triage

A wounded American soldier arrives at a triage station in France during World War I

2 January 2023

In general, to triage is to sort and classify. The verb is frequently found in medical contexts, where it is used to refer to prioritizing patients in need of treatment. But English use of the word has its origins in commercial contexts, in particular that of the trade in wool.

Triage is a borrowing from French, where it is a noun derived from the verb trier, which simply means to classify or sort. It dates to the fourteenth century in Middle French, and we see it in Randle Cotgrave’s 1611 French-English dictionary:

Triage: m. Choice, a culling, or picking out from among others. Triages de forests. The seuerall diuisions, walkes, or parts, of Forests.

It would take another century from Cotgrave’s recognition of the French word to its appearance in English. Triage appears in Ephraim Chamber’s 1728 Cyclopædia under the entry for wool:

The Spaniards make the like division into three Sorts, which they call Prime, Second, and Third; and for the greater Ease, denote each Bale or Pack with a Capital Letter denoting the Sort———If the Triage or Separation be well made, in fifteen Bales there will be twelve mark’d R, that is Refine, or Prime; two mark’d F, for Fine or Second; and one S, for Thirds.

We see the verb in John Smith’s 1747 Chronicon Rusticum-Commericale; or Memoirs of Wool:

Wools of France are commonly sold by the Farmers and Labourers, en suis, i.e. unwashed. Those that buy them first Hand, either wash and triage them, or else sell them in the Fleece, washed only. When the Wool has been triaged, then it is sold only by Weight.

From its use in the wool trade, use of triage spread into the trade in other commodities.

Medical adoption of triage occurred during the First World War and given that American and British soldiers fought primarily in France, the medical use is probably a second borrowing from French and not an extension of the earlier English use in commercial contexts. Tracy Putnam, an American volunteer in the French ambulance service, recorded the word in his diary entry for 27 December 1915:

Chilly, intermittent rain.
Went down about noon. The triage has been transferred from Moosch to Willer; after leaving my men at the latter place, proceeded to the former.

And the verb came into medical use during the war as well. From 24 January 1919 congressional testimony on casualties sustained during the 1918 Meuse-Argonne offensive:

Then, in addition to the 1,733 admitted to the dead and missing by the Secretary’s statement, there must be added the statistics given by the man who had charge of the triage, who says he triaged 5,000, and he believed that in addition to this several hundred went through other triages or were evacuated directly from the field to the evacuation hospital.

Because triage starts with tri-, it is commonly assumed that the word comes from the sorting into three categories. In a medical context, this would be sorting patients into three groups, one for immediate treatment, one for less serious cases where treatment can be delayed, and a third for mortally injured patients who are to receive palliative care. But this is a false etymology, and triage is unrelated to tri- or three.

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Sources:

Chambers, Ephraim. Cyclopædia: or, an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, vol. 2 of 2. London: James and John Knapton, et al., 1728, s.v. wool, 377. Archive.org.

Cotgrave, Randle. A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues. London: Adam Islip, 1611, s.v. triage. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

“Losses of the Thirty-Fifth Division During the Argonne Battle.” Hearings on the Committee on Rules of the House of Representatives on H. Res. 505, 24 January 1919, 49. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2020, s.v. triage, n., triage, v.

Putnam, Tracy J. “The Death of a Comrade” (diary entry for 27 December 1915). The Harvard Volunteers in Europe. M.A. DeWolfe Howe, ed. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1916, 131. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Smith, John. Chronicon Rusticum-Commericale; or Memoirs of Wool, &c., vol. 2 of 2. London: T. Osborne, 1747, 411. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Photo Credit: US Army Signal Corps, c.1918. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

rain cats and dogs

Erik (the cat) and Lila (the dog) poised for conflict (or in their case, snuggles).

30 December 2022

The phrase to rain cats and dogs means to rain heavily, to storm. The underlying metaphor is quite straightforward, likening a storm to cats and dogs fighting. But despite being rather obvious, numerous spurious explanations for the phrase have arisen.

The idea of cats and dogs being sworn enemies and always at odds with one another dates to at least the sixteenth century. It appears in a 1557 translation of a dialogue by Erasmus:

Eulalya. I wyll tell you a prety story more, and so make an ende One of oure neyghboures, a well disposed and a goddes man, but that he is some what testie, on a day pomeld his wife well and thriftely aboute the pate and so good a woman as euer was borne, she picked her into a inner parler, and there weepynge and sobbynge, eased her heuye harte, anone after, by chaunce her husbande came into the same place, and founde hys wyfe wepyng. What sitest thou heare sayth he seighing & sobbig like a child The[n] she like a wise woman sayde. Is it not more honesty for me to lamente my dolours here in a secret place, the[n] to make wondering and on oute crye in the strete, as other wome[n] do. At so wysely and womanly a saing his hart melted, promysynge her faythfullye and truelie that he woulde neuer laye stroke on her afterwarde, nor neuer did.

