gaslight

Theatrical poster for George Cukor’s 1944 film Gaslight, starring Charles Boyer, Ingrid Bergman, and Joseph Cotton. Drawings of the three actors in the film.

29 July 2022

To gaslight someone is to manipulate them by making them question their own senses or sanity. The verb was coined as a result of George Cukor’s 1944 film Gaslight. Cukor’s film was based on a 1940 British film by Thorold Dickinson, which in turn was based on a 1938 stage play by Patrick Hamilton. But it was Cukor’s film that was a critical and box-office hit, garnering three Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Actress for Ingrid Bergman.

The plot of the film concerns a husband (played by Charles Boyer) who tries to convince his wife (Bergman) that she is going mad in order to cover up a murder he has committed. One of the tricks he uses to convince her that she is hallucinating is to make the gas lamps in their house flicker at random intervals. The verb gaslight, however, does not appear in either film or in the original play. It is simply a plot device and title.

A few years after the film’s debut, however, we get the phrase gaslight treatment. From the Miami Daily News of 16 September 1948:

GASLIGHT—Divorce petitions filed in Dade circuit court in recent weeks reveal an influence traceable to the current run of movies dealing with psychiatric plots, especially those in which the husband tries to convince the wife she is crazy. Several complainants have charged husbands with actions designed to produce fear of mental unbalance, and one suit, filed the other day, claimed the husband “gave her the Gaslight treatment.”

So, by 1948 the concept was in the zeitgeist, even if the verb wasn’t yet.

The Historical Dictionary of American Slang includes an oral attestation of the verb from 1956. We have no particular reason to doubt the date, but the usual caveats apply in regard to memories of usage (reminiscences of exact wording are often inaccurate):

N.Y.C. woman, age 41: To gaslight someone is to play tricks on them to make them think they’re crazy. It comes from the movie Gaslight.

But we do get a print attestation of the verb by 1962. From a television listing for the series Surfside 6 in the Jersey Journal of 12 February 1962:

“Who Is Sylvia?” is a bit more logical and a good deal more interesting than is usual for this series. Sylvia is a beautiful woman whose business-partner husband is “gaslighting” her. (That means he’s trying to drive her crazy.)

Google Ngram viewer showing a rise in the use of the words gaslight, gaslighted, and gaslighting starting in the year 2000 and especially after 2012

The verb has had a surge in usage in recent years, as shown in the Google Ngram graph. It has also broadened in meaning somewhat, at times referring more generally to deception, as opposed to making someone question their sanity, but still, it often appears in the context of a man deceiving a woman.

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Sources:

Google Books Ngram Viewer, accessed 10 July 2022.

“The Journal Pre-Views Tonight’s TV.” Jersey Journal (Jersey City, New Jersey), 12 February 1962, 12. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Lighter, J.E. Historical Dictionary of American Slang, vol. 1 of 2. New York: Random House, 1994, s.v. gaslight, v.

“Miami’s Own Whirligig.” Miami Daily News (Florida), 16 September 1948, 7-B. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2012, s.v. gaslight, v.

Yagoda, Ben. “Gaslighting, Again.” Benyagoda.com, 24 December 2021.

Image credit: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Loew’s, Inc., 1944. The poster is a public domain image (original copyright not renewed).

chili

A bowl of chili con carne, consisting of pork, beef, beans, tomatoes, and chili peppers, garnished with two tortilla chips.

27 July 2022

(28 July: added parenthetical note on spelling)

A chili is a pepper of genus Capsicum, native to the Americas but now grown worldwide. The word has a rather straightforward etymology, and is unrelated to chilly, referring to temperature, or to the country of Chile. The word is originally Nahuatl and comes into English via Spanish.

Chili is recorded in Alonso de Molina’s 1571 Nahuatl-Spanish dictionary:

Chilli. Axi. o pimienta de las indias.

(Chili. Capsicum or Indian pepper.)

(The double < l > in Nahuatl represents a lengthened consonant, but since neither Spanish or English distinguish the length of the consonant, it’s spelled with a single < l > in Spanish and American English. British English tends to retain the double consonant in its spelling. Axi is the Taino word for the pepper.)

