sandwich

A chicken salad sandwich. Chopped chicken breast tossed with almonds, celery, and tarragon, topped with romaine, and served between two slices of brown bread on a white plate.

5 October 2022

Sandwich is the word that introduced me to etymology. I read an account of the oft-repeated story of the word’s origin while in elementary school. There is reason, though, to question that story’s veracity—it may or may not be true. First what we know for a fact.

The earliest known use of the word sandwich to describe a dish consisting of slices of meat served between two slices of bread is in the journal of historian Edward Gibbon for 27 July 1762. On that day, Gibbon writes of a late-night meal at the Cocoa Tree coffeehouse:

We went thence to the play (the Spanish Friar); and when it was over, returned to the Cocoa Tree. That respectable body, of which I have the honour of being a member, affords every evening a sight truly English. Twenty or thirty, perhaps, of the first men in the kingdom, in point of fashion and fortune, supping at little tables covered with a napkin, in the middle of a coffee-room, upon a bit of cold meat, or a Sandwich, and drinking a glass of punch.

It's clear from this passage that the word was already established by 1762, at least among the fashionable London set that Gibbon was a part of. With that factual basis established, let’s look at the popular story.

Allegedly, the sandwich is named for John Montagu (1718–92), the Fourth Earl of Sandwich, who, as the story goes, was an inveterate gambler who could not be bothered to leave the gaming table to eat, so he would have the dish served to him, hence the name. It’s very likely that the sandwich is indeed named for Montagu—there is no other plausible explanation for how the dish got its name. The bit about gambling and not leaving the gaming table, however, is questionable, but it may indeed turn out to be true. We just don’t know.

1783 Gainsborough portrait of John Montagu, the fourth Earl of Sandwich. A man in eighteenth-century dress, a blue suit with gold trim and a powdered wig, standing and holding a roll of paper with the title “Infirmary.”

That gambling story is based on a single account by the French travel writer Pierre-Jean Grosley, who visited London in 1765, while Montagu was serving as the First Lord of the Admiralty. Grosley writes in his 1779 Londres:

Les Anglois profonds, violens, outrés dans toutes leurs passions, portent celle du jeu á l’extrême: on nomme plusieurs lords trés-riches qui s’y sont absolument ruinés: d’autres prennent sur les affaires, sur le repos, sur leur santé le temps qu’ils lui donnent. Un minister d’Etat passa 24 heures dans un jeu public, toujours occupé au pointe que, pendant ces 24 heures, il ne vécut que de quelques tranches de bœuf grillé, qu’il se faisoit servir entre deux rôties de pain & qu’il mangeoit sans quitter le jeu. Ce nouveau mets prit faveur pendant mon séjour à Londres: on le baptisa du nom du minister qui l’avoit imaginé, pour économiser le temps.

(The English, deep, violent, excessive in all their passions, carry that for gaming to the extreme; several wealthy lords are named whom it brought to absolute ruin; others take from the business, from the rest, from their health the time they give to it. A Minister of State spent 24 hours in a gaming house, always busy to the point that, during these 24 hours, he subsisted only on a few slices of grilled beef, that he had served to him between two toasted pieces of bread & that he ate without leaving the game. This new dish took favor during my stay in London: it was baptized with the name of the minister who had imagined it, to save time.)

Grosley doesn’t specifically name Montagu, but given that the dish was called a sandwich, it’s pretty obvious who he is referring to. But this is a rather sensational story, which, given that Gibbon had casually used the word two years earlier, was written several years after the term’s coinage. It is more likely that Grosley is repeating old gossip. Given Gibbon’s earlier use of the word, Grosley is mistaken when he says the word had been newly coined upon his arrival in London.

Furthermore, Montagu’s biographer, N.A.M. Rodger, points out that while the earl, like most of contemporaries of his class and station, did gamble, he was far from an inveterate gambler. What other accounts we have of his activities at the gaming tables describe a man who whose betting was rather restrained and who did so primarily for the social and professional connections, much like a present-day businessman might take up golf.

