cute

The apotheosis of cute. A gray, striped kitten.

3 August 2022

Cute is one of those words whose meaning as shifted over the years so that its original sense is barely recognizable today. It started out as a clipped, or aphetic, form of acute. This original sense and etymology are recorded in Nathan Bailey’s 1730 Dictionarium Britannicum:

CUTE (acutus, L.) sharp, quick-witted.

A century later in America, however, cute began to be used to refer to things that were attractive because they were clever. We can see both these senses in the letters of J. Downing, a fictional character created by Charles Augustus Davis in the 1830s who opined on politics in letters to newspapers. Cute is used in the original clever/skillful sense in a letter from 24 July 1833:

If I don’t give Mr. Biddle and his money-bags a stirring up, I’m mistaken; there is no one thing I’m so cute at, as looking through accounts.

And in the attractively clever sense in a letter from 25 January 1834 about fiscal policy and the Bank of the United States a divisive, partisan political topic of the day:

And so I placed the cups bottom up, all along in a row on the table, and then I gin the general a hand full of small balls. “Now,” says I, “I’m goin to show you about as cute a thing as you’ve seen in many a day—them cups they call banks, and them balls is the money we took from Squire Biddle’s Bank; the next thing is to show you how things are goin to work, now that we’ve got our money from one pocket, where we always know’d where to find it, and divided it round among twenty pockets, where may-be you may or may-be you may not find nothin at all on’t—and here,” says I, “are some leetle pieces of paper that our folks make use on to throw dust with—now,” says I, “Gineral, look sharp, or you’re gone, hook and line,” says I.

And within a few decades cute was being used to mean not just clever but also something that is generally attractive and charming. From David Hunter Strother’s Virginia Illustrated of 1857:

Minnie, behindhand with her work, as usual, was engaged in finishing a pair of red socks for her doll.

“What cute little socks!” said the woman, regarding the work with interest.

Minnie exhibited her doll. As the young matron held the toy to the light, her eyes sparkled and her hand trembled. “How pretty!”

While these new senses originated in the United States, they quickly traveled back to England and entered into common use.

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Sources:

Bailey, Nathan. Dictionarium Britannicum. London: T. Cox, 1730, s.v. cute.

Davis, Charles Augustus. “Letter IV” (24 July 1833). A. Letters of J. Downing. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1834, 41–42, 214. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Lexicons of Early Modern English, University of Toronto, 2021.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. cute, adj.

Strother, David Hunter (under the pseudonym Porte Crayon). Virginia Illustrated. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1857, 165–66. Gale Primary Sources: American Fiction.

Photo credit: Nicolas Suzor, 2008, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

cowabunga

A surfer riding the tube of a wave off Teahupo’o (Tahiti)

1 August 2022

Cowabunga is an exclamation of surprise. Originally, it expressed displeasure, but in the mouths of 1950s–60s surfers it came to mean an expression of pleasant surprise or enthusiasm. The word was coined by Eddie Kean, head writer for the Howdy Doody show, a children’s television show that aired in the United States from 1947–60. Kean originally used cowabunga as a faux-Native American term.

The exact date of Kean’s coinage is unknown as most of the early episodes of Howdy Doody are lost. A 1997 Chicago Tribune interview with Kean places the date as 1949, but according to IMDb, the character of Chief Thunderthud, who originally uttered the word, did not begin to appear on the show until 1950. An extract from the Tribune interview reads:

The 79-year-old lounge pianist and composer coined cowabunga in 1949 while working as head writer for “The Howdy Doody Show.”

Only, he spelled it “kowabonga.” The plot thickens.

“On ‘Howdy’ we had a character named Chief Thunderthud,” says Kean, “and (host) Buffalo Bob Smith rightly thought the old boy needed his own greeting. Movie Indians said ‘How!’ in those days, you know, but I always felt ‘How’ sounded stupid and contrived. Did any self-respecting Indian ever say ‘How!’? I seriously doubt it.

“Our Princess Summerfall Winterspring used kowagoopa as her greeting, so kowabonga seemed logical enough for Chief Thunderthud. At least Bob and I felt kowabonga worked…”

Buffalo Bob Smith, semi-retired and living near Flat Rock, N.C., remembers Kean as “a creative genius with a marvelous sixth sense for knowing what kids would enjoy. Only Eddie Kean could have come up with kowabonga…and believe me, kowabonga caught on!

“Bill Lecornec walked in dressed as Chief Thunderthud and rarely got his line out,” Smith says. “The Peanut Gallery always beat him with their own `Kowabonga!’”

(Lecornec, who played Chief Thunderthud for 13 seasons, keeps a low profile in his Miami neighborhood these days, declining any discussion of “Howdy Doody,” or of cowabunga.)

“The full line went ‘Kowabonga, Buffalo Bob!’" Kean says. “Later, I had the chief use kowabonga as a mild curse in his fights with Clarabell. Kowabonga meant ‘hello’ or ‘darn it!’ My preferred spelling was kowabonga, but I see where the surfers changed it to cowabunga.

