverty. His white dimity could not last for ever, and he gradually went to seed, and withered like a stately onion. In fine he was obliged to work, and that ruined him for nature had made him a gentleman.—And a gentleman is the caput mortuum of human nature, out of which you can make nothing under heaven—but a gentleman. He first carried wild game about to sell; but this business not answering, he bought himself a buck and saw, and became a redoubtable sawyer. But he could not get over his old propensity—and whenever a lady passed where he was at work, the little man was always observed to stop his saw, lean his knee on the stick of wood, and gaze at her till she was quite out of sight. Thus, like Antony, he sacrificed the world for a woman—for he soon lost all employment he was always so long about his work. The last time I saw him he was equipped in the genuine livery of poverty, leaning against a tree on the Battery, and admiring the ladies.

A sawbuck; a wooden trestle with two X-shaped pairs of legs connected by crossbars, on which a piece of lumber to be cut can be laid.

And we see it again in this 11 January 1825 piece in the Wilmington, Delaware American Watchman:

That all religions are tolerated by the laws is true; but not exactly by public opinion. Zekiel Stanford, came to complain of Teary [sic] O’Rourke. He was sawing a load of wood in his vocation patiently and honestly on christmas day, because wood is necessary on christmas, which always falls in winter; Terry was coming from church, and swore that no man should work on christmas; by the powers he would not tolerate such things; so he despoiled poor Zekiel of his buck and saw, threw the wood about, and Hays, Junr. interfering and arresting Terry, he was rescued by his companions, but after sundry hustlings he succeeded in securing his man, and lodging him in Bridewell. Terry swore there was no freedom in this country, in locking up a man because he protected religion.—New York Advocate.

And we see the slang sense, referring to the banknote, by 23 August 1834 in the New York Evening Post, in an article about the then-ongoing political fight over the Bank of the United States, which was opposed by President Andrew Jackson:

Resolved, That we cherish a decided preference for Jackson Gold over the bills of the United States Bank—and we look upon a Jackson Eagle with vastly more complacency, than upon a paper (X) “Saw-buck” from the Rag-factory of Biddle, Baring & Co.

Discuss this post

---

Sources:

“Christmas.” American Watchman and Delaware Advertiser (Wilmington), 11 January 1825, 3. Library of Congress, Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2022, s.v. sawbuck, n.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. sawbuck, n., buck, n.7.

“Ninth Ward.” Evening Post (New York), 23 August 1834, 2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Paulding, James Kirke. “Letter 17.” Letters from the South, Written During an Excursion in the Summer of 1816, vol. 1 of 2. New York: James Eastburn, 1817, 188–89. HathiTrust Digital Archive. https://www.hathitrust.org/

Photo credits: wooden sawbuck, Kimsaka, 2012, licensed under a  Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license; US banknote, 2013, National Numismatic Collection, National Museum of American History. Public domain image.

testify

Charles Lindbergh testifying in the 1935 trial of Bruno Hauptmann, his son’s kidnapper and murderer. Hauptmann is in profile on the right. Black and white photograph of a man sitting on a chair on a courtroom’s witness stand, surrounded by court clerks, lawyers, jurors, and onlookers.

6 May 2022

[Updated 7 May 2022, adding PIE root.]

Testify is a word with a straightforward etymology but one with a myth attached. The verb is a late fourteenth-century borrowing from the medieval Latin testificare, a later variant on the classical testificor. The Proto-Indo-European root is *trei, with a base meaning of three, and testify and related words come from the compound root *tri-st-i, meaning something like third person standing by, in other words a witness to the fact or truth.

One of its earliest English-language appearances is in William Langland’s poem Piers Plowman, written c.1387. In this passage Patience is speaking to Will about the hypocritical Master of Divinity, who is gorging himself before giving a theological lesson on penance:

Pacience parceyved what I thoughte, and [preynte] on me to be stille,
And seide, "Thow shalt see thus soone, whan he may na moore
He shal have a penaunce in his paunche and puffe at ech a worde,
And thanne shullen his guttes gothele, and he shal galpen after;
For now he hath dronken so depe he wole devyne soone
And preven it by hir Pocalips and passion of Seint Avereys
That neither bacon ne braun ne blancmanger ne mortrews
Is neither fissh ne flessh but fode for a penaunt.
And thanne shal he testifie of a trinite, and take his felawe to witnesse
What he fond in a f[or]el after a freres lyvyng;
And but the first leef be lesyng, leve me nevere after!