And chili makes its way into English discourse by the mid seventeenth century. Here is an extract from Thomas Gage’s New Survey of the West-Indias, in which Gage is in conversation with a Spaniard in Mexico:

One of these, who was thought the chiefe in my time, called Don Melchor de Velasco, one day fell into discourse with mee concerning England, and our English nation, and in the best, most serious and judicious part of his Don-like conference, asked me whether the sun and moone in England were of the same colour as in Chiapa, and whether English men went barefoot like the Indians, and sacrificed one another as formerly did the Heathens of that Countrey? and whether all England could afford such a dainty as a dish of Frixoles (which is the poorest Indians daily food there, being black and dry Turkey or French beanes boyled with a little biting Chille or Indian pepper with garlicke, till the broath become as black as any Inke).

Chili can also refer to a type of stew made with chilis, short for chili con carne (chili with meat). This sense is recorded in an 1857 book about the Mexican-American War by S. Compton Smith, titled Chile Con Carne; or, the Camp and the Field:

To this spot, also, would come the rancheros, who had learned that the Americanos del norte were not the cannibals their priests had at first taught them to believe; but were buenos Cristianos as well as themselves. Here would they assemble, and display their stock-in-trade, consisting usually of carne seco and carne fresco, leche de cabro, chile con carne,* tamales, frijoles, tortillas, pan de maiz, and other eatables, with puros, blankets, saddles, etc. These articles found ready purchasers among our men, often at most unreasonable prices; for soldiers, as well as sailors, spend their money, freely.

The marginal note under chile con carne reads:

*Chile con carne—a popular Mexican dish—literally red pepper and meat.

Colonization and warfare are one way that a people’s culinary tastes, and culinary vocabulary, expand.

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Sources:

Gage, Thomas. The English-American His Travail by Sea and Land: or, a New Survey of the West-Indias. London: R. Cotes, 1648, 99. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Molina, Alonso de. Vocabulario en Lengua Castellana y Mexicana. Mexico City: Antonio de Spinosa, 1571, 2.21r. Internet Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. chilli, chilly, n.

Smith, S. Compton. Chile Con Carne; or, the Camp and the Field. New York: Miller and Curtis, 1857, 99–100. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Photo credit: Carstor, 2005. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license.

cad / caddie / cadet

U.S. Air Force Academy cadets at graduation, 2009. Rows of men and women in uniform marching.

25 July 2022

A cad is a disreputable and dishonest person; a caddie is someone who carries golf clubs for a player; and a cadet is one training to be a military officer. While all three have very different meanings, the words stem from the same root.

Cadet is a sixteenth-century borrowing from French and originally carried the meaning of a younger son or brother of a noble family. It ultimately, via various French dialects, comes from a diminutive of the Latin caput, or head; a younger scion of a family is a “little head.”

The word appears in English by 1548, when historian Edward Hall uses it in reference to the younger son of a French noble. He is writing about the 1441 siege of the French town of Tartas by English forces, and the cadet in question is Charles d’Albret, the fourth son of Charles II d’Albert:

The Englishe capitaines beyng in Guyen, hauyng knowledge of the valeau[n]t doynges of their countreymen in the realme of Frau[n]ce, determined to do some notable and noble enterprise, on the French costes adioynyng to Aquitayn: & so, thei besieged the strong toune of Tartas belongyng to the lorde Delabreth, their old and auncient enemie. The capitaines and gouernors of the toune, consideryng their weakenesse, and the force of the Englishemen, toke this appoyntment with the Englishe capitaines, that the toune should remain neuter, and for the assuraunce therof, thei deliuered Cadet the sonne of the lorde Delabreth in pledge.

A century later it appears in James Howell’s 1651 Survay of the Signorie of Venice, where cadet is generalized and not used specifically in reference to France:

She hath allso another politic law that permitts not the younger sonnes of the Nobility and Gentry to marry, lest the nomber encreasing so exceedingly it should diminish the dignity, and her great Councell shold be too much pester'd, and this may be one reason why she connives at so many Courtisans for the use of the Cadett-gentlemen.