Instead, Rodger postulates that Montagu’s connection to the invention of the sandwich instead comes from his habit of eating meals at his desk while working. This explanation, however, runs into a problem of dates. Rodger points out that Grosley’s 1765 visit to London coincides with one of Montagu’s stints as a cabinet minister. A busy government official might indeed have a habit of eating at his desk. But evidently Rodger was unaware of Gibbon’s 1762 use of sandwich and the fact that Grosley was relaying an old bit of gossip. Montagu was not in government in 1762, and one has to go back to 1751 to find a time when he was. And indeed, Rodger writes:

In 1751, however, Sandwich had no work to do. The collapse of his career and his marriage more or less simultaneously seems to have robbed him of personal as well as financial stability. Up to 1751 he was often cited as a model of respectability, and throughout his life he lived frugally, but once out of office he began to acquire the reputation of a libertine which never left him. It is clear that it was not altogether unjustified.

It appears, however, that Montagu’s indiscretions were more often of an amorous rather than a wagering variety. But by 1765, Montagu’s recent re-entry into government may have provided the reason for the old gossip being newly re-circulating during Grosley’s visit. So, the story of the gambling earl cannot be easily dismissed. While there is some reason to question it, there really isn’t a good alternative for how the sandwich came to be named for the earl.

The verb to sandwich, meaning to place something between two other things, like meat between slices of bread, is in place by the early-to-mid nineteenth century. From a letter published in the New York Daily Express on 9 August 1837 that rhapsodizes about the beauty of the Susquehanna River valley:

Cooper lives above me at the head waters of the river, and mayhap will send me a flower of fancy by a Hindoo post, and below me eighty miles, is poetic Wyoming—what I call a pretty parenthesis. I would willingly take chance for immortality sandwiched between Cooper and Campbell.

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Sources:

Gibbon Edward. Journal, 27 July 1762. Miscellaneous Works of Edward Gibbon, vol. 1 of 2. London: A. Strahan, et al., 1796, 110. Eighteenth Century Collections Online.

Grosley, Pierre-Jean. Londres, vol. 1. Lausanne: 1770, 262. Google Books.

Letter. New York Daily Express, 9 August 1837, 1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. sandwich, n.2.

Rodger, N.A.M. The Insatiable Earl: A Life of John Montagu, Fourth Earl of Sandwich, 1718–1792. London: HarperCollins, 1993, 76–81.

Tréguer, Pascal. “History of the Word ‘Sandwich.’” Wordhistories.net. 23 March 2017.

Image credits: Chicken salad sandwich: Lara604, 2012, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license. Earl of Sandwich: Thomas Gainsborough, 1783. National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London. Public domain image as a mechanical reproduction of a public domain work.

fudge

Trays containing variety of fudges on display in a shop, including whisky fudge, mint fudge, and Baileys truffle

3 October 2022

Fudge has a number of meanings. It can be a verb meaning to make something fit, to “cook the books,” or to lie. It can be an interjection of contempt or disgust. And it can be a type of easy-to-make, (usually) chocolate confection. It is also a word that has a clear semantic connection back to Old English but whose modern form cannot be accounted for by any usual phonetic changes. There is a something of a mystery in its etymology.

The semantic throughline is the sense of making something fit, of cobbling something together. The earliest from is the Old English verb fegan, meaning to join, unite, fit. We see it in one of the riddles found in the Exeter Book, a collection of poems that includes some ninety-plus riddles, the exact number being a subject of debate because it’s not always clear when one riddle ends and the next begins. But the one traditionally labeled number twenty-five reads:

Ic eom wunderlicu wiht,     wifum on hyhte,
neahbuendum nyt;      nængum sceþþe
burgsittendra,      nymþe bonan anum.
Staþol min is steapheah,      stonde ic on bedde,
neoþan ruh nathwær.      Neþeð hwilum
ful cyrtenu     ceorles dohtor,
modwlonc meowle,      þæt heo on mec gripeð,
ræseð mec on reodne,     reafað min heafod,
fegeð me on fæstan.      Feleþ sona
mines gemotes,      seo þe mec nearwað,
wif wundenlocc.      Wæt bið þæt eage.

