duck (fabric) / duck tape / duct tape

Duck/duct tape used to jury-rig a repair to the fender of the Apollo 17 lunar rover. A photo of a rear wheel of the lunar rover with folded lunar maps replacing a portion of the fender and fastened with the tape. Astronaut Harrison Schmidt is seated in the rover.

30 September 2022

(This is a substantially updated and corrected version of the posting of 28 September.)

People often debate whether or not the adhesive cloth tape should be called duct tape or duck tape. The dictionary underneath Microsoft Word declares duck tape to be an error and suggests duct tape as a replacement, but you don’t have to submit to the tyranny of the software giant. Both are perfectly good terms, so use whichever you prefer, but which term was first used to describe the adhesive tape is uncertain; duct tape is attested a few years earlier, but the use of duck tape to refer to non-adhesive tape is significantly older and may have also had earlier unattested use for the adhesive variety.

The duct in duct tape clearly refers to its application in sealing heating and air-conditioning ductwork, but the origin of duck tape is uncertain. It is most likely an alteration of duct, with the / t / phoneme being dropped. There are claims that the name comes from its waterproof capabilities, but this would appear to be an after-the-fact explanation, ginned up to explain the term. Or the duck could refer to the cotton cloth backing to which adhesive was originally applied.

Duck is a term that was likely borrowed from the seventeenth-century Dutch doeck, meaning cloth. The word appears in two Dutch-English dictionaries written by Henry Hexham in 1647 and 1648. The 1647 one only translates English to Dutch and uses doeck in several entries. Here is the one for linnen:

fine linnen, Fijn lijnwaet, ofte fijn lijnwaet-doeck

[The hyphen comes at a line break, so it’s uncertain whether lijnwaet-doeck is an open or closed compound.]

The next year, Hexham published the complete English-Dutch/Dutch-English edition, which has these entries in the Dutch-English half:

Doeck, ofte doeck-laken, Linnen, or linnen cloath.

Doeck, Cloath.

The fact that the term only appears in the Dutch half of the dictionaries indicates the term was generally unfamiliar to English speakers when Hexham wrote his lexicons.

But the word did have some limited currency in English before Hexham published his dictionary. Duck appears in a 1640 table of import duties, referring to cloth imported from the Continent (the hinderlands):

Gutting and spruce canvas drillings pack, duck hinderlands, middle good headlock, Muscovy linnen, narrow, Hamburgh cloth, narrow, and Irish cloth, the C. ells, qt. six score     0[s] 1[d]

Over time, duck became a standard term in English for a type of cotton cloth. And we see the phrase duck tape by the end of the nineteenth century, although the earliest uses refer to non-adhesive strips of cloth. The following passage is from an article on women’s fashion in the New Orleans Daily Picayune of 8 February 1899:

An extremely stylish effect noticed upon many of the cloth suits was a trace buckle of silver, finished with a strap of the material. Another style, especially designed for driving, has its shoulders extended by supporters quite three inches deyond [sic] the normal line, while the coat trails softly in sacque fashion all around the figure. It makes a very odd, exclusive design. In the washable suits for later wear pique and duck tape take the lead, especially in white and dark blue.

Adhesive cloth tape started to appear in the early years of the twentieth century, but all the known instances of the phrase duck tape refer to the non-adhesive type, and by the start of World War II the phrase was most often used to refer to the strips of cloth upon which the slats of Venetian blinds were hung.

A commonly told story is that duck/duct tape as we know it today was created by the Johnson & Johnson company under contract to the US military during the war. Colored green, it was intended to provide a waterproof seal for ammunition boxes, but soldiers found all sorts of uses for it. It is true that Johnson & Johnson was contracted to provide waterproof adhesive tape to seal ammunition boxes, but whether or not this tape was the duck/duct tape that we know today is uncertain. Johnson & Johnson may have used one of their existing waterproof adhesive tapes, such as Utilitape, to fulfill the contract. The manufacturing records for that period are no longer available, and there are no recorded instances of duck tape being used to refer to adhesive tape during the World War II era.

