bitch / son of a bitch

30 September 2020 (Image added 19 February 2023)

Extract from Cambridge, Trinity College MS B.15.34, p. 270, showing the interlinear gloss of fulan horen & byccan (foul whores and bitches) for fracodan myltestran (wicked prostitutes)

The word bitch is used to refer to a female dog, and the word is also used as a derogatory term for a woman, and it is used in the idiomatic epithet son of a bitch and as a verb meaning to complain. It’s an old word, dating to Old English, but the practice of referring to women as dogs is much, much older than the English language itself.

The Old English bicce appears five times in the extant corpus. Two of these are simple glosses of the Latin canicula (female dog). Two others appear in a medical text:

Biccean meolc gif ðu gelome cilda toðreoman mid smyrest & æthrinest, butan sare hy wexað. Wearras & weartan onweg to donne, nim wulle & wæt mid biccean hlonde, wrið on þa weartan & on þa wearras.

(If you frequently smear and touch a child’s gums with bitch’s milk, the teeth grow without pain. To do away with corns and warts, take wool and wet it with bitch’s urine, bind it to the warts and corns.)

The fifth appearance of the word in the Old English corpus is an epithet for a woman. (One may quibble over whether this instance is Old English or Early Middle English, as it dates to the twelfth century.) The word appears in the manuscript Cambridge, Trinity College MS B.15.34, which contains a copy of Ælfric’s homily “Sermo ad Populum.” Ælfric wrote in the closing years of the tenth century, but a twelfth-century hand has emended the text in this manuscript. The text in this manuscript reads:

ða fulan forliras, and ða fulan horan and byccan
ðe acwellað heora cild ær þan ðe hit cuð beo mannum

(the foul fornicators and the foul whores and bitches
who kill their children before they can become adults)

The words “fulan horan and byccan” (foul whores and bitches) replace “fracodan myltestran” (wicked harlots) in Ælfric’s original.

But the practice of referring to women as dogs didn’t start in the twelfth century, but rather at the very least a thousand years before that. In Act 5 of his play Curculio, Plautus (c.254–184 BCE) describes a fight between a man and a woman over a ring:

ut eum eriperet, manum arripuit mordicus.
vix foras me abripui atque effugi. apage istanc caniculam.

(To get it away [from me], she seized my hand with her teeth. With difficulty I fled out of doors and escaped. Away with this bitch of yours.)

There are undoubtedly other such instances in various ancient languages. But while the derogatory use of bitch to refer to a woman may be ancient, in English, at least, it was rather uncommon until relatively recently. In American English, it was rarely heard before the 1920s, when its use suddenly exploded. The table here shows the word’s appearances in the Corpus of Historical American English in the first four decades of the twentieth century, broken down by sense: literal reference to a dog, reference to a woman, the phrase son of a bitch, and other uses (i.e., as a surname or as a general swear word).

Uses of the word bitch in American speech during the first four decades of the twentieth century (Source: COHA)

The phrase son of a bitch may literally be a derogatory reference to a woman, but as an idiom it often does not have that connotation and is used as a general term of abuse.

This surge in use of the insult corresponds with first-wave feminism and the women’s suffrage movement. As women started pushing for greater inclusion in public life, men started to tear them down.

The verb to bitch, meaning to complain, which comes from a metaphor of a nagging or complaining woman, makes a few appearances in eighteenth-century British speech. From Edward Ward’s 1745 A Compleat and Humorous Account of the Remarkable Clubs and Societies in the Cities of London and Westminster:

A Leaden-Hall Butcher would be bitching his Wife, for not only opening her Placket, but her Pocket-Apron to his Rogue of a Journeyman, and expensively treating the young strong back’d Rascal at the Ship Tavern, whilst himself was entering his Puppy at the Bear Garden.

And there is this from a letter by Edmund Burke of 9 May 1777. The speaker of the House of Commons, Fletcher Norton, gave a speech that some thought insulting to the king and objected to being entered into the record. But Burke, Charles Fox, and others supported Norton, and it was eventually entered.

Norton bitched a little at last; but though he would recede, Fox stuck to his motion for the honour of the House; and they were obliged to admit it.

