eureka

August 8, 2022

8 August 2022

Eureka is a cry made upon discovering something or coming to a sudden realization. It is from the Greek εὕρηκα (I have found it).

Vitruvius (c.75–15 BCE), in his De archtectura, says that the cry originated with the mathematician Archimedes (c.287–c.212 BCE). King Heiro II of Syracuse had donated an amount of gold to be made into a votive crown for one of the temples in the city, but Hiero wanted to be sure the finished crown had not been adulterated by replacing some of the gold with silver. With the mathematics of the day incapable of calculating the volume of an irregularly shaped object like the crown, Archimedes puzzled over how to measure its volume. Then one day when in the bath, so the story goes, Archimedes realized that that he could indirectly measure the volume of the crown by measuring the amount of water it displaced when submerged. He supposedly leaped out of the bath and ran naked through the streets of Syracuse shouting, “Eureka! Eureka!” The crown, it turns out, had indeed been adulterated with silver.

The incident probably never occurred, at least not this way and especially not this dramatically. Archimedes makes no mention of it in any of his surviving works. And just as the mathematics of the day was not capable of calculating the volume of the crown, the precision required to measure the difference in water displacement between gold and silver was also not possible in Archimedes’s day. But Archimedes does outline the principle of a hydrostatic balance in his work On Floating Bodies, and he may have used such a balance to make the determination. But the bit about running through the streets naked and screaming is almost certainly mythical.

Still, a story need not be true to inspire a word’s use. And Vitruvius, and the others who repeated the tale, were widely read over the ensuing centuries. References to the tale and Archimedes’s alleged cry of Eureka! start appearing in English by the sixteenth century. A preface, written by John Dee, proto-scientist and mystic, to a 1570 translation of Euclid’s Geometry contains the following lines:

For this, may I (with ioy) say, EYPHKA, EYPHKA, EYPHKA: thanking the holy and glorious Trinity: hauing greater cause therto, then Archimedes had (for finding the fraude vsed in the Kinges Crowne, of Gold).

But Dee is using the Greek alphabet. We see it in Latin letters, with the spelling heureca, in Philemon Holland’s 1603 translation of Plutarch’s Morals:

As for Archimedes, he was so intentive and busie in drawing his Geometricall figures, that his servants were faine by force to pull him away to be washed and anointed; and even then he would from the strigil or bathcombe (which served to currie and rub his skin) draw figures even upon his very bellie: and one day above the rest, having found out whiles he was bathing, the way to know, how much golde the gold-smith had robbed in the fashion of that crowne which king Hiero had put forth to making, he ran foorth suddenly out the baine, as if he had beene frantike, or inspired with some fanaticall spirit, crying out; Heureca, Heureca, that is to say, I have found it, I have found it, iterating the same many times all the way as he went.

And by the mid eighteenth century, eureka was being used in English writing with the present-day spelling and without explicit allusion to Archimedes. The various editions of Henry Fielding’s satirical novel Joseph Andrews show the word in transition and anglicization. A passage from the 1742 second edition of the novel reads as follows:

They stood silent some few Minutes, staring at each other, when Adams whipt out on his Toes, and asked the Hostess “if there was no Clergyman in that Parish?” She answered, “there was.” “Is he wealthy?” replied he; to which she likewise answered in the Affirmative. Adams then snapping his Fingers returned overjoyed to his Companions, crying out, “Eureka, Eureka;” which not being understood, he told them in plain English “they give themselves no trouble; for he had a Brother in the Parish who would defray the Reckoning, and that he would just step to his House and fetch the Money, and return to them instantly.

The first edition, printed a earlier in 1742, uses the Greek letters, reading Ευρηκα, Ευρηκα. And the 1743 third edition reads, Heureka, Heureka. At this point, the word had not yet standardized or become fully anglicized, rapidly moving from being printed in Greek letters to different spellings in the Latin alphabet. Since then, the eureka spelling has become the standard, and heureka fell by the wayside.

Some claim that Eureka! is the greatest word in the history of science, but others have pointed out that most scientific discoveries are not heralded by Eureka! but rather by that’s weird.

