teetotal

June 6, 2022

c.1874 lithograph by Currier and Ives, titled “Woman’s Holy War. Grand Charge on the Enemy’s Works.” A young woman in armor, bearing an axe and a shield with the stars and stripes and astride a charging horse, leads a group of similarly armed women as they shatter barrels of liquor.

6 June 2022

[Edited 8 June 2022, adding references to tee-totally as characteristic of Irish speech.]

Teetotal refers to the complete abstinence from alcoholic drinks, or more generally from any intoxicant. But it has not always been that specific. The word began its life as simply an emphatic way to say total, what etymologists call reduplication, the repetition of a sound for rhetorical effect. Tee-totally seems to have been an element in the dialect of the north of England and Ireland.

The earliest use that I know of is in the form of the adverb tee-totally that appeared in the Chester Chronicle of 7 September 1810 in a letter detailing a debate over the origin of the name of the town Thornton-le-Moors:

Mr. Plane said, “he differed tee-totally from the attorney in his last assertion, whom he was sorry to see so deficient in the history of his country.”

We see it again in the novel The Man-of-War’s Man, which was serialized in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in 1821:

But come, shipmates, dang it I’ll follow my old plan wid you—open all of you your fists, so, and let’s have a squint at them—for I’ll be teetotally d—d, if Matt. Higgins shall allow either a tailor or any other loblolly to enter his crew without his knowledge.

And there is this which appeared in the London periodical The Age of 14 March 1830. It purports to be an accurate transcription of a speech given by Anglo-Irish, Tory MP John Wilson Croker on 12 March, but it is almost certainly written by the editors portraying Croker as a comic Irishman. The topic of the speech is the system of benefices enjoyed by the clergy of the Church of England:

But says the young Lord Grizzle—Howich I mane—but I’m always thinkin of the names invinted for his ould progenitor in the John Bull—says he, ’tis a whole downright sinecure that ought to be ’bolisht teetotally, and not tacked as a selvage to no sort of office at all.

The adverb tee-totally appears in the American press by 3 September 1830, when the New-York Spectator published a series of five letters on the congressional elections of that year. As with the transcript published in The Age, these letters appear to be inventions by the Spectator’s editors. All five all bear the signature of men named John Smith, differing only in their middle names. This one is purportedly by a John Snag Smith:

You need not, if you value the character of your paper for consistency, which I believe you do, lay any flattering unction to the souls of the Clay men about the election in this State. It has tee-totally gone for Jackson. You can’t see a Clay man any where.

The reference to Clay is to the Whig/Republican Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky, a political rival to the Democratic President Andrew Jackson.

We also see the word in a piece originally published in the Germantown Telegraph and reprinted in the Poughkeepsie, New York Independence on 24 April 1833. It’s from a speech purportedly given in Illinois calling for a war against the local Indigenous tribes:

Yes gentlemen and feller citizen sodjirs! my soul rises spontanaciously as I contaminat the glorious event that must extinguish our names in the heart of our countrymen till time shall be no more! Our excess in this experdition is sartin; it is a mere sarcumstance! The planos will be aroused, and we will all fight on ’em bodiaciously, and tee totally abflisticate ’em off the face of the yearth!

And it appears in Samuel Lover’s 1834 story Barny O’Reardon, the Navigator:

You’re a good sayman for that same, says he, an’ it would be right at any other time than this present, says he, but it’s onpossible now, tee-totally, on account o’ the war, says he.

These last two are clearly meant to portray a stereotypical Irish dialect.

Finally, we see the adjective tee total by 25 July 1835, when it appears in Portland, Maine’s Eastern Argus in a political context:

The Bangor Courier has a long article to prove that the British government is purer and better than ours. The editor thought so, we suppose, in the last war, when he took sides with the invaders of our soil, and ministered to their physical wants. This Samuel Upton is a tee total “Whig”—no mistake.

The fact that many of these early citations of use are from fictional sources or invented snippets of dialect does not matter for our purposes. It’s still a word, and in early use teetotal and teetotally was strongly associated with dialectal speech, first in the north of England, and then spreading, perhaps by sailors, to Ireland and the American frontier.

