go for broke

Goichi Suehiro of Co. F, 2nd Battalion, 442nd RCT in the Vosges region of France, 1944. A Japanese-American soldier standing in a foxhole, holding an M-1 carbine.

16 May 2022

To go for broke is a verb phrase meaning to risk everything on a venture, to give one’s all. And go for broke is also an adjectival phrase describing such efforts. The underlying metaphor is that of risking bankruptcy. The phrase arose in Hawaiian Pidgin in the early twentieth century and entered into widespread American usage in the 1940s.

Hawaiian Pidgin is creole language, a combination of Hawaiian and English, spoken in Hawai’i by about a million people. According to Ethnologue, it has about 600,000 first-language speakers and another 400,000 second-language speakers, with “vigorous use” by some 100,000–200,000. Its use is not restricted to any specific ethnicity; rather it’s spoken by generally by those raised in Hawai’i. Despite its name, Hawaiian Pidgin is a creole, not technically a pidgin. A pidgin is a contact language with simplified grammar and limited vocabulary, often used to conduct business and trade. A creole, on the other hand, is a full-fledged language, a blending of two or more other languages, with a full grammar and vocabulary and the ability to express an infinite number of ideas. Hawaiian Pidgin is distinct from Hawaiian, which is a Polynesian language spoken in Hawai’i.

The first recorded use of let’s go broke is in a 1935 song title listed in a catalog of copyrighted works. The song is from Hawai’i:

Let’s go for broke; song; with ukulele arr. © July 9 1935; E pub. 49251; Harry Owens, Honolulu. 15930.

A 1937 travelogue of an extended tour of Hawai’i by travel-writer Harry Franck gives a number of snippets of Hawaiian Pidgin, including this one:

A well-known nursery story ends in some circles with, “The gingerbread man he run like hell; he go for broke.”

It appears again the next year in Me Spik English, a 1938 book of examples of Hawaiian Pidgin. In Hawaiian, kane means man and wahine woman:

Kane: “You like go for one walk, huh?”
Wahine: “Too much trobble. I like see one peecture.”
Kane: “We go for broke. We go Hawaii T’eater, see ‘Spoiled Goods.’”
Wahine: “Who de hero?”
Kane: “I tink is no hero. Is maybe educational peecture.”
Wahine: “Educational? Waste time!”

During World War II, the 442nd Regimental Combat Team adopted go for broke as its unit motto, and this is the point at which the phrase starts entering into general American speech. The unit, which served in Europe, was the most highly decorated regiment of the war, including twenty-one Medals of Honor awarded to its soldiers. The 442nd RCT was activated in February 1943 and consisted almost entirely of Japanese-American (Nisei) soldiers. Roughly two-thirds of the soldiers in the unit came from Hawai’i, with the other third coming from the mainland, mainly the west coast. And many of families of those soldiers from the mainland had been interned in relocation camps. (Ironically, Japanese Americans in Hawai’i, those closest to the combat areas, were not interned; because of their numbers, doing so would have been ruinous to the Hawaiian economy.) Go for broke was, therefore, a fitting motto for soldiers who had to go all out to prove their loyalty to their fellow citizens, most of whom viewed them as the enemy.

The adoption of the motto was memorialized in a 14 April 1943 Associated Press article:

As the first trainload unloaded after a 4,000-mile journey via boat and rail, the motto “Go for Broke,” was adopted by those loyal Americans of Japanese ancestry who are taking advantage of an opportunity offered by the War Department for military service against enemies of the United States.

Adjectival use of the phrase appears in print shortly after the war, again in a description of the Nisei valor on the battlefield. From A.W. Lind’s 1946 Hawaii’s Japanese:

The “go for broke” spirit was probably reflected in the bold daring observed among the Islanders on the battle field. Some of the Caucasian officers attributed the apparent unconcern for death among the “Hawaiians” to a Japanese fatalism rather than to an American quality of character. Doubtless there was a certain survival of shikata-ga-nai and of the Japanese sense of obligation (giri). It would be strange if these significant cultural traits of their parents had not retained some influence upon the second generation sons. Preeminent, however, in the gallantry of these sons of Hawaii was the thoroughly American hope that their rights as citizens of the land might be finally established.

So, go for broke is both an etymologically and historically apt term, reflecting both its linguistic and ethnic origins as well as the valor of those who used it.

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Sources:

“442nd Regimental Combat Team.” Go For Broke National Education Center.

Associated Press. “Loyal Japs from Hawaii Reach Dixie to Train.” Atlanta Journal (Georgia), 14 April 1943, 9. (Page number printed on the page is 8 because there are two page 6s.)

Catalog of Copyright Entries, Part 3 Musical Compositions. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1936, no. 15930. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Ethnologue, 2022.

Franck, Harry A. Roaming in Hawaii. New York: Frederick A Stokes, 1937, 146.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2022, s.v. go for broke, v., go-for-broke, adj.

“Hawaiian Pidgin for Beginners.” Languagehat.com, 4 January 2022.

“Hawaii Pidgin.” Ethnologue.com, 2022.

Lind, Andrew W. Hawaii’s Japanese: An Experiment in Democracy. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1946, 167.

