pound sand

30 November 2022

To pound sand is an Americanism referring to performing a menial task, specifically compressing sand to create a firmer foundation for some sort of construction. The phrase appears in an 1857 poem by Alexander Smith:

We crept into a half-forgotten street
Of frail and tumbling houses propt by beams,
And ruined courts which, centuries before,
Rung oft to iron heels,—which palfreys pawed,
As down the mighty steps the Lady came
Bright as the summer morning,—peopled now
By outcasts, sullen men, bold girls who sat
Pounding sand in the sun.

It is also used in the form knows enough/has sense enough to pound sand, referring to someone who barely capable of such a menial task. This form is recorded a couple of decades later. From The Atchison, Kansas Globe of 26 December 1877:

We don’t know whether the young man you refer to knows enough to pound sand or not. His winking and blinking at you is certainly in bad taste, and if you have a big brother, you might have him pound the daylights out of him.

And the Iowa State Register of 15 November 1879:

Mr. Clark, the liveryman on the East Side, was taken in and done for by a very neat game, day before yesterday; Indeed, the game was played fine enough to hoodwink Mr. Clark’s attorney, and the gall of the thing comes in when the public reflect that they were done by a Norwegian who looked as if he didn’t have sense enough “to pound sand.”

Sometimes a longer form appears, with down a rat hole added. From the Denver Tribune of 23 October 1883:

The ground of the opposition of the Republican to the candidacy of Mr. Graham is a sham and a fraud patent and apparent to any man who has sense enough to pound sand down a rat hole.

It’s often used in the construction go pound sand, an expression of disdain or disagreement, similar to go fly a kite or go jump in a lake. But this phrasing doesn’t appear until the twentieth century. The early citations are in sports writing, but this is probably because sports writing was one of the chief avenues by which slang made its way into print, rather than the phrasing being peculiar to sports. From the Cleveland Plain Dealer of 26 May 1927:

“I see by some paper or other,” writes Chris Cross, the old Slippery Rock Normal halfback, “that Jimmy O’Connell still hopes to get even with the guys who ran him out of baseball. And I’m wondering why Jimmy never thought—to go pound Sand.”

And this piece in Indiana’s Muncie Sunday Star of 17 April 1927 is about a rule change in basketball that limited dribbling the ball down court:

So from a few little chats about town with fans and players we were almost convinced that we should go pound sand in rat holes or stove pipes and let basketball go to the dogs.

And we see the phrase outside of the sports pages in Massachusetts’s Springfield Republican of 30 September 1934:

In the agricultural areas much is being heard about soil erosion and the loss of the heavy crop-growing earth. But not so much is said regarding municipal centers and the loss of heavy taxpaying buildings. Give an owner a hard look and he tears the thing down and tells the tax assessors to go pound sand.

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Sources:

“Answers to Correspondents.” The Globe (Atchison, Kansas), 26 December 1877, 1. Newspapers.com.

“Belford Hopeful.” Denver Tribune, 23 October 1883, 1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Doyle, James E. “The Sport Trail.” Cleveland Plain Dealer (Ohio), 26 May 1927, 27. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“False Pretenses.” Iowa State Register (Des Moines), 15 November 1879, 3. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Gordon, Bob. “Sport Splashes.” Muncie Sunday Star (Indiana), 17 April 1927, 11. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2022, s.v. pound, v.2.

“Matching Wits with the Tax Collector.” Springfield Republican (Massachusetts), 30 September 1934, 1E. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2006, s.v. pound, v.1.

Smith, Alexander. “A Boy’s Poem.” City Poems. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1857, 122. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Photo credit: Matthew Comer, US Navy, 2012. Public domain photo. Wikimedia Commons.

Michigan / Michigander / Michiganian

28 November 2022

Detail of a 1763 map of New France by Louis Joliet and Jacques Marquette showing Lake Michigan

The lake came first, and the state is named for that. The name Michigan comes from an Algonquian language, probably from the Old Ojibwa *meshi-gami (big lake). In modern Ojibwa it is michaa (be big) + -gami (lake); there is also the modern Ojibwa gichigami (sea, one of the Great Lakes), although historically this would also have meant big lake.

