egregious

June 15, 2022

A flock of white sheep with a single black sheep standing in their midst

15 June 2022

The adjective egregious is often used in negative contexts, meaning flagrant, outrageous, or offensive. But it can also have a positive connotation, meaning exceptional, eminent, or especially worthy. The etymology is quite straightforward; it’s a direct borrowing from Latin, but the etymology is of interest because of the meaning of its root and when and how it was borrowed into English.

The Latin egregius means distinguished or excellent; it has no negative connotation—that connotation would develop in English usage. The root greg means flock, as in sheep or goats, and is also the root of gregarious, which literally means associated with the flock. Egregious, on the other hand, literally means outside of or distinguished from the flock.

Egregious is also an example of what is called an inkhorn term. These were words imported into English from Latin or Greek in the Early Modern Era, that is the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Inkhorn words were learned terms, associated with the classroom and ostentatious displays of education and erudition. As a result, most never entered common usage. Some, however, did pass into common use, and egregious is one of these.

The word appears in English in the mid sixteenth century in a translation of Polydore Vergil’s history of England. Here it is used in a passage about the Roman Emperor Constantine, who prior to becoming Emperor had led military campaigns in Britain:

This manne, as we have seyde beefore, after hee hadd geven the overthrowe to Maxentius and seased Italie into his handdes, proceaded to Rome, unto whome shortelie repaired Sylvester Bisshoppe, of singuler and ægregius holliness, and with facilitee perswaded himme to deserve well of the Christian religion, whoe of his owne accorde all readie hadd good affiaunce therein; farthermore, beefore that he went to Rome (as it is crediblie thought) hee was soe instructed of his own moother Helena, that goinge towards battayle he used the sygne of the crosse as a defence.

In the above passage egregious is being used in its positive sense, but the negative sense appears at about the same time. Here is an example of the adverb egregiously being used negatively in a 1553 translation of one of John Calvin’s homilies:

Be cause thei wold not seme to fight agai[n]st god w[ith]out swerd or buckler / thei bring and obiect the autoritie of this or [that] ma[n]n / as though the absolution of any one manne may exempt and deliv[er] them [that] thei be not co[n]demned of god. I wil not saie [that] thei lye egregiously / whe[n] thei alege soch men as thei do for the defence of their cause.

And here is an example of the word’s early use from Christopher Marlowe’s 1590 play Tamburlaine:

Egregious Viceroyes of these Eastern parts
Plac'd by the issue of great Baiazeth:
And sacred Lord the mighty Calapine:
Who liues in Egypt, prisoner to that slaue,
Which kept his father in an yron cage:
Now haue we martcht from faire Natolia

So, egregious is egregious in that the ovine etymology is not obvious to most English speakers today and in that it is an inkhorn term that managed to survive in common use.

Discuss this post

Sources:

Calvin, John. Certain Homilies. Wesel, 1553, sig. Dviii. Early English Books Online.

Ellis, Henry, ed. Polydore Vergil’s English History, vol. 1 (c.1550). London: John Bowyer Nicols and Son for the Camden Society, 1846, 93. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Marlowe, Christopher. Tamburlaine, part 2. London: Richard Ihones, 1590, 2.1.1, sig. F3.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2014, s.v. egregious, adj., egregiously, adv.

Photo credit: Jesus Solana, 2008. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

three sheets to the wind

June 13, 2022

A mainsail sheet (the green rope) that is where it should be and definitely not in the wind. A green rope attached to a pulley on the spar of the mainsail of a boat.

13 June 2022

To be three sheets to (or in) the wind is to be drunk. The metaphor is a nautical one, but one that many landlubbers (and some slang dictionaries who probably should know better) misunderstand.

Those not accustomed to sailboats might understandably think a sheet is a sail, but that’s not the case. In nautical jargon a sheet is a rope attached to the bottom corners of a sail and used to control the sail. By tightening or slackening the sheet, the sailor can control speed and direction of the boat. To sail with a sheet loose or in the wind is bad seamanship and portends a loss of control over the boat. With several sheets in the wind, the boat is uncontrollable; it “staggers,” sways, and veers like a drunken man.

