speculative fiction

A Martian fighting machine from a 1906 Belgian edition of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds

14 June 2023

The term speculative fiction means different things to different people. Most often it is synonymous with science fiction, but it is also interpreted more broadly to include fantasy, horror, magical realism, fairy tales, and other imaginative works. In other words, it is fiction that includes imaginative elements, and is often, but not always, set in a future where the imaginative elements are based on scientific theories that are not yet realities.

Robert Heinlein is often credited with coining the term speculative fiction, but while his use undoubtedly popularized and helped usher in the term’s widespread use in the mid twentieth century, others had been using the term for nearly a century. In a 1947 essay, “On Writing of Speculative Fiction,” Heinlein wrote:

There are at least two principal ways to write speculative fiction—write about people, or write about gadgets. There are other ways; consider Stapleton’s “Last and First men,” recall S. Fowler Wright’s “The World Below.” But the gadget story and the human-interest story comprise most of the field. Most science fiction stories are a mixture of the two types, but we will speak as if they were distinct—at which point I will chuck the gadget story aside, dust off my hands, and confine myself to the human-interest story, that being the story I myself write. I have nothing against the gadget story—I read and enjoy it—it’s just not my pidgin.

Two years later, in a 4 March 1949 letter, Heinlein wrote:

[Alice Dalgliesh, editor at Scribner’s] has fixed firmly in her mind a conception of what a “science fiction” book should be, though she can’t define it and the notion is nebulous—she has neither the technical training nor the acquaintance with the body of literature in the field to have a clearly defined criterion. But it’s there, just the same, and it reads something like this: “Science has to do with machines and machinery and laboratories. Science fiction consists of stories about the wonderful machines of the future which will go striding around the universe, as in Jules Verne.”

Her definition is all right as far as it goes, but it fails to include most of the field and includes only that portion of the field which has been heavily overworked and now contains only low-grade ore. Speculative fiction (I prefer that term to science fiction) is also concerned with sociology, psychology, esoteric aspects of biology, impact of terrestrial culture on the other cultures we may encounter when we conquer space, etc., without end. However, speculative fiction is not fantasy fiction, as it rules out the use of anything as material which violates established scientific fact, laws of nature, call it what you will, i.e., it must [be] possible to the universe as we know it. Thus, Wind in the Willows is fantasy, but the much more incredible extravaganzas of Dr. Olaf Stapledon are speculative fiction—science fiction.

Another writer of speculative fiction, Margaret Atwood, defined the term thusly in 2011:

What I mean by “science fiction” is those books that descend from H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, which treats of an invasion by tentacled, blood-sucking Martians shot to Earth in metal canisters—things that could not possibly happen—whereas, for me, “speculative fiction” means plots that descend from Jules Verne's books about submarines and balloon travel and such-things that really could happen but just hadn't completely happened when the authors wrote the books. I would place my own books in this second category: no Martians. Not because I don't like Martians, I hasten to add: they just don't fall within my skill set. Any seriously intended Martian by me would be a very clumsy Martian indeed.

But the phrase is much older. Speculative fiction appears in the mid nineteenth century in the sense of a falsehood, a lie. Nathan Lord, president of Dartmouth College, wrote the following in a public letter dated 1 December 1859:

Any other view of man or of society, in the present state, can produce nothing but a spiritual inflation swelling us with self-sufficiency, and firing us with ambition, reducing us to mere competitors and strugglers for an ideal good, and at length exploding all our gaudy visions of a millennial Commonwealth. It is this speculative fiction, not of Puritan but our revolutionary fathers, whom we blame, however, not for revolutionizing society, but for re-constructing it on a false philosophical idea.

But this usage, which continued through the rest of the nineteenth century, has little to do with the literary genre beyond sharing the collocation of words.

A few years earlier than Lord’s letter, in 1856, we see speculative fiction being used in the sense of a literary genre. Here it is used not in the sense of futuristic possibilities, but in the sense of a broader imaginative literature. From the North British Review of August 1856:

In still more recent times, there has been a new literary avatar in the serial novels of Dickens, Thackeray, Lever, and their imitators, and even, competing with that, there has appeared what may be called the literature of philosophical and speculative fiction.

