hijack / skyjack

Captain John Testrake and a hijacker onboard TWA Flight 847 in Beirut in June 1985

23 January 2023

To hijack is to waylay a vehicle in order to steal it or its cargo. The word also has an extended sense meaning to take control of something and directing it where you want to go, as in hijacking a conversation. The word arises in American criminal slang of the early twentieth century, but exactly why it is called hijacking is unknown.

The hi- or high- may refer to the highway, as early hijackings were of cargo trucks, but that’s just a guess. The -jack element could refer to a metaphorical lifting or hoisting something, although the sense of the verb to jack meaning to steal appears later and seems to be a clipping of hijack rather than the source of that word.

The earliest uses of hijack that I have found come from Oklahoma in 1915–16, with the earliest referring to hijackings of trucks carrying liquor. Interestingly, from what I gather by reading these early newspaper accounts, since Oklahoma was a “dry” state where possession of liquor itself was illegal, stealing it was not actually a criminal offense, and police often didn’t bother to pursue such bandits.

The earliest use of the word that I have found is in the Tulsa Daily World in an article with a dateline of 31 December 1915 and published the following day:

OFFICERS KNOW THE FIELD “HI-JACKERS”
Special to the World.
SHAMROCK, Okla., Dec. 31.—It developed today that the authorities know the names of the seven men who are working as “hi-jackers” on the 18-mile prairie northeast of Shamrock, holding up liquor consignments and confiscating it for their own use and to sell.

And there is this story in the Tulsa Daily World of 26 January 1916 where a posse did in fact pursue and shoot at liquor-truck hijackers:

They explained their failure to stop when so ordered by those of the posse to their opinion that they were being “hi-jacked.” They declared they had absolutely no intention to participate in a holdup when they went to Sand Springs, and were quite surprised when the shooting began.

And this story from the same paper of 5 March 1916 about a man who made a lucrative business out of transporting workers to and from the Oklahoma oil fields uses the word without quotation marks, indicating that the term was already becoming part of the general vocabulary, at least in that part of the country:

He rises as do the Bohemians, before sunrise, and takes his place on the assembling corner where during a day is created business that sometimes amounts to $700 or $800. He takes no chances on stickups and hijackers who go on their beat after dark and put fear into the hearts of night travelers.

In the latter half of 1916 we start to see the word crop up outside of Oklahoma. From an article on criminal slang that appeared in Ohio’s Columbus Dispatch on 10 September 1916:

And just as characteristic are the names that the gentlemen who make faces at the law, have for each other. A paperhanger is an honest profession but over at the penitentiary he’s a forger. Sneak thief, the crooks call him a “healer.” A highway robber is a “highjacker,” and the familiar ones are, burglar, “prowler,” pickpocket, “dip”; police informer, “rat.”

The earliest application of the word I’ve found to waylaying an airplane is in an Associated Press report from 16 April 1959:

4 CUBANS HIJACK AEROPLANE
MIAMI, Fla. (AP)—Four gunmen—three of them former members of dictator Fulgencia Batista’s secret police—captured a Cuban airliner in flight today and forced the pilot to go 325 miles out of his way and land in Miami.

The plane, carrying 17 American and Cuban passengers, landed at Miami International Airport. Police surrounded it immediately and took the hijackers into custody.

From the late 1950s through to the mid 1970s, aircraft hijackings were rampant, with many, like the example above, being flights between Cuba and the United States. In 1961, the variant term skyjack appeared to describe the practice. From the San Antonio Light of 9 August 1961:

Congress is proceeding with admirable if unaccustomed speed to make skyjacking a crime that doesn’t pay.

Legislation to make life imprisonment mandatory for pirating planes has passed the senate aviation subcommittee without dissenting vote and hearings are under way on a companion bill in the house.

The recent wave of skyjacking of U.S. airliners by sympathizers of Cuba’s Communist Castro regime has given impetus to this legislation, which has long been needed to protect passengers and crews in the air.

Use of skyjack has become far less common since the mid 1970s, paralleling a decrease in the number of aircraft hijackings.

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Sources:

Associated Press. “4 Cubans Hijack Aeroplane.” Calgary Herald (Alberta), 16 April 1959, 1. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

“A Bohemian King Now Drives Auto” (4 March 1916). Tulsa Daily World, 5 March 1916, 7. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“Capture Bandits After Pistol Duel.” Tulsa Daily World (Oklahoma), 26 January 1916, 2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2022, s.v. hijack, v., hijack, n.