The phrase appears as early as 1807, with the number being two sheets and the sense being directionless, inconsistent rather than drunk. From a political commentary that appeared in New York’s Public Advertiser on 17 December 1807:

Cheetham is a democrat, and you a fed. I acknowledge that he has tew sheets in the wind and the others fluttering, as we say at Stamford; he has shewn a kind of political coquettry that is not very pleasant to the staunch republicans; but I don’t believe he is really in love with federalism, yet.

Here, there are two sheets loose in the wind, with a third one being slack and quivering. The tew spelling is a stylistic choice; elsewhere the writer uses dewe for do.

(Note: in this period, the dominant U.S. political parties were the Democratic-Republicans, which would evolve into the present-day Democratic party, and the Federalists, which would fade away, being replaced by the Whigs, which would be replaced by the present-day Republican party. The democrats and the staunch republicans in this quotation are the same party. Cheetham is disenchanted with his own party, the Democratic-Republicans, but hasn’t crossed the aisle and joined the Federalists.)

The drunk sense is in place by 1812. From Baltimore’s Weekly Register of 2 May of that year:

It must not be wondered at that the poor, untutored, savage Kentuckyan, got “more than two thirds drunk,” that is, as the sailors term it, three sheets in the wind, and the fourth shivering, before the dinner was ended, upon a liquor which this great man found excellent.

Shivering here means fraying, coming to pieces. Three sheets are loose, and a fourth is about to go.

The phrase is recorded in Britain the following year. From an 1813 poem about a horse by Scottish poet John Gerrond, again with only two sheets:

When thou was watered, corned, and trimmed,
An’ me just twa sheets in the wind,
Thou then wad up and down hill pinned,
With merry canter,
Nae whip, but just to guide the rein,
Thou fast wad scamper.

A humorous story about a housewife trying to hide her lover from her husband and a visiting clergyman was printed in many North American newspapers in 1817. From the Ladies Literary Museum; or Weekly Repository of 26 January of that year:

The woman opened the door and received her husband with as much tenderness as surprise. He was about three sheets in the wind, that is to say a little intoxicated, and began to talk loud and swear.

The wide distribution of this story may account, at least in part, for the phrase entering general use.

That same year, the phrase is used in a book advertisement, also printed widely. The use of capsized in the ad as well points back to the nautical origin. From the newspaper Genius of Liberty of Leesburg, Virginia of 26 August 1817:

Parent’s Attend!
Moral Looking Glasses, for Youth
By M.L. Weems, Author of the life of Washington
1. The Drunkards Looking Glass.
Showing “forty curious capers’ which the drunkard cuts in the different stages of his disease, as—1. when he has only a “drop in his eye”—2. When he is “half shaved” or “three sheets in the wind”—3. When he is getting a “little on the staggers, or so”—4 & 5. and so on, till he is “quite capsized” or “fairly knocked under the table with the dogs and can stick to the floor without the trouble of holding on.”
Price 25 cts.

By 1817 the slang phrase was firmly established, and it appears in a slang dictionary in 1823. John Badcock’s Slang, published under the pseudonym Jon Bee, is the first of a line of dictionaries to misinterpret the metaphor:

Three-sheets in the wind.—Naval, but naturalized ashore, and means drunk, but capable of going along—like a ship which has three sheets braced—main, mizen, and foresail.

Badcock would not be the last to misunderstand the phrase’s underlying metaphor.

Discuss this post

Sources:

Advertisement. The Genius of Liberty (Leesburg, Virginia), 26 August 1817, 1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“Another Communication.” Public Advertiser (New York), 17 December 1807, 2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Bee, Jon. (pseudonym of John Badcock) Slang. A Dictionary of the Turf, the Ring, the Chase, the Pit, of Bon-Ton. London: T. Hughes, 1823, 215. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Gerrond, John. “R—— D——s Blind Mare.” Poetical and Prose Works. Leith: Archibald Allardice, 1813, 147. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2022, s.v. three sheets in the wind, phr.

“Lorenzo and the Paramours.” Ladies Literary Museum; or Weekly Repository, 26 January 1817, 215. ProQuest Magazines.

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

“Travellers in America.” Weekly Register (Baltimore), 2 May 1812, 143. Gale Primary Sources: American Historical Periodicals from the American Antiquarian Society.

