station wagon / estate car / shooting brake

A 1954 Studebaker Conestoga station wagon

12 December 2022

[Updated 18 December 2022 with the 1914 citation of estate car and with the commentary on shooting brake.]

A station wagon, as we know it today, is an automobile that in addition to two (or more) rows of passenger seating, has a large storage area in the back with a rear door for loading and unloading. The name comes from the idea that the car is well suited for transporting people and luggage to and from railway stations. The name is American in origin and predates the automobile, being first applied to horse-drawn carriages used for that purpose.

There is an obsolete sense of station wagon that dates from the U.S. Civil War era. This sense of station wagon is a horse-drawn carriage carrying equipment for use as a mobile telegraph station. The earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary of this sense is from 1868, a few years after the war ended, but it’s a good guess that the term was in use during the war. But this sense doesn’t figure into our current use of the term.

The sense of horse-drawn carriages for transporting people with luggage appears only a year later than the telegraph sense. And the immediate context indicates that the station wagon is not being used for trips to and from a railroad station. Instead, it is being used to transport people and luggage on a tour of Turkey. From the Christian Mirror of 29 June 1869

Here we attended to fresh supplies, and also fitted up our station wagon which had been lodged in the city some time before. We were to take it with us, and then the ladies might be relieved from their horse-back journeying. At rather a late hour we started out of the city. When fairly out in the open plains, the ladies gave up their horses for the wagon.

So, from the very start, people were using station wagons for purposes other than what the name suggests.

Almost as soon as automobiles appeared on the scene, the designation of station wagon began to be applied to them. There is this passage from a description of an automobile show in New York City that appeared in the Electrical Review of 30 November 1900, the earliest reference to a non-horse-drawn station wagon of which I’m aware:

The Woods Motor Vehicle Company, of Chicago and New York exhibits five vehicles. It has, however, a large number of vehicles of various makes in the back of the Garden for use on the track. It shows a stanhope, station wagon, runabout, brougham and Victoria.

But these early station wagons, be they horse-drawn or automotive, were considered to be utility vehicles or light trucks. They weren’t primarily intended to carry passengers, with extra capacity for baggage. In the 1920s, however, the perception of station wagons shifted, and people began to consider them more as passenger, or even pleasure, vehicles. We can see this shift in a 24 October 1922 article in the New York Times on a change in the New York state tax laws that classified station wagons as personal, rather than commercial, vehicles:

Thousands of dollars may be lost to the State but saved by automobile owners as the result of a decision just handed down by the Appellate Division, holding that the common type of automobile known as the “suburban” or “station wagon” is not a commercial truck but a passenger car, and as such is entitled to the lower rate collected by the Automobile Bureau.

[…]

“These cars are used by the thousands, especially in the country, for transporting people and for bringing packages from stores, and carrying baggage to and from the railroad station,” said Mr. Zabriskie, “and they have always been licensed as such until this year.”

[…]

In his decision, Justice Dike held that while the station wagons were frequently filled to overflowing with bundles and bags they were subject to the personal use of their owners only and were not used for transportation of passengers or freight for pay, hence were not “commercial” vehicles. Granting the application for a peremptory mandamus order, the Court classified the vehicle by saying:

“The car in question is a well-known type, and, as stated in the brief of the petitioners, ‘it is in fact known by its acquaintances simply as the Ford, and has not even been endowed with any pet name or nickname such as facetious owners frequently bestow on their flivvers, except when it refuses to function, when it is sometimes called by other names appropriate to the occasion.’”