The OED, in an older entry, places this citation under the sense of one training to be a military officer, but there is nothing here to indicate that it means anything other than a younger son. I suspect this error will be corrected when the entry is updated.

But we do see the military connection the following year when John Evelyn uses it in The State of France. Cadets would enter the military seeking commissions because, not being able to inherit lands or title, they had few other prospects:

And to the stronger twisting of this Cord, such prudence hath been had of late times, that all those great and powerful houses remain now no more divided (as still amongst the Princes of Italy and Germany) the Cadets and yonger Brothers, minding for the most part no greater preferments, then what they cut out with their sword, and merit in Field by being Soldiers of Fortune.

Of course, cadets developed a bad reputation, often being the young, dissolute sons of nobility. We see this reputation, along with the slang abbreviation cadee, in Aphra Behn’s 1690 play The Widdow Ranter. The play is set during Bacon’s rebellion in 1675 Virginia. The colonists, many of whom had demanded commissions in the army in order to drive the Indigenous inhabitants from Virginia, rebelled against the British governor who had refused them. The rebellion was suppressed but was the first such revolt against English rule in North America. In the play, one such cadet speaks to his prisoner:

Nay I'm resolv'd to keep thee here till his Honour the General comes,—what to call him Traytor, and run away after he had so generously given us our freedom, and Listed us Cadees for the next command that fell in his Army.

And cadee also appears in the 1699 slang dictionary the New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew:

Cadet, or Cadee, a Gentleman that Bears Arms in hopes of a Commission; also a younger Brother.

By the late eighteenth century, however, the position of cadet was formalized in many armies. The growing importance of artillery on the battlefield, a branch of service that required considerable technical skill and training and could not be entrusted to just any son of a nobleman, created the need for military training academies. One such academy in Spain is noted in a 1779 travelogue by Henry Swinburne:

The royal apartments are now occupied by a college of young gentlemen cadets, educated at the king’s expence in all the sciences requisite for forming an engineer. The grand master of the ordnance resides at Segovia, which is the head establishment of the Spanish artillery.

But while cadet lost, or never strongly acquired, the connotation of disrepute, the form cadee or caddie continued to carry it. This sense was especially developed in Scotland, where caddie or cawdy extended to include not just the sons of nobility, but any young man or woman who sought employment. Scottish cities and towns regularized corps of caddies to run errands or do other odd jobs. Englishman Edward Burt, while visiting Scotland, notes this practice in a 1754 letter:

I then had no Knowledge of the Cawdys, a very useful Black-Guard, who attend the Coffee-Houses and publick Places to go of Errands; and though they are Wretches, that in Rags lye upon the Stairs, and in the Streets at Night, yet are they often considerably trusted, and, as I have been told, have seldom or never proved unfaithful.

These Boys know every body in the Town who is of any kind of Note, so that one of them would have been a ready Guide to the Place I wanted to find; and I afterwards wondered that one of them was not recommended to me by my new Landlady.

This Corps has a kind of Captain or Magistrate presiding over them, whom they call the Constable of the Cawdys, and in case of Neglect or other Misdemeanor he punishes the Delinquents, mostly by Fines of Ale and Brandy, but sometimes corporally.

“The Blackheath Golfer,” 1790 engraving by Lemuel Francis Abbott. A gentleman in late eighteenth-century dress with a golf club over his shoulder. Behind him stands a caddie carrying more golf clubs.

And by the mid nineteenth century, the sense of errand runner had specialized to refer to someone who carried a player’s golf clubs. The 1845 New Statistical Account of Scotland records this usage and notes the connotation of disrepute:

It is much to be deplored, however, that an exercise in itself sufficiently stimulating, should frequently be prostituted to the purposes of gambling, and that so many of the young who are employed as cadies or club-carriers, should be initiated in the practices of vice partly from the evil example of those in whose gambling transactions they take a deep interest, and whom they in this respect on a smaller scale ludicrously imitate, and partly from the mistaken liberality of their employers, who, by extravagantly overpaying them for their services, not only furnish them with the means of vicious indulgence, but totally unfit them for the sober and steady industry of any laborious calling.