The OED defines this as an early instance of to bitch with the sense of to hang back. But since there is another eighteenth century use of the sense of to complain, that would seem to have been Burke’s meaning, not a new sense of the word.

But these eighteenth-century uses are rare, and the verb doesn’t appear again until the twentieth century in the United States. It’s recorded by the journal American Speech in 1930 in a glossary of slang used at Colgate University:

Bitch: to become dissatisfied with something and complain about it. “He bitched about the course.”

The epithet son of a bitch, a way to insult someone’s lineage and in particular their mother, dates to the early seventeenth century and is first recorded in Jacobean theater. A variation on the insult appears in Shakespeare’s King Lear, Act 2, Scene 2, in one of the more famous passages of Shakespearean insults:

Ste. What do’st thou know me for?

Kent. A Knaue, a Rascall, and eater of broken meates, a base proud, shallow, beggerly, three-suited-hundred pound, filthy woosted-stocking knaue, a Lilly-liuered, action-taking, whoreson glasse-gazing super-seruiceable sinicall Rogue, one Trunke-inheriting slaue, one that would’st be a Baud in way of good seruice, and art nothing but the composition of a Knaue, Begger, Coward, Pandar, and the Sonne and Heire of a Mungrill Bitch, one whom I will beate into clamours whining, if thou deny’st the least siliable of they addition.

And the shorter, modern phrasing appears in Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher’s play The Coxcomb, Act 2, Scene 1, which was published in 1647 but had been performed by 1610, although the existing version was heavily edited after the playwrights’ deaths, so the 1647 date is the earliest we can date the present-day phrasing:

They had no mothers, they are the sones of bitches.

So, bitch is one of those terms that existed at a low level of use for a very long time before a sudden change in politics or society catapulted it into the spotlight, in this case its rise is part of the backlash to feminism.

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Sources:

Ælfric. “Sermo ad Populum.” Homilies of Ælfric: A Supplementary Collection, ed. John C. Pope, vol. 1 of 2. Early English Text Society (EETS), 259. London: Oxford UP, 1967, 436, lines 379–80. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Beaumont, Francis and John Fletcher. Comedies and Tragedies. London: Humphrey Robinson and Humphrey Moseley, 1647, 100. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Burke, Edmund. Correspondence, vol. 2 of 4, Charles Fitzwilliam and Richard Bourke, eds. London: F. & J. Rivington, 1844, 157. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

de Vriend, H.J. The Old English Herbarium and Medicina de Quadrupedibus. Early English Text Society (EETS), 286. London: Oxford UP, 1984, 234–73.

Dictionary of Old English: A to I, 2018, s.v. bicce.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2020, s.v. bitch, n.1., bitch, v., sonofabitch, n.

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

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. bitch n.1., bitch, v.2; third edition, June 2017, s.v. son of a bitch, n. and int.

Russell, Jason Almus. “Colgate University Slang.” American Speech, 5.3, February 1930, 238. JSTOR.

Shakespeare, William. King Lear. First Folio, 1623, Folger copy no. 68, 291.

Ward, Edward. A Compleat and Humorous Account of the Remarkable Clubs and Societies in the Cities of London and Westminster. London: Joseph Collier, 1745, 64. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Zhou, Li. “Use of the Word ‘Bitch’ Surged After Women’s Suffrage.” Vox.com, 19 August 2020.

Table: Davies, Mark. The Corpus of Historical American English (COHA), 2020.

Image credit: Cambridge, Trinity College MS B.15.34, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

barium

Pure barium in an argon atmosphere to keep it from reacting with the air

17 February 2023

Barium is a soft, silvery alkaline earth metal. It has atomic number 56 and the symbol Ba. It has few industrial uses and is perhaps chiefly known for its medical use as a radio-contrasting agent in medical imaging. Barium is highly reactive and, as a result, is not found in nature in its pure form. Its ore has phosphorescent qualities. Barium was isolated and named by Humphry Davy in 1808.