But duck tape was used by the military to refer to the non-adhesive variety. There is this from the Augusta Chronicle of 17 February 1945:

Major Walsh said there are more than 300 different items used by the army made from cotton duck. Every branch of the army has developed its use for the material that are peculiar to that branch, like the cotton duck covers for smoke generators under the chemical warfare divisions or the duck tape employed by engineers to mark off mine fields.

(During my US Army service in the 1980s we referred to this particular variety, colored white, as “engineer’s tape.” The green, adhesive variety was popularly called “hundred-mile-an-hour tape” by us soldiers, presumably because it was believed to hold fast when traveling at that speed.)

After the war, cloth-backed adhesive tape found a new use in connecting sections heating and air-conditioning ductwork where it was dubbed duct tape. We see duct tape in use by the mid 1950s. From an advertisement in the Newark, New Jersey Sunday Star-Ledger of 18 September 1955:

“Furnace & Duct Tape,[”]
2” to 18” Width

And there is this advertisement for Sears from 12 March 1961 in the New Orleans Times-Picayune:

adhesive duct tape
Sears low price
2.98
Use for making leakproof jointing in both heating and cooling systems.

In contrast, the earliest unambiguous reference to adhesive duck tape that I have found is from an article about a life-sized, inflatable model of a whale in the Portland Oregonian of 25 July 1975:

A stray harpoon, perhaps? No, Pearce said, “tape separation” was to blame. The landlocked mammal’s 24 by 100 feet of plastic sheeting is girdled with 180 yards of aluminum duck tape, which “has the best adhesive quality we could find.”

I’ve found two earlier uses of duck tape that may be references to the tape we know today. The first is in an ad in the 12 October 1973 Reno Evening Gazette that reads:

the tape with a million uses
DUCK TAPE
great for just about any home mending or draft stopping job

This is clearly a reference to a kind of adhesive tape, but earlier the ad mentions “self adhesive plastic foam tape” with a peel-off backing. Whether or not this duck tape is the plastic-foam tape or the duck tape we know today is unclear.

The second is a use of duck tape in an ad for painting supplies that appeared in the Shreveport Times on 3 May 1974. This is most likely a reference to the adhesive cloth tape, but one cannot be sure.

As it stands now, when it comes to the adhesive tape, duct tape is the older term by about a decade, and duck appears to be a variation on duct. But there are much older uses of duck tape referring to non-adhesive strips of cloth, so further digging may turn up earlier uses of the adhesive variety. The story about duck tape being invented by Johnson & Johnson during World War II is true in part—the company did supply adhesive tape for sealing ammunition boxes—but there is no evidence that anyone called it duck tape at the time or even if it is the same product that we know today.

As to which one is the “correct” term, both have been with us for half a century and both are in common use, so which one you choose is a personal choice.

Discuss this post

---

Sources:

“Army Duck Output Here Is Increased.” Augusta Chronicle (Georgia), 17 February 1945, 2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Entick, John. “The Scavage Table of Rates Inwards” (1640). A New and Accurate History and Survey of London, Westminster, Southwark, and Places Adjacent, vol. 2. London: Edward and Charles Dilly, 1766, 167. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Erickson, Steve. “Students Create ‘Jaws’ in Whale-Size Version.” Oregonian (Portland), 25 July 1975, 1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Fowler, Jennifer (KRT News Service). “Stuck on Duct Tape.” Star-Ledger (Newark, New Jersey), 27 September 2000, 77. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Freeman, Jan. “Duct Tape/Duck Tape, One More Time.” Throw Grammar from the Train (blog), 29 June 2013.

———. “Tale of the Tape: Duck or Duct? A Sticky Question.” Boston Globe, 14 March 2010.

Gurowitz, Margaret. “The Woman Who Invented Duct Tape.” Kilmer House (Johnson & Johnson history blog), 21 June 2012.

“Heating Specialties” (advertisement). Sunday Star-Ledger (Newark, New Jersey), 18 September 1955, 58. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Hexham, Henry. A Copious English and Netherduytch Dictionarie. Rotterdam: Aernout Leers, 1647, sig. O7v, s.v. linnen. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

———. A Copious English and Netherduytch Dictionarie. Rotterdam: Aernout Leers, 1648, sig. F8v, s.v. doeck. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Lancashire, Ian, ed. Lexicons of Early Modern English, University of Toronto, 2021.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. duck, n.3; draft additions, August 2001, duck, n.3., duct, n.