Perhaps influenced by the Scottish usage, or perhaps just a development of the idea that a cadet of noble family would never hold a title, early nineteenth-century university slang in England clipped the word to cad and used it to refer to townspeople, especially those who hired themselves out to students. This use is noted in Pierce Egan’s 1821 edition of his Real Life in London:

Cambridge is but a short distance from that place of sporting notoriety, Newmarket, consequently it is next to impossible but that a youth of an aspiring mind should be up to all the manœuvres of a race course—understanding betting, hedging off, crossing and jostling, sweating and training—know all the jockeys—how to give or take the odds—lay it on thick, and come it strong. Some have an unconquerable ambition to distinguish themselves as a whip, sport their tits in tip top style, and become proficient in buckish and sporting slang—to pitch it rum, and astonish the natives—up to the gab of the cad.

Hence, a cad being a commoner, someone who could never be a gentleman, a disreputable person.

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Sources:

An Amateur (pseudonym of Pierce Egan). Real Life in London, vol. 2 of 2. London: Jones & Co., 1821, 519. Adam Matthew: London Low Life: Street Culture, Social Reform and the Victorian Underworld.

B.E. A New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew. London: W. Hawes, et al. 1699. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Behn, Aphra. The Widdow Ranter, or the History of Bacon in Virginia. London: James Knapton, 1690, 40. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Burt, Edward. Letters from a Gentleman in the North of Scotland, vol. 1 of 2. London: S. Birt, 1754, 26–27. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Evelyn, John. The State of France. London: T.M. for M.M.G. Bedell and T. Collins, 1652, 85. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2022, s.v. cad, n.1.

Hall, Edward. The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancastre and Yorke. London: Richard Grafton, 1548, fol. 142r. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Howell, James. A Survay of the Signorie of Venice (alt. title S.P.Q.V.) London: Richard Lowndes, 1651, 7. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

The New Statistical Account of Scotland, vol. 1 of 15. Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1845, 287. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. cadet, n.1, cad, n.4.

Scottish National Dictionary (SND). s.v. caddie, n.1, v. Dictionaries of the Scots Language, 2022.

Swinburne, Henry. Travels Through Spain. London: P. Elmsly, 1779, 407. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Image credits: Dave Ahlschwede, 2009, U.S. Air Force photo, public domain image; Lemuel Francis Abbott, 1790, public domain image.

bikini

The “Able” nuclear test conducted at Bikini Atoll on 1 July 1946, the first of twenty-three such tests at the atoll. A mushroom cloud rises above a coral atoll.

22 July 2022

The two-piece women’s bathing suit takes its name from Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The Marshallese name for the atoll is Pikinni, a compound of pik (surface) + ni (coconut). The shift in pronunciation between the Marshallese and English words is due to the fact that the phonemes /p/ and /b/ are both bilabial plosives and easily swapped for one another. The precise significance of the name is not certain, but presumably, the atoll had an abundance of coconuts.

Between 1946 and 1958, the United States conducted twenty-three nuclear weapons tests on and around Bikini Atoll. The inhabitants were forcibly removed prior to the first test and because of lingering radiation have not been able to return to this day.

In May 1946, French fashion designer Jacques Heim introduced a two-piece bathing suit that he dubbed the atome, because it was so small. Not to be outdone, on 5 July, only four days after the first of the atomic tests in the South Pacific, competing designer Louis Réard debuted a skimpier suit that he dubbed the bikini. Because the suit was so revealing, the regular models refused to wear it on the runway, so Réard hired a nude dancer, Micheline Bernardini, to model it at his show.

The fashion debut got little notice in the English-language press at first—after all, two-piece bathing suits were not new; the bikini was only notable for its lack of coverage, in more ways than one. The European edition of the New York Herald Tribune, however, ran several articles about it at the time, including this satirical piece published on 6 July 1946, the day after Bernardini sashayed down the runway:

The Foreign Ministers of Great Britain, France, the United States and Soviet Russia reached agreement on reparations on the eve of a new international complications, namely, the world’s smallest bathing suit. The suit is divided into two zones, the northern zone and the southern zone. The northern zone is divided into two enclaves. Designated as the Bikini, the suit, when not worn, is carried in a blue box one and a half inches square. Experts appointed are studying the report that the suit may be passed through an ordinary finger ring. The suit has not been put on the agenda, but there is general agreement that it looks snappy on Micheline Bernardini.