That is the North American history of the car and its name. In Britain, such cars are labeled as estate cars. An early description of an estate car can be seen in an article in Country Life magazine from 20 May 1914. The vehicle described in the article, however, is more akin to a light truck (lorry) or bus than the estate car of today, which is built on a passenger car chassis. The article also indicates why it is called an estate car, that is because it is useful for various transportation and hauling needs around a country estate:

While a chassis of suitable power built by any first-class manufacturer of industrial vehicles is naturally quite suited to form the basis of a country estate car, some makers have specialized more than others in this direction. For example, Messrs. Commercial Cars, Limited, many years ago brought out a special vehicle which they called the “Norwich Convertible Country House and Estate Car.” A brief description of the capabilities of this machine will be interesting as indicating a type very likely to suit the needs of many landowners. The “Norfolk” car is fitted with detachable bodies, which can be interchanged without the use of any running gear or other mechanism beyond a sling and pulley suspended from the ceiling of the coach-house. As a station ’bus it carries up to about twelve or fourteen passengers and some 15cwt. of luggage. As a shooting brake it is fitted with gun racks and cartridge lockers, and provides very comfortable accommodation for a fair-sized party. In general estate work it carries from 30cwt. to 2 tons of produce or goods of any kind at a very reasonable cost in a simple form of lorry body.

The above article also uses the term shooting brake, another very British term, which the OED dates to 1912. A shooting brake is a variant on the estate car used for hunting, capable of carrying hunters and their dogs, weapons, and other equipment. Like the estate car, the shooting brake has been downsized over the years. Once a truck fitted with seats in the back, present-day versions resemble what is now called a hatchback, only they are marked as shooting brakes by having only two doors. These later shooting brakes tend to be luxury vehicles, marketed toward the elites who hunt on British country estates; Aston Martin, for example, makes shooting brakes. Shooting brakes have come a long way from their lorry origins.

The shooting in shooting brake is easy enough to figure out, but brake is mysterious to most present-day speakers. The explanation is simple enough. A brake or brake is a large carriage intended primarily for breaking young horses, but which could be put various other uses around an estate.

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Sources:

“An Automobile Show in New York.” The Electrical Review, 47.1201, 30 November 1900, 862–63. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Cole, R.M. “Mirror Correspondence. Erzroom, Eastern Turkey, May 5th, 1869.” Christian Mirror (Portland, Maine), 29 June 1869, 1. America’s Historical Newspapers.

“One Vehicle—A Fleet in Itself” (advertisement). Daily Telegraph (London), 7 October 1937, 18. Gale Primary Sources: The Telegraph Historical Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2012, s.v. station wagon, n.; second edition, 1989, estate, n., shooting, n., break, n.2.

“Recent Developments in Estate Motors.” Country Life, 30 May 1914, 56. Internet Archive.

“‘Station Wagon’ Not a Commercial Truck; Pay Only Pleasure Car License, Court Rules.” New York Times, 24 October 1922, 1. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Tulinius, Kári. Comment on “Station Wagon/Estate Car.” LanguageHat (blog), 17 December 2022.

Image credit: Nick Wilson, 2019. Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1954_Studebaker_Conestoga.jpg Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. 

sweeps

1958 photo of a family watching television

16 December 2022

It used to be that four times a year, American television viewers were subjected to sweeps periods. The sweeps were when the A.C. Nielsen Company measured the audiences in all 210 US television markets. Nielsen continuously measured national programming, but local audiences were only measured in November, February, May, and July. The ratings gathered during these periods were used to set advertising rates and to make decisions about local programming. During sweeps months, the networks scheduled new episodes of programs, specials, original productions, and other shows that were likely to draw a larger-than-ordinary audience. In non-sweeps months, viewers got a lot of reruns.

Nielsen began the quarterly sweeps in the 1950s, but the term didn’t start appearing in the mainstream press until the late 1960s. Here are a pair of early mentions from the Houston Chronicle. The first is from 15 October 1967:

Among local stations, though, the most significant ratings are Nielsen’s “big November sweeps,” the ones to be taken Oct. 26 through Nov. 22, as part of the firm’s important November sampling of the national scene.

Another big one is Nielsen’s “March sweep,” taken in late February and early March, and also part of periodic [sic] in-depth national survey.

And this one from 5 February 1968:

The big winner will be revealed in the “February Sweeps” Nielsen, which starts its statistical sampling of local viewer preferences on Feb. 14, and winds up in mid-March.

