bigwig

1793 colored mezzotint of three affluent physicians in large, powdered wigs

9 January 2023

A bigwig is a person of some importance. The origin of the term is exactly what one might expect; it arises out of the eighteenth-century practice of wealthy and important personages wearing large, powdered wigs. But in its earliest uses the term is particularly associated with physicians, only later being applied more generally to important people.

Big wig appears first as a noun phrase referring to the wig, not the person wearing it. We see such a literal phrase in Oliver Goldsmith’s 1759 essay “On Dress”:

For my entertainment the beauty had all that morning been improving her charms, the beau had put on lace, and the young doctor a big wig, merely to please me.

The earliest use, that I know of, of bigwig applied to a person, again a physician, is in George Alexander Stevens’s 1772 song Tom O’ Bedlam.

Here’s a Bumber, my Boys, may we still find the way,
To speak what we know, and to know what we say.
Ye big Wigs of Gresham some Nostrum compound,
To keep our Heads clear and preserve our Hearts sound.
May Greatness and Goodness as partners agree,
May our sons, like ourselves, social sing, WE ARE FREE!
And may we, self conscious, presumption despise,
Nor e’er be so mad as to thing ourselves wise.

Note the capitalization (it was a common eighteenth-century practice to capitalize all nouns) indicates that big Wig was not yet considered a single lexical item but was still considered a noun phrase with an adjective.

And we also see it in Joseph Atkinson’s 1788 play A Match for a Widow. In this scene, set in a tavern, a doctor, Quack, is in conversation with two soldiers, Gauge and Drill:

Quack. O, curse long stories, they make me yawn—let’s drink about, here’s the king’s health.

Drill. Aye, God bless him—he’s a good master, if he’d but make the big wigs give the poor soldiers better pay.

Gauge. You minister—what, to Doctor the constitution as you do your patients—by killing them.

Quack. No reflections on my calling, if you please, Mr. Gauge.

And here, the italicization of big wig indicates that the phrase was by this point considered a single unit, a lexical item.

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Sources:

Atkinson, Joseph. A Match for a Widow. London: C. Dilly, 1788, 2.1, 19. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Goldsmith, Oliver. “On Dress.” The Bee. Being Essays on the Most Interesting Subjects. London: J. Wilkie, 1759, 38. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2008, s.v. bigwig, n.

Stevens, George Alexander. “Tom O’ Bedlam.” Songs, Comic and Satyrical. Oxford: 1772, 229. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Image credit: Robert Dighton, 1793, Wellcome Collection. Public domain image.

actinium

Actinium-255 medical radioisotope. The blue glow is due to the ionization of the surrounding air by alpha particles.

6 January 2023

The discovery of actinium, element 89, is generally credited to chemist André-Louis Debierne in 1899, a year after the Curies discovered radium. Debierne named the new radioactive element after the Greek άκτις (actis), meaning beam or ray. In this way, it is the Greek equivalent of the Curies’ Latinate radium.

Debierne announced his discovery the following year in the journal Comptes Rendus Hebdomadaires des Séances de l'Académie des Sciences (Weekly Reports of the Meetings of the Academy of Sciences), and his article was quickly translated into English and republished in the British Journal of the Chemical Society:

Actinium: A New Radio-active Element. By A. Debierne
(Compt. rend., 1900, 130, 906–908).—The new radio-active element, actinium, belonging to the iron group (compare this vol. ii, 20), may be obtained in a more concentrated form by submitting the substances containing it to the following operations.

But Debierne’s claim is disputed, with some chemists believing that his 1899 discovery was in error and that credit for the element’s discovery should go to Friedrich Oskar Giesel, who isolated the element in 1902. Giesel dubbed his discovery emanium, due to its radioactive emanations, but as both Giesel and Debierne claimed to have identified the same element, the older name received priority.

This was not the first time the name actinium was involved in a controversial elemental discovery. In 1881, Thomas Lamb Phipson claimed to have discovered a new element, one that changed chemically when exposed to sunlight. He also dubbed it actinium, but while his name has the same Greek root, Lamb’s name differed semantically. He named it for the supposed element’s actinic properties; both actinic and actinism had been in use since 1845 to describe chemicals and chemical processes affected by light rays. For example, photosynthesis and film photography are actinic processes. Phipson announced his discovery in the 24 June 1881 issue of Chemical News:

It took from 4 to 8 hours’ exposure to direct sunlight to give to this portion under the glass a very slight fawn-colour.