Micheline Bernardini modeling the original Bikini swimsuit in July 1946. Black and white photo of a woman standing beside a swimming pool wearing a two-piece bathing suit and high heels.

But by the following year, bikini began appearing in press articles, at first specifically in reference to Réard’s design, and soon in reference to any skimpy, two-piece suit. This United Press piece, about another Paris fashion show, appeared in a number of U.S. papers on 22 June 1947:

First came the famous Bikini model, worn by a shapely blonde. The Bikini model consists of three small triangles of cloth.

And this one from the San Francisco Chronicle of 16 November 1947 uses bikini more generically:

At St. Tropez last summer many young people slipped out of their “bikinis” and canoed and pedalboated about off shore in their birthday suits. The red-faced police pursued them in motorboats.

Puritanical Anglophones were not the only ones to object to the swimsuit. The August 1947 issue of Le Monde Illustré had this to say about the design:

Bikini, ce mot cinglant comme l'explosion même [...] correspondait au niveau du vêtement de plage à un anéantissement de la surface vêtue; à une minimisation extrême de la pudeur.

(Bikini, this word, as stinging as the explosion itself, […] likened the degree of covering by the beachwear to an annihilation of the clothed surface; an extreme minimization of modesty.)

And some were blunter, as this letter to London’s Picture Post of 28 April 1951 testifies:

Soon the beaches will be swarming again. Let us defend them against immorality. Forbid by law two-piece bathing suits for females—Bikinis, and all the disgusting rest. Let us keep our beaches safe for our children: not let them become scenes of living pornography for our dirty old men.

In retrospect, the debut of the bikini was a significant sociological milestone, and its metaphorical name was highly appropriate. Thomas Cole wrote of the fashion debut in 2011:

Though juxtaposed to the atome, bikini has an even more shocking and atomic effect. Moreover, Réard’s choice of name contains the nuclear threat within the sexily clad and controllable woman’s body.

Of course, by today’s standards Réard’s 1946 design was relatively staid. We have become inured to the annihilation of modesty, just as we have become inured to the threat of nuclear annihilation.

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Sources:

Cole, Thomas G. (The) Bikini: EmBodying the Bomb. Genders, 53, Spring 2011.

Hannay, Evelyn. “To All Appearances—Resort Fashions Bow In.” San Francisco Chronicle, 16 November 1947, 13S. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Hardman, Cedric. “Ban the Binkinis” (letter). Picture Post (London), 28 April 1951, 5. Gale Primary Sources: Picture Post Historical Archive, 1938-1957.

Loehwing, David A., United Press. “Unexpected Peel Causes Slip in Breathless Tightrope Act.” Richmond Times-Dispatch (Virginia), 22 June 1947, 5. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

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

“Paris Bares World’s Smallest Bathing Suit and Consensus from Every Angle Is—Wow!” New York Herald Tribune (European Edition), 6 July 1946, 4. Gale Primary Sources: International Herald Tribune Historical Archive, 1887-2013.

Photo credits: U.S. Army Air Forces, 1 July 1946. Library of Congress. Public domain image; unknown photographer, 1946, Hulton Archive, fair use of a low-resolution scan to illustrate the topic under discussion.

Appalachia / Appalachian

1857 painting by George Inness of the Delaware Water Gap, where the Delaware River cuts through the Appalachian Mountains between Pennsylvania and New Jersey. A river in the foreground that has cut through a line of hills in the background.

20 July 2022

The Appalachian Mountains are an ancient highland region running along the east coast of North America, from Labrador to Alabama. The hills once rivaled the Rockies or the Alps in height, but as they are older than those ranges, erosion has weathered them down significantly. The highest point is Attakulla (Mount Mitchell) in North Carolina, at 6,684 feet (2,037 m) above sea level. The Appalachian Trail is a hiking trail that runs continuously along the range, from Springer Mountain in Georgia to Mount Katahdin in Maine.

