feel one's oats

November 18, 2022

Oats growing in a field. Tall grasses under a blue, cloudless sky.

18 November 2022

Oat, or oats, as it is usually found in the plural, was famously defined in Samuel Johnson’s 1755 dictionary as:

A grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.

The word comes to us from the Old English ate or æte. It has cognates in other West Germanic languages, oat in Frisian and oot in Dutch, but most Germanic languages use words from a different root for the grain. In Swedish and Danish it is havre, and in German it is hafer. English also has haver, found chiefly in northern England and Scots, areas once ruled or heavily influenced by the Danes, and that word is a borrowing from Old Norse.

The Old English ate appears mainly in glosses, but one non-glossed use is from the tenth-century medical and herbal text commonly known as Bald’s Leechbook. Here it is used in a recipe for a dressing to be used on infected wounds:

Lacna ða scearpan þus, genim beanmela oþþe ætena oððe beres oþþe swilces meluwes swa þe þince þæt hit onniman wille, do eced to & hunig, seoþ ætgædere & lege on & bind on þa saran stowa.
(Dress the wounds thusly, take bean-meal or oats or barley or such meals as you think that will receive it, add vinegar & honey, infuse together & lay on & bind on the sore spot.)

In addition to the cultivated grain, there is the wild oat, and that term also dates back to Old English, where it appears in glosses to translate the Latin lolium or zizania. These are wild grasses, considered to be weeds in most places, and in the same family, Poaceae, as the cultivated oat. One such use of the Old English wilde ata can be found as a gloss for zizania in the Lindisfarne Gospels. The Latin text is from c.700 C.E., and the interlinear Old English gloss was added in the tenth century. Here is the interlinear gloss from Matthew 13.30, part of the Parable of the Sower:

& in tid hripes ic willo cuoeða ðæm hrippemonnum geadriges ꝉ somniges ærist ða unwæstma ꝉ wilde ata & bindas ða bunda ꝉ byrðenno ꝉ sceafa to bernenne.
(& at harvest time I will tell the harvesters to first gather / collect the weeds / wild oats and bind the bundle / fasces / sheaves to be burned.)

Of course, the phrase wild oats is commonly seen today in the phrase to sow one’s wild oats. The phrase refers to engaging in the dissipation and excesses of youth. The phrase’s underlying metaphor is that of sowing useless wild grasses instead of grain for cultivation. It is recorded in Thomas Newton’s 1576 The Touchstone of Complexions in a passage about the adolescent brain:

Hereuppon doe wee vse a Prouerbiall similitude taken of the nature and conditions of yonge Calues, which in the Sprynge tyme of the yeare (in ye greene pastures, when theyr bellyes be ful) skippe and leape vp and downe, wantonlye and toyingly fysking and iumpynge, now this waye, nowe that waye, nowe rounde about, one whyle raysing themselues vppon the forefeete, an otherwhyle vpon the hynder Leggs: whose maners & fashyo[n]s, such yo[n]g youthes as in their daily order of lyfe do imitate and resemble, are sayde in latine vitulari, which is, to bee as wanton and toying as a yonge Calfe: or not to haue shedde all theyr Calues teeth: or that theyr Iawes ytche with Caluishe wantonnes:
The Booke of Wysedome (fathered and asscrybed vnto Salomon) sayth: Spuria vitulamina no[n] agent radices altas, nec stabile fundamentum collocabunt: Bastarde Slippes shal take no deepe rootes nor laye any fast foundation.
By these Phrases of speach, we meane that wilfull and vnruly age, which lacketh rypenes and discretion, and (as wee saye) hath not sowed all theyr wyeld Oates, but as yet remayne withoute eyther forcast or consideration of any thinge that may afterward turne them to benefite, playe the wanton yonkers, and wilfull Careawayes. Seyng therfore yt Adolescencie and youthful age consisteth in a constitucion of Hoat and moyst, & is fuller of bloud then anye other: it is to this place therefore namely and specially to be referred.
(Hereupon do we use a proverbial similitude taken from nature and the conditions of young calves, which in the springtime of the year (in the green pastures, when their bellies are full) skip and leap up and down, wantonly and toyingly fisking and jumping, now this way, now that way, now round about, some while raising themselves upon their forefeet, and others upon their hind legs; whose manners and fashions, such young youths in their daily order of life do imitate and resemble, as is said in the Latin vitulari, which is to be as wanton and toying as a young calf; or not to have shed their calves’ teeth: or that their jawes itch with calvish wantonness:
The Book of Wisdom (fathered and ascribed to Solomon) says Spuria vitulamina no[n] agent radices altas, nec stabile fundamentum collocabunt: bastard slips shall take no deep roots nor lay any fast foundation.
By these phrases of speech, we mean that willful and unruly age, which lacks ripeness and discretion, and (as we say) have not sowed all their wild oats, but as yet remain without either forecast or consideration of anything that may afterward turn them to benefit, play the wanton yonkers, and willful caraways. Seeing therefore that adolescence and youthful age consists in a constitution of hot and moist, & is fuller of blood than any other: it is a place therefore namely and specially to be referred.)