(Patience perceived what I thought, and winked at me to be still,
And said, “You shall see this soon; when he can [eat] no more
He shall have a penance in his paunch and belch at every word,
And than shall his guts rumble, and he shall yawn afterward;
For now he has drunk so deep that he will soon expound
And prove it by the revelation [apocalypse] and passion of Saint Avarice
That neither bacon nor flesh nor blancmange nor stew
Is neither fish nor flesh but food for a penitent,
And then he shall testify of a trinity, and take his fellow to witness
What he found in a box about a friar’s means of support;
And if the first page be a pack of lies, never again believe me!”

Other words from the testi- root follow, such as testimony and testament.

The aforementioned myth is that the Latin word comes from a purported Roman practice of men grabbing each other’s or their own testicles when swearing an oath. The myth dates to the medieval period and is simply not true. We have many accounts of Romans swearing oaths, and not one involves touching anyone’s testicles. The myth, in fact, has the etymological flow reversed. The Latin testis, and therefore the English testicle, come from the metaphor of the testicles being a testament to a man’s virility.

But while the etymology of testify and testificare has nothing to do with it, the notion of swearing on someone’s testicles does possess a grain of truth. The practice is famously alluded to in two passages from Genesis.

The first is Genesis 24:2–4, in which Abraham has a servant swear an oath by placing his hand under his “thigh”:

And Abraham said unto his servant, the elder of his house, that ruled over all that he had: “Put, I pray thee, thy hand under my thigh. And I will make thee swear by the LORD, the God of heaven and the God of the earth, that thou shalt not take a wife for my son of the daughters of the Canaanites, among whom I dwell. But thou shalt go unto my country, and to my kindred, and take a wife for my son, even for Isaac.”

The second is similar, in Genesis 47:29, where Joseph swears an oath to his father Jacob’s (Israel’s):

And the time drew near that Israel must die; and he called his son Joseph, and said unto him: “If now I have found favour in thy sight, put, I pray thee, thy hand under my thigh, and deal kindly and truly with me; bury me not, I pray thee, in Egypt.”

The key Hebrew word in these passages is יְרֵכִ֑י (my thigh). The Hebrew text is using a euphemism that is repeated in later translations. The Vulgate Latin uses femore (thigh), and most English translations use thigh.

It’s clear that thigh here is a euphemism for the genitals, but the significance of the gesture is unclear and a matter of scholarly debate. It could be a call to his descendants to ensure the oath-taker keeps his word. Or it may be a form of curse, preventing the oath-taker from siring children should he break his word. There is a huge gulf between the nomadic Hebrew tribes of the Bronze Age and ancient Rome, and one cannot take a vague allusion in the Hebrew Bible and apply it to a civilization a millennium and more than a thousand miles distant.

The myth may have arisen in the minds of medieval readers. A number of ancient Roman writers engaged in wordplay and puns about male genitalia and testimony—the similarity between the words was not lost on them—and medieval readers may also have conflated the biblical readings with Roman practice. In any case, it’s not the origin of the Latin or English word.

Discuss this post

---

Sources:

Thanks to my brother the Rev. Dr. Carlos Wilton for help on the Hebrew references.

American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots Appendix, s.v. trei.

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

Katz, Joshua T. “Tesimonia Ritus Italici: Male Genitalia, Solemn Declarations, and a New Latin Sound Law.” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 98, 1998, 183–217. JSTOR.

Langland, William. Piers Plowman (B-text), c. 1387, 13.85–95. The Vision of Piers Plowman. A.V.C. Schmidt, ed. London: J.M. Dent and E.P. Dutton, 1978. Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse.

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

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

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. testify, v.

Reyburn, William D. and Euan McG. Fry. A Handbook on Genesis. UBS Handbook Series. New York: United Bible Societies, 1997, 521–22.