Quinion, Michael. “Duct Tape.” World Wide Words, 29 June 2013.

“Sears” (advertisement). Times-Picayune (New Orleans), 12 March 1961, 3.16. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“Stop That Cold!” (advertisement). Reno Evening Gazette (Nevada), 12 October 1973, 30. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

“TG&Y Family Centers” (advertisement). Shreveport Times (Louisiana), 3 May 1974. 13-A. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

“Women’s World and Works.” Daily Picayune (New Orleans), 8 February 1899, 3. NewsBank.

Photo credit: Eugene A. Cernan/NASA, 12 December 1972. Public domain image.

tuck / tucker out / take the tuck out of

“Bear Hunt,” c.1640, an oil on canvas painting by Frans Snyders and Peter Paul Rubens. A bear is attacking a man on horseback, who is armed with a sword, while another man rides to his rescue. Dead or injured dogs lie on the ground. In the back, another man is blowing a horn.

26 September 2022

To tucker out is to weary, to grow tired, become exhausted. It’s an Americanism that dates to early nineteenth-century New England. A related Americanism, recorded a bit later is to take the tuck out of, meaning to sap one’s strength or courage. But why tuck?

The verb to tuck traces back to the Old English tucian, meaning to treat poorly, to afflict. But this sense faded away during the early Middle English period, and its extended sense of to rebuke faded by the end of the seventeenth century. But in Middle English tuck had acquired the sense of to fold up, to tie up, a sense we’re familiar with today. One tucks in one’s shirt or tucks a child into bed, for example. Here’s the word from Geoffrey Chaucer’s late fourteenth-century Summoner’s Tale, describing the title character:

Whan folk in chirche had yeve him what hem leste,
He wente his wey; no lenger wolde he reste.
With scrippe and tipped staf, ytukked hye,
In every hous he gan to poure and prye,
And beggeth mele and chese, or elles corn.

(When folk in church had given him what they wished,
He went on his way; no longer would he stay.
With satchel and tipped staff, robe tucked high,
In every house he began to peer and pry,
And beg meal and cheese, or else grain.)

By around 1600, tuck was also being used as the name for a type of fishing net, one in which the netting was folded to create a bunt or pocket into which the fish were gathered. From Richard Carew’s 1602 Survey of Cornwall:

The Sayne is a net, of about fortie fathome in length, with which they encompasse a part of the Sea, and drawe the same on land by two ropes, fastned at his ends, together with such fish, as lighteth within his precinct.

The Tucke carrieth a like fashion, saue that it is narrower meashed, and (therefore scarce lawfull) with a long bunt in the midst.

And this fishing use engendered a sense of tuck meaning a stomach, or by extension, an appetite. Hence, we get to tuck in, meaning to eat. William Holloway’s 1838 General Dictionary of Provincialisms records this sense from the south of England:

TUCK, s. [Tuck, Germ. Cloth, woollen-cloth.] A cloth worn by children to keep their clothes clean; a pinafore.     Hants.
Stomach; appetite; as, “He has a pretty good Tuck of his own,” means that a man is a great eater.     Hants. Sussex.
To TUCK-IN, v.a. [A Tuck, according to Fenning, is a kind of net with a narrow mesh, and a large bunt in the middle, and may be used ironically for stomach.]
To eat voraciously.     Sussex. Hants.

And from this we also get the Australian and New Zealand term tucker, meaning food.

If to tuck in is to take in nourishment, then to tucker out is to deplete one’s energy or courage. We see this form appear in New England in the 1830s. The following passage is from an article about a shark hunt, which is eerily reminiscent of the movie Jaws, that appeared in the January 1836 issue of The Knickerbocker:

“Wearies!” echoed the excited harpooner; “why, the critter’d tow us clear round the world ag’in wind and tide, ten knot an hour. There’s no sich thing as tuckering out your raal white shark: he’s all bone and sinners. As to his wearing ship, he’ll show no sich navigation, I guess, till he gets into blue water, and this tack’ll be bolt downward, like a loose anchor.”