And in 1887, we see the following in the December issue of the Atlantic Monthly:

If we compare a finely chiseled piece of work like this with the flat, faintly colored sketches which are at present passing muster for novels, we feel that beauty of form is something not compounded of earthly materials only, and that neither the savage strength of French and Russian realism, nor the dreary monotony of German speculative fiction, can lift us any nearer the tranquil realms of art.

Exactly what is meant by “German speculative fiction” is not clear, but it probably refers to the work of, among others, Kurd Lasswitz (a.k.a Velatus) and his wissenschaftliche Märchen (scientific tales).

And by 1889 we see speculative fiction clearly being used to refer to what we today would classify as science fiction. From a book review in the October 1889 issue of Lippencott’s Monthly Magazine:

Mr. Besant has, since the success of his utopian “All Sorts and Conditions of Men,” been very much in the air. In fact, he has become both a prophet and a reformer. Edward Bellamy, in “Looking Backward," and George Parsons Lathrop, in a short story, "The New Poverty," have followed the example of Anthony Trollope and Bulwer in speculative fiction put in the future tense. Mr. Besant’s “Inner House” is as clever as any of these efforts. His German professor discovers the art of prolonging life, and the Royal Institution at once monopolize and use it for the good of the minority. A massacre of the old is ordered, and at the opening of the story everybody has been young for five hundred years.

Speculative fiction is yet another example of the recency illusion in relation to words and phrases. They are often much older than one thinks.

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Sources:

Atwood, Margaret. “If It Is Realistic or Plausible, Then It Is Not Science Fiction.” Gizmodo, 6 October 2011.

Egan, Maurice F. “Book-Talk.” Lippencott’s Monthly Magazine, October 1889, 597. ProQuest Magazines.

Robert A. Heinlein. Letter to Lurton Blassingame, 4 March 1949. In Grumbles from the Grave. New York: Ballantine, 1989, 49. Archive.org.

———. “On the Writing of Speculative Fiction” (1947). In Lloyd Arthur Eshbach, ed. Of Worlds Beyond: The Science of Science Fiction Writing, second edition. Chicago: Ardent Publishing, 1964, 13–19 at 13.

Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction, 16 December 2020, s.v. speculative fiction, n.1, n.2, n.3.

Lord, Nathan. “President Lord’s Letter” (1 December 1859). Congregational Journal (Concord, New Hampshire), 16 February 1860, 1/5. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

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

“Recollections of the Table-Talk of Samuel Rogers.” North British Review (Edinburgh), August 1856, 426. ProQuest Historical Periodicals.

Repplier, Agnes. “Some Aspects of Pessimism.” Atlantic Monthly, December 1887, 765. ProQuest Magazines.

Weaver, Toze. “What Is Speculative Fiction?” Medium.com, 2 August 2021.

Image credit: Henrique Alvim Corrêa, 1906. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

science fiction

August 1959 cover of Super-Science Fiction

12 June 2023

The Oxford English Dictionary defines science fiction, as it is most commonly used today, as:

Fiction in which the setting and story feature hypothetical scientific or technological advances, the existence of alien life, space or time travel, etc., esp. such fiction set in the future, or an imagined alternative universe.

Jesse Sheidlower’s Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction defines it as:

a genre (of fiction, film, etc.) in which the plot or setting features speculative scientific or technological advances or differences.

One can, and many do, argue over whether or not a particular work is science fiction or speculative fiction, or science fantasy, or whatever, but such hair splitting is not needed to determine the origin of the phrase, which first appears in the late nineteenth century.

In those early appearances, the term was occasionally used to refer to a scientific hypothesis or claim that is false. This is clearly not what we mean by the current use of science fiction, no matter what hairs you split.