The geographic region of Appalachia, however, is more restricted, limited to the central and southern portions of the range. The region has no definitive boundaries but is generally taken to stretch from the Catskill Mountains in south-central New York to Alabama, and sometimes even more restrictively from West Virginia to Tennessee.

The name comes from that of the Apalachee, a Muskogean people. The name is from a Muskogean language, probably either the Apalachee abalahci (other side of the river) or from the Hitchiti apalwahči (dwelling on the other side). The traditional lands of the Apalachee are in the Florida panhandle. The name entered European languages through contact with the Spanish, and it was the Spanish who dubbed the mountains as Apalache and extended the region northward, well beyond the traditional lands of the Apalachee people. The English name comes via translation from French writing, which in turn acquired the name from the Spanish.

The name first appears in English as the name of a Spanish province in Florida in a 1568 translation of André Thevet’s The New Founde Worlde, or Antarctike:

There resteth now only to describe the third parte, the which shall begin at Noua Espania, or new Spaine, comprehending all the prouinces of Anauac, Ucatan, Eulhuacan, Xalixa, Thalco, Mixtecapan, Tezeuco, Guzanes Apalachen, Pancho, Aute, and the kingdome of Micuacan, from Florida vnto the land of Bacalles, which is a great Region, vnder the which also is comprehended the land of Canada, and the prouince of Chicora, (which is .33. degrées on this side the line) the land of Labrodor, newe found land, compassed with the frostie Sea on the Northe side.

English use of the name in reference to the mountains occurs by 1587, when it appears in Richard Hakluyt’s translation of René Goulaine de Laudonnière’s A Notable Historie Containing Foure Voyages Made by Certayne French Captaynes unto Florida:

There is found among the Sauages good quantitie of Gold and Siluer, which is gotten out of the Ships that are lost vpon the cost, as I haue vnderstood by the sauages themselues. They vse traffick therof one with another. And that which maketh me the rather beleeue it, is, that on the cost toward the Cape, where commonly the Ships are cast away, there is more store of siluer, then toward the North. Neuerthelesse they say that in the Mountaynes of Appalatcy there are mines of Copper, which I thinke to be golde.

And ironically, considering it is the original sense, the use of the name to refer to the people comes later, by 1666 in a translation of César de Rochefort’s The History of the Caribby-Islands:

The Caribbians were originary Inhabitants of the Septentrional part of America, of that Country which is now called Florida: They came to Inhabit the Islands after they had departed from amidst the Apalachites, among whom they lived a long time; and they left there some of their people, who to this day go under the name of Caribbians: But their first origine is from the Cofachites, who only chang’d their denomination, and were called Caribbians in the Country of the Apalachites, as we shall see anon.

De Rochefort may have been the first to write about the Apalachee people in English, but his history is not correct. The Taino people, who originally populated the Caribbean, came from South America, not North America. It’s a good example of why one should not rely on old sources for historical facts (as opposed to evidence of linguistic usage). Being closer to the events in question does not necessarily make the source more reliable; the opposite is usually the case.

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Sources:

Bright, William. Native American Placenames of the United States. Norman: U of Oklahoma Press, 2004, s.v. Appalachian, Apalache.

Laudonnière, René Goulaine de. A Notable Historie Containing Foure Voyages Made by Certayne French Captaynes unto Florida. Richard Hakluyt, trans. London: Thomas Dawson, 1587. 2r–v. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Merriam-Webster.com, s.v. Appalachia, geographic name.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. Appalachian, adj. and n.

Rochefort, César de. The History of the Caribby-Islands. John Davies, trans. London: J.M. for Thomas Dring and John Starkey, 1666, 210. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Thevet, André. The New Founde Worlde, or Antarctike. London: Henry Bynneman for Thomas Hacket, 1568, 106v. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Image credit: George Inness, 1857. Montclair Art Museum. Public domain image.