Katy bar the door

Nineteenth-century painting by Alexander George Fraser illustrating the ballad Get Up and Bar the Door

17 July 2023

(Updated 20–21 July: identified Kate in the Old Smithy poem as a servant rather than the mistress of the house; elaborated on the Kate Barlass legend)

Katy (or Katie) bar the door is an American catchphrase used to warn of impending danger. The bar the door part is self-explanatory, referring to locking a door against intruders. But who is Katy? There’s no satisfactory answer to that question, but the phrase is connected with traditional folk music on both sides of the Atlantic.

Bar the door is an unremarkable phrase, with collocations appearing many times over the centuries. In the nineteenth century it became a standard catchphrase that called for some kind of barrier to entry, either literal or metaphorical. But it also appears in a couple of ballads published in 1769 that seem to have engendered the catchphrase. The first one is titled The Jolly Beggar, about a beggar who beds a woman who offers him hospitality:

The beggar’s bed was made e’en wi’ good clean straw and hay,
And in ahint the ha’ door, and there the beggar lay.
Up raise the goodman’s dochter, and for to bar the door,
And there she saw the beggar standin i’ the floor.
He took the lassie in his arms, and to the bed he ran,
O hooly! Hooly wi’ me, Sir, ye’ll waken our goodman.

The second is actually titled Get Up and Bar the Door. It is about a husband and wife arguing over who should get up and lock the door. They decide that the first one who speaks will do it. While they are sitting in silence, two men enter and plunder the house, but the couple remain silent until the intruders threaten to kiss the wife, at which point the husband stands up and speaks out, and the wife cackles that he has lost the bet. The ballad ends with these lines:

Then up and started our goodwife,
Gied three skips on the floor;
“Goodman, you’ve spoken the foremost word,
Get up and bar the door.”

Robert Burns also used bar the door in his bawdy Reels o’ Bogie, which was also set to music. (“Bogie” here refers to the River Bogie in Aberdeenshire.) The poem is of uncertain date but must predate his 1796 death. While the song has been played quite a bit over the centuries, its subject (and its inclusion of one particular word) prevented the publication of the one particular stanza until the 1964 American edition of the collection Merry Muses of Caledonia. As a result of the censorship, we don’t know for certain exactly how Burns’s original read. The version of the final stanza, with the offending word partially redacted, as it was published in 1964 reads:

Said I, young man, more you can’t do,
    I think I’ve granted your desire,
By bobbing on my wanton clue,
   You see your pintle’s all on fire.
When on my back I work like steel
   An bar the door wi my left heel,
The mair you f[uck] the less I feel,
   An that’s the reels o’ Bogie.

Bar the door’s use in American folk music dates to at least 1850, when it appears in A Christmas Song: A Song of a Pleasant Old Woodman, and his Wife Joan, at a Christmas Fire by an F. J. Palmer, published in the Anti-Slavery Bugle of New Lisbon, Ohio on 23 November. The song is about an older couple who lock the door so their grandchildren will not disturb their amorous activities. The song opens:

Come! Jock o’ the wood, my jolly old man! get up and bar the door!
The feathery sleet with frosty foot, is dancing on the moor.

But while we’ve seen bar the door in various folk songs on both sides of the Atlantic, so far there is no Katy. The first known association of a woman of that name barring the door in the phrase is from an 1841 poem The Old Smithy, published in a London collection of sketches and stories titled The Mirror. The story is about a blacksmith who kills a lone traveler for his money on dark, November night. Years later, a dog digs up the traveler’s bones, and the blacksmith hangs himself and his wife dies of grief. The poem opens:

“The snow is drifting on the ground,
And loud the east wind roars;
Come, men and maidens, hie you in;
Kate, bar those creaking doors.

“Call in the dogs, rouse up the fire;
And, mistress, do you hear?
Heat us a jug of elder wine,
For the night is chill and drear.”

The Kate here appears to be a servant in a public house or inn where the speaker is telling his grim tale. It’s worth noting that this is a British source, while the subsequent early sources are all American. How it might be connected to these later American uses is not known.

Katy makes her American appearance in a nineteenth-century American fiddle tune entitled, appropriately enough, Katie, Bar the Door. We don’t know who wrote the song or when it was written, but the earliest known reference to it is from the 2 October 1872 Louisiana Democrat of Alexandra, LA:

The Custom House Packet, with the Custom House colored band, U.S. Marshal Packard, in command, with the old flag triumphantly kissing the breeze of old Red, the band playing “Katie, Bar The Door,” and with waving rags touched the wharf and proceeded to land her precious cargo.