Of course these phenomena could not be due to any compound of silver; nevertheless, the specimens were tested for silver, and with great care, but without the slightest result. In fact, no actinic substance has been met with that will darken in the sunshine, become white again in the dark, and will not darken under a sheet of ordinary window glass. It was hinted that I was dealing with a new element (to be called “Actinium”); but the continuation of my experiments lead me to believe that the phenomena described above may probably be due to the presence of sulphide of barium and protoxide of iron in the specimens, rather than some unknown metal.

While in his initial announcement Phipson hedged the idea that he had discovered a new element, a few months later he was more assertive in his claim:

My experiments on the new metal Actinium have been interrupted in various ways, and by the fact that, for the sake of my health, I have been compelled to leave London for a short time. […] As the only method which I have yet discovered of separating oxide of actinium from oxide of zinc is by means of caustic soda, I am not certain that I have, hitherto, obtained the process perfectly exempt from oxide of zinc, even after four or five treatments at boiling heat.

Phipson was mistaken in his belief that he had discovered a new element, and few chemists at the time accepted his claim. His claim and this earlier sense of actinium are now mere footnotes in the history of science.

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Sources:

“Actinium.” Journal of the Chemical Society, 78.2, 1900, 350. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Kirby, H.W. “The Discovery of Actinium.” Isis, 62.3, Autumn 1971, 290–308. JSTOR.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, November 2010, s.v. actinium, n., actinic, adj., actinism, n.

Phipson, Thomas Lamb. “Correspondence: Actinium.” Chemical News, 43.1142, 14 October 1881, 191. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

———. “On a Curious Actinic Phenomenon.” Chemical News, 43.1126, 24 June 1881, 283. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Waggoner, William H. “The First Actinium Claim.” Journal of Chemical Education, 53.9, 1 September 1976, 580.

Photo credit: Oak Ridge National Laboratory, 2015. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

atmospheric river

2010 image from the GOES 11 satellite showing an atmospheric river flowing from the eastern Pacific to California

5 January 2023

In current meteorological jargon, an atmospheric river is a narrow stream of very humid air that often carries a series of storms with it. Perhaps the most famous of these is the so-called Pineapple Express that flows from Hawaiian waters to the west coast of North America. But the term is not a new one, having existed for some 150 years.

And metaphorical use of river to refer to a mass of a flowing substance is even older, dating to at least the fourteenth century when it appears in a Wycliffite translation of Job 29.6:

I wesh my feet with butter, and the ston helde to me ryueres of oile.

The Vulgate uses rivos. So, the underlying metaphor is an old, obvious, and common one.

But the specific phrase atmospheric river dates to at least 1865, when John Mullan used it in his survey of the American West to describe a belt of warm air that flowed from Missouri to Montana:

The meteorological statistics collected during a great number of years have enabled us to trace an isochimenal line across the continent, from St. Joseph’s, Missouri, to the Pacific; and the direction taken by this line is wonderful and worthy the most important attention in all future legislation that looks towards the travel and settlement of this country. This line, which leaves St. Joseph’s in latitude 40°, follows the general line of the Platte to Fort Laramie, where, from newly introduced causes, it tends north-westwardly, between the Wind River chain and the Black Hills, crossing the summit of the Rocky Mountains in latitude 47°; showing that in the interval from St. Joseph’s it had gained six degrees of latitude. Tracing it still further westward it goes as high as 48°, and develops itself in a fan-like shape in the plains of the Columbia. From Fort Laramie to the Clark’s Fork, I call this an atmospheric river of heat, varying in width from one to one hundred miles. On its either side, north and south, are walls of cold air, and which are so clearly perceptible that you always detect them when you are upon its shores.

The use in the present-day meteorological sense dates to at least 1871. From an article on meteorology by T.B. Maury in Scribner’s Monthly from February of that year:

But the Gulf Stream is a great liquid avenue, over whose blue waters roll mighty masses of atmosphere and ride in terrifio [sic] triumph the fiercest cyclones.

Its track is overhung by aqueous vapor, and is thus a region of rarefied air and of a low barometer.

Here is a natural ATMOSPHERIC RIVER-BED. Its banks are colder and heavier air and its bottom is the bosom of the sea itself. The storm, as it passes along this great highway carved out for it by an ordinance of the Almighty, may rub and fret against its bounds, as the locomotive, thundering along the curve of the road, may chafe against and batter the steel edges of the unyielding rail. It may even, like the engine, leave and leap its track and fly off in tangential fury. But it has a track, an ordained track, in which man may ordinarily expect to find it.