On 25 March 1836, the following appeared in Bangor, Maine’s Daily Commercial Advertiser:

The travelling between this and Belfast[, Maine] is bad enough in all conscience—even the “old Eddington mare,” which some folks insist is the best horse in the whole Penobsoct [sic] region, would get “tuckered out” in half the distance.

And this passage is from a story that appears in print in Newburyport, Massachusetts’s Essex North Register of 29 April 1836. The story was reprinted in many newspapers over the next few years. The voice is that of one described as a “yankee backwoodsman”:

“I thank you a thousand times,” said the stranger, “I reckoned to have got to the tavern by sundown, but I hav’nt [sic], and as I’m prodigiously tuckered out, I’ll stay, and thank ye into the bargain,” following the clergyman into the house.

The related phrase to take the tuck out of dates in print to a few decades later, although it was undoubtedly circulating orally prior to that. From Day Kellogg Lee’s 1852 book Summerfield; or Life on a Farm, in a chapter about a bear hunt:

Terror was up in a moment, and leaped from heart to heart. Away bounded Fabens, and closely on his heels bounded the grim and open-mouthed bear. Over a rock he leaped, round a tree he ran, and the bear bounded after. Then came dogs and men, and were repulsed with shrieks and ejaculations. Then they renewed the attack; and, as old Spanker caught her by the leg, and she turned upon the dog in fury, Colwell put a ball through her head, and the fearful chase was over.

“A narrow squeak fo [sic] you, Fabens,” said Wilson; “a very narrow squeak.”

“Too narrow, I declare,” said Uncle Walter. “I cannot stand that, I must set down. I thought Matthew was a gonner, and the fright takes the tuck out o’ my old knees.”

I don’t know about you, but tracing all the detours and permutations of this entry took the tuck out of me.

Discuss this post

---

Sources:

“The Advertiser.” Daily Commercial Advertiser (Bangor, Maine), 25 March 1836, 2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“The Book Agent.” Essex North Register (Newburyport, Massachusetts), 29 April 1836, 4. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Carew, Richard. The Survey of Cornwall. London: S. Stafford for John Jaggard, 1602, 30r. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

“A Chapter on Sharking.” The Knickerbocker, January 1836, 21. Gale Primary Sources: American Historical Periodicals from the American Antiquarian Society.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. “The Summoner’s Tale.” The Canterbury Tales, lines 1735–39. Harvard’s Geoffrey Chaucer Website.

Dictionary of American Regional English, 2013, s.v. tuck, n.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2022, s.v. tucker out, v., tuckered out, adj.

Holloway, William. A General Dictionary of Provincialisms. Lewes: Baxter and Son, 1838, 178. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Lee, Day Kellogg. Summerfield; or Life on a Farm. Auburn, New York: Derby and Miller, 1852, 22–23. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. tuken, v.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. tucker, v.1., tucker, n.1., tuck, v.1.

Image credit: Frans Snyders and Peter Paul Rubens, c.1640, North Carolina Museum of Art. Public domain image as a mechanical reproduction of a public domain work.

shock and awe

Two US M-1 Abrams tanks passing underneath the “Hands of Victory” arch in Baghdad, 13 November 2003. The arch, one of two, consists of two outstretched hands holding swords that form the arch.

23 September 2022

The phrase shock and awe came to the fore during the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. The phrase was a term of art in the US military for the overwhelming application of military force to suddenly and completely destroy the enemy’s will to fight, achieving the military objectives with comparatively few casualties on the attacking side.

While one can find the co-location of shock and awe in many contexts stretching back a century or more, its use as a lexical item stems from a 1996 book, Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance by Harlan Ullman and James Wade and published by the US National Defense University. Ullman and Wade write:

The key objective of Rapid Dominance is to impose this overwhelming level of Shock and Awe against an adversary on an immediate or sufficiently timely basis to paralyze its will to carry on. In crude terms, Rapid Dominance would seize control of the environment and paralyze or so overload an adversary’s perceptions and understanding of events so that the enemy would be incapable of resistance at tactical and strategic levels. An adversary would be rendered totally impotent and vulnerable to our actions. To the degree that nonlethal weaponry is useful, it would be incorporated into the ability to Shock and Awe and achieve Rapid Dominance.