The association of teetotal with the temperance movement seems to have begun in September 1833 when a Richard Turner is said to have given a speech advocating total abstinence from alcohol in Preston, Lancashire, England, but no record or transcript of the speech was made. The word was picked up by the Preston Temperance Advocate and used multiple times the next year in reference to abstinence—the Oxford English Dictionary has a number of 1834 citations of the word from that paper. As a result, it became a well-established term within the British temperance movement.

By 1835 the use of teetotal became a fixture of the American temperance movement as well. In January of that year, Boston’s Temperance Journal reprinted a series of testimonies that has originally appeared in the Preston Temperance Advocate. One of them reads:

I then signed the moderation pledge, and in about ten days after I signed the tee-total, and can say solemnly, that nothing that can intoxicate has entered my mouth, except on sacramental occasions, since that time.

So, both the generic, dialectal, and emphatic use of teetotal and its specific application by the temperance movement started in the north of England before spreading to North America and beyond, albeit at slightly different times.

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Sources:

“The Bathing Boat” (Letter, 27 August 1810). The Chester Chronicle (England), 7 September 1810, 4. Newspapers.com.

“The Church.” The Age (London), 14 March 1830, 4. Gale Primary Sources: Nineteenth Century UK Periodicals.

“Flowers of Rhetoric.” Independence (Poughkeepsie, New York), 24 April 1833, 2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Lover, Samuel. “Barny O’Reardon, the Navigator.” Legends and Stories of Ireland, second series. London: Baldwin and Cradock, 1834, 50–51. Nineteenth Century Collections Online.

“The Man-of-War’s Man.” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, November 1821, 424.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. teetotal, adj. and n., teetotally, adv.1.

“Reformed Drunkards.” Temperance Journal (Boston), January 1835, 1. Gale Primary Sources: American Historical Periodicals from the American Antiquarian Society.

Smith, John Snag (pseudonym). “Western Elections.” Letter (12 August 1830). New-York Spectator, 3 September 1830, 2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“Summary of News.” Eastern Argus (Portland, Maine), 25 July 1835, 2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Tréguer, Pascal. “The Authentic Origin of the Word ‘Teetotal.’” Wordhistories.net, 12 January 2017.

Image credit: c.1874, Currier and Ives. Library of Congress. Public domain image.

tattoo

June 3, 2022

Photo of Tuhoe Maori activist Tame Iti at an event to raise awareness and funds for Maori arrested in 2007 "terror raids" by the New Zealand government. Headshot of a Maori man with facial tattoos.

3 June 2022

The most common meaning of tattoo is a decoration of the skin, usually a permanent one made by inserting a pigment under the skin, but tattoos can be made by other means, both temporary and permanent. The English word is borrowed in the mid eighteenth century from the Tahitian tatau, of the same meaning, a word with cognates in many Polynesian languages. The proto-Polynesian is *tatou. The practice of tattooing is not unique to Polynesia, having been practiced by many cultures dating back into antiquity. But the practice of tattooing in present-day Western culture is a legacy of this eighteenth century cultural contact.

The first known appearance of tattoo in English is in Captain James Cook’s journal of his first circumnavigation aboard in the Endeavour. In his description of Tahiti, which he visited in July 1769, Cook writes:

Both sexes paint their Bodys, Tattow, as it is called in their Language. This is done by inlaying the Colour of Black under their skins, in such a manner as to be indelible. Some have ill- design'd figures of men, birds, or dogs; the women generally have this figure Z simply on every joint of their fingers and Toes; the men have it likewise, and both have other differant figures, such as Circles, Crescents, etc., which they have on their Arms and Legs; in short, they are so various in the application of these figures that both the quantity and Situation of them seem to depend intirely upon the humour of each individual, yet all agree in having their buttocks covered with a Deep black. Over this Most have Arches drawn one over another as high as their short ribs, which are near a Quarter of an inch broad. These Arches seem to be their great pride, as both men and Women show them with great pleasure.
Their method of Tattowing I shall now describe. The colour they use is lamp black, prepar'd from the Smoak of a Kind of Oily nut, used by them instead of Candles. The instrument for pricking it under the Skin is made of very thin flatt pieces of bone or Shell, from a quarter of an inch to an inch and a half broad, according to the purpose it is to be, used for, and about an inch and a half long. One end is cut into sharp teeth, and the other fastened to a handle. The teeth are dipped into black Liquor, and then drove, by quick, sharp blows struck upon the handle with a Stick for that purpose, into the skin so deep that every stroke is followed with a small quantity of Blood. The part so marked remains sore for some days before it heals. As this is a painful operation, especially the Tattowing their Buttocks, it is perform'd but once in their Life times; it is never done until they are 12 or 14 years of Age.