So, a song of that title existed in 1872, but efforts to track down its music or lyrics have been unsuccessful. The following lyrics are associated with a tune called Katy Bar the Door as played by twentieth-century banjo man Roscoe Parrish. But we don’t know if this particular tune, much less its lyrics, is the one from the 1870s:

Katy bar your door,
Katy bar your door;
The Indians jumping all around your house,
Katy bar your door.

Katie bar the door appears in 1878 in yet another song. This one was composed especially for a wedding of a soldier named Murphy, stationed at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and a Miss Cooper. It was published in Missouri’s Sedalia Weekly Bazoo on 26 March 1878, and includes the lines:

This winsome maid had lovers many,
Whose love she did implore,
There was George and Fred and Harry,
And Ed who numbered with the score,
But when the soldier he came in,
It was “Katie bar the door.”

We don’t know the first name of Miss Cooper, but it probably wasn’t Katie. The quotation marks indicate that the catchphrase was in use at the time and being used here to indicate that Cooper is metaphorically locking the door against new suitors now that she has met Murphy.

The next year we see the following in the Lima, Ohio Allen County Democrat of 30 October 1879 about the mining town of Leadville, Colorado:

To sum it all up, my advice to anyone thinking of going there would be “don’t,” unless they have a pocketfull of the “rhino” which they can afford to lose. I saw it was “Katy bar the door” with me unless I skipped, and I lost no time in skipping.

In short, we have no idea who Katy or Katie is or why she should be barring the door. All we know is that the phrase appears in the mid nineteenth-century and that it has a connection to folk music.

There is a legend that is often cited as the origin of the phrase, although the only evidence connection to the phrase is circumstantial—the story circulated around the time the phrase was developing. On 20 February 1437, King James I of Scotland was assassinated while staying at the Dominican chapterhouse in Perth, and, according to the legend, one of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting, Catherine Douglas, tried to save him by using her arm as a bolt to secure the door against the assassins. She was unsuccessful and her arm was broken, but her bravery was celebrated, and she became popularly known as Kate Barlass. According to the story, her descendants to this day bear a broken arm on their family crest and keep the name Barlass, but no such coat of arms is recorded in heraldic records.

Walter Scott repeated the legend in his 1827 Tales of a Grandfather, but the story did not catch the public’s attention until the publication of George Gilfillan’s 1860 Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets (which is also the first recorded mention of the name Barlass). Perhaps the most famous version of the legend was Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s 1881 poem, The King’s Tragedy, but this poem was written well after the phrase had been established. None of these works of Victorian literature use the phrase Katy bar the door or anything remotely resembling it.

So, the chronology works for the Kate Barlass legend being the inspiration of the phrase, but that’s it. It is a possibility, but there is no particular reason to connect Kate Barlass with the Katy who is barring the door in the phrase.

Discuss this post

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Sources:

Burns, Robert. “Reels O Bogie” (before 1796). In The Merry Muses of Caledonia, James Barke and Sydney Goodsir Smith, eds. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1964, 161–162. Archive.org.

“Get Up and Bar the Door.” Ancient and Modern Scots Songs. Edinburgh: Martin and Wotherspoon, 1769, 330–31. Eighteenth Century Collections Online.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2023, s. v. Katy bar the door, phr.; work, v.

“The Jolly Beggar.” Ancient and Modern Scots Songs. Edinburgh: Martin and Wotherspoon, 1769, 46–47. Eighteenth Century Collections Online.

“Katy Bar the Door.” Traditional Tune Archive, 1 December 2022.

“A Limaite Just From Leadville.” Allen County Democrat (Lima, Ohio), 30 October 1879, 3/4. Newspapers.com. [Archive metadata gives the paper name as Times-Democrat]

Morris, Peter. “‘Katy, bar the door’ (1872–1887).” ADS-L, 7 February 2016.

“The Old Smithy.” The Mirror, 6 February 1841, 91. Google Books.

Oram, Richard. “Kate Barlass—Catherine Douglas: History, Myth and Modern Folk Tale.” Part 1. Part 2. No date. Kingjames1ofscotland.co.uk.

O’Toole, Garson. “Re: ‘Katy, bar the door’ (1872–1887).” ADS-L, 6 February 2016.

Palmer, F.J. “A Christmas Song.” The Anti-Slavery Bugle (Salem, Ohio), 23 November 1850, 4. Library of Congress: Chronicling America, Historic American Newspapers. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83035487/1850-11-23/ed-1/seq-4/

“The Radical Barbecue.” Louisiana Democrat (Alexandria, Louisiana), 2 October 1872, 2/3. Library of Congress: Chronicling America, Historic American Newspapers.