Before science fiction began to be commonly used, the term used to describe the genre was slightly different, scientific fiction. We find this phrase used in an 1876 obituary for the writer William Henry Rhodes, who commonly wrote under the pseudonym of Caxton. In his early years, Rhodes wrote in the genre before moving on to other types of stories:

His fondness for weaving the problems of science with fiction, which became afterwards so marked a characteristic of his literary efforts, attracted the especial attention of his professors; and had Mr. Rhodes devoted himself to this then novel department of letters, he would have become, no doubt, greatly distinguished as a writer; and the great master of scientific fiction, Jules Verne, would have found the field of his efforts already sown and reaped by the young Southern student.

By the end of that century, however, science fiction would start to displace scientific fiction as the name for the genre. But before we get to that, let’s take a look at one example of an early use of science fiction in a slightly different sense. William Wilson, in his 1851 A Little Earnest Book upon a Great Old Subject, uses the phrase to refer to stories and poetry that make use of present-day science, rather than speculative advances in the future:

Campbell says that “Fiction in Poetry is not the reverse of truth, but her soft and enchanting resemblance.” Now this applies especially to Science-Fiction, in which the revealed truths of Science may be given, interwoven with a pleasing story which may itself be poetical and true—thus circulating a knowledge of the Poetry of Science, clothed in a garb of the Poetry of life.

A more recent example of this genre would be Michael Crichton’s 1969 novel, and the 1971 film directed by Robert Wise, The Andromeda Strain, which purports to be a history of scientists battling the arrival of a deadly extraterrestrial microorganism in the recent past (1967 or 1968). Because it does not speculate about future technologies, one might classify the book and movies as a techno-thriller rather than science fiction. (I was wrong, a little of the hair splitting is necessary to discuss the phrase’s origin.)

But this particular use of science fiction was rare, perhaps even a one-off usage.

Use of science fiction to refer to a literary work that speculates about the future dates to a least 1897. In that year, Harry B. Mason published a story in which the narrator goes to sleep in 1897 and wakes in 1917. The story appears in the 20 May issue of The Pharmaceutical Era. That seems like an odd venue for such a story, but in the story the narrator is a clerk in a drug store. Anyway, the first paragraph of the story contains these lines:

No Svengali had ushered me into the peace of oblivion. My last remembrance had been of reading Mr. Lloyd’s Etidorhpa. (And now that I thought of it, this was at the store, too. I must have been carted to the house, and allowed to sleep my sleep out, which quite broke my former records.) The complete arrest of bodily function and tissue waste which the central figure of that remarkable science-fiction achieved at the point where gravitation ceases, somewhere between here and China, impressed me deeply. Long and intense in-dwelling upon it had evidently brought about its achievement in me. Mind had exerted great power over matter and matter had knuckled.

But this use of the term refers to an individual work, not the genre as a whole, and it can be constructed in the plural; one may, for instance, write several science fictions.

Use of the term to denote the genre appears a year later, and possibly may have been written by the same Harry B. Mason. It is in a book review of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds that appears in another pharmaceutical journal, the October 1898 issue of the Bulletin of Pharmacy. (What is with pharmacists and science fiction?) The review immediately preceding this one, about a tome on rheumatoid arthritis, was authored by an “H.B.M.” The only questions are whether H.B.M. is the same Harry B. Mason and whether he also penned the book review of Wells’s novel. The review reads, in part:

Mr. H. G. Wells, the imaginative writer of science-fiction, has recently brought out a thrilling romance whose basis in the intended conquest of the earth by the inhabitants of Mars.

Perhaps Mason was the coiner of both senses of the term. In any case, the use of science fiction to denote the genre was in place before the start of the twentieth century, the century in which the genre would fully establish itself on the literary landscape.

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Sources:

Barnes, W.H.L. “In Memoriam.” In Rhodes, W.H. Caxton’s Book. Daniel O’Connell, ed. San Francisco: A.L. Bancroft, 1876, 6–7. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

“The Beneficent Microbe.” Bulletin of Pharmacy, 12.10, October 1898, 466/1. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Goranson, Stephen. “science-fiction, 1898 antedating (?),” ADS-L, 3 February 2021.

Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction, 12 May 2023, s.v. science fiction, n.2; 17 May 2022, s.v. science fiction, n.1.; 16 December 2020, s.v. scientific fiction, n.

