third degree

Poster for the 1919 silent film The Third Degree

23 December 2022

There are many types of third degree. In many contexts, the phrase is simply a collocation of words designating a classification by stages, as in third-degree burn, the worst type of burn. But in law enforcement slang, the third degree refers to a police interrogation that involves torture. Usually, it is difficult to pin down the exact origin of a slang term, but in this case we can trace it to the New York City Police Department of the late nineteenth century and the methods employed by then Chief of Detectives Thomas F. Byrnes.

Byrnes labeled his interrogation technique the third degree, a name he apparently took from Freemasonry. Admission to the highest level, or third degree, of Masonry involves a ritual questioning that includes simulated violence. References to the third degree of Masonry date to at least the 1770s.

But it would be Byrnes who labeled his own brand of interrogation as the third degree. We have this account that appeared in the New York Tribune of 5 February 1883 of the arrest of several men who allegedly committed burglaries and then called in fire alarms to the locations they had robbed:

The Central Office detectives under the direction of Inspector Byrnes on Saturday arrested the gang of men who have been for two years sending out false fire alarms. They are all young, their ages ranging from seventeen to twenty-three years. When taken to Police Headquarters and put through what Inspector Byrnes styled “the third degree of initiation,” or “pumping process,” they all confessed their guilt.

I have not been able to determine if Byrnes was a Freemason, but his use of initiation here would seem to be an allusion to the Masonic ritual.

And there is this somewhat more detailed description of Bryne’s third degree in the New York Herald of 23 March 1887. The article does not specifically allege torture, strongly hints at it. The prisoner, Peter J. Inglis, was accused of murder and of shooting at two police officers, so one might expect the police to be rather unforgiving:

BYRNES’ THIRD DEGREE

Two Mysterious Prisoners Under Inquisition at Police Headquarters—Was Inglis One?

When Inspector Byrnes subjects a suspected criminal to the moral rack and thumbscrews in his private confessional at Police Headquarters he calls it putting the candidate through the “third degree.” It is a sort of hypnotic process, and real criminals seldom resist it.

The chief of detectives operated on two subjects last night. They were brought to his room by Detective Sergeants King and O’Connor. One was a tall slender young man who closely resembled Peter J. Inglis, and the other a large stout woman clad in a dark velvet dress and wearing a brocade shawl. At different times during the night, and after the prisoners had passed several hours in the gloomy dungeons below, they were brought up stairs one at a time.

Detectives O’Connor and King assisted in working the “third degree.” The young man was brought up and down again, but the woman was only afforded a single interview. She was led down stairs crying and when the bolts had been sprung on her cell her screams could be heard throughout the entire building.

What were they arrested for or the nature of the confession they had made? Inspector Byrnes had nothing to say. He looked cross as he drew his coat collar about his neck and started, as he said, for home. He admitted, however, that he had been giving the caged birds “the usual course,” but would not remain long enough to give the reporters a chance to try “third degree” hypnotism on him.

When the inspector’s doorbell was rung, an hour or so afterward, the servant said that Mr. Byrnes was not at home, and she did not expect him until very late.

Another article in the Herald the following day doesn’t use the term but again hints at torture through the use of euphemism:

Inspector Byrnes was as silent as the grave yesterday regarding the mysterious subjects he “hypnotized” the previous night. Still, it was learned that the young man thrice lead into the “confessional” was Peter J. Inglis, who the Brooklyn police think is the Weeks murderer. The returns of the Detective Bureau show that Inglis was the only young man locked up in the Police Central Office for several hours on Tuesday night. No record could be found, however, of the woman who was led sobbing and screaming down to the cell by Detectives King and O’Connor.

“On what charge was this weeping woman arrested?” asked a HERALD reporter of Inspector Byrnes yesterday.

The Inspector looked daggers at the reporter and scowled. Then he curtly replied:—“That woman came to see me about her wayward son. Of course she would weep under the circumstances”—and the Inspector strode away quickly.

Third degree implies that there are defined stages of interrogation, but in practice this is not the case. The phrase simply denotes police brutality during questioning.

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Sources:

“Arrest of a Gang of Burglars. Their Capture by Inspector Byrnes.” New York Tribune, 5 February 1883, 5. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Byrnes’ Mysterious Methods.” New York Herald, 24 March 1887, 64. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“Byrnes’ Third Degree.” New York Herald, 23 March 1887, 4. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2022, s.v. third degree, n., third degree, v.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. third degree, n. and adj.

Preston, William. Illustrations of Masonry. London: Brother J. Williams, 1772, 205. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Image credit: 1919, Vitagraph Company. Public domain image as a mechanical reproduction of a public domain work.

swan song

Two swans in a pond

19 December 2022

A swansong is the final work or performance of an artist. The word comes from the belief that just before dying a swan, a bird not known for its song, will utter one beautiful melody. The phrase doesn’t appear in English until the sixteenth century, but the belief dates to antiquity.

Ovid, for instance, references the belief in Book 14 of the Metamorphoses in describing the death of Caieta, the wet-nurse of Aeneas:

ultimus adspexit Thybris luctuque viaque
fessam et iam longa ponentem corpora ripa.
illic cum lacrimis ipso modulata dolore
verba sono tenui maerens fundebat, ut olim
carmina iam moriens canit exequialia cycnus; 

(Tiber was last to see her, weary with grief and journeying, laying her body down on his wide banks. There, with tears, her grief set to music, she poured out her mournful words in feeble tones, just as the swan, in dying, sometimes sings a funeral song.)

Chaucer, in the late fourteenth century, also references the myth, although like Ovid he does not use the word or exact phrase. From the ending of the poem Anelida and Arcite, about a jilted lover:

But as the swan, I have herd seyd ful yore,
Ayeins his deth shal singen his penaunce,
So singe I here my destinee or chaunce,
How that Arcite Anelida so sore
Hath thirled with the poynt  of remembraunce.

(But like the swan, I have heard said of yore,
Facing his death shall sing his penance,
So sing I here my destiny or fate,
How that Arcite so sorely
Has stabbed Anelida with the point of remembrance.)

As for the term swansong itself, that is in place by 1597, when it appears in William Warner’s Albion’s England:

But now must end our Swan-song, now the Swan himselfe must end,
Euen he, that toyld such tedious Seas his Countries weale to mend,
Returning Homewards, neere at Home, euen on the Scottish Cost,
Did wracke, and those aboord his Ship then perished for most.

Swansong is a compound that was most likely formed in English, although it appears in European languages at about the same time. German has Schwanengesang from 1561 and Middle French chant du cycne from 1546 in reference to the swan’s singing, although use of those terms to refer to an artist’s final work come later than the English. How these parallel developments influenced the English term, or vice versa, is anyone’s guess.

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Sources:

Chaucer, Geoffrey. “Anelida and Arcite.” The Riverside Chaucer, third edition, Larry D. Benson, ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987, lines 346–50, 381.

Ovid. Metamorphoses, vol. 2 of 2, books 9–15 (Ovid vol. 4 of 6), second edition. Loeb Classical Library 43. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1984, 14.426–30, 330.

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

Warner, William. Albions England. London: Widow Orwin for Ioan Broome, 1597, 11.65, 280. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Photo credit: Marek Szczepanek, 2005. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

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.