Reinhelm. “The Old Smithy.” The Mirror, vol. 37, London: Hugh Cunningham, 1841, 91.

Scott, Walter. Tales of a Grandfather, vol. 1 of 4. Philadelphia: Porter and Coates, 1827, 165–66. HathiTrust Digital Archive.  

“A Soldier’s Wedding.” Sedalia Weekly Bazoo (Sedalia, Missouri), 26 March 1878, 3/7. Library of Congress: Chronicling America, Historic American Newspapers.

Taylor-Blake, Bonnie. “‘Katy, bar the door’ (1872–1887).” ADS-L, 6 February 2016.

Image credit: Alexander George Fraser, 19th century. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

polycule

19 July 2023

Polycule is a relatively new word from the world of polyamory. A blend of poly[amory] and [mole]cule, it refers to a graphical or physical model of a polyamorous relationship, and by extension a name for the group of people in that relationship.

The term isn’t in any major dictionaries (yet), but Urbandictionary.com has an entry for it dating from 2015. That entry says:

Polycule is used to describe any system of connected non-monogamous relationships.

A polycule can be as simple as a “V’"(A is dating both B and C, with their approval, but B and C are not dating each other) or a triangle (A, B, and C are all dating each other), but it can also get very complex. (Ex: A is dating B and C. B is dating A and D. C is dating A, E, and F. F is also dating G.)

When drawn out as a chart, these connections can look similar to a molecular structure—hence the name polycule.

"My boyfriend's wife just got a new girlfriend. Looks like I'll have to update our polycule!"

Such a chart or model resembles the ball-and-stick models used to show molecular structure, where each ball represents a person and the sticks the relationships with others in the polycule.

The earliest use that I can find of polycule is in Dan Savage’s sex advice column, Savage Love, from 5 August 2010. In it, Savage credits a Koe Sozuteki, who was raised in a polyamorous household, with coining the term:

Sozuteki identifies as poly—her first relationship, she notes, was a quad—but her closest sibling, her brother, is in a monogamous relationship. She currently works at the Center for Sex Positive Culture, is studying to become a sex educator, and coined a widely embraced term in the poly community: “polycule.”

“I was in high school at the time,” she says, “and one day I started making a chart of what my family situation looked like. I wrote down names, drew lines between the names, how some bonds were strong, how some shifted, showing all the connections.”

Sozuteki was studying organic chemistry at the time.

“I finished the chart and thought, ‘Oh, my God-this looks like a molecule, like the diagrams in my biology textbook!’ It really helped me to understand my family.”

Savage gives no date for Sozuteki’s coinage, but he gives her age as twenty, and it seems unlikely that she would have been studying organic chemistry, a university-level subject, much before 2008.

Another early published use is from the news website Vice.com from June 2012:

The basic premise of polyamory is that it is possible and fine to love or lust after more than one person at one time, and that, with care and communication, you can have more than one (or more than ten, YOLO) successful, happy relationships at once. So, naturally, everyone at the event took some plasticine and straws and made “polycules,” little modelling-clay representations of the romantic/sexual relationships in their lives.

And the use of polycule to mean a particular network of polyamorous relationships appeared on the polyamory website Morethantwo.com in 2015:

This is something that hits home to me. I’ve seen abuse happen in my polycule. It’s incredibly disempowering to see someone you love being abused by, for example, your metamour—especially when your metamour is also your friend.

Discuss this post

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Sources:

Heisey, Monica. “Exploring Polyamory with a Bunch of Horny Nerds.” Vice.com, 19 June 2012.

Savage, Dan. “Heather Has Two Mommies, One Daddy, and Several Matriarchal Women in the Community Who She Thinks of as Moms,” The Stranger (Seattle), 5 August 2010, 17.

Urbandictionary.com, 15 March 2015, s. v. polycube. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Polycule

Veaux, Franklin. “Some Thoughts on Community and Abuse.” Morethantwo.com, 11 February 2015.

Photo credit: Boxflip (anonymous contributor), 2016. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

dubnium / rutherfordium / kurchatovium / hahnium

14 July 2023

Of all the chemical elements, the histories of the names of elements 104 and 105 are perhaps the most complex. The naming of these elements was mired in Cold War competition between the Soviet Union and the United States. Both elements are synthetic, not found in nature, and with short half-lives which makes them unsuitable for purposes other than pure research.