The noun phrase wild oat, meaning a dissolute youth, can be found a few decades earlier, however, indicating that sowing one’s wild oats is somewhat older than Newton’s text. From Thomas Becon’s 1543 A Pleasaunt Newe Nosegaye, complaining about the strange fashions of the kids today:

And what shall I saye of the manifold & straunge fasshions of the garmentes, that are vsed nowe a dayes? I thi[n]ke Satan studieth not so much to inuent newe fasshyons to bryng christen men into his snare, as the Taylours nowe a dayes are co[m]pelled to excogitate, inue[n]t & ymagyne diuersities of fasshyo[n]s for apparel, that they maye satisfy the foolyshe desyre of certayne lyghte braynes & wylde Otes, which are all togither gyuen to newe fanglenes.

The other common phrase relating to oats is to feel one’s oats. This one is more recent and American in origin, dating to the early nineteenth century. The underlying metaphor of a horse that becomes frisky after it has been fed. It appears as early as 5 May 1830 in the Rhode Island newspaper the Providence Patriot:

Tommy Chilton, M.C., begins to feel his oats. He lately introduced a resolution calling upon the President to assign causes for every removal which had been made under the present administration. This impertinent measure was treated as it deserved—19 voting for, and 123 against its consideration.

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Sources:

Becon, Thomas. A Pleasaunt Newe Nosegaye Full of Many Godly and Swete Floures. London: Johan Mayler for Johan Gough, 1543, sig. E.ii.v–E.iii.r. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Cockayne, Oswald, ed. Leechdoms, Wortcunning, and Starcraft of Early England, vol. 2 of 3. London: Longman, et al., 1865, 1.35, 84. London, British Library Royal MS 12.D.xvii. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Dictionary of Old English: A to I. University of Toronto, 2018, s.v. ate, æte, n.

Johnson, Samuel. A Dictionary of the English Language (1755). Beth Rapp Young, Jack Lynch, William Dorner, Amy Larner Giroux, Carmen Faye Mathes, and Abigail Moreshead, eds. 2021. s.v. oats, n.

Newton, Thomas. The Touchstone of Complexions. London: Thomas Marsh, 1576, 98r–v. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2004, s.v. oat, n.; December 2011, wild oat, n.; March 2015, s.v., haver, n.2.

“Providence.” Providence Patriot Columbian Phoenix, 5 May 1830, 2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Skeat, Walter W., ed. The Gospel According to Saint Matthew in Anglo-Saxon, Northumbrian, and Old Mercian Versions. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1887, 13.30, 113. London, British Library, Cotton MS Nero D.iv. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Photo credit: W. Carter, 2016. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

stiff drink

November 16, 2022

A glass and bottle of Highland Park Scotch whisky sitting on a wooden surface

16 November 2022

A stiff drink is a strong, alcoholic one. The idiom is odd to present-day ears because stiff once had a sense meaning strong that isn’t used much anymore, except in the context of booze.