And from later in the article:

Moreover, as the Gulf Stream of the Atlantic is the natural channel for the storms which beat upon the British coast, so the Kuro-Siwo, or Black Stream of Japan, a mightier gulf stream than ours, whose recurving waters wash and warm the Pacific coasts of America, affords a pathway for cyclones generated in the Pacific Ocean and the China seas. This latter region of the earth is near the very womb and nursery of the tempest and the typhoon. The storm engendered in its bosom finds, in the atmospheric river-bed overhanging the smoking waters of the Kuro-Siwo, a free and ready transit.

Chalk another one up to the recency illusion.

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Sources:

Maury, T.B. “Weather-Telegrams and Storm-Forecasts by the American Signal Service.” Scribner’s Monthly, 1.4, February 1871, 418, 421. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Mullan, John. Miners and Travelers’ Guide to Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado. New York: William M. Franklin, 1865, 39–40. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2010, s.v. river, n.1.

Image credit: US Naval Research Laboratory, Monterey, 2010. Public domain image.

bagel

A poppy-seed, Montreal-style bagel topped with lox and cream cheese

4 January 2023

A bagel is a toroidal bread roll that is boiled and then baked, giving it a dense consistency. It is traditionally associated with Jewish cuisine. The word is recorded in Yiddish as early as 1610, but the roll is undoubtedly older. The first syllable comes from a common Germanic root referring to things that are curved or bent.

We see a form of the word bagel appear in an English text in Israel Zangwill’s 1892 Children of the Ghetto, but Zangwill presents the Yiddish word rather than an Anglicized one:

So Moses went away and bought dinner, treating his family to some beuglich, or circular twisted rolls, in his joy.

The Oxford English Dictionary has an Anglicized use from the 27 July 1898 New York Commercial Advertiser:

The feast to-night before commencing the fast will consist of beigel, hard-boiled eggs besprinkled with ashes and milk.

The earliest use of the Anglicized word that I can independently verify is in a 1912 translation of Israel Joseph Zevin’s (a.k.a. Tashrak) short story The Hole in a Beigel:

When I was a little Cheder-boy, my Rebbe, Bunem-Briene-Gite’s, a learned man, who was always tormenting me with Talmudical questions and with riddles, once asked me, “What becomes of the hole in a Beigel, when one has eaten the Beigel?”

The bagel spelling is in place by the 1940s. Here’s an example from the 14 August 1946 issue of Variety. It’s in a sports gossip column that makes reference to New York restauranteur Leo “Lindy” Lindemann, who operated several delicatessen and restaurant chains in New York City:

Leo Lindy is something of an athlete too. He walks. And he walks. Like he talks. And he talks. Starting from his bagel shop he has hoofed it to the Bronx. What he never tells, though, is how he gets back. Nor does anyone ever ask. The reason is that just thinking about his jaunts exhausts his audience.

Bagel has also entered sports slang for a score of zero, on account of the shape of the bread. It appears first in the world of tennis, where it was popularized by tennis player Eddie Dibbs, who along with his doubles partner Harold Solomon were known as the Bagel Twins. From the Los Angeles Times of 20 September 1974:

They call them the Bagel Twins. Partly because they’re Jewish. Mostly because they’re inseparable on the tennis court. And off.

[...]

The Bagel Twins. "I was the one who originally made it up,” Dibbs said. “You see, when you get beat six games to love, it’s called ‘The Bagel.’ Simple logic. A bagel has a hole. Zero. It used to happen to me a lot, so I called myself The Bagel Kid. The Bagel Twins was a natural.”

The story that the bagel was created by a Jewish, Viennese baker in 1683 to commemorate King John III Sobieski of Poland’s defeat of the Turks is false. The tale has it that the bread was made in the shape of a stirrup (Steigbügel or Bügel in German), but the word existed in Yiddish decades before this event.

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Sources:

Green, Ted. “Bagel Twins: Court Jesters of Pro Tennis.” Los Angeles Times, 20 September 1974, D1. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2019, s.v. bagel, n.

“Sports Shorts.” Variety, 14 August 1946, 2. ProQuest Variety Archive.

Tashrak (pseudonym of Israel Joseph Zevin). “The Hole in a Beigel.” In Helena Frank, trans. Yiddish Tales. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1912, 309. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Zangwill, Israel. Children of the Ghetto, vol. 1 of 2. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1892, 83. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Image credit: Helen Cook, 2007. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

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.