Theoretically, the magnitude of Shock and Awe Rapid Dominance seeks to impose (in extreme cases) is the non-nuclear equivalent of the impact that the atomic weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had on the Japanese. The Japanese were prepared for suicidal resistance until both nuclear bombs were used. The impact of those weapons was sufficient to transform both the mindset of the average Japanese citizen and the outlook of the leadership through this condition of Shock and Awe. The Japanese simply could not comprehend the destructive power carried by a single airplane. This incomprehension produced a state of awe.

Following the publication of the book, the phrase started appearing in defense journals and reports, indicating widespread adoption within the American armed forces. But it remained restricted to those circles, rarely breaking out into the mainstream press. One of the rare exceptions is an appearance in Newsweek on 1 December 1997 that quotes Ullman:

The only way to achieve a relatively bloodless victory over a well-armed opponent is to deploy so much force, so swiftly, that the enemy is overcome by what military analyst Harlan Ullman calls “a regime of shock and awe.” It’s the technique of the street mugger: sudden, stunning violence that paralyzes the victim’s will to fight back. So if you are a military planner looking out into the 21st century, what you want is an arsenal of new weapons that will produce “shock and awe.” The process of developing such an arsenal is what defense thinkers call “the revolution in military affairs”—a concept so important that, in military speak, it rates an acronym: RMA.

It isn’t until the run-up to US invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001 that the phrase begins to appear in the mainstream press with any frequency. Here is an example from the British Daily Telegraph on 27 September 2001:

The US armada will exploit its overwhelming firepower to devastate the Taliban in a policy of "shock and awe", defence analysts said yesterday.

[…]

According to Professor Air Vice Marshal Tony Mason, head of defence studies at Birmingham University, in-flight refuelling tankers would be a key indicator.

"In-flight refuelling will be essential," he said. The US have some KC-10 tankers in the huge base at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. Analysts agree that when air power is called for, and it will be, it will be on a huge scale—a policy christened "shock and awe".

"One of the lessons of Kosovo was that the gradual build-up of attacks did not have the right effect on the regime [in Belgrade]," said Nigel Vinson, a specialist at the Royal United Services Institute. "You need to deploy `shock and awe' from the very beginning."

And shock and awe became a household term during the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. Here is an example from the Los Angeles Times of 5 May 2002 describing the planning for that invasion:

Launching ground and air attacks simultaneously—instead of leading off with a substantial air assault first to soften up Iraqi defenses—would produce shock and awe in enemy forces, according to early briefing documents. “It was a lead-with-your-chin, ground-only war,” a senior officer not in the Army said. But, he added, “The only shock and awe inspired was the ‘you gotta be [kidding] me’ look” it evoked in critics.

[…]

As planning continued into April, the internal questioning continued too. “How can you have shock and awe and deploy such a massive ground force at the same time?” one officer asked. Though the Army has positioned tanks and armored vehicles in Kuwait and Qatar, deployment of large numbers of troops could not be kept secret and might well provoke an Iraqi response.

The brackets around kidding are in the original. The actual quote was probably something on the order of “you gotta be shitting me.”

Discuss this post

---

Sources:

Arkin, William M. “Planning an Iraqi War but Not an Outcome.” Los Angeles Times, 5 May 2002, M3. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Google Books Ngram Viewer, 24 August 2022.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2022, s.v. shock, n.3.

Rooney, Ben. “Bomb Blitz Will ‘Shock and Awe’ the Taliban, the Military.” Daily Telegraph (London), 27 September 2001, 10. Gale Primary Sources: The Telegraph.

Ullman, Harlan K., and James P. Wade. Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance. Washington, DC: National Defense University, 1996, xxv–xxvi.

Watson, Russell and John Barry. “Tomorrow’s New Face of Battle.” Newsweek (special issue), 1 December 1997, 66. ProQuest Magazines.