The adjective stiff, meaning rigid, unbending traces back to Old English stif. And the word retains that as its primary meaning through to the present day. But in the Middle English period, stiff began to be used to mean strong. For instance, the word is used in that sense to describe the physical prowess of William the Conqueror in the Metrical Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester, c.1300:

Suiþe þikke mon he was · & of grete strengþe
Gret wombede & ballede · & bote of euene lengþe
So stif mon he was in armes · in ssoldren & in lende
Þat vnneþe enimon · miȝte is bowe bende
(Such a stout man he was and of great strength
Great bellied and bald but well proportioned
So stiff a man he was in arms, in shoulders and in loins
That scarcely any man might bend his bow)

Stiff starts to be associated with alcohol by the end of the sixteenth century, at first in the phrase stiff drinkers, that is to say hard or inveterate drinkers. From a song in John Lyly’s 1594 masque Mother Bombie:

IO Bacchus! To thy Table.
Thou call'st euery drunken Rabble,
We already are stiffe Drinkers,
Then seale vs for thy iolly Skinckers.

We see it in another song performed in a masque, this time in Ben Jonson’s The Masque of Auguries. The masque was first published in 1622, but while that edition references the song, it does not include its lyrics. The lyrics appear in the 1640 compilation of Jonson’s works:

From Court we invite
Lord, Ladie, and knight;
Squire, gentleman [sic], yeoman and groom.
And all our stiffe drinkers,
Smiths, Porters, and Tinkers,
And the beggars shall give ye roome.

We see stiff applied to the booze itself by the end of the eighteenth century. There is this use of glass of stiff grog from an obituary of a British sailor that appeared in the February 1791 edition of London’s Gentleman’s Magazine:

At Chatham, Mr. William Ewin, boatswain of his Majesty’s ship Bristol. He was boatswain of the Resolution, with Captain Cook, on his last voyage to the South Seas, and had been with him on his expedition in search of the Southern continent. His character was that of an intrepid, good seamen [sic], never afraid of a stiff gale, yet always better pleased with a glass of stiff grog.

And we have stiff drink of grog in Parson Weems’s 1808 edition of his biography of George Washington. It may appear in earlier editions of that work, but this is the earliest one I’ve found. Weems is describing an incident that occurred during the June 1776 British attack on Charleston, South Carolina. The British force, under the command of Commodore Peter Parker, was driven away by American gunnery. Not only were the British forced to retreat, but Parker lost his pants in the battle, shredded by gunfire. Much mockery was made of this at the time, although it was undeserved. It happened when Parker ordered his quarterdeck cleared of everyone but himself and the intense gunfire shredded his pants. It was a brave act, and he was lucky not to have been killed. Anyway, the following is Weems’s description of an exchange that occurred between Parker and one of the Black pilots he had brought on board to navigate the Charleston channel as they British squadron retreated. I don’t reproduce Weems’s transcript of the actual conversation because it is not strictly relevant to our point here and is incredibly racist:

This was right down impudence: and Cudjo richly deserved a ropes-end for it; but Sir Peter, a good natured man, was so tickled with the idea of measuring the Atlantic Ocean with a quart pot, that he broke into a hearty laugh, and ordered Cudjo a stiff drink of grog.

There is this poem, titled A Glass of Gin Toddy, that appeared in Virginia’s Alexandria Gazette and Daily Advertiser on 1 December 1818:

Should you be in the dumps,
Or your wife have the mumps,
Which frequently will happen to a body;
Let it be day or night,
And you want to set things right,
Just swallow a stiff drink of gin toddy.

And there is this satirical Apology for Drunkenness that appeared in Vermont’s Woodstock Observer on 17 July 1821:

Drunkenness promotes Religion in general and humanity in particular—Because some men have no religion until they obtain a stiff drink of grog, and their religion increases in proportion to the quantity of spirits which they may imbibe, until at length they become so extremely religious and humble, as to wallow in the mud along with hogs, for the edification of the spectators.

So that’s where we get stiff drink from. It’s just a fossilized noun phrase that uses an obsolescent sense of stiff meaning strong.

There is a tale that says stiff drink comes from the practice of transporting corpses in spirits to preserve them for later burial. Supposedly, hard drinkers would surreptitiously sneak a drink from the cask containing the stiff. The story is nonsense, mostly. Occasionally, a corpse of a wealthy or famous person who died far from home would be preserved in spirits. Horatio Nelson was so preserved following his death at Trafalgar so he could have a funeral in England. But the practice was not common. And while one cannot discount the lengths an alcoholic will go to get a drink, actually drinking the preserving spirits would be even rarer. It’s not the origin of the phrase, just a post-hoc rationalization/joke.

