gadolinium

A sample of gadolinium

8 September 2023

Gadolinium is a silvery-white metal with atomic number 64 and the symbol Gd. It is named after mineralogist Johan Gadolin (1760–1852), who in 1794 discovered a silicate of yttrium, beryllium, and iron with traces of other elements in the mine at Ytterby, Sweden. In 1801, Louis Nicolas Vauquelin dubbed the mineral gadolinite.

In 1880 Jean Charles Galissard de Marignac detected the oxide of the gadolinium via spectroscopy in a sample of gadolinite, and the pure element was isolated in 1886 by Paul-Émile Lecoq de Boisbaudran. In an 1886 communication with de Boisbaudran, Marignac dubbed it gadolinium.

Discuss this post

---

Sources:

Miśkowiec, Pawel. “Name Game: The Naming History of the Chemical Elements: Part 2—Turbulent Nineteenth Century.” Foundations of Chemistry, 8 December 2022. DOI: 10.1007/s10698-022-09451-w.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2018, gadolinium, n., gadolinite, n.

Vauquelin, Louis Nicolas. “Analysis of a Stone Called the Gadolinite.” The Philosophical Magazine, vol. 8, January 1801, 366–75 at 368. Biodiversity Heritage Library. https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/53001#page/386/mode/1up

Image credit: unknown photographer, 2010. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

galoot

Lobby card for the 1926 film The Ramblin’ Galoot

6 September 2023

A galoot is an awkward and not-too-intelligent person. It’s often used in affectionate deprecation; you might call a large friend a big galoot. But most people would be surprised to find that the word has an origin in Royal Navy slang and that it is associated with a man who is perhaps the most colorful lexicographer in history.

Galoot is a mildly offensive term that originally referred to an inept sailor or to a marine on board ship, much like a modern sailor might use jarhead. Etymologist Anatoly Liberman points to the thirteenth century Italian galeot(t)o, “sailor, steersman,” as a possible source for galoot. The Italian word spread to other languages as well as continuing into Modern Italian, acquiring some additional senses like “galley slave,” “convict,” and “pimp” along the way. Liberman suggests the proximate origin is the Middle Dutch galioot. But he also notes that the problem with his proposed etymology is a gap of several centuries between the Middle Dutch and the word’s 1808 appearance in English. That gap is not necessarily disqualifying, as slang terms often have a long sub rosa existence before appearing in print, but it does work against the hypothesis to some degree.

Wiktionary goes another direction and traces galoot to the Arabic جالوت (jālūt, pronounced galūt in Egyptian Arabic), the proper name Goliath. This etymology, however, is unconvincing, not only because no route for transmission from Arabic to early nineteenth-century English slang is proffered, but also because the name Goliath is so well known in English that the adoption by English sailors of the Arabic name in preference to the English one seems highly doubtful. Just because a word in one language resembles one in another does not mean they are etymologically related.

Another proposed etymology, but one that is almost certainly wrong, is that it comes from the Krio adjective galut, which is applied to people and means “large.” Krio is an English-based creole spoken in Sierra Leone. Fyle and Jones’s A Krio-English Dictionary gives the etymology of the Krio word as a borrowing from English into Krio, not from one of the African languages that also constitute the creole.

The word’s first English-language appearance is in an anonymous 1808 poem, The Cruise: A Poetical Sketch, where it seems to refer to a new recruit who is inexperienced in sailing the high seas, and therefore can pose a danger to the ship if not properly supervised:

A Pupil of this school then, we can trace,
Our gallant, hardy Seaman, active BRACE;—
Yet strange however, as it may appear,
Ne’er had he been to us, so justly dear,
Had he continu’d longer, that pursuit;—
For Men-of-war, an absolute Galoot
Raw from the country, had been full as good
At first, at least;—but to be understood—
Such Collier Seamen, as have never been
Engag’d at sea, in any other sense
Than merely coasting,—ne’er had been to roam,
At any distance from their native home;
Returning, soon as the short run was made,
Are ever of a Man-of-war afraid,
So much so even as in bloom to fade,
When first they’re made to serve on-board of these,
And forc’d to quit a time, their well-known seas,
Nor quite allow’d to do just as they please.

