lu-lu

August 19, 2022

The crowd at the 2015 Lollapalooza music festival. A crowd of people with arms raised standing before a stage.

19 August 2022

Lollapalooza (with various spellings) is a slang term referencing something great or wonderful or simply an outstanding example of something. The lolla- element appears to be from an earlier slang term, lalla, which also gave us lulu. The ‑palooza is simply a nonsense addition.

Lalla appears in print as early as 1881 in an article about theatrical slang in the 13 August 1881 Los Angeles Daily Herald:

He calls a beautiful woman a “lalla,” a “dandy,” or a “corker,” and an ugly one is a “chromo.”

The California paper gives credit to the Philadelphia Times for the article, but I cannot find that earlier appearance.

We see it, with a different spelling, in reference to baseball in the National Police Gazette of 25 September 1886:

Connor’s hit over the right field fence was a lahah.

And a number of secondary sources, including the Oxford English Dictionary in an old entry, record lulu a little more than a month later. This use is said to occur in the New Orleans Lantern of 10 November 1886:

Farrell’s two baser was a lu-lu.

The only copy of the Lantern I can locate is a microform copy at Tulane University, which I am unable to consult. I have grown suspicious of sources, even otherwise respectable ones, that I cannot verify. In this case, the citation appears in a 1950 article in American Speech, and I suspect that other secondary sources are using this article as their reference. This is a classic situation where errors tend to be propagated. In this case, however, even if this particular citation is in error, we know that lulu was in use by that same year because it appears in Geore Ade’s 1886 novel Artie in a description of a bad hangover:

“I’ve got a set o’ coppers on me this g.m. that’d heat a four-room flat and my mouth tastes like a Chinese family ’d just moved out of it.”
“Another poker party?” asked Miller.
“Guess again. Worse ’n any poker party. A bat—a real old bat. Pazoo-oo-oom! Ooh! Mebbe you think I ain’t got a lulu of a head on me this morning. I ought to be out at the Washin’tonian home with all the rest o’ them stills and hypos.”
“You do n’t [sic] mean to say that you were—loaded?” inquired Miller, leaning over his desk and lowering his voice so that young Mr. Hall should not hear.
“To the guards. Up to here,” and Artie, elevating his chin, drew a forefinger across his Adam’s apple.

And Ade’s novel gives us the first recorded use of a variant of lollapalooza, this time in reference to a beautiful woman:

“But the girls—wow!
“Beauties, eh?”
“Lollypaloozers!”

Also in the late nineteenth century, lollapalooza developed a specific sense in poker as a hand that is worthless according to the standard rules of poker but that is used to dupe a novice player into thinking they’ve been beaten. This sense appears in an article in the Idaho Daily Statesman of 25 October 1899. The article, which gives other examples of similar terms, is credited to the Washington Post, but again I cannot find that original:

A middle aged Maryland farmer, who picked the right one to the tune of nearly $800 at the Rockville fair races, got into Washington in the nihgt [sic] following the wind up of the fair, says the Washington Post. He was hunting for joyance and three cheerful workers gold [sic] hold of him and nudged him into a four-handed poker game. The farmer didn’t know much about the game, but he won steadily for the first hour. Then the cheerful workers went at him in a bunch and they took his winnings and his own bundle off him so fast that it made him sneeze. One of them got a “squeeze-jib,” which he explained as being a hand that couldn’t be shown, and raked down $135 of the Maryland man’s money. Another got a “lallapaloosa,” consisting of three clubs and a pair of spades, and took $85 of the farmer’s money. The Maryland man only had three queens. Another of the merry grafters caught four diamonds and the ace of clubs on top, which, being a “kiftynitch,” beat any hand in the deck, and was explained to the man who had won out on the fair, and the “kifty-nitch” [sic] topped his king-full and cost him $90 more. The Maryland farmer began to look pretty solemn when he was more than $300 in the hole. Then it came to a jackpot. All hands stayed until the pressure became too great and when two of the grafters dropped out there was more than $350 in the center of the table. The farmer stood pat and he came back at the grafter, who plunged at him every time with $25 raises. When there was more than $600 in the middle of the table the farmer pasted the amount of the grafter’s last raise into the center of the table and called. The grafter laid down four jacks.
“No good,” said the farmer, throwing his hand face down in the middle of the table and raking in the pot.
“Hold on, there,” exclaimed the grafter. “What are you trying to do anyhow? I’ve got four jacks. What you got?”
“I’ve got a hunch,” said the farmer, sweeping the stakes, which consisted of bills, and not chips into his pocket and he backed out of the room. He happened to be about six feet three and built proportionately and the cheerful workers didn’t attempt to detain him.

