snowclone

October 12, 2022

Meme of a screenshot of Boromir from the 2001 movie The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, in which he utters the line, “one does not simply coin a snowclone.” The original line was “one does not simply walk into Mordor.” — Meme consisting of a screenshot of the character Boromir (Sean Bean) from the 2001 movie *The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring*, in which he utters the line, “one does not simply coin a snowclone.” The original line was “one does not simply walk into Mordor.”

12 October 2022

A snowclone is a variable, but formulaic, cliché in which a familiar idiom is modified to fit new circumstances. A classic example is X is the new Y, where the two variables can be substituted, as in blue is the new black. Another might be I’m not X, but I play one on TV, where X was originally doctor and first uttered in a 1986 commercial for Vick’s Formula 44 cough syrup by actor Peter Bergman, who played a doctor on the soap opera All My Children. (Claims that actor Robert Young, who played Marcus Welby, M.D. uttered the phrase are classic examples of quote migration, where a quotable line moves from a less famous to a more famous source.)

The phenomenon came to the attention of linguists via a 27 October 2003 Language Log post by linguist Geoffrey Pullum, and in doing so Pullum also suggested the metaphor underlying the term snowclone:

Mark [Liberman] pointed out to me in connection with a post of mine on LanguageLog that hundreds or even thousands of unimaginative writers are using If Eskimos have N words for snow... (pick any number you like for the N), especially as the first sentence in a piece. It has become a journalistic cliché phrase with an attention-grabbing hook and totally free parameters for you to set as you wish -- that is, the value for N and the main clause that you continue the sentence with (like ...Santa Cruzans must have even more for surf or whatever).
[…]
What's need is a convenient one-word named for this kind of reusable customizable easily-recognized twisted variant of a familiar but non-literary quoted or misquoted saying.

Pullum also used as an example the tagline for the 1979 movie Alien (1979), directed by Ridley Scott, in space no one can hear you scream, which has birthed many such variations. Pullum did not, however, come up with a name for the phenomenon. That honor would go to screenwriter and economics professor Glen Whitman, who took Pullum up on his challenge and coined snowclone in early 2005.

Other examples of snowclones include:

have X will travel, from the 1950s television series Have Gun Will Travel
the mother of all X, from mother of all battles, uttered by Saddam Hussein at the start of the 1991 Gulf War
holy X, Batman, from various exclamations uttered by Robin (Burt Ward) in the Batman television series (1966–68)

Internet memes can be a pictorial form of snowclone. Examples include:

One does not simply X into Y, from the meme of the Lord of the Rings character Boromir (Sean Bean) saying, one does not simply walk into Mordor
I don’t always X, but when I do it’s Y, from the 2006 “most interesting man in the world” (Jonathan Goldsmith) ad for Dos Equis beer in which he says, I don’t always drink beer, but when I do, it’s Dos Equis
X; Change My Mind, from a 2018 photo of comedian Steve Crowder sitting behind a table on a college campus, drinking a mug of coffee, with a sign reading Male Privilege Is a Myth; Change My Mind

slang

October 10, 2022

Meme displaying the character of Philip J. Fry from the cartoon television series Futurama with the caption, “I swear English is the only language where 50% of the words are slang.” — Meme displaying the character of Philip J. Fry from the cartoon television series *Futurama* with the caption, “I swear English is the only language where 50% of the words are slang.”

10 October 2022

Despite one noted etymologist claiming that the origin of the term slang “is known!” (exclamation point in the original), the origin of the term is not. Like so many slang words, the word slang itself does not have a known origin.

And the issue with slang is not just the etymology; exactly what constitutes slang is also hotly debated. Perhaps the best definition of slang is given in J.E. Lighter’s Historical Dictionary of American Slang, which glosses it as:

An informal, nonstandard, nontechnical vocabulary composed chiefly of novel-sounding synonyms for standard words and phrases.

I’ll leave the definition at that. Debate it amongst yourselves if you will. On to what we know about its etymology.

Slang once meant a narrow strip of land. This sense goes back to at least 1610, when it appears in a translation of William Camden’s Britannia:

From thence the shore is drawne in, whereby there runneth forth into the sea a certaine shelfe or slang, like unto an out-thrust tongue, such as Englishmen in old once termed a File.

But how this older sense relates the language sense, if at all, is not clear.

As for the language sense, Green’s Dictionary of Slang records the following from Henry Fielding’s 1734 play Don Quixote in England as being the first use of slang to mean “illiterate, ‘low’ language.” The character of Squire Badger says:

Ay, Sir, and you wou’d have been merry, if you had been in such Company as I have been in. My Lord! ’Sbud! where's my Lord? ’Sbud! Sir Thomas, my Lord Slang is one of the merriest Men you ever knew in your Life; he has been telling me a Parcel of such Stories!

Badger uses Lord Slang three times in the play. The other two are:

Oons! what's the Matter with you all? Is the Devil in the Inn that you won’t let a Man sleep? I was as fast on the Table as if I had been in a Feather-bed.—’Sbud, what’s the matter? Where’s my Lord Slang?

And:

Sir, your Daughter, Sir, is a Son of a Whore, Sir. ’Sbud, I’ll go find my Lord Slang. A Fig for you and your Daughter too; I’ll have Satisfaction.

