fair to middling

Nineteenth-century mezzotint of the not-so-fair-to-middling actor Edmund Kean as Shylock in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice

15 May 2023

Fair to middling refers to something of acceptable, but not remarkable, quality, mediocre. The phrase begins to appear in print in the early 1820s, but from the context of those appearances must be somewhat older. The phrase probably got its start as a grade of commercial products or commodities, such as cotton, but from its earliest appearances in print it was also being used as jocular rankings of people.

Middling, meaning medium or moderate, especially used of something occupying an intermediate position between two extremes, is much older and Scottish in origin. The word appears as early as c.1420 in a Scottish manuscript on weights and measures:

The ynch sulde be with the thoum off midling mane nother our mikil nor our litil bot be tuyx the twa

The inch should be with the thumb of a middling man, neither over great nor over little but between the two

And we have this use of middling to refer to grades of meat in the Register of Privy Council of Scotland for 18 August 1550:

Nocht the les the mutoun is commonlie sauld upoun ane our hie price, and for remaidy heirof, it is divisit and ordanit that every mutoun be sauld of the prices following. The best moutoun for ix s, the midiling moutoun for viii s, and the worst moutoun for vii s.

(None the less, mutton is commonly sold at an over high price, and as a remedy hereof, it is devised and ordained that every mutton be sold at the following prices. The best mutton for 9 shillings, the middling mutton for 8 shillings, and the worst mutton for 7 shillings.)

At about this time middling starts appearing outside of Scotland.

Jump to 1821, and we see the first appearance of the phrase fair to middling. It’s in a supposed letter to the New England Galaxy of 2 March 1821 by someone with the improbable name of Diedrich Sapperment Van Wisem. It’s used in a question about the acting chops of Edmund Kean:

You are “requested to state,” whether, in all human probability, “Kelly’s Cambist” is not nearly “exhausted” by the Boston Weekly Report r[sic] and if you consider Mr. Kean’s acting to be of a quality from “middling to fair,” or “from fair to middling?”

Can you tell me the reason why “amateurs” are so blind when they sit in the pit?—When they sit in the boxes, third row, or gallery, they can see well enough—but when they condescend to sit in the pit, they wear spectacles.

The next year, we see fair to middling used in a modern commercial context as a grade of rice. From England’s Manchester Mercury of 16 July 1822:

The demand for Rice is very good, and the public sales have gone off with spirit at 13s for old, up to 14s 6d a 16s 3d per cwt. for fair to middling new: the quantity sold by public and private is 600 casks.

And it’s also in use in the United States, here seen in the Charleston, South Carolina City Gazette of 3 October 1822 as a grade of cotton:

The business of the week has been remarkably dull, and but few transactions in any description of produce have taken place—consequently, our quotations may be considered (with a few exceptions) nominal.

Cotton.—No transactions worthy of notice have taken place in this article during the week: sales for two or three small parcels only, of fair to middling, have been effected at our quotations.

Tobacco.—Sales of about one hundred hogsheads in small lots, of various qualities, at our prices, constitute (as far as we have been advised) the transactions of the week.

Whiskey appears to be advancing, several small lots have been sold at 40 cents.

A few days later the phrase appears as a ranking of politicians in the 9 October 1822 issue of the Boston Castigator. It’s in a humor piece masquerading as an advertisement for a public-relations “fixer.” I don’t know what, if any, particular scandal is being alluded to here (if anyone knows, by all means let me know):

ADVERTISEMENT EXTRA!
Monsieur Nong Tong Paw, Professor of President-making, Editor of “My Report,” &c. &c. direct from Paris tenders his service to the people of this ignorant country, in the line of his profession. N.B.—Any grand-father’s grand-son who should happen to get into a predicament from which his little wits cannot extricate him, can, by application as above, be screened from deserved public contempt. And any political renegade whose integrity should want whitewashing, can have the operation performed “weekly,” in so thorough a manner as to enable me to “report” him every Saturday evening, “from fair to middling.”

The following year we see it used as “grade” of marriageable women. From Boston’s Independent Microscope of 3 October 1823:

PRICES CURRENT.

Cattle Shows—plenty; the season just commencing.

Poultry—plenty, but principally in the hands of forestallers who purchase by the load, while the Clerk of the Market is seeking and prosecuting flying butchers, for selling meat in the vicinity of the Old Market.

Street walkers, of the feminine gender—very scarce, having generally taken lodgings in the House of Correction.

Ditto, of the masculine gender—plenty, and generally prowling about in darkness, seeking whom they may——destroy.

Young Ladies, candidates for matrimony—plenty, although quite bashful; upon the whole we may report from fair to middling.