Photo credit: Technical Sergeant John L. Houghton, Jr., USAF, 2013. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

proof of the pudding

A haggis (the “great chieftain o the puddin'-race”) served on a bed of lettuce. An animal’s stomach, presumably a sheep’s, that has been cooked and sliced open, revealing that it has been stuffed with sheep’s organs, onion, oatmeal, suet, and spices.

21 September 2022

The original form of this adage is the proof of the pudding is in the eating. It may seem to be an odd phrase to many present-day readers, especially in its shortened form, as it uses a sense of proof that isn’t all that common anymore, that is a sense meaning test—the ultimate test of food is in how it tastes, not in who cooks it or in how it is presented.

The phrase dates to the early seventeenth century when it appears in John Taylor’s 1615 poem “My Defence Against Thy Offence.” In the poem, Taylor attacks fellow poet William Fennar, a “rimer” of low reputation, who had been accused of publishing under the name of Richard Vennar, a more highly regarded poet:

So much to them, whose harts will not beleeue
But that in Poetry I filch and theeue.
I dare them all to try me, and leaue threating,
The proofe of pudding’s always in the eating:
Thus I haue told thee, why, wherefore, and how
His Majesty did thee that Name allow;
The name of Rimer carry to they graue,
But stile of Poet, thou shalt neuer haue.
Search well in Turnbole-street, or in Pickthatch,
Neere Shorditch, or Long-alley prethee watch,
And ’mongst the trading females; chuse out nine
To be thy Muses, they will fit thee fine.

(The OED erroneously cites William Camden’s 1605 Remaines, an anthology of earlier works, as using the phrase, but it does not appear in that work until the 1623 edition, where it appears in a list of proverbs.)

Over the years, the phrase was often clipped to just the proof of the pudding.

As proof in the test sense became less common, people began to re-analyze the phrase with the sense of proof meaning evidence. But the combination of the new sense and the clipped form is somewhat nonsensical, so the wording the proof is in the pudding began to appear.

That particular wording appears in a 30 May 1863 letter to the Hereford Times arguing in favor of vegetarianism:

I trust you have “proofs” enough; if not, I will give you some of another kind. I was brought up like you to get my living by sweat of brain rather than sweat of brow. I am about your age and size, and now (I am not a proud man) I will challenge you to a week at spade and barrow, and I’ll soon show you the “proof” is in the pudding and not in the beef.

But this is not quite an example of the re-analysis. The writer is playing with the dual sense of proof, using it in the evidence sense when he says, “I trust you have ‘proofs’ enough, and in the test sense in “the ‘proof’ is in the pudding.”

But we do see the evidence sense in this advertisement for a medicinal tonic in San Francisco’s Daily Examiner of 24 August 1887:

THE PROOF IS IN THE PUDDING.

Dr. Henley’s Celery, Beef and Iron contains greater elements of strength than any known tonic. We believe it has greater merit and has cured more nervous troubles and weaknesses in humanity than any known remedy. Sold by all druggists and country dealers.

And on the other side of the United States, we see it in this ad for a men’s clothier from Jersey City’s Evening Journal of 27 April 1904:

The Values We Offer need no comment. They stand as a monument to our unceasing efforts to provide for the people of Hudson County the very best that experts can produce at a price lower than inferior goods are sold elsewhere. The proof is in the pudding. Use your eyes and your powers of deduction. They will tell you all that’s necessary.

But, at least according to Google Ngrams, the proof is in the pudding phrasing remained relatively rare until the latter half of the twentieth century, when it increased in frequency considerably. Still, it remains the less common phrasing.

Discuss this post

---

Sources:

“10th Anniversary Sale” (advertisement). Evening Journal (Jersey City, New Jersey), 27 April 1904, 3. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Advertisement. Daily Examiner (San Francisco), 24 August 1887, 8. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Camden, William. Remaines of a Greater Worke, Concerning Britaine. London: George Eld for Simon Waterson, 1605. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

———. Remaines, Concerning Britaine. London: Nicholas Okes for Simon Waterson, 1623. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Google Books Ngram Viewer, 23 August 2022.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2007, s.v. pudding, n.