Mobley, Milly Lou. Me Spik English: To Help You Remember—Stories of Pidgins in Paradise Heard in Hawaii. Honolulu: Honolulu Star Bulletin, 1938, 17. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2015, s.v. go-for-broke, adj.; second edition, 1989, s.v. broke, adj.

Photo credit: U.S Army, 1944. Public domain image.

state of the art

13 May 2022

A colored etching satirizing the technological advances of the early 19th century. A conglomeration of scenes, such as a steam-powered horse, a suspension bridge between Cape Town and Bengal, and cat food labeled “delicate viands for quadrupeds.”

The phrase state of the art refers to something that incorporates the latest and most sophisticated technology or practice. The phrase as it is commonly used today dates to at least 1815, but there are precursor phrases, and state of the art is a good example of how a collocation of words can become a stock idiom.

We see the collocation of the four words as early as 1692 in Stanford Wolferstan’s An Enquiry into the Causes of Diseases:

The present state of the Art of Physick is just like that of War, both have received considerable Improvements, the one to save, and the other to destroy Mankind.

If we parse this sentence, it’s obvious that the phrase here is not the noun phrase state of the art, but rather that there are two phrases: a noun phrase, present state, and a prepositional phrase, of the Art of Physick. But Wolferstan is using the collocation to refer to technological and practical development.

And several decades later we see the noun phrase state of the art appear. A review of an essay on ancient Mycenean shipbuilding and navigation, as seen in the writing of Homer, in the Annual Register for 1775 has this to say about the technology and techniques of the ancient seafaring:

Agreeably to this account of ancient ships and ship-building, we see, that though Homer’s seamen are expert in their manœuvre, yet they are confined to the precautions of that timid coasting navigation, which is at this day practiced in the Mediterranean, in slight undecked vessels, unfit to resist the open sea. Their first care is, to venture as little as possible out of sight of land, to run along shore, and to be ready to put in, and draw up their ships on the beach, if there is no port, on the first appearance of foul weather.

We find Nestor, Diomedes, and Menelaus, consulting at Lesbos upon a doubt, which this imperfect state of the art alone could suggest. The question was, Whether, in their return to Greece, they should keep the Asiatic coast till they past [sic] Chios, which was the most secure, but the most tedious way home; or venture directly across the open sea, which was the shortest, but the most dangerous?

With the turn of the nineteenth century, we see the collocation of the words appear more often. And these appearances tend to not include references to the continuing development of technology or practices, making the earlier use in reference to Mycenean shipbuilding to be something of an outlier. For example, there is this advertisement for a book in New York’s Evening Post from 17 November 1804:

To this edition Mr. James Barry has added a supplement, containing Anecdotes of the latest and most celebrated Artists, and remarks on the present state of the art of Painting.

Or this advertisement in Philadelphia’s United States Gazette of 7 June 1805:

For the twenty-one large quarto volumes in boards illustrated with five hundred and ninety-five copper-plates, (a number not likely to be soon greatly exceeded in any similar undertaking) which bear honourable testimony to the state of the arts in the United States during the progress of the work: [price list follows].

But the phrase, as opposed to the collocation, remained in use, as can be seen from this account of cloth dying in seventh-century China that appeared in the Washington Expositor of 4 December 1807:

The dying of the Chinese, at an early period, seems to have been confined to Cotton and Silk; the colors, which were extracted from vegetable substances, were generally Red, Blue, Violet, and what is often termed a woad colour: the process being performed by the females in each family. This state of the art seems to have continued until near the end of the seventh Century, when they discarded their own, and borrowed the Indian, and Persian, art of dying, and with it the use of Alum and Coperas.

And in this article on Robert Fulton’s steam engine from Washington, DC’s Daily National Intelligencer of 7 July 1815:

Experiment after experiment had failed, and every additional unsuccessful attempt served to retard rather than to advance to progress of invention. In this state of the art Fulton enlisted in its service, and it was at once carried to the highest degree of perfection.

But the phrase state of the art remained relatively rare until the mid 1950s, when the frequency of its use skyrocketed. This rise corresponds to the technological revolution that followed in the wake of World War II.

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Sources:

“Account of Books for 1775: An Essay on the Original Genius and Writings of Homer.” Annual Register, 1775, 232. ProQuest.

Davies, Mark. Corpus of Historical American English (COHA). Accessed 12 April 2022.

“For the Expositor: A Brief Account of the Origin and Process of Dying.” Washington Expositor and Weekly Register (Washington, DC), 4 December 1807, 1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers. [Database metadata says 5 December.]

Google Books Ngram Viewer. Accessed 12 April 2022.

“New Books” (advertisement). Evening Post (New York), 17 November 1804, 4. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2012, s.v. state-of-the-art, adj, and n., state, n., status, n. and adj.

“Robert Fulton.” Daily National Intelligencer (Washington, DC), 7 July 1815, 2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“Thomas Dobson” (advertisement). United States Gazette (Philadelphia), 7 June 1805, 4. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Wolferstan, Stanford. An Enquiry into the Causes of Diseases. London: Thomas Bassett, 1692, sig. A5v. Early English Books Online.

Image credit: Paul Pry (pseudonym of William Heath), 1829. Wellcome Library. Public domain image.

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.)

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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.

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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.

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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.