Element 104 was first created in 1964 by scientists at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) in Dubna, Russia, and they proposed the name kurchatovium for it, after nuclear physicist Igor Kurchatov. But the Soviet claim was not widely accepted in the West.

Six years later, an American team at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley California synthesized element 104 and proposed the name rutherfordium and the symbol Rf, after the chemist Ernest Rutherford. But because of the competing Soviet claim of discovery, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) did not give the element an official name for several decades.

In 1968 scientists at the JINR synthesized element 105. They published the finding in 1971 but did not propose a name for the element at that time. In 1973, the JINR team proposed the name bohrium, after physicist Niels Bohr, later changing their proposal to nielsbohrium to avoid confusion with boron.

Meanwhile, an American team at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory independently created element 105 at about the same time. They published their discovery in 1970, proposing the element be named hahnium, after the chemist Otto Hahn who had recently passed away.

That’s were things stood until the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War in the 1990s. Element 104 was called either kurchatovium or rutherfordium and 105 either nielsbohrium or hahnium. But the problem of the names would not be resolved easily and would become even more confusing in the 1990s.

In 1994 IUPAC attempted to end the naming controversy, proposing the following naming scheme for elements 101–09:

• 101: mendelevium

• 102: nobelium

• 103: lawrencium

• 104: dubnium

• 105: joliotium (after Frédéic Joliet-Curie)

• 106: rutherfordium

• 107: bohrium

• 108: hahnium

• 109: meitnerium

This proposal pleased no one, especially the Americans because their proposal for element 106, seaborgium, was dropped because its proposed namesake, chemist Glenn Seaborg, was still living, and the IUPAC decided that element should not be named for living persons.

The controversy dragged on for three more years, until in 1997 the IUPAC came up with a proposal that was acceptable to all (names altered from the 1994 proposal are in bold):

• 101: mendelevium

• 102: nobelium

• 103: lawrencium

• 104: rutherfordium (née kurchatovium and dubnium)

• 105: dubnium (née hahnium, bohrium, and nielsbohrium)

• 106: seaborgium (née joliotium)

• 107: bohrium (née nielsbohrium)

• 108: hassium (née hahnium)

• 109: meitnerium

The names the names hahnium, kurchatovium, and joliotium were dropped. Perhaps these names will be revived if heavier elements are created.

Discuss this post

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Sources:

Browne, Malcolm W. “Element Is Stripped of Its Namesake.” New York Times, 11 October 1994, C12. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Flerov, G.N., et al. “On the Synthesis of Element 105.” Nuclear Physics A, 160.1, January 1971, 181–92.

Flerov, G.N. et al. “Synthesis and Physical Identification of the Isotope with Mass Number 260 of Element 104.” Atomnaya Énergiya, 17.4, October 1964, 1046–48. English translation at SpringerLink Historical Archives Physics and Astronomy. DOI: 10.1007/BF01116295.

Ghiorso, A., et al. “261Rf; New Isotope of Element 104.” Physics Letters B, 32.2, 8 June 1970, 95–98. DOI: 10.1016/0370-2693(70)90595-2.

Ghiorso, Albert, et al. “New Element Hahnium, Atomic Number 105.” Physical Review Letters, 24.26, 29 June 1970, 1498–1503.

International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC). “Names and Symbols of Transfermium Elements (IUPAC Recommendations 1997).” Pure and Applied Chemistry, 69.12, 1997, 2471–73.

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.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2012, s.v. dubnium, n., March 2011, s.v. rutherfordium, n.; second edition, 1989, s.v. hahnium, n., kurchatovium, n.

Image credit: anonymous artist, 2008. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

kick the bucket / bucket list

12 July 2023

Actor Jimmy Durante about to kick the bucket in the 1963 film It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World

While we have a fairly good record of the phrase’s early appearances, the metaphor underlying kick the bucket is uncertain. The phrase, of course, means to die, and it came into use in the late eighteenth century. It is still commonly used today and has generated at least one other common phrase, bucket list.

This sense of bucket probably comes from the Old French buquet, meaning a trébuchet or balance. The more familiar sense of pail is likely from the Old French buket, meaning a tub or pail. Shakespeare uses the buquet sense of the word, less familiar to us today, in Henry IV, Part 2 (III.ii.261):

Wil you tel me (master Shallow) how to chuse a man? care I for the limbe, the thewes, the stature, bulke and big assemblance of a man: giue me the spirit M. Shalow: heres Wart, you see what a ragged apparance it is, a shall charge you, and discharge you with the motion of a pewterers hammer, come off and on swifter then he that gibbets on the brewers bucket: and this same halfe facde fellow Shadow, giue me this man, he presents no marke to the enemy, the fo-man may with as great aime leuel at the edge of a pen-knife, and for a retraite how swiftly wil this Feeble the womans Tailer runne off? O giue mee the spare men, and spare me the great ones.