Those phosphorescent qualities of the ore have been known for centuries, and since quantities of the ore are found near Bologna, Italy, it came to be known in early modern Latin as lapis bononiensis (Bononian or Bolognian stone). The English name of the ore is recorded in a 1657 translation of Pierre Gassendi’s life of Nicolaus Claudius Fabricius:

Now he was of opinion, that as the light of the Sun, and its heat is imprinted upon a Bononian stone: so the light and whitenesse are imprinted upon the vitreous humor, and by reason of their corpulency, create there a certain shaddow of themselves: but he was afterwards of opinion, that the shadow externally appearing, was not produced from the crassitude of the light or whitenesse, but feigned by a fault which may happen, not only in the vitreous, but also in the watery, and especially in the Crystalline humor.

And we see Bolognian stone in a 1712 translation of Pierre Pomet’s Compleat History of Druggs:

17. Of the Bolognian Stone.

Pomet. This is a heavy Stone of a shining Silver Grey, very like in Figure to the Nephritick Stone, which is found very commonly about Bologna in Italy, whence it takes its Name. This Stone is of no other Use than, after Calcination, to make the Phosphorus, of which Mr. Lemery treats so largely at the End of his Book of Chymistry; and likewise Mr. Worms, he having writ a long Discourse of it, whither those who desire to make it may have Recourse: The Bolognian Stone is not yet well known amongst us, which is the Cause we sell so little of it. Some call this Stone calcin’d, the Sun or Moon Spunge, the illuminated Stone; Lucifer, Cassiolanus his Stone, or Kercher’s Phosphorus.

But in the eighteenth century, because of its weight, chemists took to calling the ore barytes or baryta, from the Greek βαρύς (heavy) + -ῑτης (-ites, suffix used in the names of minerals). There is this from Adair Crawford’s 1789 On the Medicinal Properties of Muriated Barytes:

In the year 1784 I made several experiments and observations on the medicinal properties of the Muriated Barytes, from which I concluded, that it might probably possess considerable powers as a deobstruent.

Chemist Humphry Davy isolated the element from its ore in 1808 and dubbed it barium. From his paper announcing the discovery:

These new substances will demand names; and on the same principles as I have named the bases of the fixed alkalis, potassium and sodium, I shall venture to denominate the metals from the alkaline earths barium, strontium, calcium, and magnium; the last of these words is undoubtedly objectionable, but magnesium has been already applied to metallic manganese, and would consequently have been an equivocal term.

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Sources:

Crawford, Adair. “On the Medicinal Properties of Muriated Barytes” (1789). Medical Communications, vol. 2. London: Joseph Johnson, 1790, 301. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Davy, Humphry. “Electrochemical Researches on the Decompositions of the Earths; with Observations on the Metals Obtained from the Alkaline Earths, and on the Amalgam Procured from Ammonia.” The Philosophical Magazine, 32, October–December 1808, 203. Nineteenth Century Collections Online.

Gassendi, Pierre (Petrus Gassendus). The Mirror of True Nobility and Gentility. Being the Life of the Renowned Nicolaus Claudius Fabricius, Lord of Pieresk, Senator of the Parliament of Aix. London: J. Streater for Humphrey Moseley, 1657, 102. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. barium, n., baria, n., baryta, n., barytes, n., Bologna, n.

Pomet, Pierre. A Compleat History of Druggs, vol. 1. London: R. Bonwicke, et al., 1712, 409. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Image credit: Matthias Zepper, 2005. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

bedlam

William Hogarth’s c.1733 painting In the Madhouse

15 February 2013

Bedlam is a state of madness, confusion, or uproar. This sense of the word comes from the Hospital of St. Mary of Bethlehem in London, which has served for centuries as a hospital for the mentally ill. Nowadays, it is officially known as Bethlem Royal Hospital and is run by the UK’s National Health Service.

Betleem as a form of the name of Bethlehem dates to the Old English period. It appears in the late tenth-century Blickling Homilies in the text of a sermon for Easter Sunday:

Arige us nu & miltsige se Drihten þe on engla endebyrdnesse wæs gehered, þa he on Betleem wæs acenned.

(May the Lord, who was lauded by the order of angels when he was born in Bedlam, now have pity and show mercy for us.)