On its face, Lord Slang would seem to be a proper name of a fictitious character, but there is no such character in the play. Lord Slang seems to be a representation of colorful and salty language, especially as Badger’s speech is peppered with profanity, such as ‘Sbud (God’s blood). Green’s definition seems appropriate, although Fielding’s use of the word is not quite the same as our current use.

The word in the sense of the vocabulary of the underworld is first recorded in William Toldervy’s 1756 novel The History of Two Orphans:

Thomas Throw had been upon the town, knew the slang well; had often sate a flasher at M‑‑d‑‑g‑‑n’s, and understood every word in the scoundrel’s dictionary; had as much assurance as any fashionable fellow in London; for which he had been kicked out of all the houses from buttock of beef island, to the Brawn’s-Head: But, at this fortunate table, Tom found himself considered a man of damn’d good humour, and hellish high wit.

The phrase sate a flasher is a bit of a cipher. A flasher would be a hawker at a casino or gaming house, and sate refers to sitting, as in having as an occupation. So, Thomas had at one point served as a flasher, or worked the door at a gambling house, and therefore was well acquainted with the vocabulary of the underworld.

Etymologist Anatoly Liberman is the one who claims that the origin of slang has been discovered, but his explanation, while plausible, is speculative. In his 2008 Analytical Dictionary of English Etymology, Liberman resurrects an etymology that had been originally suggested at the turn of the twentieth century. This explanation would have slang coming from the narrow strip of land sense by way of those who travel about the land, especially traveling vendors, then moving on to the patter of vendors trying to make a sale, and then to low-class vocabulary in general.

The major problem with this proposed etiology is that slang meaning a seller of goods is not recorded until the nineteenth century, well after the informal vocabulary sense was well established. It seems more likely that the sales sense comes from the vocabulary sense rather than the reverse. Salesmen and hawkers used slang, therefore they started to be called slang. Of course, it’s possible that the sales sense was simply not recorded in published works. And Toldervy’s 1756 use in connection with flasher, hints that the two senses are related. But the evidence for Liberman’s explanation is tenuous.

And no, slang is not a contraction of short language.

In the end we’re left with “origin unknown.” Usually, such a conclusion is unsatisfying, but for slang, it is rather appropriate.

Discuss this post

Sources:

Camden, William. Britain, or a Chorographicall Description of the Most Flourishing Kingdomes. Philemon Holland, trans. London: George Bishop and John Norton, 1610, 715. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Fielding, Henry. Don Quixote in England, a Comedy. London: J. Watts, 1734, 47, 57, and 59. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2022, s.v. slang, n.

Liberman, Anatoly. An Analytical Dictionary of English Etymology. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 2008, 189–96.

———. “The Origin of the Word ‘Slang’ Is Known!” OUPBlog, 28 September 2016.

Lighter, J.E. Historical Dictionary of American Slang, A–G, vol. 1 of 2. New York: Random House: 1994, xi.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. slang, n.2, slang, n.3, slang, adj. (and adv.).

Toldervy, William. The History of Two Orphans, vol. 1 of 4. London: William Owen, 1756, 68. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Image credit: imgflip, 2022.

eggcorn

October 7, 2022

7 October 2022

An eggcorn is an example of a type of folk etymology where the listener re-analyzes an unfamiliar word or phrase by changing it to something similar that is more familiar sounding. It is the alteration of a word or phrase to make it seem more sensical. Hence acorn becomes eggcorn or asparagus becomes sparrow-grass.

The linguistic term eggcorn, as opposed to the folk-etymology eggcorn for acorn, was coined by linguist Geoffrey Pullum in response to a 23 September 2003 post by Mark Liberman on the Language Log blog:

Chris Potts has told me about a case in which a woman wrote “egg corns” for “acorns.” This might be taken to be a folk etymology, like “Jerusalem” for “girasole” in “Jerusalem artichoke” (a kind of sunflower). But it might also be treated as something like a mondegreen […] the kind of “slip of the ear” that is especially common in learning songs and poems. Finally, it's also something like a malapropism, where a word is mistakenly substituted for one of similar sound shape.
Although the example is somewhat like each of these three named categories of errors, it's not exactly any of them. Can anyone suggest a better term?

Within a week, Pullum had suggested that they be called simply eggcorns. The name stuck.

As for the folk etymology, people have been calling acorns eggcorns since at least 1844, when a line from a 16 June 1844 letter by an S.G. McMahan reads:

I hope you are harty as you ust to be that you have plenty of egg corn bread which I cann not get her and I hope to help you eat some of it soon.

Other examples of eggcorns include:

Old-timer’s disease for Alzheimer’s disease
Cold slaw for cole slaw
Mute point for moot point
One fowl swoop for one fell swoop

Cf. crash blossom.

Discuss this post

Sources:

Liberman, Mark. “Egg Corns: Folk Etymology, Malapropism, Mondegreen, ???.” Language Log (blog), 23 September 2003, updated 30 September 2003.

McMahan, S.G. Extract from a 16 June 1844 letter. In Albert L. Hurtado. John Sutter: A Life on the North American Frontier. Norman: U of Oklahoma Press, 2006, 130.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, November 2010, s.v. eggcorn, n.

Photo credit: Desultrix, 2011. Licensed by a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

sandwich

October 5, 2022

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.

Discuss this post

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

October 3, 2022

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.

Discuss this post

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.