Indigenous tribes and bands traditionally and currently resident in Michigan include the Ojibwe (Chippewa), Odawa (Ottawa), Huron, and Potawatomi, among others.

Michigan as the name of the lake starts appearing in English in the mid eighteenth century. For example, there is this from the 1747 Complete System of Geography:

Lakes are here very large, and in great Number; the principal of which are those of Erie, Michigan, Huron, Superior, Frontenac, or Ontavia, Nipissing, Temiscaming, besides others of a smaller size.

The United States formally created the Michigan Territory in 1805, which would become the state in 1837. Here is an announcement of that creation that appeared in the Hudson, New York Bee on 12 February 1805:

Michigan Territory. Congress have passed an act dividing the Indiana Territory into two districts, the new government to be called the Territory of Michigan, described as follows:

“All that part of the Indiana Territory, which lies north of a line drawn east from the southerly bend or extreme of lake Michigan, until it shall intersect lake Erie, and east of a line drawn from the said southerly bend thro’ the middle of the said lake to its northern extremity, and then due north to the northern boundary of the United States.”

Originally, residents of Michigan were dubbed Michiganians. That name appears as early as 10 November 1813 in the title of a letter printed in Washington, DC’s Daily National Intelligencer. The letter was protesting the expulsion of American residents of Detroit by the British during the War of 1812. Fort Detroit had surrendered to the British the previous year, and the expulsion was contrary to the articles of surrender that had been negotiated.

One still sees Michiganian occasionally today, but that name has largely given way to Michigander. That name appears in a 16 September 1838 travelogue in Northampton, Massachusetts’s Hampshire Gazette:

I came, as I told you, the last thirty miles to Detroit by rail road. This is part of one which the Michiganders are making across St. Joseph’s. Another one parallel, and but a few miles south of it, is about being made in the States of Ohio and Indiana, from the Maumee River to Michigan city.

In 1848, Abraham Lincoln labeled Lewis Cass, a political opponent and former governor of the Michigan Territory, a Michigander, making a play on words by likening him to a goose. But, although many claim him to be, Lincoln was not the coiner of the term.

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Sources:

Bright, William. Native American Placenames of the United States. Norman: U of Oklahoma Press, 2004.

“Canada: or, New France.” A Complete System of Geography, vol. 2 of 2. London: William Inkys, et al. 1747, 621. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Everett-Heath, John. Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Place Names, sixth ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2020. Oxfordreference.com.

“Federal and State Recognized Tribes.” National Conference of State Legislatures, March 2020.

Marrin, Doug. “Abraham Lincoln Used ‘Michigander’ as an Insult.” Sun Times News (Dexter, Michigan), 1 April 2021.

“Michigan” (16 September 1838). Hampshire Gazette (Northampton, Massachusetts), 14 November 1838, 1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“Michigan Territory.” The Bee (Hudson, New York), 12 February 1805, 3.

Gray, Kathleen. “Michiganders or Michiganians? Lawmakers Settle It.” Detroit Free Press, 2 November 2017.

“The Michiganians” Daily National Intelligencer (Washington, DC), 10 November 1813, 2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2001, s.v. Michigan, n., Michigander, n., Michiganian, n.

Image credit: Lewis Joliet and Jacques Marquette, 1673. Library of Congress. Public domain image.

in deep kimchi

A serving of kimchi. Pickled cabbage on a plate.

25 November 2022

Kimchi is a staple of Korean cuisine, a dish of fermented cabbage and other ingredients such as garlic, ginger, fermented fish paste, red pepper, and onions. The word starts appearing in English in the late nineteenth century. From an article with the dateline of 4 May 1888 in the August issue of the Christian missionary magazine The Gospel in All Lands:

There is a peculiar kind of pickle resembling sauer kraut which goes by the name of “kimchi,” and, while it is rather offensive to ordinary olfactories, it is not more so than the famous German dish.