A later interview with Kean, conducted in 2005 by the Television Academy Foundation tells roughly the same tale, but with slightly different details:

This is crazy. In the show Clarabelle squirted the villain, Indian chief, Chief Thunderthud, He started screaming when he got squirted. I had to come up with something for him to say. Now, we couldn't say, “Damn you, Clarabelle,” or anything close to that. Earlier in the show, I gave the Indian Princess and another Indian, Chief Featherman—and we loved Indians and clowns together—a greeting to say, “Hello,” kowagoopa, instead of the usual Indian greeting, How, because I didn’t want to resemble real Indians that much. So, kowagoopa was sweet and soft and charming and lovely, and for some reason they came up with the phrase kowabonga for Chief Thunderthud when he got mad and got squirted or mad or frustrated, or whatever, using hard syllables like B and G, and for some reason or another, unknown to me for a long time, the word caught on for long after the show left the air. 

As with many slang terms, which usually originate in speech, the spelling varies in early uses before settling down to a canonical form, which in this case has become cowabunga.

The word begins appearing in print by 1954. The Oxford English Dictionary has this citation from a comic book based on the show (Howdy Doody #26, Dell Comics) from January of that year:

Kowa-Bunga! Then Me Fix You Good! You Be Sorry.

Another early appearance is in an article from Jersey City’s Jersey Journal of 27 September 1954 which details a live charity show for children with cerebral palsy that featured characters from the show:

“Kowabunga,” Chief Feathman [sic] shouted the magic words from the stage, and out Zippy came, acting more like people than people

* * *

THE LITTLE chimpanzee skated around the stage, hugged kids who came too close, chewed on a policeman’s boot and generally wrecked the furniture.

“Kowabunga,” said Chief Featherman, in full Indian regalia, and out of the runway came Papoose Shining Leaf, who didn’t get the kids to scream as loud as Zippy did, but was much prettier.

Papoose Shining leaf, whose real name is Eleanor Duffy, and who hails from Jersey City, sang a few songs, started clapping her hands, and 1,000 kids applauded with her.

Frame from a 1954 Mad magazine parody of the Howdy Doody television show. Chief Thunderthud utters Kowabunga! as he and Buffalo Bob flee from Clarabell who is about to squirt them with seltzer.

And kowabunga also appears in Mad Magazine in December 1954 in a spoof of the television show. In the spoof, which alters the names of the characters presumably for copyright reasons, Chief Thundamelvin utters Kowabunga! as he and Buffalo Bill flee from Clarabella who is about to squirt them with seltzer.

The cultural insensitivity in the supposedly Native-American characters on the TV show is palpable nowadays, but the pseudo Native American connection is not carried through in later, popular uses of the word.

By the early 1960s, the word had been picked up by surfers, who standardized the spelling and shifted the meaning to the more positive sense. Their use of cowabunga was, perhaps, influenced by the Hawaiian word kupaianaha, meaning amazing or wonderful. A 1965 Peanuts cartoon has Snoopy using the phrase while surfing.

Frame from a 1965 Peanuts comic strip depicting Snoopy on a surfboard yelling “Cowabunga!”

The word occasionally cropped up in other contexts. In 1978 television special Christmas Eve on Sesame Street, the Muppet Cookie Monster yells Cowabunga! as he smashes with a karate chop a typewriter that he was using to write a letter to Santa Claus. By this point, the word seems to have infiltrated the culture of Japanese martial arts, or at least the American media’s depiction of that culture.

Cowabunga was introduced to a new and wider audience when it became a catchphrase of two popular television cartoon characters. The Simpsons began appearing as a series of shorts on the Tracey Ullman Show starting in April 1987, before being spun off into their own show in 1989. The character of Bart Simpson used the phrase on occasion in those shorts. And in December of 1987, cowabunga became the catchword of the character Michelangelo in the animated television show Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987–96). The Turtles clearly carry on the connection with Japanese martial arts that can be seen in the earlier Sesame Street bit. I haven’t determined which of the two characters, Michelangelo or Bart, was the first to utter it, but it’s clear that the resurgence in the word’s popularity was sparked by the Turtles, as the Simpsons did not reach a wide audience until their own show hit the airwaves two years later in 1989. And while Bart did on occasion utter the word, his association with cowabunga was mainly through t-shirts and other merchandizing items that did not start appearing until 1989, indicating that the word’s popularity among the new generation had already started to rise due to the Turtles.

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Sources:

“Appendix: Etymology/cowabunga.” Wiktionary, 16 October 2021.

“Bill LeCornec.” Internet Movie Database (IMDb), 2022.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2022, s.v. cowabunga!, excl.

Kean, Eddie. Interview with Karen Herman, Television Academy, 3 November 2005.

Mueller, Jim. “Holy Cowabunga!” Chicago Tribune, 21 May 1997.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2007, s.v. cowabunga, int.

“Shining Leaf, Chimp Star in Cerebral Palsy Show.” Jersey Journal (Jersey City, New Jersey), 27 September 1954, 4. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Image credits: Duncan Rawlinson, 2007, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license; Elder, Bill. “Howdy Dooit.” Mad, December 1954, fair use of a single, low-resolution cartoon frame to illustrate the topic under discussion; Charles Schulz, Peanuts, 9 August 1965, fair use of a single, low-resolution cartoon frame to illustrate the topic under discussion.

peg / pegging

Not the type of pegs discussed here. A picture of four metal tent pegs.

