French fries / pommes frites

A cardboard sleeve of French fries with a side of ketchup.

12 August 2022

French fries are, of course, deep-fried potato slices. The name comes from association of the dish with France, and indeed, French cooks were the first to prepare potatoes in this fashion. Pommes de terre frites is attested in French by 1808, and in subsequent decades it was clipped to Pommes frites. The French name appears in English, although not nearly as often as its English counterpart, and pommes frites is attested to in English by September 1872, when it appears in London’s Frasier’s Magazine in a travelogue about a journey through France:

We have come for hospitality; what can he do? His house is full. Yet he will not hear of our walking on to la Chevreuse in the dark. Il s’adresse á madame, and the result is, that in ten minutes we are sitting down to a very good supper: soup, cutlets, delightful pommes frites, an omelette of course, goat’s milk cheese, and wine which they have sent for to the mill.

The following quotation is from a theater review in London’s Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News from 16 February 1878. It shows that the term pommes frites was common enough to be recognized by a general audience, even if they did not grasp the niceties of French grammar. The “(sic)” is in the original:

Pythias, oft consulting a tattered edition of Joe Miller, constructs new arrangements of venerable puns, while Damon invents the “funny” incidents, such for instance as that of the canary bird crushed to death, purposely, under the heel of M. “Pommefrite,” who has been annoyed by its singing. Their imperfect knowledge of French is shown in the designation of the café keeper as “Pommer frites” (sic). If they wished to call him (in French of Paris, unto them unknown) “fried potatoes,” they should have used the compound term “pommes-frites,” but they have kept the noun in the singular (“pomme”) and the adjective (“frites”) in the plural! Damon and Pythias no doubt have plenty of French dictionaries, but apparently no French grammar.

But the association of the dish with France is older than the French term’s appearance in English. We see French fried potatoes appear in English before pommes frites. From Eliza Warren’s 1856 Cookery for Maids of All Work:

FRENCH FRIED POTATOES.—Cut new potatoes in thin slices, put them in boiling fat, and a little salt; fry both sides of a light golden brown colour; drain dry from fat, and serve hot.

And French fries is an American coinage that is in place by 12 October 1886, when it appears in an advertisement in Massachusetts’s Springfield Republican:

REMEMBER, that the place to buy Saratoga Potatoes is at No 4 Dwight street (near State), also French fries Wednesdays and Saturdays; also choice fruit and confectionery. Orders for parties, sociable, etc., a specialty. Home-made bread and pastry will soon be sold there.

A decade later, there is this ad in Boston’s Sunday Herald of 16 February 1896:

Potato Chip Fryers · · 49c
A Sheet Steel Fry Pan, with wire basket, with supports for draining; for crullers, potato chips, French fries, etc. Pan and basket only 49c.

Finally, the clipping to simply fries, or the singular fry, is in place shortly after World War II. From an ad it the Vidette Messenger of Valparaiso, Indiana, on 4 April 1947:

Try Our Delicious
HAMBURGERS
“They Hit The Spot”

Small Hamburger 15c

LARGE HAMBURGER, with Fries . . 25c

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Sources:

Advertisement, Vidette Messenger (Indiana), 4 April 1947, 5. NewspaperArchive.com.

Classified advertisement. Springfield Republican (Massachusetts), 12 October 1886, 1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“General House Supplies” (advertisement). Sunday Herald (Boston, Massachusetts), 16 February 1896, 3. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2009, s.v. French, adj. and n., December 2006, s.v. pommes frites, n.; second edition, 1989, fry, n.2.

“A Pilgrimage to Port-Royal.” Frasier’s Magazine (London), September 1872, 283. ProQuest Historical Periodicals.

“Royalty Theatre.” The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News (London), 16 February 1878, 526. ProQuest Historical Periodicals.

Warren, Eliza. Cookery for Maids of All Work. London: Groombridge and Sons, 1856. Google Books.

Photo credit: Santeri Viinamäki, 2018. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

fortnight

10 August 2022

[11 August 2022: added comment about sennight]

A line from Ine’s law code from Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 383 regarding the value of sheep

A fortnight is fourteen days, or two weeks. At first blush, the etymology may not be apparent, but a few moments’ thought should puzzle it out. Fortnight is a condensed form of fourteen nights. The word sennight, a blend of seven night, was also in common use in the medieval period, but has since faded from use, driven out by week, and now found only in deliberately archaic formulations.

It goes back to the Old English feorwertyne niht, as can be seen in this line from Ine’s law code. The code dates to c.694 but is only found in later manuscripts. This one is from the late eleventh or early twelfth century and relates the value of sheep:

Eowu bið hire geonge sceape scill weorð oðþ[æt] feorwertyne niht ofer eastron.

(A ewe with her lamb is worth a shilling, until fourteen nights after Easter.)

But in Old English, feorwertyne niht was distinctly written as two words. The blending would happen in the early Middle English period, as can be seen in the poem Layamon’s Brut, line 12815, found in British Library, Cotton MS Otho C.13, c. 1300. The line is in reference to news being brought to King Arthur about a fiend or monster who has kidnapped a maiden:

Nou his folle fourteniht þat he hire haueþ iholde.

(Now a full fortnight had he held her.)

The manuscript British Library, Cotton MS Caligula A.ix, written about the same time and which contains a more complete version of the poem reads feowertene niht. So, it was about this point that the transition from the two-word phrase to the single blend occurred.

Fortnight is a good example of how, if one takes care in consulting a variety of sources, one can see language change underway.

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Sources:

Ine § 55. In Felix Liebermann. Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, vol. 1 of 3. Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1903, 114. Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 383, fol. 28v.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. fourte-night, n.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. fortnight, n.; third edition, March 2021, s.v. sennight, n.

Image credit: Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 383, fol. 28v. Stanford University, Parker Library on the Web. Public domain image as a mechanical reproduction of a public domain work.

eureka

The Great Seal of California bearing the word eureka, referring to the discovery of gold there in 1848. A round seal depicting the goddess Athena/Minerva, a grizzly bear, ships sailing into San Francisco Bay, and a miner digging for gold.

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.

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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

Typical digs at the Wynn Hotel in Las Vegas, 2013. A hotel room with bed, couch, chairs, television, and other furnishings with a view of the Las Vegas strip out the window.

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.

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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

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.