Discuss this post

Sources:

Dee, John. Elements of Geometrie (preface). H. Billingsley, trans. London: John Daye, 1570, sig. c.ii.v. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Fielding, Henry. The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews, vol.1 of 2. A. Millar, 1742, 266. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

———. The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews, second edition, vol.1 of 2. London: A. Millar, 1742, 267. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

———. The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews, third edition, vol.1 of 2. A. Millar, 1743, 266. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. Eureka, int. (and n.).

Plutarch. The Philosophie Commonlie Called, the Morals. Philemon Holland, trans. London: Arnold Hatfield, 1603, 590. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Image credit: State of California, 1937. Public domain image as the copyright was not renewed.

digs

August 5, 2022

5 August 2022

One’s digs are one’s home, abode, or lodging. On its face, why digs should carry this sense is opaque, but when one looks at the history of the word, how it came to be becomes clear. But digs is also a word with a fraught lexicographic history. It is testament to the need to actually check citations to see if they are accurate. One should not assume that just because a detailed citation is given, with date, volume number, and pages, that it is correct. Casual word lovers can generally rely on citations without checking them, but if you’re doing serious research aimed at publication somewhere, then one should always double check.

Digs is a clipping of diggings, and that word originally referred to a mine or quarry. Over time, however, the meaning of diggings broadened to include the locality around a mine or quarry, and eventually to mean a region or locale divorced from any idea of delving into the earth. Then diggings reversed course and specialized to refer to a home or abode, and it was eventually clipped to just digs.

Diggings in the sense of a mine or quarry and the area around one dates to the sixteenth century. We see it in poet and antiquary John Leland’s account of his travels about Britain, written sometime before 1552 and published in 1710:

On the South side of Welleden a litle without it, hard by the highe Way, ys a goodly quarre of Stone, wher appere great Diggyns.

And this remained the sense of the noun diggings for several centuries. In nineteenth-century American speech, however, it began to change. The meaning of the word broadened to refer to any region or locality. We can see this shift in a single work, Alphonso Wetmore’s 1837 Gazetteer of the State of Missouri. In that work, Wetmore uses diggings several times to refer to mines. For example, there is this line:

These diggings of mine à Lamotte are supposed to have been the earliest discovery of lead in Missouri.

But toward the end of his work, Wetmore includes a narrative that uses diggings to refer to a campsite used by fur trappers, not miners:

I told Jonas the varmint [i.e., a bear] would revisit us before morning; and he sat down with his darning-needle and an old pair of blue stockings, while I barbecued a few slices of old blackee for a late supper, or a very early breakfast. Our guns were close about the “diggings.”

And there is a 24 June 1841 letter from North Carolinian J.S. Knight that uses diggins to refer to a locale in Georgia:

You request me to give you an epitome of the times about here which if I did correctly I should certainly send you a blank sheet of paper—There is no times in these diggins.

Charles Dickens uses the word in his 1843 novel Martin Chuzzlewit. Dickens had completed a trip to America in 1842, and the novel contains a number of Americanisms that he picked up there. In the passage in question, Chuzzlewit is on board a train in the United States and talking to a group of Americans:

“Queen Victoria won’t shake in her royal shoes at all, when she hears to-morrow named,” observed the stranger. “No.”
“Not that I am aware of. Why should she?”
“She won’t be taken with a cold chill, when she realizes what is being done in these diggings,” said the stranger. “No.”
“No,” said Martin. “I think I could take my oath of that.”

Here we have the first problem in the lexicographic history. Many secondary sources, including the Oxford English Dictionary (in an old entry that dates to the nineteenth century), place Dickens’s use of diggings under the sense of home or abode. But it is clear from the context that the word is still being used in its more general sense of region or locale.

But that is far from the most egregious error. If you look online, almost every source, including the OED, will point to a first citation of diggings in the sense of lodgings as being in J.C. Neal’s 1838 Charcoal Sketches. The only problem is the quoted lines do not appear anywhere in Neal’s work. In this case, lexicographers over the course of the last century (including me in an earlier version of this entry) have fallen down on the job and failed to actually check the citation. The error seems to have started with M. Schele De Vere’s 1872 Americanisms, which cites the line, giving volume and page number. Virtually every other source since then has cited De Vere or one of the other subsequent secondary sources without looking to see if it is real. But De Vere obviously mixed up his sources. What source he meant to refer to is unknown, but it was not Neal’s book. That’s forgivable—we all make errors—but the fact that no one subsequently bothered to check his source is not.