This use is as a verb, which is an English invention as the Tahitian word is a noun. The Tahitian verb is ta ‘tatau, literally to stamp/strike a tattoo.

But there is an older, etymologically unrelated sense of tattoo in English, that of a military signal ordering soldiers to retire to their quarters. This signal was originally a drumbeat and later and into the present day, a bugle call. This military sense comes from the Dutch taptoe, from tap (tap of a cask) + toe (shut). In short, taptoe was originally a last call in a tavern. But by the seventeenth century, the Dutch word could be used simply as a command to stop or cease, and it was also in military use as well.

Adoption of tattoo by the English military dates to at least the English Civil War. It’s recorded in the 21 April 1643 testimony of a Parliamentary officer in the garrison of the Bristol, which at the time was threatened by Royalist forces under the command of Prince Rupert. The testimony of Captain Jeremy Bucks reads, in part:

On the seventh of March I was sent from Colonell Fiennes and the Counsell of War in Bristoll, about ten of the clock at night, to the house of M. Robert Yeomans, there to apprehend him and the Conspirators, who as they said, they were informed they were to destroy the Guards, and so to give entrance unto Prince Rupert and his Forces then against the Town: I took 20. Muskettiers from the Bridge and went thither, and the first knock or suddenly after, M. Yeomans came to the door, and desired to know my businesse; I answered, It was to speak with the man of the house; He again desired to know my businesse, I answered again, He should know when I came in; He then said, The Taptow had beaten, and therefore I would not after that time of night enter his house; I told him, I would enter, and then called up the Muskettiers, who before stood silent, and called for something to break up the door, Yeomans then said, he would open it, but used many delayes; at length, I being urgent, he opened a little wide gate, and I entred and took him prisoner.

The tattoo spelling appears in the eighteenth century, although the taptow form continues into the nineteenth.

Cf. taps.

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Sources:

American Heritage Dictionary, fifth edition, 2011, s.v. tattoo.

Cook, James. Captain Cook’s Journal During His First Voyage Round the World Made in H.M Bark “Endeavour” 1768–71. W.J.L. Wharton, ed. London: Elliot Stock, 1893, 93. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Merriam-Webster.com, s.v. tattoo, n.1.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. tattoo, n.1, tattoo, n.2, tattoo, v.2.

The Severall Examinations and Confessions of the Treacherous Conspiratours Against the Citie of Bristoll. London: Edward Husbands, 1643, 6. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Photo credit: Stuart Yeates, 2009. Photo taken in public place with the explicit permission of the subject. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Taps

May 30, 2022

30 May 2022

The bugle dirge that signals “lights out” and is used at funerals in the US military is called Taps. But the name Taps predates the creation of the bugle call we know today. At the end of the day, the bugle would sound Tattoo, and shortly afterward, usually about fifteen minutes, the call Extinguish Lights would be sounded. Extinguish Lights consisted of the first few bars of Tattoo, followed by several isolated beats on a drum—hence the name Taps.

The bugle call we know today as Taps is a variation of an earlier bugle call, the Scott Tattoo, named for General Winfield Scott. Tradition has it that Taps was arranged in 1862 by Brigadier General Daniel Butterfield. Its first use during military funerals was also in 1862, when, being in a combat zone, it was deemed unwise to fire the traditional volleys of gunfire over the grave. Taps was sounded instead, and the custom quickly spread.

But Taps could be beat at other times; it was simply the name for isolated beats on a drum. For instance, there is this list of drum signals from US Army regulations of 1812:

The Signals
Adjutant’s call. First part of the troop.
First sergeant’s call. One roll and three flams.
All non-commissioned officers’ call. Two rolls and five flams.
To go for wood. Poing stroke and ten-stroke roll.
To go for water. Two strokes and a flam.
To go for provisions. Roast beef.
Front to halt. Two flams from right to left, a full drag with the right, a left hand flam and a right hand full drag.
For the front to advance quicker. The long march.
For the front to march slower. The taps.
For a fatigue party. The pioneers’ march.
For the church call. The parley.