Taylor, John. “My Defence Against Thy Offence.” A Cast Ouer the Water. London: William Butler, 1615, sig. C. Google Books.

Tréguer, Pascal. “‘The Proof of the Pudding Is in the Eating’: Meaning, Origin, and Variants.” Wordhistories.net. 12 November 2017.

“A Word with the Vegetarians.” Hereford Times (England), 30 May 1863, 13. Gale Primary Sources: British Library Newspapers.

Photo credit: Tess Watson, 2007. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

lobby / lobbyist

Sign in the Maryland State House reading, “No Lobbyists Beyond This Point.”

19 September 2022

In present-day political parlance, a lobby is an interest group that actively petitions legislators in a systematic and organized fashion to support its policies and to lobby is to engage in such activity. The word comes from the idea that such petitioners would gather in the antechamber, or lobby, of the legislative hall in order to speak to the legislators.

That architectural sense of lobby comes from the medieval Latin lobia or lobium, meaning a gallery or portico. We see it in English by 1563, when it appears in Thomas Becon’s The Reliques of Rome, a Protestant tract that outlined the corruption, real or imagined, in the Roman Catholic Church. The following quotation is from a section on anchorites, or recluses who resided in chambers built into the walls of churches, living a life of prayer and meditation, and relying on alms for their maintenance:

Our Recluses as persons onelye borne to consume the frutes of the erth, liue idlely of the labour of other mens handes. Iudith, when tyme required, came oute of her closet to do good vnto other. Our Recluses neuer come out of their lobbeis sincke or swimme the people

And there is this from 1596, from Michael Drayton’s Mortimeriados, a poem about the baronial revolt against King Edward II in 1321–22. This passage relates the death of two of the rebellious barons:

His trustie Neuill, and young Turrington,
Courting the Ladies, frolick voyd of feare,
Staying delights whilst time away doth runne,
What rare Emprezas hee and he did beare,
Thus in the Lobby whilst they sporting weare:
Assayld on sudaine by this hellish trayne,
Both in the entrance miserably slayne.

We see the word lobby applied to the antechamber of the English parliament at Westminster by 1692. From John Rushworth’s Historical Collections of Private Passages of State, relating events of 1640:

On Monday April 13 [1640], the Parliament opened at Westminster. Now because we desire to keep strictly to point of Time, let Military preparations be post-poned till the end of this Parliament, which was dissolved the fifth of May following.

But before the Parliament opened, a Proclamation was made before the Lord Steward in the Lobby as followeth.

But it is in the American context that we see lobby applied to the people who would gather in such an antechamber to buttonhole the politicians. The following quotation is from an account of the congressional debate on a proposal to remove the seat of government from Washington, DC to Philadelphia that occurred on 2 February 1808. (In 1808, the US capital was a collection of ramshackle buildings in the midst of a swamp. No one particularly enjoyed being there.) The writer is attempting to capture the words of Matthew Lyon, a Democratic-Republican from Kentucky. As we shall see from the next quotation, it is not an exact transcript of Lyon’s words, but the summary of his speech, written in the first person, that dates from 11 February 1808:

We have heard it said that if we move to Philadelphia we shall have a commanding lobby; we shall learn the sentiments of the population! The only inducement which influenced me to be a little satisfied at moving to Philadelphia, was, because Congress were almost overawed by the population of the city; measures were dictated by that city. I had rather move into a wilderness; I do not want to go among these people; I have seen too much of them. I have seen the time when members of this House could not walk the streets in safety. I have seen the time when men with cockades in their hats would say “there goes one of the d——d minority.” I can never forget the insults I received in Philadelphia whilst in the minority.

Evidently it was a thing in the early nineteenth century to put summaries of speeches in the first person, as if it were the speech itself. A differently worded summary of Lyon’s 2 February 1808 speech appears in the Washington Federalist of 20 February:

I have, sir, heard talk of a lobby influence, for which we ought to go to Philadelphia.—I can tell the gentlemen who wish to leave this place for the sake of the influence the merchants of a great city would have over our deliberations, I shall be the last man to be influenced by such considerations. I wish we had more mercantile experience—more mercantile experience in this house—but I want it should come in at the front door. I want to have an influence for the benefit of the whole nation, not for the benefit of a single city.