(This story may remind Star Trek fans of the card game Fizzbin, which appears in the episode “A Piece of the Action” in the original series.)

More recently, Lollapalooza, with a capital letter, was the name of series of music festivals beginning in 1991, and the term was adopted by numerous other such festivals in the 1990s and later. But there are transitional uses of the term prior to the 1991 proper noun. Here is one from Fort Lauderdale’s Sun-Sentinel of 8 February 1989, which uses the term as an adjective to describe a charity event:

April 1 is the date of this year's lollapalooza fund-raiser for the Community Alliance for AIDS, starring Sophia Loren, no less.

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Sources:

Ade, George. Artie: A Story of the Streets and Town. Chicago: Herbert S. Stone, 1896, 8, 76–77. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2022, s.v. lallapaloosa, n., la-la, n.1.

Gross, Martha. “A Formidable Army Forms Against AIDS.” Sun Sentinel (Fort Lauderdale, Florida), 8 February 1989, 3E. ProQuest Newspapers.

“‘Had a Hunch.’ And the Grafter Didn’t Try to Detain the Farmer.” Idaho Daily Statesman (Boise), 25 October 1899, 3. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Lighter, J.E. Historical Dictionary of American Slang, vol. 2 of 2. New York: Random House, 1997, s.v. lolla, n., lollapalooza, n., lulu, n.

Lumiansky, R.M. “New Orleans Slang in the 1880s.” American Speech, 25.1, February 1950, 35. JSTOR.

“Our National Game.” National Police Gazette, 25 September 1886, 14. ProQuest Magazines.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989 with June 2021 draft additions, s.v. lollapalooza, n., lulu, n.

“Theatrical Slang.” Los Angeles Daily Herald, 13 August 1881, 2. California Digital Newspaper Collection.

Photo credit: Aneil Lutchman, 2015. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

husband / husbandry

August 17, 2022

Goats! A photo from a 1920 book on animal husbandry showing five girls standing next to four Angora goats.

17 August 2022

A husband is a male partner in a marriage or long-term relationship, but it can also be a verb meaning to judiciously manage resources, and husbandry is just such judicious management. Today, these two senses seem unrelated, but the history of the word makes the relationship clear.

Our present-day husband comes from the Old English husbonda. That word was modeled on the Old Norse husbondi but formed from common Germanic roots already present in English, hus + bonda. And in Old English the most common meaning of husbonda was that of a householder, a landowner. We see this sense in an Old English translation of the Gospels. It appears in a bit of commentary that follows Matthew 20:28 and the parable of the workers in the vineyard:

Witodlice þon[ne] ge to gereorde gelaþode beoð ne sitte ge on þam fyrmestan setlu[m] þe læs þe arwurðre wer æfter þe cume & se husbonda hate þe arisan & ryman þam oðron & þu beo gescynd
(Certainly, when you are invited to a feast, you do not sit in the first place lest a more honored man arrives later, and the husband says to rise and make room for the other, and you are embarrassed.)

But bonda itself carried the sense of householder and even that of a male partner in marriage in Old English, particularly in legal texts. From the second law code of Cnut in a section regarding the probate of wills:

& þær se bonda sæt uncwydd & unbecrafod, sitte þ[æt] wif & þa cild on þa[m] ylcan unbesacen.
(And where the bonda sat uncontested and not subject to claims, the wife and the child sit similarly uncontested.)

The Quadripartitus, a twelfth-century Latin translation of pre-Conquest English laws, translates this passage as:

Et ubi bonda (id est paterfamilias) mansit […]

(As a rule, the Quadripartitus is an unreliable guide to translation; the translator was not fluent in English, but here the translator appears to have gotten it right.)

In the early Middle English period, a husband could also be someone who manages resources, such as an estate or forest, a specification of the duties of a householder. We see the English word inserted into Anglo-Latin texts starting in the early twelfth century. And the Middle English verb husbonden emerges in the early fifteenth century, meaning to manage resources thriftily. For instance, the verb appears in Thomas Hoccleve’s Balade to the Virgin and Christ:

Wolde god, by my speeche and my sawe,
I mighte him and his modir do plesance,
And, to my meryt, folwe goddes lawe,
And of mercy, housbonde a purueance!
(Would God, by my speech and my words,
I might do satisfaction to him and his mother.
And to my merit, follow God’s law,
And of mercy, husband a supply.)

And this verb sense of husband continues on to the present day.

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Sources:

2 Cnut § 72. In Felix Liebermann. Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, vol. 1 of 3. Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1903, 358, 359.

