metamour

2018 Pride parade in London

25 September 2023

Metamour is a word that has yet to make it into any major dictionary. It is, perhaps, best defined by Janet Hardy and Dossie Easton in their book The Ethical Slut:

Metamour Relationships

The word metamour is a recent coinage to describe your relationship with your lover’s lovers, and theirs with you. Beting a metamour brings up points of etiquette that Emily Post never dreamed of.

The word is a combination of meta- (above, beyond) + amour (French: lover).

The earliest use of the word that I have found is in the Urbandictionary, which in an entry from 19 July 2004 defines it thusly:

In a polyamorous relationship, where your lover has more than one lover, a metamour is the name given to your partner's other lover(s).

My partner and I went to see her metamour Jane at the weekend.

The earliest use of metamour I have found in print is from London’s the Independent of 4 April 2005 in an article on the growing (or at least becoming more open) phenomenon of polyamory in Britain:

Metamour Used to describe your relationship with one of your partner's partners

I did, however, discover a nonce use of metamour in a different sense in one of William Safire’s “On Language” columns for the New York Times. From 12 September 1982:

In passing, I derogated the supposed need for new words to cover highly specialized relationships, shrugging off the query from a reader who wanted to know what to call “an ex-wife with whom one was having an affair.” However, since most of the mail came in with suggestions for that query and not mine, let me pass them along:

“Because I am having an affair with my ex-husband,” writes an Arizona woman—how did I get involved in this?—“I have three suggestions”: conjugate, as a noun, is one; the others, interspersed with embarrassing and unnecessary confidences, are Paramate and metamour.

Other readers of Safire’s column suggested amorex, marry-go-round, mistrex (referring to an ex-wife with whom was sleeping), exspousal, and spousetress/spouster.

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Sources:

Frith, Maxine. “‘Ethical Sluts’ Develop New Language of Love for Open Relationships.” Independent (London), 4 April 2005, 16–17. ProQuest Newspapers.

Hardy, Janet W. and Dossie Easton. The Ethical Slut, third edition. Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 2017, 204. Archive.org. (The word does not appear in earlier editions of the book.)

Safire, William. “On Language: The Bloopie Awards.” New York Times Magazine, 12 September 1982, 16. Nytimes.com.

Urbandictionary.com, 19 July 2004, s.v. metamour.

Image credit: Camerawalker, 2018. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

germanium

A 12-gram chunk of germanium, 2–3 cm in size

22 September 2023

Germanium is a hard-brittle, grayish-white metalloid with the atomic number 32 and the symbol Ge. The element has a large number of industrial uses, including use as a semiconductor in transistors and in fiber-optics, solar cells, and light-emitting diodes (LEDs).

It was discovered by chemist Clemens Winkler in 1885, who published his findings in early 1886, dubbing the new element after his homeland of Germany:

Nach mehrwöchentlichem mübevollem Suchen kann ich heute mit Bestimmtheit aussprechen, dass der Argyrodit ein neues, dem Antimon sehr ähnliches, aber von diesem doch scbarf unterschiedenes Element enthält, welchem der Name “Germanium” beigelegt werden möge.

(After several weeks of exhausting searching, I can now say with certainty that argyrodite contains a new element that is very similar to antimony, but differs sharply from it, to which the name “germanium” may be ascribed.)

The existence of germanium had been predicted by Dmitri Mendeleev and his periodic table. Mendeleev had provisionally dubbed the prospective element eka-silicon. (See eka-)

Winkler had initially wanted to dub his discovery neptunium, after the newly discovered planet, but that name had already been taken by a supposed element discovered by another German chemist, R. Hermann. Hermann’s discovery later proved to be mistaken.

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Sources:

Fontani, Marco, Mariagrazia Costa, and Mary Virginia Orna. The Lost Elements: The Periodic Table’s Shadow Side. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2015, 131. ProQuest Ebook Central.

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, March 2012, s.v. germanium, n.; September 2003, neptunium, n.