29 July 2022

Deliberately coined words rarely achieve widespread and lasting use. But occasionally one breaks through and becomes part of the common vocabulary, and the sexual sense of the verb to peg is one such word. Pegging is when a woman anally penetrates a man with a strap-on dildo, and the word was coined from a suggestion in a contest run by sex-advice columnist Dan Savage in 2001. Savage asked his readers to come up with a name for this practice, and in his 24 May 2001 column he published this reply (among others) from a reader named Paris P.:

Boy prostitutes were sometimes called peg boys because they would sit on pegs to keep their assholes open between clients, so I suggest the word “peg.” The woman would be the “pegger”, the boy would be the “peggee,” the act would be “pegging,” and the boy would write in his personal ad: “I want to get pegged.”

Savage was initially skeptical of the term, preferring punt or bob for the practice, replying:

Most people who like to fuck butts like to fuck butts that are tight, not butts gaping open after hours on a peg. Consequently, a boy prostitute who sits on pegs would seem to have a less marketable ass than one who spends his downtime doing, say, squat thrusts or crossword puzzles. So I very much doubt that the practice you describe was widely practiced, if it was practiced at all. And while “peg” has a certain appeal as a sex word—one syllable, percussive—my Aunt Peggy (who goes by Peg) would never speak to me again if “peg” took off.

[…]

So here's where we're at, folks. Out of the hundreds of proposed names for woman-on-man ass-banging, we've got two good options: bob and punt. While I would normally choose one myself and order my readers to use it, in this case I find myself torn. So let's vote: For punt, send an e-mail to punt@savagelove.net; for bob, send an e-mail to bob@savagelove.net; and, what the hell, for peg, send an e-mail to peg@savagelove.net. In two weeks, I'll announce the winner, and we'll have our cute new term for this delightful sexual practice.

In his 21 June 2001 column, Savage announced the winner:

The votes are in, they've been counted, recounted, and...actually, I'm going to resist making the stock Florida/hanging-chad/Republican-coup jokes. After all, this is serious business: What term, from this day forward, will be the commonly accepted slang for a woman fucking a man in the ass with a strap-on dildo? Three candidates stood in this election: bob, for Bend Over Boyfriend, a popular series of “how to fuck your man in the ass” videos; punt, for kicking the ball to the other team; and peg, for a device once used to, uh, keep the butts of some very unlucky boys gaping open. Thousands of people took the time to cast ballots (12,103 to be exact) and many included impassioned pleas for their favored candidate along with their votes.

[…]

And now, the moment you've all been waiting for...THE WINNER! In what can only be regarded as a stunning upset, my favored candidate, bob, came in dead LAST. Out of 12,103 votes cast, bob received only 2,721 votes (22.5%). In second place, with 4,166 votes (34.5%), was punt. And in first place, with 5,216 votes (43%), was peg! Peg is the winner!

[…]

And, finally, I'd like to offer an apology to my Aunt Peg. I've always been close to my Aunt Peg—she taught me about the birds and the bees—and she's always been there for me. And how do I thank her? By ruining her good name.

By 2 October 2002, peg had an entry in Urbandictionary.com:

peg

A term coined by sex advice columnist Dan Savage that refers to an act of love making that involves a woman with a strap-on dildo anally penetrating her male partner.

Jennifer pegged the shit out of John last night; I bet he won't be able to sit down for a week.

But a sexual sense of peg is not entirely original to Savage and Paris P. There is a nineteenth-century slang use of peg meaning simply to fuck. The Man of Pleasure’s Illustrated Pocket-Book for 1850, a guide to the sex workers and bordellos of London, uses the verb in a play on words involving cribbage, a card game where score is kept on a peg-board and to win is to peg one’s opponent:

They dance, and are card players; they play a pretty game at all-fours, and when they cut they are safe to turn up Jack. The abbess, who is a slashing piece, is good at cribbage, though she will let you peg her; she is safe to bilk your crib, and hole you in spite of your play.

And five years later, another such guide, the Yokel’s Preceptor, has a definition:

Pegging cribs, Bawdy houses.

Still, Savage and his readers deserve credit for the present-day sense. This sense of peg has yet to make it into any of the standard dictionaries, but that’s only a matter of time and available editorial resources.

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Sources:

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2022, s.v. peg, v.5.

The Man of Pleasure’s Illustrated Pocket-Book for 1850. London: William Ward, 1850, sig. E3v. Adam Matthew: London Low Life.

Savage, Dan. “Savage Love: Let’s Vote.” The Stranger, 24 May 2001.

———. “Savage Love: We Have a Winner!” The Stranger, 21 June 2001.

Urbandictionary.com, 2 October 2002, s.v. peg, v..

Yokel’s Preceptor. London: H. Smith, 1855, 30. Google Books.

Photo credit: Jan Uthoff, 2007, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

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.