“Noah Webster of Pen Takes Dip into Crook Talk.” Columbus Dispatch (Ohio), 10 September 1916, 14. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“Officers Know the Field ‘Hi-Jackers.’” Tulsa Daily World (Oklahoma), 1 January 1916, 2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. hijack, v., hijacker, n.

“Piracy Penalty.” San Antonio Light (Texas), 9 August 1961, 42. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Image credit: US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), 1985. Wikipedia Commons. Public domain image.

antimony

A chunk of antimony mined in Andalusia, Spain

20 January 2023

Antimony, atomic number 51, is a lustrous, gray metalloid. The element has been known since antiquity, but the name dates to the medieval period. In classical Latin, the element was called stibium, hence its atomic symbol of Sb. The medieval Latin antimonium is of unknown origin but was probably taken from an unidentified Arabic word into medieval Latin and thence into English. Antimonium was used by Constantinus Africanus of Salerno in the eleventh century and the word appears in Gilbertus Anglicus’s thirteenth-century Compendium medicinae.

The word appears in English c.1425 in the Middle English translation of Guy de Chauliac's Grande Chirurgie (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale angl.25):

Antymoyne is a myne colde in þe firste degre, drye in þe secounde degree.

(Antimony is a cold mineral in the first degree, dry in the second degree.)

In using colde, Guy is associating the mineral with the elements of earth and water and the humors of phlegm and black bile. And in using drye he is associating the mineral with earth and fire and choler and melancholy.

I usually don’t like to refer to a false etymology unless it is one that has some popular currency and needs to be debunked, but Samuel Johnson gives a delightfully incorrect origin for antimony in his 1755 dictionary:

The reason of its modern denomination is referred to Basil Valentine, a German monk; who, as the tradition relates, having thrown some of it to the hogs, observed, that, after it had purged them heartily, they immediately fattened; and therefore, he imagined, his fellow monks would be the better for a like dose. The experiment, however, succeeded so ill, that they all died of it; and the medicine was thenceforward called antimoine; antimonk.

I believe that Johnson knew full well that the etymology was bogus, but he just couldn’t resist it. Neither could I.

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Sources:

Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, 2013, s.v. antimonium, n.. Brepols: Database of Latin Dictionaries.

Johnson, Samuel. A Dictionary of the English Language, vol. 1 of 2. London: W. Strahan, 1755, s.v. antimony, n. Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary Online.

Lewis, Charlton T. and Charles Short. A Latin Dictionary. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1879, s.v. stibium, n. Brepols: Database of Latin Dictionaries.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. antimonie, n.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. antimony, n.

Image credit: Robert Lavinsky, before 2010. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

tongue in cheek

President Barack Obama literally has his tongue in his cheek as jokes about his birth certificate

18 January 2023

To speak with one’s tongue in cheek is to speak whimsically or with insincerity. It’s an idiom that makes no literal sense today, but it dates to the eighteenth century and a practice of making a bulge in one’s cheek with one’s tongue as a gesture of contempt, a 1700s equivalent of extending one’s middle finger.

The use of the gesture is recorded in a description of process serving in a 1735 Scottish legal case:

But Donaldson, to prevent that, proposed to the Declarant, to trust him with the Money, and he would deliver the Process, and the principal Decreet arbitral, and that, in the Space of half an Hour, he would call for the Declarant at the Laigh Coffee-House, and deliver him the Discharge and that he would shut his Tongue in his Cheek at James Wright, and tell him that the Money was in his Pocket, and obtain from him the Discharge.

Writer Tobias Smollett referred to the gesture in a number of his novels. He did so twice in his 1748 Adventures of Roderick Random:

I saluted each of them in order, and when I came to take Mr. Slyboot by the hand, I perceived him thrust his tongue in his cheek, to the no small entertainment of the company; but I did not think proper to take any notice of it, on this occasion.—Mr. Ranter too, (who I afterwards learned was a player) displayed his talents, by mimicking my air, features and voice, while he returned my compliment:—This I should not have been so sensible of, had I not seen him behave in the same manner, to my friend Wagtail, when he made up to them at first.—But for once I let him enjoy the fruits of his dexterity without question or control, resolved however, to chastise his insolence at a more convenient opportunity.