Mason, Harry B. “A Rip Van Winkle Episode.” The Pharmaceutical Era, 7.20, 20 May 1897, 592/1. Google Books.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2014, s.v. science fiction, n. and adj., scientific, adj. and n.

Wilson, William. A Little Earnest Book upon a Great Old Subject. London: J. Wertheimer, 1851, 137, 138–40. Archive.org.

Image credit: Headline Publications, 1959. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image as a work published in the United States prior to 1963 whose copyright was not renewed.

copernicium

The “Toruń portrait” of Nicolaus Copernicus, c.1580

9 June 2023

Copernicium is a radioactive, artificially created, transuranic element with the atomic number 112 and the symbol Cn. Copernicium has a half-life of about thirty seconds and has no uses other than research. It is, of course, named for astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543), who advanced the theory of a heliocentric solar system. The naming is in line with that of other artificially created elements, which tend to be named after scientists or for places where nuclear research is conducted.

Copernicium was first created in Darmstadt, Germany in 1996 at the Gesellschaft für Schwerionenforschung (Center for Heavy Ion Research). It was officially recognized by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) in 2009, and at that time the Darmstadt researchers proposed the name. From their 14 July 2009 press release announcing the proposed name:

Element 112 shall be named “copernicium”

Proposed name honors astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus

In honor of scientist and astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543), the discovering team around Professor Sigurd Hofmann suggested the name “copernicium” with the element symbol “Cp” for the new element 112.

IUPAC approved the name in 2010, but changed the symbol to Cn, as Cp had been used in the past to designate the element now known as lutetium, which had been known as casssiopeium.

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Sources:

Gesellschaft für Schwerionenforschung. Press release, 14 July 2009. Internet Archive.

Hofmann, S., et al. “The New Element 112.” Zeitschrift für Physik A Hadrons and Nuclei, 354.3, December 1996, 229–230. DOI: 10.1007/BF02769517.

Miśkowiec, Pawel. “Name Game: The Naming History of the Chemical Elements—Part 3—Rivalry of Scientists in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries. Foundations of Chemistry, 12 November 2022.

Image credit: anonymous painter, c.1580. District Museum in Toruń, Poland. Public domain image as a mechanical reproduction of a public domain work.

hell-bent / hell for leather / hell-bent for leather / hell-bent for election

“The Cowboy,” by Frederick Remington, 1902

7 June 2023

Hell bent features in a number of slang phrases. To be hell bent is to be doggedly determined, and to ride or go hell for leather or hell bent for leather (or election) is to travel fast and recklessly. The etiology of hell bent is straightforward enough, a metaphor for being on a path that will end up in the bad place, but the additions of leather and election are seemingly nonsensical. And unfortunately, as is often the case with such phrases, the recorded history of the terms doesn’t offer much insight.

We see hellishly bent pop up in the c.1566 play The Bugbears. In the scene in question two men are discussing marriage plans:

Brancatius her father is content but my master Amedeus is so hellishely bent on the muck of this world, on his pelfe & his drosse that of three thousand crownes he wyll not bate a crosse of rownd redy payment in dowry to bringe with her.

But this use of hellishly bent appears to be a simple collocation of words, rather than the use of a set phrase. There are no other recorded uses of a similar phrase for several centuries.

The Oxford English Dictionary includes the following alleged use of hell bent in Ebenezer Cooke’s 1731 poem The Maryland Muse:

Of Ab-origines in Arms,
Who far and near did then resort,
In Haste to Susquehanna Fort,
Hell bent [Full bent?] on Thoughts of Massacre,
To cut off ev’ry Marylander.

I haven’t been able to verify it, however. While a number of transcriptions of the poem use hell bent, every scan that I have found of the 1731 edition clearly reads full bent. But these scans are all of a revised, third edition. It is possible that hell was expurgated from this printing and the original did indeed use hell bent.

But hell bent is definitely in use by 1824, when it appears in a story titled The Mohawk Chief:

It was then, that casting his eyes through the window by which he sate [sic], he discovered that he was in the midst of a large encampment of savages, hideously painted, and “hell-bent” on carnage.