Following this, galoot appears throughout the first half of the nineteenth century in various books and papers concerning the Royal Navy in the sense of a sailor or especially a marine. It had the connotation of a lumbering or clumsy person. Here is a passage from Frederick Marryat’s 1834 novel Jacob Faithful, that tells of the rescue of four sailors from a boat that had been capsized by the ineptitude of one of them:

“Have you got them all, waterman?” said he.
“Yes, sir, I believe so; I have four.”
“The tally is right,” replied he, “and four greater galloots were never picked up; but never mind that. It was my nonsense that nearly drowned them.”

In the 1860s, galoot gained a foothold in America, where it became a popular epithet among soldiers fighting the Civil War. It is in America that galoot loses its association with the navy and marines and acquired the current, general sense that we know today. Mark Twain, for example, uses it in his 1872 Roughing It:

He could lam any galoot of his inches in America. It was him that put down the riot last election before it got a start; and everybody said he was the only man that could have done it. He waltzed in with a spanner in one hand and a trumpet in the other, and sent fourteen men home on a shutter in less than three minutes.

The colorful lexicographer who is associated with the word is James Hardy Vaux (1782–1841?), who in 1812 compiled the Vocabulary of the Flash Language, a glossary of London slang in which he glosses galloot as “a soldier.” For years, his dictionary was the earliest known use of the word. That glossary is also notable because it is one of the first dictionaries compiled in Australia and because of Vaux’s somewhat notorious biography.

Vaux, a former sailor and legal clerk, was convicted of stealing a handkerchief and sentenced to seven years in the penal colony of Australia, arriving down under in 1801. He returned to England in 1807, returning to a life of crime and marrying a prostitute. Two years later was convicted of stealing from a jeweler’s shop and sent to Australia for life. During this second stint in Australia he wrote and had published his memoirs and the slang dictionary. He married again in 1818; the fate of his first wife is unknown. Vaux was pardoned in 1820, remaining in Australia for several years. He remarried again in 1827; committing bigamy as his second wife was still alive. He eventually found his way to Ireland, where in 1830 he was convicted of passing forged bank notes and sent to Australia yet again—making him the only person known to have been transported to Australia three times. In 1837 he was released from the penal colony and settled in Sydney. But two years later he was convicted of assaulting an eight-year-old girl. Vaux was released from prison in 1841 and subsequently disappeared. Unmentioned here are his numerous escape attempts and desertions from Royal Navy ships. Vaux undoubtedly picked up the term galoot during one of his stints as a sailor.

Discuss this post

---

Sources:

Fink, Averil V. “Vaux, James Hardy (1782–1841).” Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 2, 1967.

Fyle, Clifford N. and Eldred D. Jones. A Krio-English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1980, s.v. galut. Archive.org.

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

Historical Dictionary of American Slang, vol. 1 of 2. J. E. Lighter, ed. New York: Random House, 1994, s.v., galoot, n.

Liberman, Anatoly. ”Advice to the Etymologist: Never Lose Heart, or, The Origin of the Word Galoot,” OUPblog, 23 July 2008.

Marryat, Frederick. Jacob Faithful, vol. 3 of 3. London: Saunders and Otley, 1834, 82. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Naval Officer, A. The Cruise: A Poetical Sketch. London: J. Hatchard, 1808, 286–87. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

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

Twain, Mark (pseud. Samuel Clemens). Roughing it. Hartford, Connecticut: American Publishing, 1872, 336. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Vaux, James Hardy. A New and Comprehensive Vocabulary of the Flash Language (1812). Unknown publisher, 1819, 176, s.v. galloot. Archive.org.

Wiktionary, 29 August 2023, s.v. galoot, n.

Image credit: Action Pictures/Associated Exhibitors, 1926. Wikimedia. Public domain image.

drag / drag race / main drag

Two dragsters racing

4 September 2023

(For drag referring to cross-dressing, click here.)

The present-day verb drag comes to us from the Old English verb dragan, with the same meaning, and it either developed from proto-Germanic within English or it was borrowed from the Old Norse draga during the pre-Conquest period. Here is an example of the Old English from Ælfric of Eynsham’s sermon on the life of Saint George, written c. 1000. The passage relates the death sentence passed on the martyr:

Nimað þisne scyldigan þe mid scincræfte towende ure arwurðan godas mid ealle to duste and dragað hine niwelne his neb to eorðan geond ealle ðas stræt and stænene wegas and ofsleað hine syþþan mid swurdes ecge.