But in Old English, as well as in Middle English, Bedlam was only used as the name of the town in Judea that tradition holds as the birthplace of Jesus Christ. The association with madness and confusion would not come until the sixteenth century.

The Hospital of St. Mary of Bethlehem was founded in 1247 at Bishopsgate, just outside the walls of the City of London. (It has moved several times over the centuries, and since 1930 has been located in Beckenham, London.) It was founded as the Priory of the New Order of Our Lady of Bethlehem. The first verifiable mention of the priory being used as a hospital treating the mentally ill dates to 1402. During the Dissolution of the Monasteries (1536–41) under Henry VIII, the hospital was given to the City of London. And in 1547 it received a royal charter and officially became a hospital for the mentally ill.

But by then Bedlam already had a reputation for a place of insanity. In his 1528 Obedience of a Christen Man, William Tyndale wrote:

In lyke maner is it for the most parte of oure most holy religion. For they of lyke imaginacion doo thinges which they of Bedle[m] maye se / that they are but madness. […] They ascribe heven vnto their imaginacions and mad invencions / and receave it not of the liberalite of God / by the merites and deservinges of Chirst.

The more general sense of madness or uproar, disassociated from the hospital itself, was in place by the end of the sixteenth century. In a 1598 satirical poem, John Marston wrote:

Whe[n] some damn'd vice, som strange mishapen sute,
Makes youths esteeme themselues in hie repute.
O age! in which our gallants boast to be
Slaues vnto riot, and lewd luxury!
Nay, when they blush, and thinke an honest act
Dooth their supposed vertues maculate!
Bedlame, Frenzie, Madnes, Lunacie,
I challenge all your moody Empery
Once to produce a more distracted man
Then is inamorato Lucian.

That’s how the name of Jesus’s birthplace came to be associated with madness.

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Sources:

Marston, John. “Satire #3.” The Metamorphosis of Pigmalions Image and Certaine Satyres. London; Edmond Matts, 1598, 53. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. Bedlem, -leem, n.

Morris, Richard, ed. “VII. Dominica Pascha” (# 7. Easter Sunday). The Blickling Homilies of the Tenth Century (1874). Early English Text Society, O.S. 58, 63, & 73. London: N. Trübner, 1967, 93. HathiTrust Digital Archive. Princeton, Scheide Library, MS 71.

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

Tyndale, William. The Obedie[n]ce of a Christen Man. Antwerp: Hans Luft, 1528, fol. 36v–37v. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Names of the Classical Planets

13 February 2023

Six planets in the night sky are visible to the naked eye, and five have been known since antiquity: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. The sixth, Uranus, is at the edge of perception for the unaided human eye, and its orbital period, 84 years, is too long for the ancients to have noticed its apparent motion. It was not recognized as a planet until the eighteenth century.

The English names for these five classical planets are taken from the Latin ones. The names appear in the Old English corpus with their Latin inflections, indicating that the names had not been fully assimilated into English at the time. Bede and Alcuin, writing in Latin, mention them. And King Alfred’s ninth-century translation of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy makes mention of Saturnus. But it is two monks, Ælfric of Eynsham and Byrhtferth of Ramsay, writing in the tenth and eleventh centuries that use the names in English writing, albeit with the Latin inflections.

In his translation of Alcuin’s Interrogationes Sigewulfi in Genesim (Questions to Sigewulf About Genesis), Ælfric writes:

Ðone ufemyston heton þa hæþenan saturnus, se gefylð his ryne on þrittig geara fyrste; þone oðerne þe beneoþan Saturnu[m] gæð hi heton iouis & se gefylð his ryne bin nan twelf gearu[m]; Þone þriddan þe benoþan iouem gæð: hi heton mars & se gfylð his ryne binnan twam gearum; Se feorða is seo sunne; seo gefylð hire ryne on twelf monþu[m]; þæt is on þrim hund dagu[m] & fif & sixtigu[m] & syx tidum; Se fifta is gehaten uenus, se is æfen steorra, se gefylð his ryne on þrim hund dagu[m] & eahta & sixtigu[m] dagum; Se syxta is gehaten mercurrus, micel & beorht, se gefylð his ryne on þrim hund dagum & nigon & twentigu[m] dagum; Se seofoþa is se mona ealra tungla nyðemest & forþi hæfð læstne embegang & forþi hegefylð his ryne on seofon & twentigu[m] dagum & on eahta tidu[m].