Winkler, Clemens. “Germanium, Ge, ein Neues, Nicht-Metallisches Element” (6 February 1886). Berichte der Deutschen chemischen Gesellschaft zu Berlin, vol. 19.1 (January–June 1886), 210–11 at 210. Bibliothèque Nationale de France: Gallica.

Image credit: Chemical Elements: A Virtual Museum, 2009. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

ditto

Screenshot from the movie Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982)

20 September 2023

Growing up in the United States in the 1970s, dittos were a staple of my educational experience. Ditto was the proprietary name of a type of spirit duplicator that produced purple-colored copies of a printed page. Dittos had a distinctive, pleasant odor, and it was something of a ritual to smell the sheets of paper that the teacher handed out. But why the name?

Ditto is an early seventeenth-century borrowing from Italian, which in turn is from the Latin dictus, meaning said. The word appears in John Florio’s 1598 Italian-English dictionary, A Worlde of Wordes:

Ditto, sayd, spoken, told. Also a speech or a saying.

Florio, however, is recording the Italian usage, not an English one.

We first see ditto in English writing early in the seventeenth century. It is first used as a substitute for the name of a month that had been previously mentioned. Here is an example from the 1625 collection of travel narratives, Purchas His Pilgrimes:

In the morning at breake of day (to our great admiration) wee saw land to the Westward, bearing North by West fiue leagues off, not once looking for any that way, but to the Eastward for Iuan de noua, which we made account could not be aboue sixe leagues South from vs, and being be-calmed, did doubt least the Current would set vs vpon it in the night: but the day clearing, we found it to be the Northermost Iland of the Angoxas, whence we departed the one and twentieth, ditto in the afternoone, which so amazed our Marriners, as that they were discouraged of getting our Voyage this way.

This usage was quickly adopted for things other than dates and frequently appears to this day in lists and inventories. We can see ditto in prose, referring to a previously mentioned thing, in a sermon on death by Ninian Campbell that was published in 1635:

That sun which ye see setting over your heads, the ebbing and flowing of the sea, which environeth us, that earth whereupon we walk, lately renewed, now growing old; and to come nearer, these graves whereupon yee trode in your entrie, this Church-yard, these through stones, that dead bell, that beir, that dolefull convoy, these two corps, and that wide opened sepulchre, telleth us, that we must die. And as Catullus saith,

—Ostentant omnia lethum. [They all signify death.]

Death is painted with the net of a fowler: and with this ditto, Devoro omnes, I devoure all. All things above us, beneath us, about us, within us, and without us, tell us that we must die.

And in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, ditto was used to refer to style of clothing in which all the articles of apparel were of the same color. Here the word used in the London newspaper the Connoisseur of 14 July 1755 saying that suits of ditto were commonly worn by physicians:

We may learn the disposition of a man by his apparel, as we know the trade of a carpenter by his leathern apron, or a soldier by his red coat. When we see a snuff-coloured suit of ditto with the bolus buttons, a metal headed cane, and an enormous bushy grizzle, we as readily know the wearer to be a dispenser of life and death, as if we had seen him pounding a mortar or brandishing a clyster-pipe.

And we see ditto used as a verb, meaning to repeat or echo what someone else has said, in the early nineteenth century. From the Albion (New York) of 28 February 1824:

Mr. Wilson asserted that so far from entertaining any improper intentions towards Mrs. Poolman, he really wouldn’t touch her with a pair of tongs—for she was a scold; and it was solely because she was an arrant scold that he told her husband he pitied him; and as to the kicking, he had threatened only if she should ever enter his apartments again. Mr. Lees, the landlord, dittoed Mr. Wilson’s statement as to Mrs. Poolman’s scolding faculty—she had a tongue enough, he said, to set a whole parish by the ears, and he heartily wished his house was rid of her.

And the trademarked Ditto machine from my childhood is first recorded in 1919. From a classified advertisement in Omaha, Nebraska’s Sunday World-Herald of 19 October 1919:

Ditto Duplicator

New machine, but can be purchased for great deal less than list price. J. E. Beckman. Doug. 346.