(Take this sinner, who by magic, has turned our venerable gods all to dust and drag him prone with his face to the earth through all the streets and stony ways and then slay him with the sword’s edge.)

By the beginning of the fourteenth century, drag was starting to be used as a noun, referring to a dragnet or to a plow or harrow. And by the seventeenth century, drag or drug was being used to refer to vehicles. The 1679 edition of Joseph Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises includes a drawing of a hand-cart called a drug, and the 1693 edition includes the drawing and this definition:

Illustration of a drug from Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises

§ 12. Of the Drug, and its use.

The Drug described Plate 9. A. is made somewhat like a low narrow Carr. It is used for the carriage of Timber, and then is drawn by the Handle a a, by two or more men, according as the weight of the Timber may require.

Samuel Johnson’s 1755 dictionary includes this sense of drag and cites Moxon’s work as its source.

And in the twentieth century, drag moved from hand and horse carts to automobiles. Green’s Dictionary of Slang has a citation for drag referring to a motor vehicle from 1930 from Dewitt MacKenzie’s Hell’s Kitchen: The Story of London’s Underworld.

As for drag racing, there is a sense of the phrase that developed in the late nineteenth century referring to an amusement associated with foxhunting. A dead fox or other lure would be dragged for the hounds to chase. London’s Observer newspaper from 6 October 1872 has this:

In many places the pheasants give as little amusement in hunting up as an alderman with a red herring and train oil rubbed on his heel would give fun to a drag race.

And in America, the Georgia’s Augusta Chronicle of 26 February 1890 has this:

A drag race was afterwards arranged in which the dogs showed up splendidly. Mr. Lambert’s pack is something of which he is proud and justly so for it comprises some of the finest and fastest fox hounds in this country.

But drag racing automobiles was a post-World War II phenomenon. The term comes either or both of two sources. One is directly from the use of drag to mean a vehicle. The other is from the transferred use of drag to mean a route by which something is dragged, i.e., a street or road, often in the phrase main drag, referring to the primary street in a town. Drag racing was often undertaken on streets, as opposed to specialized tracks. This latter sense of drag appears in the mid nineteenth century. Hotten’s 1859 slang dictionary contains this entry:

DRAG, a street or road; BACK-DRAG, back street.

Two years later we see the phrase main drag in Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor:

I come now to the third class of patterers,—those who, whatever their early pursuits and pleasures, have manifested a predilection for vagrancy, and neither can nor will settle to any ordinary calling. There is now on the streets a man scarcely thirty years old, conspicuous by the misfortune of a sabre-wound on the cheek. […] He sells anything—chiefly needle cases. He “patters” very little in a main drag (public street); but in the little private streets he preaches an outline of his life, and makes no secret of his wandering propensity.

Back to the twentieth century and drag racing, the earliest example of the phrase that I have found is from the Miami Herald of 13 July 1947:

“The boys explained, too, that a “drag race” is a lineup of four or five cars on a highway “contesting to see who can get away the fastest from a stoplight.”

And there is this from the San Diego Union of 1 March 1950:

The lights on one of the newly-arrived hot rod cars winked out and the driver came over to join the group of 20 or 30 boys and two or three girls who had assembled beside a two-lane highway across Kearny Mesa for an outlaw “drag race.” The track was a ¼-mile straightaway.

Discuss this post

---

Sources:

Ælfric. “XIV. April 23. St. George Martyr.” Ælfric’s Lives of Saints, vol 1 of 4. Walter W. Skeat, ed. Early English Text Society O.S. 82. London: Oxford UP, 1885, 316, lines 153–57. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2023, s.v. drag, n.1.

“Hot Rod Builders Race Speed Creations Clandestinely to Avoid Clash with Law.” San Diego Union (California), 1 March 1950, a-12/3. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Hotten, John Camden. A Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant, and Vulgar Words. London: 1859, 33, s.v. drag, n. Archive.org.