Gamblers and Pickpockets—not very plenty now, many having gone to country Musters where some have eaught [sic] the hypo, which may probably prove dangerous; a few, however, are seen occasionally lurking about Merchant’s Hall and Ann street, in each of which places they have a rendezvous.

So that’s it. Middling got its start as a Scots adjective for something of intermediate quality. It entered into commercial usage as grade of product. At some point, probably in the early nineteenth century, the phrase fair to middling came into use in commercial contexts and was quickly taken up by American wits and jokesters to classify people.

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Sources:

Burton, John Hill, ed. Register of the Privy Council of Scotland, vol. 1 (1545–1569). Edinburgh: H.M. General Register House, 1877, 106–07. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

“Commercial.” City Gazette and Commercial Daily Advertiser (Charleston, South Carolina), 3 October 1822, 3/2. Readex: America’s Historic Newspapers.

Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue, 1971, s.v. midlin, adj. Dictionaries of the Scots Language | Dictionars of the Scots Leid (DSL).

“Liverpool Prices Current.” Manchester Mercury (England), 16 July 1822, 2/1. Gale Primary Sources: British Library Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2013, s.v. fair, adj. and n.1.; March 2002, middling, adj.1.

“The Presidency.” Boston Castigator (Massachusetts), 9 October 1822, 4/2. Gale Primary Sources: American Historical Periodicals from the American Antiquarian Society.

“Prices Current.” Independent Microscope, Boston (Massachusetts), 3 October 1823, 15/2. Gale Primary Sources: American Historical Periodicals from the American Antiquarian Society.

Van Wisem, Diedrich Sapperment. Letter. New England Galaxy (Boston), 2 March 1821, 83/3. Archive.org.

Image credit: Henry Hoppner Meyer, late 19th century. Folger Shakespeare Library. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

cerium

Cerium, Ce, element #58

12 May 2023

Cerium is a rare-earth element, a soft, ductile, silvery-white metal with atomic number 58 and symbol Ce. It has a variety of commercial uses, including in catalytic converters and in LED lights. It was independently discovered by two groups in 1803, in Sweden by Jöns Jakob Berzelius and Wilhelm Hisinger, and in Germany by Martin Heinrich Klaproth. Berzelius dubbed the metal cerium and Klaproth ochroit.

Berzelius named the element for the asteroid Ceres, which had recently been discovered, following the scheme of naming elements after planets, as in uranium, tellurium, and, later in the twentieth century, plutonium and neptunium. Hisinger and Berzelius justified their choice of name in an 1803 article in the Neues Allgemeines Journal der Chemie, which was translated into English the following year in the Journal of Natural Philosophy, Chemistry, and the Arts:

The tungstein of Bastnas, which we call cerite, for reasons which will be presently given, was found, in the year 1750, in a copper-mine called Bastnas, or Saint-Gorans Koppargrafva, at Riddare-Hyltan, in Westmannia, of which, with asbestos, it formed the matrix.

[…]

These appearances, and those which follow, determined us to consider the substance found in the cerite, as the oxide of a metal hitherto unknown, to which we have given the name Cerium, from the planet Ceres, discovered by Piazzi.

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Sources:

D’Hesinger, W. and J.B. Bergelius. “Account of Cerium, a New Metal Found in a Mineral Substance from Bastnas, in Sweden.” Journal of Natural Philosophy, Chemistry, and the Arts, 9, December 1804, 290–300, at 290 and 294. Biodiversity Heritage Library.

Hisinger, W. and J. Berzelius. “Cerium ein Neues Metall au seiner Schwedischen Steinart, Bastnäs Tungstein Genannt.” Neues Allgemeines Journal der Chemie, 2, 1803, 397–418 at 397 and 403. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Miśkowiec, Pawel. “Name Game: The Naming History of the Chemical Elements: Part 2—Turbulent Nineteenth Century.” Foundations of Chemistry, 8 December 2022 (online).

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

Photo credit: Unknown photographer, 2009. Images-of-elements.com. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

face the music

A soldier who is literally not facing the music being drummed out of the Union Army during the US Civil War

10 May 2023

The phrase face the music means to accept unwelcome consequences, especially the consequences of one's own actions. The underlying metaphor is uncertain, but there are a number of plausible suggestions.

What we do know is that the phrase is an Americanism, appearing first in New Hampshire in the mid 1830s. The phrase face up to appears a century earlier, and face the music appears about the same time as face the facts, and may have been a metaphorical play on those more literal phrases.