(The uppermost the heathens called Saturn; it runs its course in thirty years time. The second that goes beneath Saturn they called Jove, and it runs its course in twelve years. The third that goes beneath Jove they called Mars and it runs its course in two years. The fourth is the sun; it runs its course in twelve months: that is three hundred sixty-five days and six hours. The fifth is called Venus; it is the evening star; it runs its course in three hundred twenty-nine days. The sixth is called Mercury, strong and bright, it runs its course in three hundred twenty-nine days; The seventh is the moon, of all the stars the lowest and therefore has the shortest circuit and therefore runs its course in twenty-seven days and eight hours.)

Note that Ælfric calls these heathen names and uses the Latin inflections, although one cannot distinguish between the Latin and later English names for Venus and Mars. The orbital periods he gives are accurate if one assumes a geocentric model of the solar system.

Byrhtferth, writing some decades after Ælfric, gives a similar account. His book on astronomy, titled the Enchiridion (Handbook), is a macaronic text of Latin and English. The passage here is largely English but uses the Latin names for the planets, including Martis and Veneris:

Þa steorran þe man hæt planete on Lyden and on Grecisc apo tes planes (hoc est ab errore) oðre hwile hig beoð on eastende þære heofone swa sunne byð dæghwhamlice, and se mona gelome geondscrið þæne circul þe hatte zodiacus. Eall swa deð se steorra þe hatte Veneris and eac Mercurius; þæt ylce we cweðeð be þam steorran þe hatte Martis and eac be þam þe ys Iouis geciged. Saturnus ys se yfemsta; he geyrnð hys ryne binnan þrittigum wintrum. And se oðer ys geciged Foeton oððe Iouis; twelf wintrum he gerynð his ryne. And se þridda, þe hatte Vesper oððe Martis, he gefærð his ryne binnan fiftyne wintrum. Seo sunne ys onmiddan þissum tacnum  gesett, and heo gerynð hyre ryne binnan eahta and twentigum wintrum. Þæræfter on þam circule Lucifer uparist, þæne sume uðwitan hatað Candidum; he yrnð nigon ger hys ryne. He ys Veneris gehaten; he scinð ealra steorra beorhtest. Mercurius  yrnð twentig wintra his ryne. Luna (þæt ys mona) he geondscrið hys ryne binnan nigontyne wintrum. Iudagum Romani and eac Angli gehalgedon on þisra tungla gemynde heora dægas, and þæne forman dæg hig heton Sunnandæg forþan heo ys ealra tungla wlitegost, and se dæg wæs ealra daga firmest on heora dagum and nu ys on urum timan, Gode lof, ealles. Þone oðerne dæg hig heton Monandæg forþon he ys beorhtest æfter þære sunnan. Ðæne þriddan Marte hig getealdon and þone feorðan Mercurio and þone fiftan Ioue and þone syxtan Venere and þone seofeðan Saturnus.

(The stars that one calls planets in Latin and in Greek apo tes planes (hoc est ab errore [that is from wandering]) are sometimes in the eastern quarter of the heavens as the sun is daily, and the moon often traverses the circle that is called the zodiac. As well do the stars that are called Venus and Mercury; we say the same about the star that is called Mars and also about the one called Jove. Saturn is the highest; it runs its course in thirty winters. And the second is called Phaeton or Jove; it runs its course in twelve winters. And the third, that is called Vesper or Mars; it travels its course in fifteen winters. The sun is placed in the middle of these stars, and it runs its course in twenty-eight winters. After that, Lucifer arises in the circle, which some wise people call Candidum; it runs its course in nine years. It is called Venus; it shines the brightest of all the stars. Mercury runs its course in twenty winters. Luna (that is the moon), it traverses its course in nineteen winters. Formerly, the Romans and also the English consecrated their days in commemoration of these stars, and they called the first day Sunday because it is brightest of all the stars, and that day was the first of all the days in their days and now in our time entirely so, God be praised. The second day they called Monday because it is the brightest after the sun. The third they assigned to Mars and the fourth to Mercury and the fifth to Jove and the sixth to Venus and the seventh to Saturn.