The slang phrase in deep kimchi, a euphemism for in deep shit, arose among US military personnel stationed in South Korea. We don’t know exactly when service members started using the expression, but it was probably in the 1960s or early 1970s. There is no record of it from the Korean War era.

Craig Hiler’s 1979 novel about the Vietnam War, Monkey Mountain, has this line supposedly uttered in 1969:

If something happens before we can get backups flown in, then we’re in deep kimchi.

That may or may not reflect actual use of the phrase in 1969, but the earliest example in print is from the Christian Science Monitor of 26 September 1978 in an article about recently appointed chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff General David Jones:

Others credit General Jones with being “the principal and most vocal” supporter of the AWACS (Airborne Warning and Control System) radar plane program when it was “in deep kimchi” and with convincing Defense Secretary Harold Brown that it was wrong for the Air Force to kill its last wing of F-15 fighters and replace it with two other wings of F-16 fighters or A-10 ground attack aircraft.

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Sources:

“Customs in Korea” (4 May 1888). The Gospel in All Lands, August 1888, 366. Google Books.

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

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2021, s.v. kimchee, n.

Popik, Barry. “Deep Kimchi (deep trouble).” The Big Apple (blog), 14 November 2020.

Webbe, Stephen. “Our Top Military Chief Prefers ‘Readiness Now.’” Christian Science Monitor, 26 September 1978, B–13. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Image credit: Star5112, 2008. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

laundry / launder / money laundering / lavender

Oil on canvas painting by Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, c.1735

23 November 2022

Launder, laundry, and associated words come to us from the Old French lavandiere (feminine) and lavandier (masculine), which in turn come from the Latin lavandaria. These terms originally refer to people who wash clothes. These made their way into English in the thirteenth century in the form lavender. Launder is a later contraction of that form.

The present-day word for the plant used in perfume making is from the Medieval Latin lavandula. The relation of laundry to the present-day lavender is uncertain. It may be that the plant was named because of its use in washing clothes, making them smell better, or it may be coincidence, or the plant name may have originally been *livindula and morphed through folk etymology by association with washing.

Laundry is first recorded as a surname. We have a record of an Isabella la Lavendre, living in Oxfordshire, from the year 1227. It was usually women who did this work, but we do have records of men with that name as well. There is, for instance, a record of a Geoffrey le Lavander from 1261.

The use of lavender outside of names is in place by 1350, when it appears in the poem Heye Louerd, Thou Here My Bone, found in the manuscript London, British Library, Harley, MS 2253:

Whil mi lif wes luther ant lees,
Glotonie mi glemon wes;
   With me he wonede a while.
Prude wes my plowe-fere;
Lecherie my lavendere;
   With hem is Gabbe ant Gyle.

(When my life was deceitful and false, gluttony was my minstrel; he dwelled with me for a while. Pride was my playmate, lechery my laundress, with them are gossip and guile.)

The contraction appears shortly thereafter. The hagiography of Saint Brice in London, British Library, Harley MS 4196, copied sometime between 1375–1425, contains these lines:

A woman þat his lander was
In þat tyme had done trispas:
Flesly scho had her body filde,
And was deliuer of a knaue-childe.

(A woman who was his laundress
In that time had sinned;
She had polluted her body carnally
And was delivered of a boy-child.)

The term money-laundering, that is using legitimate transactions to hide the origin of money from a criminal enterprise, doesn’t appear until much, much later. It becomes part of criminal jargon in the latter half of the twentieth century and makes its way into print by 1970. From an article about the mafia in Toronto’s Globe and Mail from 4 November 1970:

Ontario, Dr. Shulman said, as well as being a meeting place for Mafia members because they are not harassed by the police, is also favored as a place to invest money and to “launder” money.” [sic]

“Laundering,” Dr. Shulman said, is using unaccountable money from criminal activities for a legitimate transaction after which the money becomes usable.