The earliest known use of the phrase is from the New Hampshire Statesman of 2 August 1834:

By the way, the mention of the late Sheriff of Merrimack brings again to mind the lost law. The editor of the Courier has not, probably, forgotten that this individual was accused by him of stealing that bill, while he held it in his possession, by virtue of the arrangement with one Charles F. Gove. Will the editor of the Courier explain this black affair. We want no equivocation—“face the music” this time—Gove and Barton are able backers. And when this is done with, we may perhaps take occasion to read another lesson or two pertaining to his official conduct, before we touch his private affairs.

It then appears in another New Hampshire paper, the Dover Enquirer, a couple of times the following year before spreading out to the rest of New England and the wider world. The first of these is dated 19 May 1835:

One of the brightest feathers in General Jackson’s cap, in the estimation of the tories of this state, is his pertinacity in vetoing all projects for internal improvement; and one of the strongest claims which Van Buren possesses to the old man’s shoes, according to the same gentry, is his determination to follow up the work. As Van Buren, however, has now given “assurances” that he will not be a Vetoite, we are curious to see how the tories will get over it. Come gentlemen—no dodging—face the music.

And the second appearance in the Dover Enquirer is from 15 September 1835:

Notice is given in the Concord papers, that all “$100 Judges,” who intend to follow the “patriotic example” of Judge Stark, are requested to send in their resignations before Monday the 21st inst. when the Governor and Council will be in session to fill the vacancies. Come Judge Simpson, “face the music!”

There are a number of possible metaphors to explain the phrase. It may be from a nervous performer fearing to come on stage. Alternatively, it may come out of a military context. Face is commonly used in the military in commands telling soldiers which direction to turn, and music is military slang for gunfire, and so to face the music may refer to going into battle. Somewhat more plausible is that face the music may come from the practice of literally drumming a soldier out of his regiment for bad behavior. Militating against the military explanations, however, is the fact that none of the early appearances in print are particularly martial. In the end, though, while all of these speculations are possible, we just don’t know.

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Sources:

“The Editor of the Courier.” New Hampshire Statesman (Concord), 2 August 1834, 3/2. Gale Primary Sources: Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2023, s.v. music, n.

“Notice Is Given.” Dover Enquirer (New Hampshire), 15 September 1835, 2/3. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2009, s.v. face, v.; June 2015, s.v. drum, v.1.; March 2003, s.v. music, n. and adj.

 “A Slant at Henry Hubbard.” Dover Enquirer (New Hampshire), 19 May 1835, 2/5. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Photo credit: Haas and Peale, 1863. Library of Congress. Public domain image.

dry run

Sailors aboard the USS Oak Hill conducting a dry run firefighting drill

8 May 2023

Dry run is an Americanism dating to the late nineteenth century usually referring to a rehearsal or practice run of some activity. But the phrase dry run has an older, etymologically unrelated sense referring to a waterless creek bed, an arroyo. This use dates to the late eighteenth century and even appears as a proper place name in some locations.

Wentworth and Flexner’s 1960 Dictionary of American Slang defines the other common uses of the phrase today:

dry run     1 Firing or shooting practice with blank or dummy ammunition. Army use. → 2 A rehearsal; any simulated action. 3 [taboo] Sexual intercourse during which a contraceptive is used. v.t. To subject someone or something to a dry run. 1953: “The V[eterans’] A[dministration] invited Lemanowicz in a few days early so the hospital staff of 27 could ‘dry run’ their equipment.” AP, Jan. 6.

The slang sense of dry run first arises in firefighting jargon, referring to training exercises where water is not used. We see an example of its antonym, wet run, in an announcement of a firefighting tournament in the Tacoma, Washington Territory Daily Ledger of 1 September 1886:

State Association Champion Hose Race—Open to all; wet run; distance, two hundred yards to hydrant.

And the next year we see a similar announcement, only using dry run this time, in upstate New York’s Watertown Herald of 25 June 1887:

No less than fifteen nor more than seventeen men to each company. Dry run, standing start; each team to be allowed one trial; cart to carry 350 feet of hose in 50 foot lengths: distance, 300 yards run; 200 yards to hydrant: attach and lay one line of hose 300 feet from hydrant; break coupling, and put on pipe; pipe and coupling to be 8 threads to the inch, with at least 3 full threads to couple and to be screwed up to shoulder or washer, ready for water.

It makes its way into US Army slang by the beginning of the World War II era. The October 1941 issue of the journal American Speech defines it thusly, and also includes its use as a verb:

DRY RUN. To practice; a dress rehearsal.