Tréguer, Pascal. “Origin of the Phrase ‘Three Sheets in the Wind’ (Drunk).” Wordhistories.net, 25 July 2018.

Photo credit: Adam Hunt, 2020. Public domain photo.

Third World

June 10, 2022

Plenary session of the 1955 Bandung Conference. Diplomats from Asian and African nations seated in a conference hall facing a speaker, who is not seen in the photo.

10 June 2022

The Third World comprises the developing nations of the world. It’s a somewhat dated term, coined during the Cold War when political scientists were dividing up the world into spheres of influence exercised by the superpowers. But the term has a more revolutionary origin, challenging the status quo of the established powers. The term was originally coined in French, Tiers Monde, by anthropologist and historian Alfred Sauvy, who likened the developing and oppressed nations of the world to the pre-revolutionary Third Estate of France. Writing in L’Observateur of 14 August 1952, Sauvy said:

Car enfin ce Tiers Monde ignoré, exploité, méprisé comme le Tiers Etat, veut, lui aussi, être quelque chose.
(After all, this Third World, ignored, exploited, despised like the Third Estate, also wants to be something.)

It would take a few years for the term to start appearing in English, and when it did the underlying metaphor would shift. Instead of Sauvy’s metaphor of anti-colonial, revolutionary rumblings, in English usage the developing nations would be seen through a Cold War lens. One key element in that shift was the creation of the Non-Aligned Movement, which formally organized the developing nations into a bloc distinct from the two blocs led by the superpowers of the United States and the Soviet Union. The Non-Aligned Movement would officially come into being in 1961, but the groundwork started to be laid at a conference of Asian and African nations held in 1955 at Bandung in Indonesia.

We have this use of third world bloc from an Associated Press piece about the Bandung Conference from 4 April 1955:

But some Asian observers believe Chou [En-Lai] is coming to Bandung with the hope of grabbing the leadership of the African-Asian world. A seat for Red China in the U.N. would fit in with these hopes.
There is also the belief among other Asian observers that Chou may try to swing the Bandung meeting toward a third world bloc led by Red China. These observers say Red China would rather lead such a bloc than remain in the Soviet orbit.
Nehru has said the conference will not take sides in the cold war between East and West.

This is not a use of the noun phrase third world as we know it. Third is modifying the phrase world bloc, a third bloc in the world. And the importance of the Cold War lens can be seen in a appearance of third world force in a United Press International piece from 1 December 1959 about a meeting between Conrad Adenauer of Germany and Charles De Gaulle of France. Here the third bloc is not the developing world, but the European nations other than the two superpowers. And instead of China, it is France that would be the putative leader of the imagined bloc:

The two leaders see eye-to-eye in many things, but Eckhardt disclosed they do not include De Gaulle’s concept of continental Europe as a third world force between “the Russians and the Anglo-Saxons.”

Again, third is modifying world force, and the developing nations are absent. What is important is the bloc’s/force’s relation to the superpowers, not who constitutes the bloc or force.

But by 1958 the phrase third world, as we know it today, had entered English parlance. There is this Associated Press piece of 25 January 1958 about a speech given by Eric Johnston, an Eisenhower-administration official:

Eric Johnston, foreign aid information coordinator, said the nation’s future rests with a third world—a billion Asians and Africans as yet uncommitted to either the Communist or the free world.
Johnston said Moscow is trying to lure the third world into its camp with economic aid.

Evidently, Johnston was the administration’s front man on this issue, giving speeches across the country on the subject. Here is an article from the Denver Post of 20 May 1958 where Johnston again defines the third world in Cold War terms:

Russia has stolen the economic weapons of the United States—trade and aid—in its campaign to win the “third world” of uncommitted nations born since World War II, Eric Johnston told more than 3,000 Parent-Teacher Assn. members here Monday night.
[...]
It is a fallacy, Johnston said, to think that the West can overcome the Communist threat “with our hands in our pockets and blinders on our eyes.”
“We need the third world today for our own national survival,” he said.