And the second time:

He fixed his eyes on me and asked if I had seen him tremble.—I answered without hesitation, “Yes.”—“Damme, Sir, (said he) d’ye doubt my courage?”—I replied, “Very much.”—This declaration quite disconcerted him.—He looked blank, and pronounced with a faultering voice, “O! ’tis very well—d—n my blood! I shall find a time.”—I signified my contempt of him, by thrusting my tongue in my cheek, which humbled him so much, that he scarce swore another oath during the whole journey.

By the nineteenth century, tongues were being thrust in cheeks to signal that what one was saying was not serious. We have this passage from actor Samuel Ryley’s 1809 memoirs:

Luckily, the officer of justice said nothing, but seem’d to enjoy this warfare of words, by putting his tongue in his cheek, and winking at me, at the same time saying, “Twig the old one.”

The phrase tongue-in-cheek was being used as an adjective denoting insincerity by 1838, as this from Ireland’s Waterford Chronicle of 24 November 1838 attests:

The Mail was not Protestant enough for such a Protestant out-and out [sic] affair—its reporters were excluded; and thus the tactics of the wily Peel, of the imbecile Shaw, and the trading tongue-in-cheek Mail, laughing at the whole pack of dupes, is sacrificed to a newspaper juggle.

And there is this from an 1893 British Labour Party pamphlet which has Liberal Prime Minister William Gladstone speaking insincerely:

With its present slender majority the government could not move a step of its way, save at extreme peril, without their approbation and consent. This, of course, would be annoying to the government and we should no longer see the Grand Old Man unctuously spreading his hands towards them, and, tongue in cheek, commending them to an assembled world as exemplars of all that was wisest and best.

So, Obama was hardly the first politician to do so.

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Sources:

An Exact Copy of the Process Presently Depending Before the Sheriffs of Edinburgh. Edinburgh: 1735, 26. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

“The Feud and the Factions.” Waterford Chronicle (Ireland), 24 November 1838, 4. British Newspaper Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. tongue-in-cheek, adj. and adv., tongue, n.

Ryley, Samuel William. The Itinerant; or, Memoirs of an Actor, vol.1 of 3. London: Sherwood, Neely, and Jones, 1809, 293. Nineteenth Century Collections Online.

Smollett, Tobias George. The Adventures of Roderick Random, vol. 2 of 2. London: J. Osborn, 1748, 100, 196. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Tréguer, Pascal. “Meaning and Origin of the Phrase ‘(With) Tongue in Cheek.’” Wordhistories.net, 21 May 2017.

Washington, Samuel (Elihu). The Case for the 4th Clause. Manchester: Independent Labor Party, 1893, 11. Nineteenth Century Collections Online.

Photo credit: Associated Press, 2011.

at first blush

A scene from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight that makes one blush; Lady Bertilak in Gawain’s bedchamber

16 January 2023

The idiom at first blush means upon first sight or by initial and cursory examination. Like most idioms, it does not make literal sense anymore as blush, in Present-Day English, relates to the color red, in particular to the reddening of the face through either embarrassment or cosmetics. But in this case, the history of the term makes sense of the phrase.

The verb to blush can be traced back to the Old English ablysian. That verb appears some fifteen times in the extant Old English corpus, usually in glosses of Latin psalters. For instance, there is this tenth century gloss of Psalms 6:11:

ablysigen ł scamien & syn drefed ealle fynd mine syn gecerred on hinder & aswarnien swiþe hredlice ł anunga

(Let all my enemies blush / be ashamed & be troubled, let them be turned back & be confounded very quickly / rapidly)

Ablysian here glosses the Latin erubescent, to redden, to blush, to be ashamed.

There is also a single appearance of the verb blysian in the corpus, with the meaning of to flare or burn. Not only does the flame associate the word with the color red, but this form may be the source of our modern verb to blaze. The word’s sole appearance in the extant Old English corpus is in the prose translation of the Psalms that are commonly attributed to King Alfred the Great, which if the attribution is correct would date the composition to the late ninth century, although the surviving manuscript is from the tenth century. From the Old English prose translation of Psalms 17:8:

For þam astah smec for his yrre, and fyr blysede beforan his ansyne

(So smoke rose up because of his ire, and fire blazed before his face.)