Byrhtferth’s orbital periods for Jupiter and Saturn are accurate. His twenty-eight-year period for the sun is the number of years it takes for the Easter cycle to repeat itself, and the period he gives for the moon is the nineteen-year solar-lunar cycle. The periods he gives for the other planets cannot be explained.

The English in the pre-Conquest period did not, as far as we know, give the planets English names. It is possible that there were English names which were not written down. But militating against this hypothesis is the fact that both Ælfric and Byrhtferth used the Old English sunna and mona, and Byrhtferth even provides the English translation for the Latin Luna. If there were commonly used English names for the other planets, these two writers would probably have mentioned them.

It isn’t until the Middle English period that we start to see some of the names of the planets Anglicized. In addition to the sun and moon, the South English Legendary, a collection of saint’s lives written c.1300, refers to Venus, Mars, and Jupiter, but keeps the Latin Mercurius and Saturnus:

Eiȝte firmamenz þare beoth: swuche ase we i-seoth,
þe Ovemeste is þe riȝtte heouene: in ȝwan þe steorrene beoth—
for godes riche is þare a-boue: þat last with-outen ende;
þare-be-neoþe beoth seoue fermamenz: þat euerech of heom, i-wis,
One steorre hath with-oute mo: þat planete i-cleoped is.
Ichulle nemmen heore seoue names: and formest bi-guynne hext:
Saturnus is al a-boue: and Iupiter sethþe next,
þanne Mars bi-neoþen him: and sethþe þe sonne is,
Venus sethþe, þe clere steorre: Mercurius þanne i-wis,
þat wel selden is of us i-seiȝe: þe Mone is next þe grounde.

(There are eight firmaments, such as we see. The highest is the genuine heaven, in which are the stars—for God’s kingdom is above that, which lasts without end. Beneath that are seven firmaments, each one being home, in fact, to just one star, which is called a planet. I will list their seven names, beginning with the highest. Saturn is above all, and Jupiter follows next. Then Mars is beneath him, and then follows the sun. Venus, the bright star, follows, then, in fact, Mercury, which is very seldom visible to us. The moon is next to the ground.)

By the late fourteenth century, all the planetary names had been Anglicized. Book 7 of John Gower’s 1390 poem Confessio Amantis lists them all, which you can click the link to read.

Discuss this post

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Sources:

Ælfric. “Ælfric’s Version of Alcuini Interrogationes Sigeuulfi in Genesin.” MacLean, George Edwin, ed. Anglia, 7, 1884, 14. HathiTrust Digital Archive. Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 162, 144.

Byrhtferth. Byrhtferth’s Enchiridion. Peter Baker and Michael Lapidge, eds. Early English Text Society, S.S. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995, 15. 2.3, 118. Oxford, Bodleian Library Ashmole MS 328 and Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 421.

Gower, John. Confessio Amantis, vol. 3 of 3. Russell A. Peck and Andrew Galloway, eds. TEAMS Middle English Texts Series. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 2004, 7.721–954.

Horstmann, Carl, ed. “Of the Eight Firmaments and the Seven Planets.” The Early South-English Legendary. Early English Text Society, O.S. 87. London: N. Trübner, 1887, 312–13, lines 413–23. HathiTrust Digital Archive. Oxford, Bodleian MS Laud 108.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2001, s.v. mercury, n., December 2000, s.v. Mars, n.1, September 2019, s.v. Saturn, n.; second edition, 1989, s.v. Venus, n.1, Jupiter, n.

Image credit: NASA, 2007. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

Superb Owl

A Superb Owl

12 February 2023

The NFL championship game is sometimes jocularly referred to as the Superb Owl. Tracing exactly who came up with the coinage is impossible—it was probably independently coined multiple times.