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

Mayhew, Henry. London Labour and the London Poor, vol. 1 of 2. London: Griffin, Bohn, 1861, 218/1. Archive.org.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. drag(ge n.(1), draggen, v.

Moxon, Joseph. Mechanick Exercises, or, The Doctrine of Handy-Works. London: J. Moxon, 1693, 124. Early English Books Online (EEBO). Mention in the 1679 edition is on page 166.

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

“Pheasant Shooting.” The Observer (London), 6 October 1872, 5/4. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Stapleton, William. “‘Hot Rods’ Rallying to Provide Sport.” Miami Herald (Florida), 13 July 1947, 1-B/1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“The Wild Cat. A Large Crowd Out to See the Chase.” Augusta Chronicle (Georgia), 26 February 1890, 5/2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Image credits: Tom McKinnon, 1991. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license; Moxon, Joseph. Mechanick Exercises, or, The Doctrine of Handy-Works. London: J. Moxon, 1693, Plate 9, between pages 122–23. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

francium

3 August 2023

Francium is a chemical element with atomic number 87 and symbol Fr. It is extremely radioactive, and only two of its thirty-seven known isotopes are found in nature. Its most stable isotope, Francium-233, has a half-life of only 22 minutes. Francium has no applications other than research. It is, obviously, named for the country of France.

It was discovered by physicist Marguerite Perey in 1939, and she originally dubbed it actinium K, in accordance with the then-current system for naming radioactive isotopes. But with the determination that it was a new element, a new name was required. In her 1946 doctoral thesis she proposed the name Francium and the symbol Fa. The suggestion for the symbol, however, was altered to Fr when officially adopted later that year.

Discuss this post

---

Sources:

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. DOI: 10.1007/s10698-022-09452-9.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2009, s.v. francium, n.

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license.

wipe / whip / lash / whiplash

“Snap the Whip,” Winslow Homer, 1872

30 August 2023

Wipe, whip, lash, and whiplash are all words that, at their core, refer to some sort of back-and-forth motion. While we know the etymologies of these words in general terms, some of the specifics are uncertain.

Wipe and whip can be traced back to the proto-Indo-European root *weip-, meaning to turn, vacillate, tremble. Wipe is the Present-Day English form of the Old English verb wipian, which has essentially the same meaning as our current word. An example of the Old English verb is found in Ælfric of Eynsham’s life of Saint Lawrence, in the description of the martyr’s death:

On ðære tide gelyfde an ðæra cempena, ðæs nama wæs romanus, & cwæð to ðam Godes cyðere laurentium; Ic geseo Godes engel standende ætforan ðe mid handclaðe; & wipað ðine swatigan leomu.

(At that time, one of the soldiers, whose name was Romanus, believed and said to God’s martyr, “Lawrence, I see God’s angel standing before you with a hand-cloth and wiping your sweating limbs.)

The verb to whip appears in Early Middle English. It may be a development of the Old English verb, or the sense may be borrowed from a cognate in another language, such as the Middle Low German and Middle Dutch wippen, meaning to move back and forth, oscillate, dance. We see this verb, meaning to flutter or rapidly move back and forth, in the thirteenth-century poem The Owl and the Nightingale. In this passage, the owl berates the nightingale for tempting women into illicit amorous affairs with its song:

Enes þu sunge—ic wod wel ware!—
Bi one bure, & woldest lere
Þe lefdi to an uuel luue,
An sunge boþe loȝe & buue,
An lerdest hi to don shome
An unriȝt of hire licome.
Þe louerd þat sone underȝat:
Liim & grine & wel eiwat
Sette & leide, þe for to lacche.
Þu come sone to þan hacche:
Þu were inume in one grine.
Al hit aboȝte þine shine!
Þu naddest non oþer dom ne laȝe
Bute mid wilde horse were todraȝe.
Vonde ȝif þu miȝt eft misread
Waþer þu wult, wif þe maide!
Þi song mai bo so longe genge
Þat þu shalt wippen on a springe!