With the rise of cable and streaming television, the sweeps periods started to lose their significance, although for a long while they remained important as the sweeps periods determined advertising rates for local stations and programs, especially local news. In 2018, Nielsen switched to twelve monthly periods, surveying local markets twelve times throughout the year, negating the importance of the traditional sweeps months.

There are a couple of competing explanations for why the ratings periods were labeled sweeps. The most likely is that it simply comes from sweeping up or gathering the data. An oft-repeated, variant on the general metaphor has it that in the 1950s, Nielsen would collect the paper diaries starting on the east coast and then sweep west collecting them. While this more specific imagery is evocative, there is no evidence to support it, and it has the ring of a post-hoc rationalization.

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Sources:

Hodges, Ann. “News Teams Reshuffled as Nielsens Loom. Houston Chronicle (Texas), 5 February 1968, 13. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

———. “Wasn’t Even Much of a Rasslin’ Match.” Houston Chronicle, 15 October 1967, Zest–9. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, draft additions 1993, s.v. sweep, n.

Photo credit: Evert F. Baumgardner, 1958. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

paparazzi

A grainy, 1963, black-and-white photograph of actor Mickey Hargitay assaulting paparazzo Rino Barillari on the Via Veneto in Rome

14 December 2022

A paparazzo is a freelance photographer who snaps shots of celebrities for sale to media outlets. Paparazzi are known for being aggressive and transgressive in getting their money shot. The name comes from just such a character in Federico Fellini’s 1960 film La Dolce Vita named Paparazzo, played by Walter Santesso.

Paparazzo is an Italian surname, so naming a character that would not be unusual. Fellini claimed that he took the name from an opera libretto and that to him the name suggested a biting insect, a pest. But his co-writer Ennio Flaiano claimed to have contributed the name, and that his inspiration came from its use in George Gissing’s 1901 novel By the Ionian Sea, where it was the name of a hotelier. Gissing’s novel was translated into Italian in 1957, and presumably Flaiano had recently read it. It has also been suggested that paparazzo means clam in the Abruzzi dialect, from which Flaiano hails, and is a metaphor for the opening and closing of a camera shutter.

In Italian, paparazzo is the singular form of the word and paparazzi the plural, but that distinction has not been consistently observed in English, which commonly uses paparazzi for both singular and plural. The earliest use of the word to refer to a freelance photographer (other than the character in the film) that I’m aware of is in Time magazine from 14 April 1961. Time does make the distinction between singular and plural forms:

Trouble that can be shot with a camera is Kroscenko’s business. A three-block stretch of the Via Veneto, cascading from the Aurelian Wall to the U.S. embassy is his favorite hunting ground. Here, in the glittering array of hotels, smart shops and open-air cafés, throng Kroscenko’s picturesque prey. He is a paparazzo,* one of a ravenous wolf pack of freelance photographers who stalk big names for a living and fire with flash guns at point-blank range.

Shot from a Box. The paparazzi are a small crew—a couple of dozen at most—and they are more bullyboys than news photographers. They lounge beneath lampposts, lips leaking cigarettes, cameras drawn like automatics. “Come esce lo faccio secco [When he comes out, I’ll drill him],” they snarl, while waiting for their quarry to open a nightclub door. Then the paparazzi attack.

The footnote reads:

* A name coined by Movie Director Federico Fellini for a freelance photographer in La Dolce Vita, his gamy study of Roman café society. “Paparazzo,” says Fellini, “suggests to me a buzzing insect, hovering, darting, stinging.”

But just a year later, a United Press International article from 13 May 1962 uses paparazzi as both singular and plural. The singular use appears in a quote by the aforementioned Ivan Kroscenco (different spelling in the UPI piece). The quote is at a crossroads between multiple languages. Kroscenco was Russian born and living in Italy, but the quote is rendered in English. This is exactly the type of situation where one would expect strict distinctions between singular and plural forms to be blurred:

Russian-born Ivan Kroscenco is the unofficial “king of the paparazzi.”

A squat man of 32—and always dressed in a black leather jacket—Kroscenco explained that “anybody can take regular photographs. But we want the ones that nobody else can take.