And from the same source, this reference to taps being played at the beginning of the day:

At the first appearance of day, the officer of the guard will cause the taps to be given on the orderly drum; the musicians will assemble on the parade; and in five minutes after the taps have been given, they will commence the reveillé; every officer and soldier will instantly rise; so soon as it is finished, the rolls shall be called.

The use of taps to signal lights out dates to at least 1824, as this regulation from the US Military Academy at West Point shows:

At thirty minutes after reveille, each superintendent will visit and inspect every room in his division, noticing particularly the state of police, and all infractions of regulations, and report to the officer in command of the barrack in the following form, viz:
I certify that I have carefully and thoroughly inspected the rooms of my division (N.B. or S.B.) at the taps last evening, and thirty minutes after reveille this morning, and that I have reported all infractions of regulations, and such rooms as are not in good order.
______ ______,
Superintendent Division, S.B.
It is his duty, in the event of noise, scuffling, or any improper conduct whatever, to repair instantly to the spot, order the parties to their rooms, and forthwith make report of the circumstances to the commandant of the barrack, or, in his absence, to the officer of the week; to visit his rooms, at the taps; see that the lights are extinguished; the fires properly secured; the occupants present, and in bed.

It's difficult to pinpoint when exactly Taps switched from a drum signal to a bugle call. There are many references to Taps in 1862 and 1863, but most are ambiguous as to the instrument used. But there is this description of a night patrol leaving camp in Harper’s Weekly of 18 April 1863 where the use of the verb blew indicates that Taps is a bugle call:

I thought it darker that it had ever seemed before as our little party stole quietly out of camp before tattoo, and felt our way down to the river. In a leaky boat, two at a time, we managed to cross, the noise of the skiff in the water sounding to our ears all the time as if it must be audible at least five miles; and just as taps blew, dismissing the rest of the regiment to bed, we started to leave it, perhaps forever.

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Sources:

“Condition of the Military Academy at West Point” (21 February 1824). Documents, Legislative and Executive, of the Congress of the United States, from the First Session of the Sixteenth to the Second Session of the Eighteenth Congress, Inclusive, vol. 2. Washington, DC: Gales and Seaton, 1834. 656. Google Books.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. tap, n.2.

Regulations for the Field Exercise, Manœuvres, and Conduct of the Infantry of the United States. Philadelphia: Fry and Kammerer, 1812, 175–76, 205. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

“Stealing a March.” Harper’s Weekly, 18 April 1863. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Audio credit: US Army. Public domain recording.

Photo credit: US Army, 2009. Public domain image.

Taliban

May 30, 2022

30 May 2022

The Taliban are a politico-military governing force in Afghanistan who espouse a strict, fundamentalist interpretation of Islamic law. The word Taliban is from the Farsi/Pashto Talib, meaning seeker or student, especially a student of Islamic law. The Farsi word is a borrowing of the Arabic talib, which is a clipping of talib al-ilm, or seeker of knowledge; the -an is a plural marker. (Because in Farsi and Arabic Taliban is a plural, some object to English usage labeling individuals as “a Taliban,” but the grammar rules of one language do not apply to others, and part of the process of adoption into a different language is that the word takes on the grammar of the adopted language.)

The Taliban got their start in the early 1990s as a loose confederation of radical Afghan student groups, both within Afghanistan in in exile in Pakistan, who shared a version of conservative Sunni Islam. They emerged in 1994 as an organized and powerful politico-military force and by 1996 had become the dominant faction in the country, capturing the capital, Kabul. They were overthrown in 2001 by a US military intervention, only to return to power in 2021 with the withdrawal of American troops from that country.

The name Taliban starts appearing in English-language newspapers in late 1994. From the Times of India of 19 December 1994:

Recently on November 30, some 2,000 heavily armed Afghan students seized control of Lashkargarh, capital of Helmand province where they ousted from power the Akhundzada family, reportedly the world’s biggest heroin traffickers.
This student group, Taliban, is believed to be backed by the Saudi and Pakistani intelligence and has the tacit support of western countries.

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Sources:

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2006, s.v. Talibanization, n.