(Once you sang—I know well where—by a certain bedroom and would lure a lady into a sinful love, singing both low and high, and lured her to do a shameful and immoral thing with her body. Her husband soon found out: lime and snares and everything he set and laid, in order to catch you. You soon came to the window: you were quickly trapped in a snare. It was all around your shins! You had no other judgment nor law except to be drawn by wild horses. Why don’t you try again, if you wish, to lead a wife or maiden astray? Your song may be so effective that you end up whipping in a snare.)

The noun whip, referring to a scourge, is in place by the early fourteenth century, and the more specific sense of the verb, meaning to beat with a scourge, is in place by the end of that century. From Chaucer’s The Parson’s Tale:

This ydelnesse is the thurrok of alle wikked and vileyns thoghtes, and of alle jangles, trufles, and of alle ordure. Certes, the hevene is yeven to hem that wol labouren, and not to ydel folk. Eek David seith that “they ne been nat in the labour of men, ne they shul nat been whipped with men”—that is to seyn, in purgatorie. Certes, thane semeth it they shul be tormented with the devel in helle, but if they doon penitence.

(This idleness is the storehouse of all wicked and lowly thoughts, and of all gossip, trifles, and of all filth. Certainly, the heaven is given to them who will labor, and to idle folk. Also, David says that, “they are not in the labor of men, nor shall they be whipped by men”—that is to say, in purgatory. Certainly, then it seems they shall be tormented by the devil in hell, unless they do penance.)

Whip also has a parliamentary sense on both sides of the Atlantic. In the first half of the eighteenth century, we start to see whipper in used as a term for the assistant huntsman who uses a whip to keep hounds from straying from the pack. It’s not uncommon to first see the earliest recording of a slang or jargon term in the name of a racehorse, and that’s the case with whipper in. The name Whipperin is recorded of a gelding in the 12 September 1728 edition of London’s Stamford Mercury.

A few years later we see whipper in used in a satirical newspaper piece that uses the term to literally mean a huntsman’s assistant and metaphorically to refer to a political party official whose duty it is to keep the members in line and voting for the party’s policies. From London’s Fog’s Weekly Journal of 28 May 1737:

Since I have been taken into the Pack of Court Hounds, and have had my feeding from the Hands of the Huntsman, Gratitude exacts of me, the contributing so far as my Experience will permit (and I flatter myself I am esteemed a pretty Staunch Dog) to better the Kennel, by either encouraging your slow, or retraining your too forward Whelps; some of which latter, will open upon a wrong Scent, mislead a raw Pack and disappoint a Morning’s Sport by their babling. A Babler of a Puppy, may be excused, the Whipper in, may, by his Correction, reclaim him and he may make a good Hound, but when an old Dog will mislead the Pack, there is no other Remedy than the Cord; he is immediately tuck’d up as irreclaimable.

To be more intelligible, and let my Reader know what I open upon, I shall inform him that the Game I have in view is the Reduction of the Interest of the redeemable National Debt, which has happily miscarried in the House of Commons.

We see whipper-in used directly to refer to a party disciplinarian in London’s Annual Register of 1771. The piece gives brief biographies of people in various professions, and the following appears in one on a politician:

That he was first a whipper-in to the Premier, and then became Premier himself; that he led the House of Commons by the nose and hated the city; that he drained the Treasury to enrich his friends and parasites; that he dreaded general warrants, was for a standing army, and constantly opposed the liberty of the subject; and that if he was not beheaded, he ought to have been.

By 1850 the parliamentary sense of whipper-in had been clipped to simply whip, and it eventually crossed the Atlantic to appear in American political jargon as well.

Lash, on the other hand, is of more uncertain etymology. It is possibly echoic and formed analogously with words such as dash, flash, mash, and smash. But it shares the same general sense of beating or striking with whip. (The sense of lash meaning to tie or fasten, is from a different root, borrowed from the Anglo-Norman lasce [ribbon, string] and lascher [loosen] and is related to lace.) Both the noun and verb appear in the poem Of Arthour and of Merlin, probably composed prior to 1300 and copied into the Auchinleck Manuscript c. 1330:

One passage in that poem describes a battle, using the verb to lash (note also the multiple uses in this passage of dash, meaning both to rush and the strike at):

He [tok] kniȝtes þousandes to
And out of his cite dassed him þo
Among þe ribaus anon he dast
And sum þe heued of he laist,
Þis þre þousand he slouȝ anon

(He [took] two thousand knights and dashed out of his citadel. He clashed among the foot soldiers, and some he hewed off, he lashed them, three thousand he quickly slew.)