“You’ve got to be fast with a camera, get the instant. Zot, like that,” he said, indicating a fast shot from the hip.

* * *

“Now, everybody claims to be a paparazzi. But I started it and there are only half a dozen of us. The best are just hangers on. But they don’t get much anyway. They don’t know how to operate.”

But a few months later we see the singular paparazzi in an all-English context when the Philadelphia Daily News of 20 September 1962 ran a headline that read, “Ingrid Pops A Paparazzi.” The article is about actor Ingrid Bergman slapping a photographer who was pestering her while she was shopping with her daughters.

Bergman would not be the last celebrity to slug a paparazzi. There is this that appeared in Washington, D.C.’s Evening Star on 7 September 1964:

Peter O’Toole’s telling punch at a paparazzi in Rome has all the Hollywood stars cheering. The pesky flies (literal translation) make life miserable for any foreign celebrity on the Via Veneto. It takes an Italian to take it all in stride—as Rosanno Brazzi did when we were driving with some of his guests out of the Excelsior driveway and the photographers descended like locusts. Rosanno grabbed the wife of a friend and went into a big kissing pose. And how those cameras clicked! When wife Lydia saw the photographs in a magazine, she laughed and laughed. She knows the paparazzi. And her spouse.

Can one blame a celebrity for punching a paparazzi who disrupts their sweet life?

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Sources:

Graham, Sheilah. “Short Honeymoon for Anna Marie.” Evening Star (Washington, D.C.), 7 September 1964, A-19. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“Ingrid Pops a Paparazzi.” Philadelphia Daily News, 20 September 1962, 3. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2005, s.v. paparazzo, n. (and adj.), paparazzi, n.

“Paparazzi on the Prowl.” Time, 14 April 1961, 81. Time Magazine Archive.

“Tale of Two (Eternal) Cities: Just Eternal and Eternally Political” (United Press International). Springfield Union (Massachusetts), 13 May 1962, 16A. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Image credit: Unknown photographer, 1963. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

shit

2 November 2021

[Update 14 December 2022: added 1844 interjectional use]

The passage from Bald’s Leechbook that uses the word shit

It is commonly believed that our so-called “four-letter words” are all Old English in origin, dating back to the earliest days of our language. In most cases, this is a false assumption. Most of our modern swear words are more recent than the early medieval era. Shit, however, is an exception where this common belief is actually correct. It traces back to the Old English scitte.

Here is a passage from Bald’s Leechbook, a mid tenth-century manuscript of a medical text:

Wiþ þon þe men mete untela melte & gecirre on yfele wætan & scittan, þam monnum ðeah þæt hie spiwen, gif him to uneaðe ne sie, gegremme mið wyrtðrence þæt he spiwe.

(In case a person’s food digests badly and turns to an evil liquid and shit. [It is good for] these people that they should spew; if it is difficult for them, induce with wort-drink so that they spew.)

In Old English use, or at least in the instances of the word that survive, scitte specifically means diarrhea.

The Old English verb *scitan (to shit) isn’t found in the extant Old English corpus, but it probably existed. The verb is first recorded in Middle English, in the c.1335 Hail Seint Michel Wiþ þe Lange Sper, a satirical poem of twenty stanzas. The poem is a parody of the Norse practice of minnis-drykkja, or toasting the saints. The first five stanzas toast saints, starting with archangel Michael (technically not a saint, but labeled and treated as such), the next five toast clerics, the next nine toast various tradespeople, and the last stanza addresses the audience, telling them to drink deeply. The word schite appears in a stanza about how tanners and their chemical solutions produce a noxious odor:

Hail be ȝe skinners wiþ ȝure drenche kine!
Who so smilliþ þerto, wo is him aliue,
Whan þat hit þonneriþ, ȝe mote þer in schite.
Daþeit ȝur curteisie, ȝe stinkeþ al þe strete,
     Worþ hit wer, þat he were king
     Þat ditid þis trie þing.