Johnston’s rhetoric was followed up by cash assistance to lure developing nations into the American fold. From an Associated Press piece of 6 September 1960 about US economic assistance to Latin American nations:

The American pledge was an answer to Brazil’s call for help for what the Brazilian delegate, Augusto Frederico Schmidt, called “the third world of underdeveloped peoples.”

Sauvy’s original anti-colonial spin on third world was lost in the English translation. But while it may not be present in the phrase, it still very much exists in reality.

Discuss this post

Sources:

Associated Press. “U.S. Urged to Woo ‘3rd World.’” Miami Herald, 25 January 1958, 7-A. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Bradshaw, Stanford (Associated Press). “U.S. Pledges More Cash for Latin America.” Seattle Daily Times, 6 September 1960, 8. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Clements, Olen (Associated Press). “Commies to Try to Get UN Seat.” Times-Picayune (New Orleans), 4 April 1955, 24. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Lee, Betty Jean. “Reds Use U.S. Aid Plan, Johnston Warns P-TA.” Denver Post, 20 May 1958, 27. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2014, s.v. First World, n. and adj.; second edition, s.v. Third World, n. (and adj.), second, adj. and n.2.

Sauvy, Alfred. “Trois Mondes, Une Planète” (“Three Worlds, One Planet”). L’Observateur, 14 August 1952, 14.

United Press International. “Adenauer Disagrees with De Gaulle” (1 December 1959). Commercial Appeal (Memphis, Tennessee), 2 December 1959, 2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Photo credit: Foreign Ministry of the Republic of Indonesia, 1955. Public domain photo.

tuxedo

June 8, 2022

8 June 2022

The dinner jacket is named for a town in New York where it first became stylish in the closing years of the nineteenth century. Tuxedo and Tuxedo Park are towns in New York, in the Hudson River valley just north of the border with New Jersey. The towns take their names from the Munsee *ptukwsiituw (there are members of the wolf clan); the Munsee people, a subgroup of the Delaware or Lenape nation, are associated with the wolf. The Munsee ptukwsiit (round foot) can refer to wolves, dogs, foxes, and bears.

The placename Tuxedo, spelled at first as Tucseto and Tuxseto, appears in colonial records as early as 1735. The exclusive community of Tuxedo Park was created in 1885 by the tobacco magnate Pierre Lorillard IV, and the club there opened the following year.

Shortly after the club’s opening, men attending events there began to wear tailless dinner jackets in lieu of the more traditional tailed coats. Tailless dinner jackets had been known in England since the 1860s, when the then Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII, took to wearing them at private dinner parties. But the dinner jackets were informal attire, a way of dressing down. It wasn’t until the dinner jacket was imported into America several decades later that it started to replace the traditional white-tie attire.

Tuxedo as a name for the jacket appears in print by 1888. The earliest use I have found is from August 1888 and refers to Bar Harbor Maine, showing that the name had quickly spread from the original Tuxedo Club:

One would imagine that a man’s idea of comfort and cleanliness would forbid his wearing to a hop in the evening the same flannels in which he had played tennis all day, and certainly decorum should prevent his asking a lady to dance with him in such a costume. The Tuxedo coat has become popular with a great many men who regard its demi train as a happy medium between a swallowtail and a cutaway, but there are always some men at the hops in flannels, dancing with whoever will dance with them, regardless of both cleanliness and courtesy.

And there is this from Washington, DC’s Evening Star of 5 November 1888:

Despite ridicule and hostility the curtailed dress-coat has fought its way into a vacant niche in the gentlemen’s wardrobe, and may tritely but truly be described as filling a long-felt want. In England the new garment has been known for some time past as the “Cowes coat,” and in this country it has taken the aristocratic title, the “Tuxedo.”

Discuss this post

Sources:

“Bad Manners at Bar Harbor” (18 August 1888). New York Herald, 19 August 1888, 6. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Grumet, Robert S. Manhattan to Minisink: American Indian Place Names in Greater New York and Vicinity. Norman: U of Oklahoma Press, 2013.

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

“Tailless Dress Coats.” Evening Star (Washington, DC), 5 November 1888, 6.

Image credit: W.D.F. Vincent, 1898, The Cutter's Practical Guide to Jacket Cutting and Making. Public domain image.

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.

Discuss this post

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.