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Sources:

“Apology for Drunkenness.” Woodstock Observer (Vermont), 17 July 1821, 4. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“Deaths.” Gentleman’s Magazine (London), February 1791, 187. Gale Primary Sources: American Historical Periodicals from the American Antiquarian Society.

“A Glass of Gin Toddy.” Alexandria Gazette and Daily Advertiser (Virginia), 1 December 1818, 2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Jonson, Benjamin. “The Masque of Auguries.” The Workes of Benjamin Jonson, vol. 2, London: Richard Meighen, 1640, 85. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Lyly, John. Mother Bombie. London: Thomas Scarlet for Cuthbert Burby, 1594, 2.1, sig. C4r. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. stif, adj.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. stiff, adj., n., and adv.

Robert of Gloucester. Metrical Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester, vol. 2 of 2. William Aldis Wright, ed. London: Stationery Office, 1887, lines 7730–33, 556.

Weems, Mason Locke. The Life of George Washington, sixth edition. Philadelphia: R. Cochran, 1808, 80. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Photo credit: Niklas Morberg, 2009. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

angel

November 14, 2022

14 November 2022

Being a Christian religious term, it is no surprise that angel traces back to Old English. The Old English word comes from the Greek ἄγγελος (angelos), literally messenger, via the Latin angelus, reinforced in Middle English by the Anglo-Norman aungel. The Old English engel appears some 2,250 times in the extant corpus, one such occurrence coming from Ælfric of Eynsham’s sermon for Christmas, written in the late tenth century:

Ðreo þing synd on middanearde, an is hwilwendlic, þe hæfð ægðer ge ordfrumman ge ende, þæt synd nytenu and ealle sawullease þing þe ongunnan þa þa hi god gesceop and æft geændiað and to nahte gewurðaþ. Oðer þing is ece swa þæt hit hæfð ordfruman and næfð nenne ende; þæt synd ænglas and manna saula, þe ongunnen ða þa hi god gesceop, ac hi ne geendiað næfre. Dridde þing is ece swa þæt hit næfð naðor ne ordfruman ne ende, þæt is se ana ælmihtiga god on þrynesse and on annysse æfre wuniende unasmeagendlic and unasæcgendlic.
(There are three things on this earth: one is transitory, that has both a beginning and an end; such are beasts and all soulless things which began when God created them and afterward end and turn to nothing. The second thing is eternal, so that it has a beginning and does not have an end; such are the angels and the souls of humans, which began when God created them, but they never end. The third thing is eternal, so that it has neither a beginning nor an end; such is the one almighty God in trinity and unity, who continues forever inconceivable and indescribable.)

The figurative sense of angel meaning a virtuous person is in place by the fifteenth century. It appears in William Caxton’s translation from the French of Raoul Le Fevre’s History of Jason, in the passage where Medea kills her son Jason, who is named after his father:

“Ha. a Iason my dere sone thy figure & semblaunt. and thy faders entresemble & ben lik. Thou art moche fayr if thou mightiest come to thaage of a man / certes thou sholdest ensiewe and folowe the maners of thy fader the most double & leest trew knight of the worlde. hit is moche better that thou deye an angel in thy yongth / thenne a deuill in thy olde aage” / and wythoute more speking or other bewaillyng she drew out a sharp knyf in the presence of the norices that wyste not what to saye. and smote him with the knif vnto the herte. And after departed at that oure that men might not see her.
(“Ah, Jason my dear son, your figure and countenance resembles and is like your father’s. You would be very handsome if you would come to the age of a man; it is certain that you would ensue and follow the manners of your father, the most double and least true knight in the world. It is much better that you die an angel in your youth than a devil in your old age,” and without any more speaking or bewailing, she drew out a sharp knife in the presence of the nurses who did not know what to say and smote him with the knife into the heart. And afterward, she departed at that hour so that men might not see her.)

In traditional Christian theology, angels are immortal beings that predate the creation of the world and of humanity. The idea that humans, at least those with God’s grace, become angels when they die is a much more recent one, dating to the late eighteenth century. Here is an example from Elizabeth Helme’s 1787 novel Louisa:

I composed my features as well as possible, that they might not be an index of the contending passions that dwelt within, and obeyed my summons to the drawing room, where I was repossessed, like Mary, in favour of the stranger, who was a likely man, seemingly about the age of thirty-eight. He rose at my entrance—“Ah! Madam, said he, it is indeed the daughter of my friend, the living image of her angel mother;” and he embraced me with a fatherly affection.