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Sources:

Advertisement. Sunday World-Herald (Omaha, Nebraska), 19 October 1919, Want Ads 5/3. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Campbell, Ninian. A Treatise upon Death First Publickly Delivered in a Funerall Sermon, Anno Dom. 1630. Edinburgh: R. Young for I. Wilson, 1635, sig. C2r–v. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Florio, John. A Worlde of Wordes. London: Arnold Hatfield for Edward Blount, 1598, 110. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

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

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. ditto, n.; third edition, September 2022, s.v. ditto, v.

“Police. Bow Street. Virtue in Danger.” Albion, or British, Colonial, and Foreign Weekly Gazette (New York), 28 February 1824, 292/1–2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Purchas, Samuel. Purchas His Pilgrimes in Five Books. London: William Stansby for Henrie Fetherstone, 1625, 335–36. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Tierney, Grace. “The Many Uses and History of Ditto.” Wordfoolery (blog), 29 May 2023.

Trim, Eutrapelus. The Connoisseur (London), 14 July 1755, 460. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Image credit: Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Amy Heckerling dir., Universal Pictures, 1982. Fair use of a single low-resolution screenshot from the film to illustrate the topic under discussion.

piss poor / not a pot to piss in

“An Old Woman at a Window Emptying a Chamber Pot,” anonymous, between 1700–24

18 September 2023

The phrases piss poor and not a pot to piss in date to the first half of the twentieth century and received a big boost when they entered soldier’s slang during the Second World War. They are unusual for slang terms in that some of their earliest citations are from modernist literature rather than the language of the streets.

Of the two, not a pot to piss in is the older and relies on the metaphor of a chamber pot. It is first recorded in 1934 in Djuna Barnes’s manuscript for her novel Nightwood:

My heart aches for all poor creatures putting on a dog and not a pot to piss in or a window to throw it from.

The use of piss as an intensifier is recorded a few years later, in Ezra Pound’s Cantos in the form piss-rotten. This canto (number 69) is supposedly in the voice of John Adams writing to Thomas Jefferson. It discusses the fears of an aristocracy emerging in the United States and of Alexander Hamilton’s plan for the federal government assuming the Revolutionary War debt of the states, which was a significant shift in economic power from the states to the federal government:

To T. Jefferson:
“You fear the one, I the few.”
In this matter of redeeming certificates
that were used payin' the sojers
vignette in margine
King, Sam Johnson of N. Carolina
Smith (W.) S. Carolina, Wadsworth (Jeremiah
J. Lawrence, Bingham, Carrol of Carrolton
gone piss-rotten for Hamilton

Piss-poor is a combination of the two uses, using the metaphor underlying not a pot to piss in with piss- as an intensifier. The earliest use I know of is from a diary kept by Thomas Hirst Hayes, who was held as a prisoner-of-war by the Japanese in the Philippines. His diary entry for 13 March 1943 reads, in part:

A few days ago the Nips asked for a dental officer to go to Lipa where they have a bunch of American prisoners building an air field with this whole dam [sic] bevy of panty waist dental officers here who havn’t [sic] contributed a goddam thing since the war began, they order out Bob—a man who has been through Bataan and Corregidor with us, went thru the hellish days of Cabanatuan, recently recovered from beri beri and yellow jaundice. That makes the second time they have sent our “fighting men” out to maintain their own dam lotus eating no good bastards whose prime object in this mess is to survive. Their reason this time was that Bob was the Junior. Bob like a good soldier said nothing. I was not asked anything about it, and I still maintain the Commands’ right to order as they see fit, but I insist someday in letting the world know how piss poor were some of our outfit, how useless and disgusting were our “politicians and diplomats” and “kind old gentlemen” Bob preferred to go than be classed with the “panty waists.”

Another early use if piss-poor, one that combines WWII military experience and poetic literature is in MacKinlay Kantor’s 1945 Glory for Me:

“It’s not my dish,” Fred Derry said.
“I’m much obliged to you;
You’ve certainly been decent to me—
All a guy could ask.
But—Well, I guess I know
I’m piss-poor in a job like this.
It's trivial, it’s dull:
I hate it more and more each day.
It's not your fault.
I’d rather go.