We get the first of the nonsensical variants by 1882, when hell bent for election appears in a delightfully comic story about a drunk billy goat. Printed in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on 2 January 1882, it evidently appeared earlier in the San Francisco Post, but I have been unable to find that article:

“Yes, sir; and this morning, as it was rather sultry, I sent my youngest boy for a gallon of beer. He stopped on the way and put the can down to play marbles. McGinty’s old black billy-goat came along and drank up the beer—every drop of it.”

“Great Caesar!” said the court reporter, smacking his lips regretfully.

“He drank every drop of it, and nearly choked to death on the can. He stood blinking around a little for a while; then he started for a street car, with all colors set. He hit the horse square amidship, and it foundered at once.”

“Wrecked, I suppose?” said the editor.

“Precisely. The goat then glanced off, killed the driver and telescoped the car. I was sitting at the window all this time, and my attention was attracted by Gov. Perkins going down the street hell bent for election.”

“Gov. Perkins?”

“That’s the goat’s name, you see. McGinty is a strong Republican. There were four men getting a piano out of a wagon across the strreet [sic] when the Governor went through ’em like a pile driver behind time. The Steinway was sent to the manufactory and the men to the hospital. Terrible, wasn’t it?”

The fact that the goat was named for a governor—George Perkins was the Republican governor of California, 1880–83—hints that hell bent for election was already in use in reference to politicians doggedly determined to win office. And the political connection is made stronger by a one-line note appearing in the Buffalo Evening News on 10 September 1894: “Maine goes ‘hell bent for election’ today.” That day was election day in Maine that year.

And we see hell bent for election used in a context completely divorced from politics in a 15 July 1898 letter by an American sailor onboard a warship in the Spanish-American War, published in Michigan’s Jackson Daily Citizen:

As we sat around the deck waiting for the clouds (not to “roll by,” but to [“]unload”) and grumbled at our inactivity, we were suddenly greeted with the cry, “sail ho,” and away we went after her, “hell bent for election,” as Jud Smith used to say.

The variant hell for leather is attested a few years later. Why leather is unknown, although the OED includes a bracketed (i.e., not the same phrase, but perhaps related to it) citation to an 1881 glossary of dialect terms from the Isle of Wight off the south coast of England:

Hellfalleero. “They be aal quarlun and fightun hellfalleero.”

We see hell for leather in Rudyard Kipling’s 1890 The Story of the Gadsbys, a tale written as dramatic dialogue:

Capt. M.—(Jealously.) Then don’t say it! Leave him alone. It’s not bade enough to croak over. Here, Gaddy, take the chit to Bingle and ride hell-for-leather. It’ll do you good. I can’t go.

Junior Chaplain.—Do him good! (Smiling.) Give me the chit and I’ll drive. Let him lie down. Your horse is blocking my cart—please!

Capt. M.—(Slowly, without reining back.) I beg your pardon—I’ll apologize. On paper if you like.

Junior Chaplain.—(Flicking M.’s charger.) That’ll do, thanks. Turn in, Gadsby, and I’ll bring Bingle back—ahem—“hell-for-leather.”

While it’s possible that hellalleero could have morphed into hell for leather, the existence of the election variant casts doubt on this origin. Why leather? It’s anyone’s guess. Perhaps it has something to do with a horse’s tackle, the saddle, reins, etc., which are typically made of leather. That still doesn’t make much sense, but at least there’s some kind of logical connection.

And we get hell bent for leather by 1912, when it appears in the 31 October issue of the Riverside Enterprise:

When Becker took the family name and guaranteed to keep the same from shame and stain and blame in every kind of weather, he never dreamed the time was near when everyone he held most dear would look at him through eyes of fear and run hell bent for leather.

The gap in our knowledge of the phrase’s origins is unsatisfying, and hell bent for election/leather doesn’t make sense, but that’s the way with such idioms. Because such phrases come into common oral use before they appear in the published record, their origins are often murky. And language is not logical, or at least the logic driving an idiom’s coinage and spread is often lost in that murk of history.