And the sense of angel meaning a financial backer of some venture, got its start in theater circles in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Here is an example from the New York Sunday Mercury of 31 May 1885 that is the earliest citation of this sense in the Oxford English Dictionary:

Actors and authors tempt their “angels” with new plays which are sure to make all concerned Goulds and Vanderbilts.

It would take capitalism to equate robber barons with immortal, heavenly beings.

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Sources:

Ælfric. “De natiuitate Christi” (Regarding the Nativity of Christ). Ælfric’s Lives of Saints, vol. 1 of 2 (originally published in 4 volumes) (1881). Early English Text Society O.S. 76. London: Oxford UP, 1966, 12. London, British Library, Cotton MS Julius E.vii.

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

Helme, Elizabeth. Louisa; or, the Cottage on the Moor, vol. 1 of 2. London: G. Kearsley, 1787, 81–82. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Le Fevre, Raoul. The History of Jason (1477). William Caxton, trans. John Munro, ed. Early English Text Society, E.S. 111. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1913, 192–93. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2019, s.v. angel, n.

Image credit: York Project (2002). Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image as a mechanical reproduction of a public domain work.

hell

November 11, 2022

c.1450–1516 oil-on-wood painting of the harrowing of hell by an artist in the school of Hieronymus Bosch. Image of people being tortured by demons and being fed into the gigantic mouth of Satan in the center of the frame. At center left is Christ breaking down the gate to hell and admitting light.

11 November 2022

As a general rule, words that are central to a particular culture date to an early period. Therefore, it is no surprise that hell traces back to Old English, pretty much unchanged in form and meaning. And given that much of the extant Old English corpus is religious in nature and was copied and preserved by Christian monks and nuns, it is no surprise that the word appears some nine hundred times in that corpus. While most of those appearances are in the context of a Christian hell or the Sheol of the Hebrew Bible, some are in reference to pagan abodes of the dead. And indeed hell comes from a common Germanic root relating to the underworld. For example, the Old Icelandic Hel is the name of the goddess who rules over the dead as well as her abode

We see hell in Ælfric of Eynsham’s tenth century translation of Genesis 37:35. The verse is about Jacob learning that his favorite son Joseph has been killed:

Soðlice hys bearn hi gesamnodon to þam þæt hi heora fæder gefrefrodon: he nolde nane frefrunge underfon, ac cwæð wepende: ic fare to minum suna to helle
(Now, his children gathered there to console their father; he would not accept the consolation and said weeping: “I go with my son into hell.”)

Of course, Joseph had not been killed, but rather had been sold into slavery by his jealous brothers.

Hell starts breaking loose by the late sixteenth century. The following is a passage from the anonymous play Misogonus, dating to around 1570:

Stay a while Eupelas I knowe our laboure we shall lose but yet He tell the vnthrift of his detestable dealinge Calsta this honest company or is this an honest sporte to be revelinge and bousinge after such a lewde fashion I thinke hell breake louse when thou gatst ye this porte foure such thou coudst scase fynde in a whole nashion

And by 1600 Shakespeare is telling people to go to hell. From the Merchant of Venice:

One half of me is yours, the other halfe yours,
Mine owne, I would say; but if mine, then yours,
And so all yours; o, these naughty times
Puts barres betweene the owners and their rights;
And so, though yours, not yours, (proue it so)
Let fortune goe to hell for it, not I.

But go to the devil is much older. Geoffrey Chaucer uses that phrase some two hundred years earlier. From The Wife of Bath’s Prologue, in a passage about what makes a woman attractive to a man:

Thou seyst som folk desiren us for richesse,
Somme for oure shap, and somme for oure fairnesse,
And som for she kan outher synge or daunce,
And som for gentillesse and daliaunce;
Som for hir handes and hir armes smale;
Thus goth al to the devel, by thy tale.
(You say some folk desire us for riches,
Some for our shape, and some for our beauty,
And some because she can either sing or dance,
And some for nobility and flirtatiousness;
Some for their hands and their slender arms;
Thus goes all to the devil, by your telling.)