(I am a strange creature, what a woman hopes for, of use to neighbors, harmful to no city-dwellers, except the one who kills me. My shaft is straight up, I stand on a bed, underneath somewhat hairy. Sometimes a very beautiful churl’s daughter, a haughty maiden, dares so that she grasps me, rushes me to redness, ravages my head, fits me into an enclosed place. She soon feels the encounter with me, she who confines me, the woman with braided locks. One eye will be wet.)

The answer to the riddle is, of course, an onion. If you thought it was something else, shame on you.

Actually, a number of the Old English riddles contain sexual double entendres.

The verb, in the from feien, continued to be used into the Middle English period. But in the mid-sixteenth century, we see the verb to fadge, meaning to fit or to be suitable. Here is a 1566 translation of Seneca’s Octavia:

Be not dismayde, Madame, for such like paine,
The quéene of Gods was forced to sustaine,
When to eche pleasaunt shape the heauenly guyde,
And syre of Gods yturnde, from skyes dyd glyde.
The swannes white wings, to se how they could fadge
He did on him, and cuckoldes bullysh badge.

How the ending / -ɪn / became / -adʒ / is the mystery. There are no typical sound changes that could account for it, but a word with the same initial phoneme / f / and meaning the same thing arising de novo does not seem likely either.

A less mysterious sound change is the shift of the first vowel from / a / to / ʌ /, and by 1700 we get the form fudge, meaning to clumsily fit something, to cook an account, to lie. From the anonymous Remarks Upon the Navy of that year:

There was, Sir, in our Time, one Captain Fudge Commander of a Merchant-man, who upon his Return from a Voyage, how ill fraught soever his Ship was, always brought home his Owners a good Cargo of Lies, insomuch that now aboard Ship the Sailors, when they hear a great Lye told, cry out, you fudge it.

And by the middle of the eighteenth century we see fudge being used as an interjection expressing contempt or displeasure. From Oliver Goldsmith’s 1766 novel The Vicar of Wakefield:

But previously I should have mentioned the very impolite behavior of Mr. Burchell; who, during this discourse, sate with his face turned to the fire, and at the conclusion of every sentence would cry out Fudge, and expression which displeased us all, and in some measure damped the rising spirit of the conversation.

Of course, the interjection is a euphemism for fuck.

As for the name of the confection, that comes from the fact that fudge is a sweet that is easy to cobble together. This sense of the word arose in the United States at the close of the nineteenth century. Here is a rather condescending account from Vassar, then a women’s only school, that appeared in the Boston Journal on 24 January 1894:

“A FUDGE PARTY.”

“Fudges,” a chocolate sweetie that is a cross between a bonbon and a cakelet, are very dear to the soul of the Vassar girl. “Fudge” parties are common in that well known institution, and there is a dark suspicion that the moral sense of a “Freshie”—only a Freshie, let us hope—is blunted when the ways and means to provide materials for an impromptu “fudge” are being considered. Chocolate and sugar, the two principal ingredients, can be kept on hand, but milk and butter, which are also needed, are perishable articles and have to be provided on the instant. But a Vassar Freshman knows a thing or two, even if she has not been at college very long. And if she is suddenly attacked an hour after supper with pangs of hunger, of course she must go down to the refectory and beg for a glass of milk and a piece of bread and butter to mitigate her distress. And equally, of course, the sympathetic head of that department was never known to refuse so natural a request. Two or three hungry (?) girls are all that are needed for a sizable party, and if the bread is discarded and only the milk and butter utilized, why Vassar dormitories tell no tales, and “fudges” are too good to be lightly dispensed with.

And here is a recipe for fudge that appeared in the American Kitchen Magazine of July 1899 that shows how easy it is to make:

FUDGE.
Three cups sugar, one-fourth pound chocolate, one cup milk, two ounces butter. Vanilla. Boil ten minutes or until it makes a soft ball when tried in cold water. Then set kettle into pan of cold water and beat until creamy. Pour into pan and cut into squares when cold.

WALNUT FUDGE.
Stir in a cupful of coarsely chopped walnut meats just before pouring into the pan.

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Sources:

Dictionary of Old English: A to I, University of Toronto, 2018, s.v. fegan, v.