The imagery of on the brewers bucket here is of someone hanging pails or casks of beer or ale on a yoke on another person’s or persons’ shoulders. A gibbet is a gallows or a post on which a criminal’s body is hung following execution; Shakespeare here is verbing the noun. The line is in the context of Falstaff describing Thomas Wart, a recruit to the army, saying his thin and death-like appearance is ideal for the army because in the speed and heat of battle, he is too thin for a musketeer to actually hit.

So by the end of the sixteenth century we have the literary metaphor of a bucket being associated with death by hanging.

And at around the same time, the following entry appears in John Florio’s 1598 A Worlde of Wordes, an Italian-English dictionary:

Dar de'calci a Rouaio, to be hang'd, to kicke the winde.

The Italian literally means to kick the north wind, rovaio being a dialectal word for the north wind. While the Oxford English Dictionary, in an old entry in desperate need of revision, includes this as an English usage, it seems that Florio was simply translating the Italian phrase, rather than recording an English one. And other than appearing in a few other eighteenth-century Italian-English dictionaries translating the same phrase, the phrase kick the wind, or something similar, does not appear in English again until the nineteenth century.

We do, however, see kick the bucket in the late eighteenth century. The following passage appears in Edward Thompson’s 1775 History of Edward and Maria:

My old mess-mate, Tom Bowline, met me at the gangway, and with a salute as hearty as honest, damn’d his eyes, but he was glad I had not kicked the bucket; while another swore roundly, that I had turn’d well to windward, and left death and the devil to leeward; and a third more vociferously exclaimed, I was born to dance upon nothing.

Not only is this the first instance of kick the bucket that I’m aware of, but the passage also includes dance upon nothing, yet another example of a metaphor relating to the flailing and kicking of a hanging man’s legs.

Five years later, the same magazine published the following in its May 1780 issue:

I should have been at a loss also to have known the significance of kicking the bucket, but am told it is an expression used to inform us of a person’s death, although I should no sooner apprehend it to be so than if I were told he had let fall his watch, or rapped at my door.

Francis Grose includes kick the bucket in his 1785 Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. And the following entry appears in the 1811 Lexicon Balatronicon, a later update of Grose’s dictionary:

TO KICK THE BUCKET. To die. He kicked the bucked one day: he died one day. To kick the clouds before the hotel door; i.e., to be hanged.

So, kick the bucket was in common use by the 1780s.

Again, we see the collocation of both kick the bucket and another similar metaphor, kick the clouds. But the original metaphor underneath kick the bucket is unclear to us today. There are two plausible explanations. The first is that it might have originally referred to a suicide standing upon a bucket or pail and then kicking it away, allowing themself to drop. Supporting this explanation is this item from the London Chronicle of 26 September 1788:

Last week, John Marshfield, a labouring man, hanged himself in an out-house in Avon-street. He had very deliberately just before bought a piece of cord, which he put round his neck, and by standing on a bucket fixed it to the beam; he then kicked the bucket to a considerable distance from under him, and was found soon after.

Note that kick the bucket was already an established phrase by the time this incident occurred, but similar incidents could have inspired the phrase, or it could simply be coincidence. Militating against this explanation are the earlier citations of the phrase’s use which are unrelated to suicide.

The other plausible explanation is that it is conflation of a literary reference to Shakespeare’s brewer’s bucket with kick the wind or kick the clouds. We just don’t know, nor are we likely to know. It would seem to be lost to the ages.

Two other explanations are commonly proffered, which we can dismiss. One has the phrase referring to a hanged person kicking at the post from which they were hanged, but this seems unlikely as this would be impossible on a typical gallows where the person would be suspended from a crossbeam. The other is that bucket refers to a gibbet on which a dead person or animal might be strung upside-down, but in that case, they would be dead already and highly unlikely to be kicking anything.

Jumping forward to the twenty-first century, we see kick the bucket give birth to the phrase bucket list. This phrase is one of those that was invented by the movies. It comes from the 2007 Rob Reiner film The Bucket List. While the film was released in 2007, the phrase starts appearing in the press the previous year in anticipation of the movie’s release. Here is a United Press International report from 29 June 2006:

Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman are set to star in “The Bucket List,” about two cancer patients who break out of a hospital and head for Monte Carlo.