And a bit later, the Wife complains that age has robbed her of her beauty and vigor:

But age, allas, that al wole envenyme,
Hath me biraft my beautee and my pith.
Lat go. Farewel! The devel go therwith!
(But age, alas, that will poison all,
Has robbed me of beauty and vigor.
Let it go. Farewell! Go to the devil with it!

The use of hell as an intensifier and interjection, that is as profanity, appears at about the same time as Shakespeare’s go to hell. From a 1605 satirical play Eastward Hoe by George Chapman, Ben Jonson, and John Marston, a scene where a shipwrecked man washes ashore at a place called Cuckold’s Haven:

Secu[ritie]. Heauen, I beseech thee, how haue I offended thee! where am I cast a shore nowe, that I may goe a righter way home by land? Let me see. O I am scarce able to looke about me! where is there any Sea-marke that I am acquainted withall?
Slit[gut]. Looke vp Father, are you acquainted with this Marke?
Secu. What! landed at Cuckolds hauen? Hell and damnation. I will runne backe and drowne my selfe.

Bloody hell isn’t recorded until the nineteenth century, although oral use is undoubtedly older. The following account of a trial for mutiny onboard a ship was printed in the New Hampshire Patriot and State Gazette on 7 January 1857. The incident had occurred on 19 May 1856:

On the 19th of May, about 7 o’clock A. M., Wales being at the wheel, Capt. Lunt told him to keep the ship before the wind. Wales replied, “Why the bloody hell don’t you give me a course?”—Upon this, Capt. Lunt took him by the collar, when Wales seized the captain by the throat, tore his shirt from him, and was in the act of stabbing him with a sheath knife, when his arm was arrested by the mate.

There is a published use of hell as intensifier between these two dates. From the Daily Cleveland Herald of 1 September 1856 in an account of the last words of Philander Brace from the gallows as he awaited his hanging for murder:

Come, dry up! What the bloody hell is the use of keeping me here just waiting on you? I want to go through with it.

The fact that these early uses of bloody hell, a characteristically British phrase, appear in American newspapers may be due to the fact that the phrase wasn’t considered so offensive on the left side of the pond and was therefore considered fit to print.

And indeed, both bloody hell and hell are recorded in the 1888 West Somerset Word-Book:

Lor! lawk! lawk-a-massy! massy soce! massy ’pon us! strike me! s’elp me! are, of course, mere conjunctives, and with some individuals “Hell! bloody hell!” serve to eke out most sentences.

Discuss this post

Sources:

“California News.” Daily Cleveland Herald (Ohio), 1 September 1856, 2. Gale Primary Sources: Nineteenth Century US Newspapers.

Chapman, George, Ben Jonson, and John Marston. Eastward Hoe. London: William Aspley, 1605, 4.1, sig. F2v. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale. The Canterbury Tales. lines 257–62. Harvard’s Geoffrey Chaucer Website.

Crawford, S.J. The Old English Version of the Heptateuch (1922). Early English Text Society O.S. 160. London: Oxford UP, 2004, Genesis 37:35, 174.

Dictionary of Old English: A to I. University of Toronto, 2018, s.v. hell, helle, n.

Elworthy, Thomas. The West Somerset Word-Book. English Dialect Society. London: Trübner, 1888, s.v. oaths, imprecations, and exclamations, 530. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Misogonus (c.1570). 2.5. In Richard Warwick Bond. Early Plays from the Italian. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911, 215. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2008, s.v. hell, n. and int., Hel, n.; June 2017, s.v. devil, n.

Shakespeare, William. The Most Excellent Historie of the Merchant of Venice. London, James Roberts for Thomas Heyes, 1600, sig. E3v. Folger Shakespeare Library.

“U.S. District Court.” New Hampshire Patriot and State Gazette, 7 January 1857, 2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Zoëga. Geir T. A Concise Dictionary of Old Icelandic. Toronto: U of Toronto Press, 2004, s.v. hel, n.

Image credit: Unknown artist, c.1450–1516. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image as a mechanical reproduction of a public domain work.

mastodon

November 9, 2022

9 November 2022

The mastodon is an extinct animal belonging to the genus Mammut and the order Proboscidea, which includes the mammoth and the present-day elephant. Mastodons ranged throughout North and Central America. They went extinct some 12,000 years ago, at the end of the Pleistocene era.

Mastodon is also the name of a social media platform similar in some respects to Twitter.