(Hail to you skinners, with your pungent liquid!
Whoever so sniffs it, he is ever so wretched,
When in that place, you must shit in there.
Cursed be your courtesy, you stink up the street,
     It would be worthy, that if he were king
     That he ended this vexatious thing.)

Use of shit as an interjection doesn’t come until much later. The earliest recorded instance of the interjection is in a 16 May 1844 diary entry of one James Thomas Robinson:

Drunk! Drunk! Why in hell cant I be a Byron, or more! Why cant I immortalize my name before morning? I dont think much of this heavy drunk after all that is said about it. I dont think tis very pleasant, this allmighty dizzyness. I cant seem to write. Shit.

The punctuation makes it clear that the word is an interjection and not a characterization of his writing.

The next known use of shit as an interjection is in the record of a 5 July 1865 US Army court martial:

Charge II. Conduct prejudicial to good order and military discipline. Specification 1. In this that he, Private James Sullivan, Company I, 13th Regt. V.R.C. having been ordered by Srgt. Edward R. Finno [?] of said company to fall in the ranks for dress parade did in a contemptuous and disrespectful manner reply (to Srgt. E. R. Finno [?]) “O shit I cant,” or words to that effect.

[I am not certain of the sergeant’s name. The handwriting is not particularly good, and names are difficult to transcribe at the best of times.]

These particular instances may be the earliest we know of, but it is certain that people were saying “oh, shit” long before this date; it just wasn’t recorded in writing. As more handwritten manuscripts are digitized, undoubtedly more and probably earlier instances of the usage will be found.

Oh, and that story about shit originating as an acronym meaning ship high in transport. That’s too obviously a joke, not a serious attempt to explain where the word comes from.

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Sources:

Cockayne, Oswald. Leechdoms, Wortcunning, and Starcraft of Early England, vol. 2 of 3. London: Longman, et al., 1865, 226–227. HathiTrust Digital Archive. London, British Library, Royal MS 12.D.xvii, fol. 84v.

Heuser, W. Die Kildare-Gedichte. Bonn: P. Hanstein, 1904. 157. HathiTrust Digital Archive. https://www.hathitrust.org/ London, British Library, Harley MS 913, fol. 8r.

Martin, Susan. “‘Why Cant I Immortalize My Name Before Morning?’: The Diaries of James Thomas Robinson.” The Beehive (blog). Massachusetts Historical Society. 25 February 2019.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019. s.v. shit, n., shitten, v.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2011, modified September 2021, shit, n. and adj., shit, v.; modified December 2020, s.v. shit, int.

Proceedings Court Martial United States Army (Judge Advocate General's Office), US National Archives: Rec. group 153, File MM-2412 3 Charge II.

Sheidlower, Jesse. “Interjectional ‘Shit’ in a Drunken 1844 Diary Entry.” Strong Language (blog), 13 December 2022.

Turville-Petre, Thorlac. Poems from BL MS Harley 913, “The Kildare Manuscript.” Early English Text Society OS 345. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2015, 9–10, 12.

Image credit: Portion of London, British Library, Royal MS 12.D.xvii, fol. 84v. Public domain image as a mechanical reproduction of a public domain work.

Missouri

10 August 2021

(13 December 2022: Added note about the transcription of the Marquette map and references to the two McCafferty journal articles.)

Detail of a 1673 map by Jacques Marquette that identifies the territory of the Missouri people. This portion of the map contains the name ȣmissouri along the southern bank of what is now called the Des Moines River, near its confluence with the Mississippi River, in what is now northeastern Missouri.

The name Missouri, both a U.S. state and river, comes from the Miami-Illinois weemeehsoorita (one who has a canoe), an ethnonym for a Siouan people who once lived in what is now the northeastern portion of the state. The Miami word breaks down into wi- (third-person possessive marker) + -mihs- (wood) + -oor- (boat) + -i- (inanimate noun) + -t- (third-person animate transitive participle marker) -a- (third-person animate transitive participle ending).

The written name first appears as ȣmissouri on Jacques Marquette’s 1673 French map of the Mississippi. The < ȣ > is an < ou > ligature, a character used by early French missionaries to represent the / w / sound in Indigenous words.