Subrahmanyam, K. “Pakistan Disputes U.N. Report on Drugs.” Times of India, 19 December 1994. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Image credit: Voice of America, 2021. Public domain image.

bear arms

May 27, 2022

Black and white security video frame showing the two shooters in the 20 April 1999 shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado. The pair murdered 12 students and a teacher and wounded 21 others before committing suicide.

27 May 2022

tl;dr The U.S. Supreme Court’s current interpretation of the Second Amendment, expressed in the 2008 case D.C. v. Heller, rests on a misunderstanding of the historical meanings of the idioms to bear arms and to keep arms, and if one is to remain true to an originalist interpretation of the U.S. Constitution, one must conclude that an individual right to possess weapons does not exist.

[The research for what follows was not conducted by me. I am relying on the work of others, notably Dennis Baron, Neal Goldfarb, and Alison LaCroix. Links to their work are in the sources section below. The framing and presentation of the argument here is my own, and any errors or omissions are mine and not theirs.]

The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States reads

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

In 2008, in the case District of Columbia, et al., v. Heller, the U.S. Supreme Court, in an opinion written by Justice Antonin Scalia, interpreted the Second Amendment to include an individual right to possess firearms. Scalia wrote:

The Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home.

In this opinion, the court also held that the right to possess firearms, and in this case specifically handguns, was not absolute. Prohibitions on concealed weapons were constitutional, according to Scalia, as were restrictions on “M-16 rifles and the like.” But the court did hold that individuals had a relatively unrestricted right to possess handguns in their homes.

In his argument, Scalia separated the two clauses of the amendment and nullified the first. (A violation of his own “whole-text canon” in which a law must be interpreted in its entirety and every provision given effect.) He also referenced an “ancient right of individuals to keep and bear arms,” a purported right for which no evidence exists. (To the contrary, traditionally governments have sharply limited the ability of individuals to possess weapons.) And until this case, the Supreme Court had, in the limited jurisprudence about the Second Amendment that existed, always held that the amendment referred to a state’s power to maintain a militia independent of the federal government, not to an individual’s right to possess weapons.

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, state militias existed for three purposes: 1) to suppress slave revolts and hunt down escaped enslaved persons; 2) to engage in warfare against Indigenous people and seize new land to the west; and 3) assist in the defense of the nation in case of invasion. The states feared that due to abolitionist sentiments the federal government might disband their militias and that the federal government or, following the former policy of the British colonial government, might limit their expansion westward. Hence the need for an amendment to preserve this power of the states. While the founders were leery of creating a standing federal army, the idea that people themselves might have to resort to military means against tyranny or the need to possess weapons for self-defense did not enter into the discourse. The common-law right to self-defense did not include a right to arm oneself in preparation for an attack and was only operative when retreat was not practicable. These notions of individuals arming themselves to fight some vague, future threat of tyranny or in preparation for a possible attack on their persons are twentieth-century ones.

Scalia’s argument rests on the simple meanings of the verbs to bear and to keep, that is to carry and possess, and in so doing, Scalia separated the bearing and keeping of arms from the concept of militia service. His linguistic reasoning and evidence for doing so was superficial and incorrect, as was pointed out at the time in an amicus brief by linguists, the lead author being linguist Dennis Baron, which was cited in Justice Stephen Breyer’s dissent in the case. Furthermore, in the oral argument, Solicitor-General Paul Clement, arguing that the District of Columbia’s law was unconstitutional, acknowledged that “bear arms in its unmodified form is most naturally understood to have a military context.” And it wasn’t until the latter half of the twentieth century that entries for bear arms in major dictionaries included the sense of simply carrying a weapon. Furthermore, since the 2008 decision, several major new corpora of seventeenth and eighteenth-century English have been published, and these overwhelming confirm the conclusions of the historical linguists and show that Scalia was utterly wrong in his argument and conclusions.

Eighteenth-century usage of these verbs was different than today’s. To bear, for instance, was rarely used with the simple meaning of to carry a physical object on one’s person. And the phrase to bear arms is an idiom, that is a phrase whose meaning cannot be understood by breaking it apart into its component parts. To bear arms had two distinct meanings at the time of the Second Amendment was written. the first was to engage in military service or when combined with against, to fight a war. There are approximately 900 distinct uses of the phrase bear arms in the Corpus of Early Modern English and the Corpus of Founding Era American English (COFEA), and all but a handful are in the context of military service, soldiering, or waging war. A majority of these military uses of bear arms have a collective subject, an army or militia, and do not refer to an individual who is serving. And the non-military uses are mostly ambiguous, with only one, a translation from the French porter armes, being definitively non-military in nature.