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Sources:

Buffalo Evening News (New York), 10 September 1894, 2/3. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

The Bugbears (c.1566). Archiv für das Studium der Neueren Sprachen und Literaturen, vol. 98, Braunschweig: George Westermann, 1897, 1.2a, lines 49–53, 308.  London, British Library MS Lansdowne 807, fols. 57–77. Archive.org.

Cooke, Ebenezer. The Maryland Muse, third edition. Annapolis, 1731, 1. Gale Primary Sources: Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Clark, James D. The Bugbears: A Modernized Edition. New York: Garland, 1979. Archive.org.

Dodd, Derrick “A Goat’s Spree.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 2 January 1882, 2/5. Reprinted from the San Francisco Post. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2023, hell bent, adj., hell, n.

Kipling, Rudyard. The Story of the Gadsbys. New York: John W. Lovell, 1890, 149. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

“Letter from a Member of the Michigan Naval Reserves (15 July 1898).” Jackson Daily Citizen (Michigan), 29 July 1898, 2/4. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“Little Enterprises.” Riverside Enterprise (California), 31 October 1912, 10.2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“The Mohawk Chief.” The Port Folio (Philadelphia), March 1824, 179. Gale Primary Sources: American Historical Periodicals.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2008, hell-bent, adj. and adv., hellishly, adv., hell, n. and int.

Smith, Henry and C. Roach Smith. “Isle of Wight Words.” Original Glossaries, English Dialect Society. London: Trübner, 1881, 15. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Image credit: Frederick Remington, 1902. Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image as a mechanical reproduction of a public domain work.

rhubarb

A bench-clearing rhubarb between the Boston Red Sox and the Tampa Bay Rays, 5 June 2008

7 June 2023

Rhubarb is any one of a variety of edible stalks of the genus Rheum. It has a strong tart taste, and as a result, while rhubarb is biologically a vegetable it is often considered more like a fruit in culinary circles, where it is often used in pies and pastries. Rhubarb also used to (still?) be used as a purgative. But in slang use, rhubarb has come to mean nonsense or rubbish, and in baseball circles, a rhubarb is a dispute, argument, or fight.

The English name for the plant comes from the Anglo-Norman reubarbe (1212), which in turn is from the post-classical Latin reubarbarum, and that from the Hellenistic Greek ῥῆον βάρβαρον (rion barbaron, barbarous rheum). It was “barbarous” because it was not cultivated in ancient Greece, but rather in the Black Sea region. The English word is in place by c.1390, when it appears in the poem “The Pistel of Swete Susan”:

Columbyne and charuwé  clottes þei creve,
With ruwe and rubarbe, ragget ariht.

(Columbine and caraway flourishing in clumps,
With rue and rhubarb ragged in the right way.)

How rhubarb came to mean nonsense is uncertain, but it happened by the beginning of the nineteenth century. The sense may come from a certain theatrical practice, where actors would repeatedly utter the word rhubarb to simulate the noise of a crowd, but this practice is not attested to until considerably after the nonsense sense. Still, it may be the practice is older and just not remarked upon in print.

The earliest example of the word being used to mean nonsense that I have found is in George Colman’s 1801 play The Poor Gentleman. In Act 2, Scene 1, two soldiers, Foss, a corporal, and Ollapod, an officer, are conversing:

Foss. Why your honour, I have seen a good deal of service in the regular way; and know nothing about Associations; but I think, an’ please your honour, if men take up arms to defend their country, they deserve to be thank’d, and respected for it, and it doesn’t signify a brass farthing what they are called.

Olla. Right—the name’s nothing—merit’s all—Rhubarb’s rhubarb, call it what you will.

Earlier in the play, Ollapod remarks upon an officer ostentatiously wearing a uniform rhubarb-colored lapels. Whether his saying rhubarb’s rhubarb, call it what you will is a reference to that earlier scene or to an already existing sense of the word meaning nonsense is uncertain.