The official name of the game, Super Bowl, was coined in 1966. Officially, the name is two words, but is often written as the closed compound Superbowl. And the first appearances of Superb-owl are as typographical errors at line breaks. The earliest I’ve found of the hyphenation error is in the Arkansas Gazette of 28 September 1977, but undoubtedly earlier examples can be found.

The error is quite common and drew at least one complaint from a would-be copyeditor in North Carolina’s Charlotte Observer on 21 October 1979:

Let’s be honest. Newspapers don’t hyphenate as well as they once did. You’ve seen it. I’ve seen it. Here are a few wallapaloozers plucked out of The Observer by Helen Baker, who works in Observer production:

[…]

Who can forget:

doork-nob

superb-owl

This must stop.

There’s a 1980 example of Superb Owl in a children’s wordplay game that appeared in Rhode Island’s Providence Journal of 6 December 1980:

superb owl Al,ice Eemca

Words Aren’t What They Seem

We want you to play a different kind of word game this week. There’s no contest involved, but we will send Junior Edition t-shirts to those we feel play this game especially well.

The idea is to change the spacing or the pronunciation of certain words. For example, if you read the first two words above, you might think of an owl that is superb. But what you’ve really done is change the spacing on Super Bowl.

In our second two words, you might think we’re telling Al that we want ice, But Alice is the word we started with, while Eemca is simply the way we’d pronounce YMCA if YMCA were a word and not initials.

But jocular use of Superb Owl started to take off in 1999 when the NFL began to crack down on violators of its trademark. An article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette of 31 January 1999 documents the phenomenon:

Examples of wildlife crop up all over the zoo that is the National Football League, from the Atlanta Falcons and the Denver Broncos, who are battling tonight in Miami in Super Bowl XXXIII, to the Lions and Dolphins and Eagles.

But before this year, it's a sure bet no one ever heard of the Superb Owls.

Don't look for Superb on any map, though. And don't bother puzzling over the Owls' record or roster.

They existed only briefly as part of a promotion co-sponsored by Rolling Rock beer earlier this month on local radio station WDVE.

Under the law, disc jockeys on the sports and rock 'n' roll station couldn't utter the words "Super Bowl" and "Rolling Rock" in the same breath while promoting a contest giving away free tickets to the big game.

The actual words "Super Bowl" are trademarked by the NFL, which jealously guards their use. And Rolling Rock, as much as some people might like its taste, is not an official NFL sponsor.

So the radio station had to figure out how to do an end-run around this little problem. They called on their listeners to come up with a sneaky way to refer to the Super Bowl.

Among the suggestions were "The Really Big Sporting Thing" and "The HMM-hmm Hmm," said Bob McLaughlin, the station's morning show producer.

But definitely snagging the award for, well, the Super Bowl of suggestions was the listener who advised disc jockeys to sidle one little letter over by a yard.

Let's think about this.

Super Bowl. Superb Owl.

Get it?

And the Superb Owl hit the big time when comedian Stephen Colbert began using it on his Comedy Central television show The Colbert Report, as documented by the Newark Star-Ledger of 31 January 2014:

The NFL has a reputation of protecting its trademarks and copyrights. After Comedy Central’s parent company, Viacom, warned employees against using the term Super Bowl in its programming, Stephen Colbert, host of “The Colbert Report,” began covering the game as “Superb Owl XLVIII.”

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Sources:

Oppel, Rich. “Here’s a Problem You Can Solve.” Charlotte Observer (North Carolina), 21 October 1979, 2B. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Royko, Mike. “Mr. Nader Discovers the Sports Fan.” Arkansas Gazette (Little Rock), 28 September 1977, 17A. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Silver, Jonathan D. “NFL to Advertisers: ‘Show Me the Money’ League Jealously Guards Super Bowl Trademark.” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (Pennsylvania), 31 January 1999, C-1. ProQuest Newspapers.

Stirling, Stephen. “Authorities Seize Counterfeit NFL Merchandise Worth $21.6M.” Star-Ledger (Newark, New Jersey), 31 January 2014, 6. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“Words Aren’t What They Seem.” Providence Journal (Rhode Island), 6 December 1980, B-17. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Image credit: Dick Daniels, 2011. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.