The name appears in English by 1698, when it appears in a translation of Louis Hennepin’s 1697 Nouvelle Découverte d'un Très Grand Pays Situé dans l'Amérique. Hennepin had accompanied René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle on his 1679–80 expedition. In this translation, the Missouri people are referred to as Messorites:

We shook Hands, to seal these Promises; and after Prayers, imbark’d in our Canow the 8th of March, 1680. The Ice which came down from the North, gave us a great deal of trouble; but we were so careful, that our Canow receiv’d no hurt; and after six Hours rowing, we came to the River of a Nation call’d Osages, who live toward the Messorites. That River comes from the Westward, and seems as big as the Meschasipi; but the Water is so muddy, that ’tis almost impossible to drink of it.

The Issati, who inhabit toward the Source of the Meschasipi, come sometimes in their Excursions to the Place where I was then; and I understood afterwards from them, having learn’d their Language, that this River of the Osages and Messorites is form’d from several other Rivers, which spring from a Mountain about twelves Day’s Journey from its Mouth.

Later on, Hennepin’s translator writes:

We left the Akansas upon the 24th of April, having presented them with several little Toys, which they receiv’d with an extraordinary Joy; and during sixty Leagues, saw no Savage neither of the Nation of Chikacha, or Messorite, which made us believe that they were gone a Hunting with their Families, or else fled away for fear of the Savages of Tintonha, that is to say, inhabiting the Meadows, who are their irreconcileable Enemies.

This made our Voyage the more easie, for our Men landed several times to kill some Fowls and other Game, with which the Banks of the Meschasipi are plentifully stock’d; however, before we came to the Mouth of the River of the Illinois, we discover’d several Messorites, who came down all along the River; but as they had no Pyrogues with them, we cross’d to the other side; and to avoid any surprize during the Night, we made no Fire; and the reb y theSavages [sic] could not discover whereabout we were; for doubtless they would have murther’d us, thinking we were their Enemies.

The Missouri spelling is in place in English at the turn of the eighteenth century. From a 1703 translation of Louis Armond de Lahontan’s Nouveaux Voyages dans l’Amerique, which uses the name to refer both to the river and the people:

I took leave of ’em the next day, which was the 13th, and in four days time, by the help of the Current and our Oars, made the River of the Missouris. This done, we run up against the Stream of that River, which was at least as rapid as the Missisipi was at that time; and arriv’d on the 18th at the first Village of the Missouris, where I only stop’d to make the People some Presents that procur’d me a hundred Turkeys, with which that People are wonderfully well stock’d.

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Sources:

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

Hennepin, Louis. A New Discovery of a Vast Country in America. London: M. Bentley, et al. 1698, 150–51, 168–69. Early English Books Online (EEBO). (There are two separate printings of this book from 1698, which are indistinguishable from their title pages. I am citing from the earlier printing, which has narrower and more pages and many more printer’s errors, as can be seen in the passage quoted. The OED errs in quoting from the later printing but citing the page numbers of the earlier.)

de Lahontan, Louis Armond. New Voyages to North-America, vol 1 of 2. London: H. Bonwicke, et al., 1703, 130. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Marquette, Jacques. Map of the New Discovery Made by the Jesuit Fathers in 1672 and Continued by Father Jacques Marquette, from the Same Group, Accompanied by a Few Frenchmen in the Year 1673, Named “Manitounie.” 1673. National Library of France. Digital image from the Library of Congress, LCCN 2021668635.

McCafferty, Michael. Native American Place-Names of Indiana. Urbana: U of Illinois Press, 2008, 192n.

———. “On the Birthday and Etymology of the Placename Missouri.” Names, 51.2, June 2003, 111–25.

———. “Returning to Missouri.” Names, 60.2, June 2012, 105–06.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2002, modified June 2021, s.v. Missouri, n. and adj.

Image credit: Jacques Marquette, 1673. Original at the National Library of France. Digital image from the Library of Congress, LCCN 2021668635.