And the term entered into the general lexicon as a result of the Watergate scandal. References to laundering the money used to finance President Nixon’s illegal campaign activities appeared many times in reporting on the scandal. Here is an early instance from the Evening Star and Washington Daily News of 12 January 1973:

Although the Justice Department charges do not detail where the $31,300 total came from or for what it was used, the prosecution’s statements in the Watergate trial have already tied the two $12,000 payments for Liddy to a Mexican money-laundering operation and Liddy’s surveillance assignments.

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Sources:

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2022, s.v. launder, v.

Hardy, Thomas, D., ed. Rotuli Litterarum Clausarum in Turri Londoninensi (Close Rolls in the Tower of London), vol. 2. London: George E. Eyre and Andrew Spottiswoode, 1844, 196. Google Books.

“Heye Louerd, Thou Here My Bone.” The Complete Harley 2253 Manuscript, vol. 2 of 3. Susanna Greer Fein, ed. TEAMS Middle English Texts Series. Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute Publications, 2014, lines 52–57. London, British Library, Harley, MS 2253.

Manthorpe, Jonathan. “Links Four Ontario Men to International Syndicate.” Globe and Mail (Toronto), 7 November 1970, 4. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. lavender(e, n.1.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2002, s.v. money, n.; second edition, 1989, s.v. launder, v., launder, n., lavender, n.1, lavender, n.2 and adj.

Polk, James R. “Nixon Campaign Panel Charged on Secret Use of Funds.” Evening Star and Washington Daily News (Washington, DC), 12 January 1973, C–Back Page. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“De sancto Bricio diacono sancti Martini.” Altenglische Legenden. Carl Horstmann, ed. Heilbronn: Henninger, 1881, 156, lines 71–74. HathiTrust Digital Library. London, British Library, Harley MS 4196.

“Writ to Walter de Burges.” Calendar of Inquisitions Miscellaneous (Chancery) Preserved in the Public Record Office, vol. 1 of 5. London: Stationery Office, 1916, 92. HathiTrust Digital Library.

Image credit: Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, c.1735, Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image as a mechanical reproduction of a public domain work.

fast and loose, play

Oil on panel painting from the school of Hieronymus Bosch of a mountebank cheating a crowd of marks with a shell game

21 November 2022

To play fast and loose is to be inconstant, to flout the rules, to cheat. The phrase comes from a con game that is in spirit, but not mechanics, akin to three-card monte. Other names for the game are pricking the garter, the endless chain, and the strap. Here is a description of the game from a mid-nineteenth century source, Halliwell’s Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words:

FAST-AND-LOOSE. A cheating game, played with a stick and a belt or string, so arranged that a spectator would think he could make the latter fast by placing a stick through its intricate folds, whereas the operator could detach it at once. The term is often used metaphorically.

As the title of Halliwell’s book suggests, the phrase is much older than the nineteenth century. It in fact dates to the mid sixteenth century. We actually have a record of the metaphorical use of fast and loose before its use as the name of the con game, but that’s not surprising given the gaps in the works that survive from this early stage of print publishing.

We see the phrase reversed from its familiar form in David Lindsay’s poem the Tragedie of the Unqhyle Maister Reuerende Fader Dauid. Lindsay (c.1490–c.1555) was a Scottish poet and diplomat, and the poem is about David Beaton, Cardinal Archbishop of Saint Andrews (c.1494–1546). Beaton was an opponent of the Protestant Reformation and worked to create an alliance between Scotland and France in opposition to Henry VIII’s Protestant England. The poem was written between 1546–55 and published in 1558. The relevant lines read:

I wes the cause, off mekle more myschance
For uphald of, my glore and dignitie
And plesoure off, the potent king France
With England wald, I haue no vnitie
Bot quho consydder, wald the veritie
We mycht ful weil, haue leuit in peace and rast
Nyne or ten ȝeris, and than playit lowis or fast.

(I was the cause of much more mischance, because for my glory and dignity and pleasure I supported the powerful king of France; I would have no unity with England. But who would consider the truth, we might very well have lived in peace and rest for nine or ten years, and then played it loose or fast.)

We get the now-familiar form fast and loose in the title of another poem. This one is by Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey, and was published in 1557:

Of a new maried studient that plaied fast or lose.