And another passage uses the noun to mean a blow:

Kehenans com wiþ gret rape
And ȝaf king Arthour swiche a las
Þat Arthour al astoned was,
Arthour smot þat geant oȝan
A dint þat fro main cam
He smot his schulder, wiþ arm and scheld
Þat it fleiȝe in þe feld,

(Kehenans came on with great haste and gave King Arthur such a lash that Arthur was stunned; Arthur smote the giant again, a blow that came with might. He smote his shoulder, against arm and shield, so that it flew onto the field.)

By the end of the fourteenth century, the more specific sense of lash meaning a whip or to beat with a whip was in place.

The redundant compound whiplash, meaning a scourge, appears in the middle-to-late sixteenth century. We see it in Thomas Tusser’s 1573 poetic Fiue Hundreth Points of Good Husbandry in a list of things a good farmer has ready for the fall harvest:

Strong exeltred cartt, hat is clowted & shod,
cart, ladder & wimble, with percer & pod.
whele ladders for haruest, light pitchfork & tough
shaue, whyplash well knotted, & cart rope enough.

(Strong axled cart, that is patched and shod,
cart, ladder, and auger, with piercer and support.
Wheel-ladder for harvest, light pitchfork, & tough
sheaf, whiplash well-knotted, & enough cart-rope.)

But the sense of whiplash meaning an injury to the head or neck caused by a rapid and forcible oscillation is much more recent, coming into use with the automobile and injuries related to high-speed travel. It appears in the mid twentieth century. The earliest example I’ve found is from an advertisement for a chiropractor in the 25 September 1950 Columbia Record of South Carolina:

A blow to the head, or a fall may cause the neck to be wrenched out of place. Whiplash injuries, wherein the head is thrown forcibly forward or backward can cause severe trouble. Auto accidents frequently cause this injury.

Discuss this post

---

Sources:

Ælfric. “Passio beati Laurentii martyris.” The Homilies of the Anglo-Saxon Church, vol. 1. Benjamin Thorpe, ed. Ælfric Society. London: Richard and John E. Taylor, 1844, 426. Archive.org.

———. “Passio Sancti Laurentii.” Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies, The First Series. Peter Clemoes, ed. Early English Text Society S.S. 17. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997, 424.

American Heritage Dictionary Indo-European Roots Appendix, 2022.

Anglo-Norman Dictionary, 2012, s.v. lasce, n., lascher, v.  

Cartlidge, Neil, ed. The Owl and the Nightingale, revised ed. Exeter: U of Exeter Press, 2003, 26, lines 1049–66. fol. 240va–b.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. “The Parson’s Tale.” The Canterbury Tales. The Riverside Chaucer, Larry D. Benson, ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987, 312, lines 10.1.715–16.

“Damaging Neck Injuries Often Bring Trouble in Later Years” (advertisement). Columbia Record (South Carolina), 25 September 1950, 3-A. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“Essay Towards the History of Mankind.” Annual Register, fifth edition. London: J. Dodsley, 1771, 196. NewspaperArchive.com.

Fog’s Weekly Journal (London), 28 May 1737, 1/1. Gale Primary Sources: Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Nichols Newspapers Collection.

“A List of the Horses Matches to be Run at New-Market in September and October, 1728.” Stamford Mercury (London), 12 September 1728, 72. NewspaperArchive.com.

Macrae-Gibson, O.D., ed. Of Arthour and of Merlin. Early English Text Society. London: Oxford UP, 1973, 309–10, lines 7581–85; 356, lines 9374–80. ProQuest. Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, MS Advocates 19.2.1 (Auchinleck Manuscript).

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. whippen, v., lash(e, n., lashen, v.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. whip, v., whip, n., lash, v.1, lash, v.2, lash, n.1, lush, v., whiplash, n.

Tusser, Thomas. Fiue Hundreth Points of Good Husbandry. London: Richard Tottill, 1573, fol. 14v. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Image credit: Winslow Homer, 1873. Butler Institute of American Art. Public domain image as a mechanical reproduction of a public domain work.