It's not uncommon for a secondary source here and there to fail in this way and plump for an incorrect citation, but usually others will check and get it right. More common is for metadata, especially dates, to be wrong and falsely propagated (I’ve also made the mistake, from time to time, of relying upon bad metadata myself), but for a non-existent quotation to persist unchallenged for over a century is rare.

Nor is this the last such error in the lexicographic history of diggings. Mathews’s 1951 Dictionary of Americanisms cites W. Gilmore Simms’s 1834 novel Guy Rivers as the first citation under the sense of region or locality. But the word does not appear in that book until the 1859 revised edition. (Consulting a later edition but citing the earlier one is also a common route for error to creep in.)

Finally, we get diggings being used to refer to the home of a widowed mother and her teenaged daughter in a letter published in the May 1845 issue of Cincinnati Miscellany:

She then returned into the house and set her rifle down. Her daughter by this time had got up and struck a light, assuring her mother, (for as old Tim Watkins the narrator said, “the gals did’nt [sic] call their Mothers Ma in those days,”) there was some strange animal about the ‘diggins’ for she heard it “fussing” around whilst her mother was out.

And it can also be found in Samuel Adams Hammett’s 1858 Piney Woods Tavern, where the word is used to refer to accommodations onboard a ship:

It’s a sartin sign of foul weather when a ship’s under bare poles, and you may be sure of it when you see them pesky little critters, Mother Carey’s chickens, a flyin’ around the starn, and when the steward can’t set the table, and you kin hear the crockery a smashin’ in the cubberd; buy when you find all the women folks a leavin’ their own diggins, and gittin’ into the main cabin fer consolation, you may know that the very old boy’s to pay.

And by the end of the nineteenth century, we see diggings, in the sense of abode or place of accommodation, being clipped to digs. Here we see a British use of digs referring to a traveling theatrical company’s lodging that appeared in a letter to London’s The Stage on 11 May 1893:

Anyone reading some of the letters published lately would imagine that the writers evidently look upon touring as a sort of pleasure trip. I would remind a few of them (who have not been on the road long enough to give a general opinion) that “being in the know” regarding the best “digs” can only be obtained by experience. When they have really done the provincial towns for a few years, and had time to find out for themselves, then let them speak.

There you have it. And of course, feel free to follow up on and check my citations for accuracy.

Discuss this post

Sources:

De Vere, M. Schele. Americanisms: The English of the New World. New York: Charles Scribner, 1872, 171. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Dickens, Charles. The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit. London: Chapman and Hall, 1844, 260. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Eliason, Norman E. Tarheel Talk. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina Press, 1956, 268.

Goranson, Stephan. “Re: [ADS-L] Digs: mystery citation?” ADS-L, 14 July 2022.

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

Hammett, Samuel Adams. Piney Woods Tavern; or, Sam Slick in Texas. Philadelphia: T.B. Peterson and Brothers, 1858, 112. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Knight, J.S. Letter to James Evans, 24 June 1841. James Evans Papers, 1826–1927, 248, Series 1, Folder 3 1840–42, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Special Collections Library, U of North Carolina.

Leland, John. The Itinerary of John Leland, vol 1 (before 1552). Oxford: 1710, 9. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Mathews, Mitford M. A Dictionary of Americanisms. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1951, s.v. digging, n.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. digging, n., dig, n.1.

Quinion, Michael. “Digs.” Worldwidewords.org, 28 August 2004.

Redding, G. “Correspondence: Another Bear Adventure” (May 1845). Cincinnati Miscellany, vol. 1. Cincinnati: Caleb Clark, 1845, 241. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Sheidlower, Jesse. “Re: [ADS-L] Digs: mystery citation?” ADS-L, 14 July 2022.

Simms, W. Gilmore. Guy Rivers, a Tale of Georgia, vol. 1 of 2. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1834. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

———. Guy Rivers, a Tale of Georgia, new and revised edition. New York: Redfield, 1859, 70. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Weir, Charles. “Letters to the Editor.” The Stage (London), 11 May 1893, 16. ProQuest.

Wetmore, Alphonso. Gazetteer of the State of Missouri. St. Louis: C. Keemle, 1837, 109, 317. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Photo credit: William Warby, 2013. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

cute

August 3, 2022

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

August 1, 2022

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. — 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.

Discuss this post

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

July 29, 2022

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.

Discuss this post

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.