Dictionary of Old English: A to I, 2018, s.v. hus-bonda, n., bonda, n.

Hoccleve, Thomas. “Ceste Balade Ensuyante Feust Translatee au Commandement de Mon Meistre Robert Chichele.” (a.k.a., “Balade to the Virgin and Christ”). Hoccleve’s Works I. The Minor Poems in the Phillipps MS 8151 (Cheltenham) and the Durham MS 3.9. Frederick Furnivall, ed. London: 1892, 67–68. ProQuest.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. hous-bond(e, n., hus-bonden, v.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2016, s.v. husband, n.

Skeat, Walter W. The Gospel According to Saint Matthew in Anglo-Saxon, Northumbrian, and Old Mercian Versions, new edition. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1887, 164. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Photo credit: Unknown photographer, 1920. In Tormay, John L. and Rolla C. Lawry. Animal Husbandry. New York: American Book Company, 1920, 148. Public domain image.

head over heels

August 15, 2022

15 August 2022

To be head over heels is to tumble, to fall, or to be topsy-turvy, hopelessly out of control, especially in reference to one who is in love. The phrase is odd because one’s normal state is for one’s head to be above one’s heels. If the phrase were to make literal sense, it would be heels over head.

And indeed, that was the original wording of the phrase, and one you still see occasionally, although it is now rare. The phrase, in its original wording, dates to the late fourteenth century, where it is found in the alliterative poem Patience. The passage in question is about Jonah being swallowed by the whale:

He glydes in by þe giles þurȝ glaym ande glette,
Relande in by a rop, a rode þat hym þoȝt,
Ay hele ouer hed hourlande aboute,
Til he blunt in a blok as brod as a halle.
(He glides in by the gills through slime and filth,
Rolling in via an intestine, that he thought was a road,
Always head over heel, hurtling about,
Til he landed in a place as broad as a hall.

We start to see the modern phrasing in the late seventeenth century. Why the switch happened is a mystery. It just did. We see the transition in Daniel Manly’s 1678 edition of Henry Hexham’s Dutch-English dictionary:

Rol-bollen, Tumble over head & heels.

And the 1694 edition of The French Rogue has this passage about a man who catches another in bed with his wife. The husband beats the man until he is supine on the floor, at which point the wife reveals that she knows the husband has been cheating on her as well. Surprised that she knows of his indiscretion, the husband allows the man to slip away, whereupon he tumbles down the stairs and escapes:

Upon this Discovery, he suppos’d his Wife had been a Witch, standing confounded and amaz’d in himself, to consider how otherwise such a Secret should come to her Knowledge; and (to be brief) whilst he a little suspended his Fury, my Spark crawl’d from under his unmerciful Clutches, on all Four; and getting to the Stair-head, made, for haste, but one leap to the bottom, and tumbl'd Head over Heels down the other, and ran out of Doors, with a Resolution of never returning.

We start seeing the figurative use of the idiom at the beginning of the eighteenth century. From a 1710 translation of the Pseudo-Lucian’s Philopatris:

What’s the matter, Critias? you seem to have metamorphosed your self into another Shape, contracting your Eyebrows backward; you seem to be wholy lost in Thought, and retir’d into the inmost Cabinet of your Breast, reeling and tumbling Head over Heels, as if, as the Poet terms it, you were playing Christmas Gambols, while a Paleness overspreads your Face.

(The original Greek is κάτω περιπολῶν (kato peripolon), roughly translated as “wandering up and down.”)

Head over heels doesn’t make sense, but that’s the defining characteristic of an idiom, a phrase that does not make literal sense. Besides, being nonsensical is somehow fitting for this phrase.

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Sources:

The French Rogue. London: N. Boddington, 1694, 112–13. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Lucian of Samosata (Pseudo-Lucian). “Philopatris.” J. Drake, trans. The Works of Lucian, vol. 2 of 3. London: Samuel Briscoe, 1710, 2.23. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Lucian. Lucian Volume 8. M.D. Macleod, trans. Loeb Classical Library 432. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1967, 416–17. Loeb Classical Library Online.

Manly, Daniel and Henry Hexham. Dictionarium Ofte Woordboeck. Rotterdam: Byde Weduve van Arnout Leers, 1678, sig. Ggg1r. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2013, s.v. head, n.1.; June 2017, heal, n.1 and int.

“Patience.” The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript, fourth edition. Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron, eds. University of Exeter Press, 2002, lines 269–72, 197.

Image credit: Goldwyn Pictures Corporation, 1922. Public domain image.

French fries / pommes frites

August 12, 2022

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

August 11, 2022

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.