To digress a bit, in 1798 Matthew Lyon, while serving as a representative from Vermont, spit in another representative's face, resulting in a brawl on the House floor. Also, Lyon is the only member of Congress to have been elected while serving time in prison. In October 1798, he was imprisoned for violating the Alien and Sedition Acts for publishing criticism of President John Adams, and he was re-elected to his seat the following month. Now, back to the main story…

The verb to lobby is in use by 1820, when it appears in an article about the Missouri Compromise over whether newly admitted states should allow slavery or not. From the New Hampshire Sentinel of 1 April 1820:

Other letters from Washington affirm, that members of the Senate, when the compromise question was to be taken to the House, were not only “lobbying about the Representatives’ Chamber," but were active in endeavoring to intimidate certain weak representatives by insulting threats to dissolve the Union, and openly declaring, that unless the compromise were acceded to, they would immediately dissolve the Senate and go home.

And we get the noun lobbyist by 25 August 1842 in an article in the Daily Cincinnati Enquirer:

The whigs of Brooklyn have held a meeting, and appointed a committee of lobbyists to proceed forthwith to Washington to persuade Congress to give up the land distribution, in order to secure protection.

And there is this interesting piece about the success of women lobbyists that appeared in Washington, DC’s Daily Globe on 30 January 1857:

In classifying the lobby members of Congress the female representatives of the “third house” occupy no unimportant position. Indeed, I may say that one experienced female lobbyist is equal in point of influence to any three schemers of the other sex with whom I am acquainted. Every session draws to Washington a number of these feminine birds of passage, as well as prey, and you will find their names at Willard’s, Brown’s, the National, or wherever members most do congregate; and not a great measure comes before Congress that they do not have an important, if not a conspicuous “finger in the pie.”

Besides showing that feminism was alive and well in the nineteenth century, this last quotation hints at the etymythology that surrounds the word lobby. According to the myth, the word comes from the practice of petitioners buttonholing legislators in the lobby of noted Washington hotels, in the stories it is usually the Willard Hotel. The myth also often dates to the practice to the Grant administration (1869–77). But as we have seen the word predates that administration as well as all three hotels mentioned in the quotation. Willard’s Hotel dates to 1847, although hotels had been on that site since 1816. The National Hotel was founded in 1827 and Brown’s Indian Queen Hotel in 1820, all after the political sense of lobby had been established.

Discuss this post

---

Sources:

Becon, Thomas. The Reliques of Rome. London: John Day, 1563, fol. 53r. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Blaise, Albert. Lexicon Latinitatis medii aeui. Turnhout: Brepols, 1975, s.v. lobia (lobium). Brepols: Database of Latin Dictionaries.

“Debate. On the Proposition for the Removal of the Seat of Government to Philadelphia” (2 February 1808). Universal Gazette (Washington, DC), 11 February 1808, 1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Drayton, Michael. Mortimeriados. The Lamentable Ciuell Warres of Edward the Second and the Barrons. London: James Roberts for Humphry Lownes, 1596, sig. R. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

“Female Lobby Members.” The Daily Globe (Washington, DC), 30 January 1857, 3. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. lobby, n., lobbyist, n., lobby, v.

Rushworth, John. Historical Collections of Private Passages of State, vol. 3 of 8. London: Thomas Newcomb for George Thomason, 1692, 1104. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

“Slavery.” New Hampshire Sentinel (Keene), 1 April 1820, 1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“Symptoms of Dissolution.” Daily Cincinnati Enquirer (Ohio), 25 August 1842, 3. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

“Tuesday, Feb. 2, Debate” (1808). Washington Federalist (Georgetown, DC), 20 February 1808, 3. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Image credits:

“No Lobbyists Beyond This Point.” Daniel Huizinga, 2014. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

“Congressional Pugilists,” unknown artist, 1798, Library of Congress. Public domain image.