But a response to the American Speech definition appears in the February 1942 issue, where a commenter, based on “four months’ experience (June to October 1941) as a draftee private at Fort Sill, Oklahoma; Edgewood Arsenal, Maryland; and Bolling Field, D.C.,” says:

“DRY RUN (to practice; a dress rehearsal).” I never heard it used as a verb, or to mean a dress rehearsal. Originally a semi-official term for practice firing without ammunition, it is slang in other senses, such as a mail-call at which one receives no mail.

But the Oxford English Dictionary has a 1949 citation of its use as a verb, so it’s reasonable to assume that American Speech got it right and the lone commenter was speaking from limited experience. It was undoubtedly the WWII military use of dry run that brought the phrase to the tongues of millions of Americans.

The sexual sense appears by the mid 1950s. Green’s Dictionary of Slang defines dry run as follows:

1. an act of sexual intercourse using a contraceptive. […] 2. (US gay) sex without ejaculation; frottage.

The sexual sense appears in Evan Hunter’s 1954 novel The Blackboard Jungle. Green’s places this citation under its second definition, but while his use of dry run clearly refers to sex, exactly what sexual act Hunter intended dry run to refer to isn’t clear from the text:

He plays drums with Gillespie, West. He beats a wild skin. He beats a wine skin too. But you’ve been to Spain, haven’t you, West? A man of your wide experience. A man who knows what “knocked up” means, and “grind session.” You also know what planked means, don’t you? You know what a dry run is, huh boy? Or do you go for crime jargon, West? Is that your speed? You a heel and toe boy? A grifter? A fish? What are you, West? A con man? Come on, West.

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Sources:

“Fireman’s Tournament.” Daily Ledger (Tacoma, Washington Territory, 1 September 1886, 5. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“Glossary of Army Slang.” American Speech, 16.3, October 1941, 163–69 at 165. JSTOR.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2022, s.v. dry run, n. in dry, adj.1.

“Hose & Foot Races!” Watertown Herald (New York), 25 June 1887. [Page 4, image 4. Pages are unnumbered and out of order in the database.] NYS Historic Newspapers.

Hunter, Evan. The Blackboard Jungle. Cambridge, Mass.: Robert Bentley, 1954, 162. Archive.org.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2022, s.v. dry run, n., dry run, v.

Wentworth, Harold, and Stuart Berg Flexner, eds. Dictionary of American Slang. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1960, 165. Archive.org.  

Wilson, Douglas E. “Remarks on ‘Glossary of Army Slang.’” American Speech, 17.1, February 1942, 67–68 at 68. JSTOR.

Photo credit: Michael Loggins, 2009. US Navy photo. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

carbon / diamond / graphite / buckminsterfullerene / fullerene / buckyball

Two allotropes of carbon: graphite (left) and diamond (right)

5 May 2023

Carbon, atomic number six and symbol C, is, at least for life on earth, the most important of the elements. It has been known since antiquity in the forms of soot, charcoal, and graphite, although its status as an element, as well as our current names for it like carbon and graphite, date only to the late eighteenth century.

In 1772 Antoine Lavoisier was the first to recognize that charcoal, graphite, and diamond were the same substance. And the name carbon was coined by Louis-Bernard Guyton, Baron de Morveau in 1787 in a treatise on chemical nomenclature:

Quand on a vu former l'air fixe par la combinaiſon directe du charbon & de l'air vital, à l'aide de la combustion, le nom de cet acide gazeux n'est plus arbitraire, il se dérivé nécessairement de son radical, qui est la pure matière charbonneuse; c'est donc l'acide carbonique, ses composés avec bases font des carbonates; &, pour mettre encore plus de précision dans la dénomination de ce radical, en le distinguant du charbon dans l'acception vulgaire, en l'isolant, par la pensée, de la petite portion de matière étrangère qu'il recèle ordinairement, & qui constitue la cendre, nous lui adaptons l'expression modifiée de carboné, qui indiquera le principe pur, essentiel charbon, & qui aura l'avantage de le spécifier par un seul mot, de manière à prévenir toute équivoque.

(When we have seen the formation of fixed air [i.e., carbonic dioxide] by the direct combination of carbon and vital air [i.e., oxygen], with the aid of combustion, the name of this gaseous acid is no longer arbitrary, it is necessarily derived from its radical, which is pure carbonaceous matter; it is therefore carbonic acid, its compounds with bases form carbonates; &, to put even more precision in the denomination of this radical, by distinguishing it from coal in the vulgar sense, by isolating it, theoretically, from the small portion of foreign matter that it usually conceals, & which constitutes the ash, we adapt to it the modified term of carbon, which will indicate the pure principle, the essence of coal, and which will have the advantage of specifying it by a single word, so as to prevent any ambiguity.)

Morveau’s work was translated into English the following year.