Photo credit: New York World-Telegram, 1935. Library of Congress. Public domain image.

reggae

Toots Hibbert in concert, 2010. A man in a blue, leather vest singing into a microphone while playing the guitar.

4 May 2022

Reggae is a style of Jamaican music that Cassidy and Le Page’s Dictionary of Jamaican English defines as:

A type of music developed in Jamaica about 1964, based on ska, and usually having a heavy four-beat rhythm, using the bass, electric guitar, and drum, with the scraper coming in at the end of the measure and acting as accompaniment to emotional songs often expressing rejection of established “white-man” culture.

The name reggae, however, appears a few years after the musical style started to be played, coined by Frederick “Toots” Hibbert in his 1968 song Do the Reggay:

I got a rich one (yeah)
Do you love me? (yeah)
Do you really want me? (yeah)
with all your heart (yeah)
I want to do the reggay (yeah)
With you (yeah)
Come onto me (Let's)
Do the dance (yeah)

Is this the new dance? (yeah)
Going around the town? (yeah)
We can move you baby (then)
Do the reggay
Do the reggay
Reggay reggay reggay
La la la la la laaaa

And the earliest known appearance in print of the name is in an advertisement in Kingston, Jamaica’s Daily Gleaner on 7 September 1968 for a band that was covering Hibbert’s song:

TONIGHT! TONIGHT!
THE “BOSS” SOUND
is back at the RAINBOW CLUB
with a
360° SOUND HAPPENING

JAMAICA’S GREATEST
Sonny Wong   Victor Wong   Derrick Herriot “The Preacher”
Skaing Souls[?]-Crazy Mood
This Music Got Soul

THE MIGHTY VIKINGS

Come do this
Brand New Dance
THE REGGAE

Hear these new Fab. Tunes:

• Don’t tell to Mary

• Watch the sound

• Love makes a woman

• Lovers Holiday

• Red Red wine

• Reggae

• Got the Rhythm

Reggae is probably a spelling variant of the Jamaican dialectical word rege-rege or raga-raga, meaning rags or raggedy clothing. Cassidy and Le Page’s dictionary cites citations from 1954 for rege-rege and 1943 for raga-raga. This etymology is backed up by Hibbert himself, who in 2004 recounted how he came up with the lyric and song title:

Hibbert says his naming of the genre on the 1968 single “Do The Reggay” was pure accident. “There’s a word we used to use in Jamaica called ‘streggae’,” he recalls. “If a girl is walking and the guys look at her and say ‘Man, she’s streggae’ it means she don’t dress well, she look raggedy. The girls would say that about the men too. This one morning me and my two friends were playing and I said, ‘OK man, let’s do the reggay.’ It was just something that came out of my mouth. So we just start singing ‘Do the reggay, do the reggay’ and created a beat. People tell me later that we had given the sound it’s [sic] name. Before that people called it blue-beat and all kind of other things. Now it’s in the Guinness World of Records.”

But others have pointed to another sense that could have been the origin, that of rege-rege meaning an argument or quarrel. This proposed origin is apt because as many reggae songs address racial inequality and the problems of a post-colonial society. Cassidy and Le Page also refer to a possible connection to ragtime, reggae being a distinctly Jamaican style of Black music with syncopated rhythm. This explanation does not necessarily preclude Hibbert’s account being accurate; the argument sense may have influenced the adoption of Hibbert’s lyric as the name for the style.

Discuss this post

---

Sources:

Advertisement. The Daily Gleaner (Kingston, Jamaica), 7 September 1968, 6. Newspaper Archive.com.

Cassidy, Frederic Gomes and Robert Brock Le Page, eds. A Dictionary of Jamaican English, second edition (1980). Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2002, s.v. rege-rege; n., raga-raga, n. and adj.; reggae, n. ProQuest: Caribbean Literature.

Hibbert, Frederick “Toots.” “Do the Reggay.” Beverley’s/Pyramid Records, 1968. Lyrics.com.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2009, s.v. reggae, n.

Sturges, Fiona. “The Reggae King of Kingston.” Independent (London), 4 June 2004, 18–19. Gale Primary Sources: The Independent Historical Archive.

Photo credit: Karl Simpson, 2010. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

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.