The two terminally ill men make a wish list of things they want to do before they kick the bucket—called the bucket list—then take a road trip. Their adventures include racing cars, eating massive amounts of caviar and playing high stakes poker, Daily Variety reported.

And like kick the bucket, one will occasionally see the underlying metaphor of bucket list being reanalyzed into a less morbid one where the bucket is a pail or container for the things one wishes to accomplish in life. As in the earlier phrase, the bucket was originally associated with death.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

Discuss this post

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Sources:

Florio, John. A Worlde of Wordes. London: Arnold Hatfield, 1598, 96.1. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2023, s.v. kick the bucket, v.

Grose, Francis. A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. London: S. Hooper, 1785, 20. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

London Chronicle, 26 September, 307. Gale Primary Sources: Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Burney Newspapers Collection.

Lexicon Balatronicon. London: C. Chappel, 1811, Sig. I2v. Wellcome Collection.

“Observations on the Errors and Corruptions that Have Crept into the English Language.” The London Magazine, May 1780, 202. HathiTrust Digital Archive. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.hxueqk&view=1up&seq=220

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. bucket, n.2, kick, v.1., gibbet, v., gibbet, n.1.; draft additions September 2013, s.v. bucket list in bucket, n.2.

Quinion, Michael. “Kick the Bucket.” World Wide Words, 5 March 2016.

Shakespeare, William. The Second Part of Henrie the Fourth (quarto). London: Valentine Simmes, 1600, sig. F2v. London, British Library, C.34.k.12.

Thompson, Edward. “The History of Edward and Maria.” The London Magazine. Or Gentleman’s Monthly Intelligencer. August 1775, 408–09. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Tréguer, Pascal. “The Authentic Origin of the Phrase ‘To Kick the Bucket.’” Wordhistories.net, 3 January 2017.

United Press International. “Nicholson, Freeman Team Up in Reiner Film.” UPI.com, 29 June 2006. Nexis-Uni.

Photo credit: Clip from a still frame from Stanley Kramer, dir., It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, United Artists, 1963. Fair use of a portion of a single frame from the film to illustrate the topic under discussion.

hip hip hooray / hurrah

Hip, Hip, Hurrah! Artist’s Party, Skagen, oil on canvas painting by Peder Severin Krøyer, 1888.

10 July 2023

The cheer, also commonly hip hip hurray/hurrah, as we know it today, dates to the early nineteenth century, but its components go back further. The cheer is often delivered with the hips as a call and hooray or hurrah as a response.

The Oxford English Dictionary has a citation from the London and Provincial Sunday Gazette of 6 June 1819 that reads:

Down with Popery—Pitt for ever—his Majesty’s Ministers—Hip! Hip! Hip! Hurrah!

But the use of the standalone hip as a cry to attract attention is recorded by 1735 and as a cheer by 1811. The hip is probably just an echoic term, a sharp sound to attract attention with no other underlying meaning.

The hurrah portion is even older, recorded as early as 1686. Even earlier is the cry of huzza, which is recorded by 1573. The shift from the / z / to the / ɹ / sound may simply be random variation, or it could reflect the influence of other languages. Various other Germanic languages as well as Russian have cries similar to hurrah. Again, this cry has no specific meaning, it’s just a combination of sounds that are easy to yell.

There is a persistent myth that the cry hip hip hooray has an antisemitic origin. Like most myths, there is a grain of truth at its core, but that truth is distorted beyond all recognition. There were a series of antisemitic riots and pogroms in Germany in 1819, in which the protesters took up the rallying cry of hep hep. The riots subsequently became known as the Hep Hep Riots. But the German cry is unrelated to the English language cheer, which as we have seen predates the German riots. Another part of the myth is that hep is a Latin acronym for Hierosolyma est perdita (Jerusalem is lost), allegedly a crusader’s cry. This is certainly not true as acronymic word origins were almost nonexistent prior to the twentieth century and there is no evidence that the Latin phrase goes back to the Crusades. Like the English hip, this antisemitic cry is simply a sound that is easy to yell.

Discuss this post

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Sources:

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2018, s.v. hip hip hooray, int. and n., hip hip hooray, v., hip, int. and n.3; second edition, 1989, hurrah | hurray, int. and n., huzza, int. and n.

Image credit: Gothenburg Museum of Art, Sweden (F 62). Wikimedia Commons. Public domain work as a mechanical reproduction of a public domain work.