The Vulgate uses the verb exardescet, to flare, to blaze

The sense meaning to shine or burn survived as the Middle English blishen, but the sense fell out of use by the Early Modern period.

But in Middle English, in addition to the continued use of blishen to mean to redden, to blush, we also see the verb used to mean to look or gaze at something. This use probably arose out of the optical theory that vision is enabled by beams of light emitted, or blazed forth, from the eyes. For instance, we see the verb used in the sense of to look in the fourteenth-century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in the passage where Gawain first encounters Sir Bertilak’s castle:

Þe walle wod in þe water wonderly depe
Ande eft a ful huge heȝt hit haled vpon lofte,
Of harde hewen ston vp to þe tablez,
Enbaned vnder þe abataylment, in þe best lawe;
And syþen garytez ful gaye gered bitwene,
Wyth mony luflych loupe þat louked ful clene;
A better barbican þat burne blusched vpon neuer.

(The wall waded wondrously deep into the water
And likewise it stretched aloft a very great height,
Of hard hewn stone up to the corbels,
Furnished with parapets under the battlement in the best fashion;
And followed by richly equipped garrets in between,
With many lovely loopholes with clear lines of sight;
A better barbican that knight had never blushed upon.)

And this sense of blush is how we get the phrase at first blush, in other words at first glance. The phrase itself appears by the late sixteenth century in an anti-Puritan tract written by Stephen Bredwell, who was a medical student at the time and who would go on to become better known for his medical treatises. The 1586 tract critiques a purportedly anonymous, radical Puritan text written by an Edward Glover, of whom little is known and whose identity is only known because Bredwell identified him. Bredwell writes:

In the rest of this diuision he hath promised to stand vpon two points. 1. To reconsile some scriptures which seeme at first blush to say the contrarie. 2. To shew what difference the holy Ghost maketh betweene the inner man of the good, and the inner man of the bad.

Although the sense of the verb meaning to look or to gaze became obsolete, the phrase at first blush became fossilized as an idiom. This sense of blush had largely fallen out of use by the time Bredwell wrote the above passage, so it is highly unlikely that Bredwell coined the phrase. Perhaps as more sixteenth-century works become digitized, earlier uses will be found.

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Sources:

Andrew, Malcolm and Ronald Waldron, eds. The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript, fourth edition. Exeter: U of Exeter Press, 2002, 237, lines 787–93. London, British Library, Cotton MS Nero A.x.

Bredwell, Stephen.51. Detection of Ed. Glouers Hereticall Confection. London: John Wolfe, 1586, Early English Books Online.

Dictionary of Old English: A to I, 2018, s.v. blysian, v., a-blysian, v.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, blishen, v.

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

Psalms 6:11. Roeder, Fritz, ed. Der Altenglische Regius-Psalter. Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1904, 8. London, British Library, MS Royal 2.B.5. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Psalms 17:8. O’Neill, Patrick, ed. Old English Psalms. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 42. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2016, 52. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, fonds Latin MS 8824.

Image credit: London, British Library, Cotton MS Nero A.x, fol. 129r. Public domain image as a mechanical reproduction of a public domain work.

bomb cyclone / bombogenesis

GOES-16 satellite image of the January 2018 bomb cyclone blizzard that hit the northeastern United States

12 January 2023

A sudden and sustained drop in barometric pressure at the center of an extratropical cyclonic storm that indicates a strengthening of the storm system is known as a bomb cyclone or bombogenesis. The use of bomb is due to the metaphorically explosive nature of the change, and of course a cyclone is simply a circular storm, like a hurricane or tornado. Bombogenesis is a compound with the connecting -o- between the two elements, bomb and genesis, referring to the cause or start of the process. This latter term is modeled after cyclogenesis, referring to the start or strengthening of a cyclonic storm, which has been in use since at least 1925.

The meteorological sense of bomb was coined by Frederick Sanders and John Gyakum in a paper published in the October 1980 issue of Monthly Weather Review. The abstract of their paper reads:

By defining a “bomb” as an extratropical surface cyclone whose central pressure fall averages at least 1 mb h-1 for 24 h, we have studied this explosive cyclogenesis in the Northern Hemisphere during the period September 1976–May 1979. This predominantly maritime, cold-season event is usually found ~400 n mi downstream from a mobile 500 mb trough, within or poleward of the maximum westerlies, and within or ahead of the planetary-scale troughs.