This military sense dates to the fourteenth century and can be seen in the Metrical Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester, which dates to c.1325:

At þe feste of seint edward · þe king huld þo anon
At londone a parlement · & heiemen manion
Þere hii lokede þo · þat alle þat armes bere
Aȝen þe king in þe worre · oþer aȝen him were
At norhamtone at lewes · oþer at euesham
Barun erl oþer kniȝt · burgeis oþer freman
Þe burgeis of norhamtone · & of londone þer to
Were alle deserited · & hor eirs al so
(At the feast of Saint Edward the king then held at once
In London a parliament & many headmen
There they looked then at all who bore arms
Against the king in that war or who were against him
At Northampton, at Lewes, or at Evesham
Baron, earl, or knight, burgess or freeman
The burgesses of Northampton & of London in that place
Were all dispossessed and their heirs also.)

To bear arms had a second sense of possessing a title of knighthood or nobility (i.e., a familial coat of arms) or rightfully possessing some insignia of office or institution. This sense appears somewhat later, but is in place by the mid fifteenth century as we can see from the records of the parliament at Westminster of 1442:

The said Carrakes aryved and entred the Port of the Isle of Rodes [...] beryng the Armes of the Hospitall of Seint John Jerusalem.

The idiom to keep arms appears much less frequently, but in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it carried the same sense of military service. The combined phrase to keep and bear arms appears to be unique to the Constitution but can only be understood as also referring to military service at the time the Second Amendment was written.

When we read to keep and bear arms as referring to military service, the entirety of the amendment, including the prefatory clause, the “whole-text” makes perfect sense. The amendment was not intended to give individuals a right to own or carry weapons, rather it was intended to guarantee the states’ power to form “well-regulated militias,” that is in a modern context police forces and National Guard units. If one is to remain consistent with an originalist interpretation of the Constitution, this is the only correct reading of the text.

Discuss this post

Sources:

Baron, Dennis. “Antonin Scalia Was Wrong About the Meaning of ‘Bear Arms.’” Washington Post, 21 May 2018.

———. “Corpus Evidence Illuminates the Meaning of Bear Arms” (pdf). Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly, 46.3, Spring 2019. 509–22.

“The Bill of Rights: A Transcription.” U.S. National Archives, 19 January 2022.

Blackman, Josh and James C. Phillips. “Corpus Linguistics and the Second Amendment. Harvard Law Review Blog, 7 August 2018.

Corpus of Early Modern English, version 5.2.2-ga3469f9, accessed 26 May 2022. Brigham Young University.

Corpus of Founding Era American English (COFEA), version 5.2.2-ga3469f9, accessed 26 May 2022. Brigham Young University.

Goldfarb, Neal. “A (Mostly Corpus-Based) Linguistic Reexamination of D.C. v. Heller and the Second Amendment,” 27 February 2021, SSRN.

———. “Corpora and the Second Amendment.” LAWnLinguistics, 8 August 2018.

LaCroix, Alison L. “Historical Semantics and the Meaning of the Second Amendment.” The Panorama, 3 August 2018.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, armes, n. (plural).

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2016, s.v. arms, n.

Scalia, Antonin (opinion), and Stephen Breyer (dissent). “District of Columbia, et al. v. Heller,” 26 June 2008. United States Reports, vol. 554, Cases Adjudged in the Supreme Court at October Term, 2007. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2013, 570–723.

Torrez, P. Andrew and Thomas Smith. “OA21: Second Amendment Masterclass,” (podcast). Opening Arguments. Part 1, 3 November 2016 and Part 2, 6 December 2016.

———. “OA161: Gun Control & the Constitution,” (podcast). Opening Arguments, 2 April 2018.

Wright, William Aldis, ed. The Metrical Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester, vol. 2 of 2. London: H.M. Stationary Office by Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1887, lines 11,786–793, 767–68. HathiTrust Digital Archive. London, British Library, Cotton Caligula MS A.11., fol. 165v.

Image credit: Columbine High School security video feed, 1999. Fair use of a single frame from the video feed of a historic event to illustrate the topic under discussion.