Colman’s play was quite successful, and two decades later, the line rhubarb’s rhubarb, call it what you will was quoted in the 22 September 1823 issue of The Mirror of the Stage, so it is not inconceivable that Colman was the originator of the slang sense. At the least, his play probably had a role in popularizing the sense.

We see the nonsense sense again in William Johnson Neale’s 1841 novel Paul Periwinkle:

In vain Bamboozle endeavoured to coax up a reply from the bottom of his throat, the words were frozen there. He got as far as “I—I—I,” and then the heavy fist of Alibi finished the rest of the sentence by the most forcible of all arguments, which the learned have termed the argumentum bacculinum, and the unlearned “the knock-down.”

“I hope that's finished you! You thrice-dyed incarnation of lies and rhubarb!” proceeded Alibi, speaking in his wrath as loudly as if the words could still annoy the bleeding ear of poor old Bam, who lay as flat upon the deck as if he never should rise more.

So, rhubarb meaning nonsense was well established by the mid nineteenth century, but the theatrical practice uttering the word rhubarb to simulate the murmuring of a crowd isn’t recorded until the twentieth century, although it may in fact be much older. The earliest mention of the practice that I’m aware of is in an article about the actor Elliott Dexter in the February 1919 issue of Motion Picture Magazine:

To return from the piscatorial to biographical, [Elliott] Dexter began his stage career as a supe, which is a noisy dram for extra, in “The Great Diamond Robbery,” at the American Theater, in New York. He didn’t carry a spear in this dramatic masterpiece, probably because there were no spears to carry, but he did grumble, “Rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb” off stage to make up the angry mob.

In baseball circles, however, a rhubarb is a dispute or a fight. It is claimed that this sense is a coinage of sportswriter Garry Schumacher, but no one has found an early use of the term by him. This baseball sense of rhubarb was popularized by famed sportscaster Walter Lanier “Red” Barber, who used the term frequently. It is likely that Barber began using rhubarb in the late 1930s when he was covering the Cincinnati Reds, but the baseball sense of the term is not recorded until 12 April 1940, when it appears in the pages of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. By this time Barber was calling the games for the Brooklyn Dodgers, and it was he who undoubtedly brought the term to Brooklyn. The article in the Daily Eagle is about the possibility of Chicago Cubs pitcher Dizzy Dean joining the Dodgers, something that did not happen. Here rhubarb is used to mean trouble:

Well, in those not forgotten days, Leo [Durocher] was Dizzy’s friend, counsellor and guide. Probably Durocher’s sage advice kept the ex-cotton picker out of many a mess of rhubarb.

And we see the dispute sense in the pages of the New York Times on 19 May 1941, again in a reference to Brooklyn, who had played the Cubs the previous day:

There was what the boys call “a bit of a rhubarb” in the eighth when Cavarretta tried to steal home as Tamulis tossed the ball to first. In the ensuing run-down, the Cubs charged Phil’s progress was illegally blocked by Lavagetto. Umpire Al Barlick ruled otherwise.

And to round out the early appearances of the baseball sense, there is this from the New York Herald Tribune of 25 September 1942 about Larry MacPhail, manager of the Dodgers:

Unless Larry turns up some kind of rumpus today he apparently is going to stand on his last two “rhubarbs,” i.e., the recent ruckus with Bill Klem, the old arbitrator, and the telegraphic altercation recently undertaken with Bill McKechnie, the Cincinnati manager.

So, how the plant became associated with nonsense is unknown, but that slang sense probably gave rise to the theatrical practice of repeating saying rhubarb to simulate crowd noise. The idea of an angry crowd may, in turn, have given rise to the baseball sense of a dispute or fight. But the connections between all these senses are a bit tenuous.

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Sources:

Anglo-Norman Dictionary, 2021, s.v. reubarbe, n.

Colman, George. The Poor Gentleman (performed 11 February 1801). London: A. Strahan, 1802, 2.1, 24. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

The Dickson Baseball Dictionary, third edition. New York: W.W. Norton, 2009, 704–06, s.v. rhubarb, n.

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

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2023, s.v. rhubarb, n.1. https://greensdictofslang.com/entry/yk4ob2q

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