Xantippa. No more wil mine god thanke my selfe.

Eulalya. But then ye are alwaies one at a nother, agreinge lyke dogges and cattes.

Erasmus’s original Latin, however, does not contain the simile of dogs and cats. It reads:

Sed interim est inter uos bellum perpetuum.

(But, nevertheless, there is continuous conflict between you two.)

The metaphor of a storm being a fight between cats and dogs appears a century later. In the earliest appearance that we know of, it is polecats instead of domestic cats, but this is a result of wordplay, so the phrase rain dogs and polecats is an allusion to the already existing, but as yet unrecorded, rain dogs and cats. It appears in Richard Brome’s play The City Witt, published in 1653 but written no later than 1652, the year of Brome’s death:

Sar[pego]. I will now breath a most strong and Poeticall execration
Against the Universe.     (Bri[dget].) Sir I beseech you—

Sar. From henceforth Erit Fluvius Deucalionis
The world shall flow with dunces; Regnabitque, and it shall raine
Dogmata Polla Sophon, Dogs and Polecats, and so forth.

Brome is mixing up Latin, Greek, and English here for satirical effect. The Latin erit fluvius Deucalionis means “it shall be the river of Deucalion”; Deucalion being a Noah-like character in a classical flood myth. Regnabitque literally means “and it shall rain.” But then Brome has Sarpego mistake Greek for Latin. In Greek dogmata polla sophon means “many are the doctrines of the wise,” but in Latin these words would mean something along the lines of “the doctrines of inconsequential wise men”; in other words, regnabitque dogmata polla sophon could mean something like and the world shall flow with dunces. And after this bit of bad Latin, Sarpego goes on to mistranslate dogmata as “dogs” and polla as “polecats,” a move Brome executes to make wordplay alluding to the English phrase rain cats and dogs.  

We see the actual phrasing rain dogs and cats a few years later in Thomas Flatman’s 1661 Don Juan Lambeto:

I am right glad to see you Sr. Lambert, though not so glad to see you here, however it is better to be here than in the open Fields, where there is no shelter against the Rain, nor any other kind of storm that should happen, for here we have Houses over our heads, so that if it should rain Dogs and Cats we could have no harm.

And in the early eighteenth century we see the animals’ order flipped to the familiar rain cats and dogs. From Jonathan Swift’s 1738 Compleat Collection of Genteel and Ingenious Conversation:

Nev[erout]. Come, Sir John, I foresee it will rain terribly.

Lord Sm[art]. Come, Sir John, do nothing rashly, let us drink first.

Lord Sp[arkish]. Nay, I know Sir John will go, though he was sure it would rain Cats and Dogs. But pray stay, Sir John, you’ll be Time enough to go to Bed by Candle-light.

Despite having a simple and obvious explanation, the phrase has inspired a number of fanciful origin stories that at best have little evidence to support them and at worst are obvious hoaxes.

Perhaps the most famous is the internet myth that states the phrase is from the fact that dogs and cats (and other animals) would live in thatched roofs of medieval homes. Heavy rain would drive the cats and dogs out of their rooftop beds, hence the phrase. This is just patently untrue and displays total ignorance of the qualities of thatched roofs, not to mention the ability of dogs to climb.

Another explanation, one with a bit more behind it, claims that the phrase is a reference to heavy rains in London drowning stray cats and dogs, leaving the streets looking like the animal carcasses had fallen from the skies. Again, we turn to Swift, who uses this imagery in his 1710 Description of a City Shower:

Now from all Parts the swelling Kennels flow,
And bear their Trophies with them as they go:
Filths of all Hues and Odours, see to tell
What Street they sail’d from, by their Sight and Smell.
They, as each Torrent drives, with rapid Force
From Smithfield, or St. Pulchre’s, shape their Course,
And in huge Confluent join at Snowhill Ridge,
Fall from the Conduit prone to Holbourn-Bridge.
Sweepings from Butchers Stalls, Dung, Guts, and Blood,
Drown’d Puppies, stinking Sprats, all drench’d in Mud,
Dead Cats, and TurnipTops, come tumbling down the Flood.

But not only is the phrase rain cats and dogs in use before Swift penned this, the rain does not consist of dogs and cats, rather it is what kills them. Furthermore, the poem is a spoof on Virgil’s Georgics, so shouldn’t be taken literally.