Goldsmith, Oliver. The Vicar of Wakefield, vol. 1 of 2. Corke: Eugene Swiney, 1766, 93. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Lincoln (Mrs.). “From Day to Day.” The American Kitchen Magazine, 9.4, July 1899, 147. Nineteenth Century Collections Online (NCCO). (The metadata incorrectly lists the title of the journal as Everyday Housekeeping.)

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. feien, v.(1).

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. fudge, int. and n., fudge, v., fadge, v., fay, v.1.

Remarks Upon the Navy. The Second Part. London: 1700, 1–2. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

“Riddle Twenty-Five.” The Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry, vol. 1 of 2. Bernard J. Muir, ed. Exeter: U of Exeter Press, 1994, 303. Exeter, Cathedral Library, MS 3501, fol. 106v–107r.

Seneca. The Ninth Tragedie of Lucius Anneus Seneca called Octauia. London: Henry Denham, 1566, sig. C2. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

“The Women’s Corner.” Boston Journal (Massachusetts), 24 January 1894, 5. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Photo credit: Daniela Kloth, 2018. Licensed under a GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2.

flea market

Black and white photo of the Marché aux Puces (Flea Market) in Montreuil, Paris, 1928. In the foreground a woman sits in a stall selling used clothing while a man glances at her wares. Other vendors’ stalls and customers milling about the street are in the background.

30 September 2022

A flea market is an open-air market for the sale of second-hand products. The phrase appears to be a calque, or literal translation, of the French marché aux puces, the name given to just such a market in Montreuil, on the outskirts of Paris. The market was so-called because the products sold there had a reputation, deserved or not, for being infested with the pests. The Montreuil market opened its stalls in 1860 and continued operation well into the twentieth century. But while this French market is the most likely source, the English phrase may not have been borrowed directly from French.

The reason to question the direct French origin is the earliest known use of flea market in English, which was uncovered by Pascal Tréguer. That use appears in reference to just such a market in Copenhagen that was mentioned in the New York Sun on 29 May 1887:

From a Copenhagen Letter.

Yesterday was the last day of the flea market. The fifty-two old women who have sat haggling over their uncanny wares in the square by the Government pawn shop until the queer band had become part of the familiar physiognomy of the city, [sic] had been told that their time was up at 3 P.M. sharp, and that the flea market would then be a thing of the past. They had appealed in vain to the Mayor, to the Minister of the Interior, and, as a last resort, by deputation to the King, praying that in consideration of their great age they might keep their stands or move them elsewhere until they could drop out together, as it were. They were told that there was no room for sentiment in in their case. Perhaps the fleas had killed it. Their mixed stock of second-hand clothes, old rags, felt shoes, and crockery certainly harbored a fair share. But, then, it was a very cheap market—so cheap that that others than the poor sought it for bargains. No matter; they must all go together. Customers had come from far and near to the closing sale until the square was black. So brisk a trade the flea market had never known. In spite of it more than one aged face was wet with bitter tears as the hands of the old tower clock pointed to 3 and the word to move on was given. There was very little left to move that was worth it; nothing more worn or shaky than the old market women themselves. As they flied [sic] out with their bundles, casting stolen glances behind them, one of the characteristic traditions of this old city when out with them and became a thing of the past.

This article bears the marks of being a translation from the Danish by someone who did not have mastery of English idiom; note until they could drop out together, as it were and until the square was black, which are unusual constructions in English. The flea market here may be a calque of the Danish loppemarked, loppe (flea) + marked (market). The Danish word may itself be a calque of the French; it may come from the German flohmarkt; or the compound may have arisen within Danish. If this use of flea market is indeed a calque of the Danish by a Dane, then the phrase flea market may not have yet had currency in English in 1887.

But the Paris marché aux puces was without a doubt the most famous of the flea markets and it is most likely the source for these other European terms. In English, with the exception of this reference to the Copenhagen market, all the early references to flea markets are to the Parisian one. Flea market appears again in English-language newspapers in a story in the Philadelphia Inquirer of 28 July 1891:

Paris, July 27.—At the place near the Barriere de Montreuil, at the extreme east end of Paris, popularly known as the “Flea Market,” Madame Packard, an aged woman, bought yesterday an ancient, dilapidated mattress. Upon cutting it open she discovered a leather bag containing fourteen thousand francs in gold. As the bedding had passed through a number of hands it was useless to attempt to find an owner, hence the national Treasury claims the property.