A Studient at his boke so plast:
That welth he might haue wonne,
From boke to wife did flete in hast,
From wealth to wo to runne.
Now, who hath plaied a feater cast,
Since iugling first begonne?
In knitting of him self so fast,
Him selfe he hath vndonne.

(Of a newly married student who played fast or loose.

A student so placed at his books that he might have won wealth, fled from book to wife in haste, ran from wealth to woe. Now, who has played a more fitting throw since juggling was invented, in knitting himself so fast, he has undone himself.)

We get a mention of the con game in George Whetstone’s 1578 play Promos and Cassandra. In this passage a hangman is speaking:

Heare are new ropes, how are my knots, I saith fyr slippery.
At fast or loose, with my Giptian, I meane to haue a cast:
Tenne to one I read his fortune by the Marymas fast,

Shakespeare would draw upon Whetstone’s play and Whetstone’s later prose version of the tale as a source for the plot of Measure for Measure. And Shakespeare would use the phrase fast and loose in three of his plays, each time using the name of the con game to describe some other deception. The first of these is in the play King John, which was probably written in the 1590s, but not published until the 1623 First Folio. In this passage the king of France is speaking:

And shall these hands so lately purg’d of blood?
So newly ioyn’d in loue? so strong in both?
Vnyoke this seysure, and this kind regreete?
Play fast and loose with faith? so iest with heauen,
Make such vnconstant children of our selues,

Shakespeare used the phrase twice in Love’s Labours Lost, whose quarto version was published in 1598. The first of these is in Act 1, Scene 2:

Ar. Take away this villaine, shut him vp.
Boy. Come, you transgressing slaue, away.
Clow. Let me not be pent vp, sir, I will fast being loose.
Boy. No, sir, that were fast and loose: thou shalt to prison.

And the second from Act 3, Scene 1:

Clo. The Boy hath sold him a bargaine, a Goose, that's flat.
Sir, your penny-worth is good, and your goose be fat.
To sell a bargain well is as cunning as fast and loose:
Let me see; a fat Lenuoy, I that's a fat goose.

And he would use it in Antony and Cleopatra, which was first performed in 1607 and published in the 1623 First Folio:

O this false Soule of Egypt! this graue Charm,
Whose eye beck'd forth my Wars, & cal'd them home;
Whose Bosome was my Crownet, my chiefe end,
Like a right Gypsie, hath at fast and loose,
Beguil’d me, to the very heart of losse.

Shakespeare’s repeated use of the phrase undoubtedly played a role in keeping the phrase alive long after the con game that inspired it had been forgotten.

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Sources:

Halliwell, James Orchard. A Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words, vol. 1 of 2. London: John Russell Smith, 1846, 348, s.v. fast-and-loose. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Howard, Henry, Earl of Surrey. Songes and Sonettes, London: Richard Tottel, 1557, fol. 64r. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Lindsay, David. “Tragedie of the Unqhyle Maister Reuerende Fader Dauid” (before 1555). Ane Dialog Betuix Experience and ane Courteour. Paris: for Sammuel Iascuy, 1558, sig. A4v. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2021, s.v. fast and loose, n. and adj.

Shakespeare, William. Antony and Cleopatra. In Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies. London: Isaac Iaggard and Edward Blount, 1623, 4.12, 361. First Folio, Folger copy # 68.

———. King John. In Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies. London: Isaac Iaggard and Edward Blount, 1623, 3.1, 10. First Folio, Folger copy # 68.

———. A Pleasant Conceited Comedie Called Loues Labors Lost (Quarto 1). London: W.W. for Cutbert Burby, 1598, 1.2, sig. B3v and 3.1, sig. C4v–D1r. London, British Library, Huth MS C.34.I.14. 

Whetstone, George. The Right Excellent and Famous Historye, of Promos and Cassandra. London: John Charlewood for Richard Jones, 1578, 2.5, sig. C3r. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Image credit: Unknown artist from the school of Hieronymus Bosch. Saint-Germain-en-Laye Civic Museum. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image as a mechanical reproduction of a public domain work.