That’s it, a rather straightforward and obvious origin. But that hasn’t stopped people from wildly speculating. Of recent vintage is the belief that the phrases come from the practice of impoverished people collecting and selling their urine for use in tanning animal hides, and that those who were really, really poor, that is piss-poor, didn’t have a pot to piss in.

It is true that urine, which is acidic, was once used in tanning leather. It helped loosen tissue and hair that remained on the skins and softened the hide. Urine was also used in production of dye and of gunpowder and for other purposes. But these uses all but disappeared in the nineteenth century with the advent of modern chemistry and the ability to produce artificial substitutes cheaply and efficiently. So this old practice is not the origin of the phrase piss poor or not having a pot to piss in, which both appear long after the practice of using urine in industrial production had ended.

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Sources:

Barnes, Djuna. Nightwood (1937). New York: New Directions, 2006, 106. Archive.org.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2023, s.v. piss-, pfx.

Hayes, Thomas Hirst. Diary, 13 March 1943, 100–101. Archive.org. 

Kantor, MacKinlay. Glory for Me. New York: Coward-McCann, 1945, 183. Archive.org.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2006, s.v. piss-poor, adj.; December 2006, s.v. pot, n.1.

Pound, Ezra. “Canto 69” (1940) The Cantos of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions, 1972, 407.

Image credit: Anonymous, in the school of Frans van Mieris the Elder, 1700–24. Wikimedia Commons. UK National Trust Collections ID: 1151396. Public domain image.

gallium / eka-

Crystals of pure gallium

15 September 2023

Gallium is a soft, silvery metal with atomic number 31 and the symbol Ga. The metal is widely used in electronics. Its name arises out of nationalist pride, a fit of egomania, or more likely both.

Gallium’s existence was predicted in 1871 by chemist Dmitri Mendeleev, the inventor of the periodic table, by its position on that table, and he provisionally dubbed the element eka-alumini. Mendeleev coined the combining form eka- from the Sanskrit meaning “one.” Gallium sits one place below aluminum on the periodic table. Eka- has subsequently been used to denote elements whose predicted existence has yet to be experimentally confirmed.

The existence of gallium was demonstrated in 1875 by French chemist Paul Emile Lecoq de Boisbaudran through spectroscopy, making it the first discovery of an element predicted by the periodic table. It was Lecoq who gave it the name gallium:

Les experiences que j’ai exécutées depuis le 29 août me confirment dans le pensée que le corps observé doit ètre considéré comme un nouvel élément, auquel je propose de donner le nom de Gallium.

(The experiments that I have performed since 29 August confirm my thought that the observed body must be considered as a new element, to which I propose to give the name of Gallium.)

Lecoq claimed to have named it after his native France, or Gallia in Latin. Others have claimed he named it after himself; gallus is rooster or cock in Latin. Lecoq specifically denied this eponymous etymology, but it seems likely that he created the name with the dual meaning in mind.

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Sources:

Lecoq de Boisbaudran, Paul Emile. “Caractères chimiques et spectroscopiques d’un nouveau métal, le gallium, découvert dans une blende de la mine de Pierrefitte, vallée d’Argelès (Pyrénées).” Comptes rendus hebdomadaires des séances de l'Académie des sciences, 81, 20 September 1875, 493–95 at 494. Bibliothèque Nationale de France: Gallica.

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, second edition, 1989, s.v. gallium, n., eka-, comb. form.

Sztejnberg, Aleksander. “Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev (1834 - 1907), prominente científico ruso. Referencias a sus grandes logros científicos en la literatura entre 1871 y 1917” (“Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev (1834 – 1907), Prominent Russian Scientist. References to His Great Scientific Achievements in the Literature between 1871 and 1917.”) Revista CENIC Ciencias Quimicas. 49, 2018, 1-13. EBSCOhost Academic Search Ultimate.

Photo credit: Foobar, 2004. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.