This story was widely reprinted in many papers over the next year or so, making the French market known to large numbers of English speakers. Depending on which version you read, the woman’s name is variously given as Packard, Pacaud, or Pacard, and in some versions she gets to keep the cash.

And there is one that appeared in London’s Daily Telegraph on 20 September 1914, shortly after the outbreak of World War I that was also reprinted in American papers:

A few housewives whose “hommes” have a weakness for the “green devil” bought packets at the price of one penny. An old man, with a long white beard of patriarchal length, posed as an infallible pedicure. He was willing to remove the corns of any one for half a franc, and even less, but for a Prussian he would charge double. There were the usual crowds at the historic “Marché aux Puces,” or “Flea Market.” Here customers and vendors ignored the fact that the German armies were still within striking distance of Paris.

It isn’t until after World War I that, with the exception of the Copenhagen letter, we start to see flea market used as a generic term for such second-hand markets. It seems likely that the repeated references to the Montreuil market, plus probable visits to the place by numerous British and American soldiers during the war, cemented the phrase in English. Also militating against the idea that flea market had currency as a generic term prior to World War I is that the two words often appear co-located in reference to the market for fleas for use in flea circuses, which was evidently a thriving, if niche, business at the time.

The first such generic use of flea market that I’m aware of is in Juliet Bredon’s 1920 Peking: A Historical and Intimate Description of Its Chief Places of Interest:

It is strange that all these luxuries lie within a stone’s throw of the worst slums of the capital. Long before the haunts of prosperity open their doors, the side, sewery lanes a little to the east of them are filled to overflowing with a poverty more pitiful for its proximity to luxury. Before dawn the Thieves’ Market is held here by torchlight. The Flea Market opens a little later. Wares are spread on the street itself, but they are generally of such a character that dirt and indiscriminate handling can do them no harm. Old bottles, broken door-knobs, bent nails lie side by side with frayed foreign collars, dilapidated tennis rackets, rusty corsets or even threadbare evening slippers that have been thrown into the waste basket of some European house and gathered up by the assiduous rag pickers who classify the refuse of Peking for this fair.

And there is this that appeared in the Atlanta Journal on 27 April 1924 in reference to a flea market in Algiers:

From the cemetery, we went to the Arabian flea market, which marks the entrance to the famous Kasba or Arab quarter. The flea market, more deserving of its name than you people at home can realize, is an open, sunny place crowded with dirty natives. Squatting on their heels and staring vacantly before them they crouch untiringly, their old broken and worn-out wares spread around them on the ground. Cracked bits of china, old brass, fragments of rugs, carved wormy wood, worn-out shoes and garments, kitchen utensils and all the endless odds and ends.

This Algerian use also lends some strength to the French origin as Algeria was a French colony at the time.

It is probable that the French marché aux puces is the source for all these flea markets, but we cannot be sure of that. And as for the English phrase, we cannot pin down with any certainty which European language it is borrowed from, and the fact that calques appear in a number of European languages hints that it may be borrowed from more than one. But it is certain that it was the Parisian Marché aux Puces that inspired the term’s widespread use.

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Sources:

“A Fortune in an Old Mattress.” Philadelphia Inquirer, 28 July 1891, 2. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Bredon, Juliet. Peking: A Historical and Intimate Description of Its Chief Places of Interest. Shanghai: Kelly and Walsh, 1920, 405. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

“Last Day of the Flea Market.” The Sun (New York), 29 May 1887, 9. Library of Congress: Chronicling America Historic American Newspapers.

Massengale, Margaret. “Atlanta Girl Sees Arabian Flea Market.” Atlanta Journal (Georgia), 27 April 1924, Magazine 11. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. flea, n.

“Parisians and the Great War.” Daily Telegraph (London), 20 September 1914, 2. Gale Primary Sources: Telegraph Historical Archive.

Tréguer, Pascal. “Origin of ‘Flea Market’: French ‘Marché aux Puces.’” Wordhistories.net. 17 April 2017.

Photo credit: Agnece de presse Meurisse, 1928; Gallica, Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Public domain image.

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

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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

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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.