The name mastodonte was coined by French naturalist Georges Cuvier in 1806 from the Greek μαστός (mastos, breast) and ὀδούς (odous, tooth) because projections on the crowns of mastodon molars resemble nipples. The form mastodon appears in English by 1811. In those early years, the distinction between and classification of mammoths and mastodons were not firmly set, and it can be difficult to determine in writing from that era which of the present-day classifications those two words refer to.

The English word is borrowed from Cuvier’s French. Thomas Jefferson used mastodont in a 10 September 1809 letter to William Clark, of Lewis and Clark expedition fame:

the bones of this animal are now in such a state of evanescence as to render it important to save what we can of them. of those you had formerly sent me I reserved a very few for myself, got Doctr Wistar to select from the rest every piece [sic] which could be interesting to the Philosophical society, & sent the residue to the National institute of France. these have enabled them to decide that the animal was neither a Mammoth nor an elephant, but of a distinct kind, to which they have given the name of Mastodont, from the protuberances of it’s [sic] teeth. these from their form & the immense mass of their jaws, satisfy me this animal must have been arboriverous. nature seems not to have provided other food sufficient for him; & the limb of a tree would be no more to him than a bough of Cotton tree to a horse.

In 1811, paleontologist and surgeon James Parkinson, who was also the first to describe what we today call Parkinson’s disease, was among the first to use the form mastodon:

Walch, Wallerius and Gmelin, have supposed the fossil jaw found in the neighborhood of Bologna, De Monum. Diluv. In agro bonon. detecto, to have belonged to the walrus; but Cuvier has plainly shown, that it is the remains of a small species of the mammoth (Mastodon), as will be more particularly noticed in a succeeding letter.
I am unable to speak decidedly of a fossil tooth, said to be found in a bed of alluvial matters, in Norfolk. Its substance is very considerably changed: it is about fifteen inches in length, and appears to be nearly perfect at its extremities; although one side of it, and considerable portion of its internal substance is removed. The fineness of its grain and its edge not manifesting the peculiar lozenge-formed decussations observed in the ivory of the elephant and of the mammoth (Mastodon), with the size and form of the tooth, lead to the suspicion of its having belonged to an animal of this genus.

Cartoon drawing of a mastodon used as the mascot for the social media service

The social media service named Mastodon was launched on 5 October 2016 by its creator Eugen Rochko. He announced it on the site Hacker News:

Plans for the project: I'm a realist so I don't think that it will be able to compete with Twitter. However I would like this project to become the go-to option for people who are already inclined to prefer decentralized/self-hosted solutions, and simply be better than the other software in that space.
No, I don't plan to monetize. Mastodon is open-source, licensed under AGLPv3. However I do have a Patreon through which interested people could support me while I work on it.

The social media service gained widespread public attention in November 2022 after Elon Musk purchased Twitter and users of that service sought an alternative. Rochko’s choice of Mastodon as the name was apparently random. He commented on the name in Time in November 2022:

That got me thinking that, you know, being able to express myself online to my friends through short messages was actually very important to me, important also to the world, and that maybe it should not be in the hands of a single corporation that can just do whatever it wants with it. I started working on my own thing. I called it Mastodon because I’m not good at naming things. I just chose whatever came to my mind at the time. There was obviously no ambition of going big with it at the time.

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Sources:

Conniff, Richard. “Mammoths and Mastodons: All American Monsters.” Smithsonian, April 2010.

Jefferson, Thomas. Letter to William Clark, 10 September 1809. The Papers of Thomas Jefferson Digital Edition, University of Virginia.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2001, s.v. mastodon, n., mastodont, n. and adj.

Parkinson, James. “Letter 22. Fossil Remains of Mammalia.” Organic Remains of a Former World, vol. 3 of 3. London: Sherwood, Neely, and Jones, 1811, 310. Gale Primary Sources: Nineteenth Century Collections Online.

Perrigo, Billy. “Thousands Have Joined Mastodon Since Twitter Changed Hands.” Time, 6 November 2022 (updated 7 November 2022).

Rochko, Eugen (pseudonym Gagron). “Show HN: A New Decentralized Microblogging Platform.” Hacker News, 5 October 2016.

Image credits: Charles R. Knight, 1897. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image; Rochko, Eugen, 2018, licensed under a GNU Affero General Public License.