A more detailed examination of bombs (using a 12 h development criterion) was performed during the 1978–79 season. A survey of sea surface temperatures (SST’s) in and around the cyclone center indicates explosive development occurs over a wide range of SST’s, but, preferentially, near the strongest gradients. A quasi-geostrophic diagnosis of a composite incipient bomb indicates instantaneous pressure falls far short of observed rates. A test of current National Meteorological Center models shows these products also fall far short in attempting to capture observed rapid deepening.

And meteorologists have been using bomb cyclone since at least 1987, when the term appears in an article by Stephen J. Colucci and J. Clay Davenport in the April issue of Monthly Weather Review:

Except for Bodurtha’s (1952) arbitrary definition of anticyclogenesis, a distinction is not made in all of these works between rapid and ordinary surface anticyclone intensification, in the same way that “bomb” cyclones are distinguished from nonexplosive cyclones.

The earliest use of bombogenesis that I’m aware of is in a 1989 master’s thesis by a Michael E. Adams, who describes his research as follows:

This research explores the processes responsible for the explosive cyclogenesis that took place over the Mid-West United States during 14–15 December 1987. Climatology shows that a high frequency of “bombogenesis” occurs over the ocean. Contrary to climatology, this storm's development occurred entirely over land. During an 18 hour period of deepening the cyclone experienced a central pressure drop of 27 mb. Moreover, within that time period the cyclone experienced a six hour pressure drop of 15 mb.

These terms began working their way out of meteorological jargon and into general discourse starting in the mid 1990s. The first was bombogenesis, which appears in an article in Rochester, New York’s Democrat and Chronicle of 16 November 1995 by local meteorologist Kevin Williams:

The storm itself developed from energy in the upper atmosphere. It strengthened rapidly as it moved over the warm Gulf Stream waters.

The explosive deepening of a storm is called “bombogenesis.”

When a storm “bombs,” it detonates a process in the atmosphere that brings together the ingredients that produce some of this planet’s greatest storms: the nor’easters.

Note that Williams is also using bomb as a weather-related verb here.

Bomb cyclone would take a while longer to enter general discourse, but it did by 31 December 2015 when it appears in an article in the Washington Post:

The same storm that slammed the southern United States with deadly tornadoes and swamped the Midwest, causing even greater loss of life, continued on to the Arctic. Sub-tropical air pulled there is now sitting over Iceland, and at what should be a deeply sub-zero North Pole, temperatures on Wednesday appeared to reach the melting point—more than 50 degrees above normal. That was warmer than Chicago.

Only twice before has the Arctic been so warm in winter. Residents of Iceland are bracing for conditions to grow much worse as one of the most powerful storms ever recorded blasts through the North Atlantic. This rare “bomb cyclone” arrived with sudden winds of 70 miles per hour and waves that lashed the coast.

Unfortunately, due to climate change we’ll be seeing a lot more of these terms in coming years.

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Sources:

Adams, Michael E. Anatomy of a “Bomb” Diagnostic Investigation of Explosive Cyclogenesis Over the Mid-West United States. North Carolina State University (master’s thesis), 1989, 11. Defense Technical Information Center.

Colucci, Stephen J. and J. Clay Davenport. “Rapid Surface Anticyclogenesis: Synoptic Climatology and Attendant Large-Scale Circulation Changes” (6 October 1986). Monthly Weather Review, 115.4, April 1987, 822. American Meteorological Society Journals.

Fears, Darryl and Angela Fritz. “Cataclysms from the North Pole to South America.” Washington Post, 31 December 2015, A1. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

O’Conner, Patricia T. and Stewart Kellerman. “Bomb Cyclone: A Blast from the Past.” Grammarphobia (blog), 9 May 2022.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2019, s.v. bombogenesis, n.; June 2015, s.v. cyclogenesis, n.

Sanders, Frederick and John R. Gyakum. “Synoptic-Dynamic Climatology of the “Bomb” (12 June 1980). Monthly Weather Review, 108.10, October 1980, 1589. American Meteorological Society Journals.

Williams, Kevin. “Folks, We Just Encountered ‘Bombogenesis.’” Democrat and Chronicle (Rochester, New York), 16 November 1995, 12A. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Photo credit: US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), 2018. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.