Other proffered explanations include the idea that the phrase is from the archaic French catdoupe, meaning waterfall or cataract, or that it uses imagery from Norse mythology, where cats had an influence on the weather, and Odin, the sky god, was attended by wolves. All of these are unlikely given the early metaphorical uses of cats and dogs to signify something noisy and violent. The actual explanation is the simplest. The noise and violence of a storm is the metaphorical equivalent of a cat and dog fight.

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Sources:

Brome, Richard. “The City Witt” (1652?). Five New Plays. London: Humphrey Moseley, et al., 1653, 4.1., sig. D7v. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Erasmus, Desiderius. Colloquiorum familiarium opus. Basel: Michael Ising, 1543, 250. Google Books.

———. A Mery Dialogue, Declaringe the Propertyes of Shrowde Shrewes, and Honest Wyues. London: J. Cawood for Antony Kytson, 1557, sig. B5r–B5v. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Flatman, Thomas. Don Juan Lamberto, second edition, corrected. London: J. Brudenell for Henry Marsh, 1661, sig. Lr. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. cat and dog, n.

Swift, Jonathan. A Compleat Collection of Genteel and Ingenious Conversation. Dublin: George Faulkner, 1738, 79. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

———. “A Description of a City Shower.” Miscellanies. London: Benjamin Motte, 1728, 17–18. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Tréguer, Pascal. “The Authentic Origin of ‘To Rain Cats and Dogs.’” Wordhistories.net, 23 June 2016.

———. Comment (4 November 2013). Liberman, Anatoly. “Etymological gleanings for October 2013.” OUPblog, 30 October 2013.

Photo credit: David Wilton, 2022.

threshold

A threshold

26 December 2022

Threshold is a word that English inherited from Proto-Germanic with cognates in German, Icelandic, Swedish, and Danish. The compound comes from two roots. The thresh- comes from a verb meaning to tread or step; in Present-Day English to thresh a cereal crop is to separate the grain from the chaff by trampling or beating it. The -hold comes from a Germanic suffix that designates a tool or instrument. We also see the suffix in the word needle, but in the case of threshold metathesis—a reordering of the phonemes—has occurred, with the / l / and the / d / swapping places.

So, a threshold is a thing that is stepped upon, that is the bottom sill of a doorway or entrance to a building.

Here it appears in the Old English translation of Exodus 12:22:

& dyppað isopan sceaf on ðam blode ðe is on ðam ðrexwolde, & sprengaþ on ðæt oferslege & on ægðrum gedyre, he forgæð þæs huses duru & ne læt slean nanne man on eowrum husum.

(& dip a sheaf of hyssop in the blood that is on the threshold, & sprinkle [it] on the lintel & on each doorpost, he will pass by the door of these houses & will let no one be slain in your houses.)

Most present-day English versions translate this as basin or bowl instead of threshold, which makes more sense in context. The Hebrew word saph can mean either threshold or basin. The Latin Vulgate translates it as limen, or threshold, and the Old English version is translating from the Latin.

Threshold can also be used figuratively to mean a starting point or a border to be crossed. This figurative use also dates to Old English. From the Old English translation of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, in a passage where Herebald is speaking of his master, John of Beverley:

Forðon þe he mæc, þæs ðe ic cweðe, from deaðes þirscwalde wæs acegende, & mec to lifes wege mid his gebede & blætsunge gelædde.

(Because he, so to speak, recalled me from death’s threshold, & led me to life’s way with his prayers and blessings.)

Þirscwalde (threshold) translates limine in Bede’s original Latin.

There is a specious bit of internet lore floating about that badly misstates the origin of threshold. I haven’t seen it circulating lately, but it being the internet such things never die. It claims that “thresh” was placed on the bare floor and a block of wood, the threshold, would hold the thresh in when the door was opened. Presumably, whoever invented this explanation misunderstood the action of threshing wheat and assumed that thresh was straw. It’s a reasonable off-the-cuff guess if one does not know etymology or the meaning of thresh, but it is just plain wrong.

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Sources:

Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Bertram Colgrave and R.A.B. Mynors, eds. Oxford Medieval Texts. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1969, 5.6, 466.

———. The Old English Version of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, part 1, vol. 2. Thomas Miller, trans. and ed. Early English Text Society, OS 96. London: Oxford UP, 1891, 5.6, 398.

Exodus 12:22. Crawford, S.J., ed. The Old English Version of the Heptateuch. Early English Text Society, OS 160. London: Oxford UP, 1969, 245.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2021, s.v. threshold, n., thresh, v.; September 2003, s.v. needle, n.; second edition, 1989, s.v. bold, n.

Photo credit: Palagiri Rama krishna Reddy, 2013. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.  

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.