Carbon appears naturally in two forms or allotropes, diamond and graphite. Both forms have been known since antiquity, but the English names are more recent, with diamond dating to the mid fourteenth century and graphite to the late eighteenth century.

Our present-day word diamond is from the Middle English diamaunt. That is borrowed from the Old French, which in turn comes from the medieval Latin diamas and medieval Greek διαμάντε (diamante). The classical Latin word is adamas, which also gives us adamant. The addition of the dia- prefix was probably to distinguish the gem from the more common magnetic lodestone, which in medieval Latin was also referred to as adamas.

Graphite, on the other hand, is borrowed from the German graphit, which dates to 1789 in that language. The modern name is based on the Greek γράϕειν (graphine, to write) because of its use in pencils. Graphite appears in English by 1796. Older names for graphite include black lead and plumbago, which is literally “black lead” in Latin, both dating to the sixteenth century.

A new allotrope of carbon was artificially created in the 1980s. Dubbed buckminsterfullerene, the first of this type consisted of sixty carbon atoms joined together as a truncated regular icosahedron of twelve pentagons and twenty hexagons, forming a symmetrical spheroidal structure suggestive of the geodesic dome or a soccer ball. It was so named in honor of architect Buckminster Fuller, a popularizer of the use of geodesic domes in architecture. The creation of buckminsterfullerenes was announced in the journal Nature on 14 November 1985:

Thus a search was made for some other plausible structure which would satisfy all sp2 valences. Only a spheroidal structure appears likely to satisfy this criterion, and thus Buckminster Fuller’s studies were consulted. An unusually beautiful (and probably unique) choice is the truncated icosahedron depicted in Fig. 1 [i.e., a photo of a soccer ball].

[…]

We are disturbed at the number of letters and syllables in the rather fanciful but highly appropriate name we have chosen in the title to refer to this C60 species. For such a unique and centrally important molecular structure, a more concise name would be useful. A number of alternatives come to mind (for example, ballene, spherene, soccerene, carbosoccer), but we prefer to let this issue of nomenclature be settled by consensus.

Buckminsterfullerene is a mouthful indeed, and Harry Kroto, one of its creators, commented in 1987 on the naming and coined the shorter fullerene to designate the class of allotrope of which buckminsterfullerene is just one:

It was called buckminsterfullerene because the geodesic ideas associated with the constructs of Buckminster Fuller had been instrumental in arriving at a plausible structure. It is convenient to retain this name for C60 and use the name fullerene generically for the class of all carbon cages composed of twelve 5-membered and an unrestricted number of 6-membered rings consistent with the constructs discussed in the original patents.

But even earlier, Kroto and his associates had more playfully dubbed them buckyballs. That name is attested in an Associated Press piece of 24 December 1985 on the discovery:

Several Rice University scientists noticed two months ago that their laser machine was producing unusual spherical carbon molecules they had never seen before.

The researchers quite by accident had found carbon 60, which they nicknamed “Buckyballs,” a discovery that has taken the international scientific community by storm.

[…]

The spheres were named buckminsterfullerene for the late architect Buckminster Fuller.

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Sources:

Anglo-Norman Dictionary, 2007, s.v. diamand, n.

Associated Press. “Scientists Find Odd Molecule.” El Paso Times (Texas), 24 December 1985, 8-A. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, 2013, s.v. diamandus, diamans, diamas, n., adamas, n. Brepols: Database of Latin Dictionaries.

Kirwan, Richard. Elements of Mineralogy, vol. 2 of 2, second edition. London: P. Elmsly, 1796, 58. Archive.org.

Kroto, H.W., et al. “C60: Buckminsterfullerene.” Nature, 318.6042, 14 November 1985, 162–63.

Kroto, H.W. “The stability of the Fullerenes Cn, with n = 24, 28, 32, 36, 50, 60 and 70.” Nature, 329.6139. 8 October 1987, 529–30 at 529.

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

Miśkowiec, Pawel. “Name Game: The Naming History of the Chemical Elements—Part 1—From Antiquity till the End of 18th Century.” Foundations of Chemistry, November 2022.

De Morveau, Louis-Bernard Guyton. “Mémoire sur le Développement des Principes de la Nomenclature Méthodique.” In Methode de Nomenclature Chimique. Paris: Chuchet, 1787, 44–45. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2016, s.v. fullerene, n.; September 2011, s.v. black lead, n.; December 2008, s.v. carbon, n.; September 2006, s.v. plumbago, n.; 1997, s.v. buckminsterfullerene, n., buckyball, n.; second edition, 1989, s.v. graphite, n.

Photo credit: Robert M. Lavinsky, 2015. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.