the coldest winter ... San Francisco

San Francisco, seen from Twin Peaks, with the fog of the marine layer rolling in

2 October 2023

The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.

—Mark Twain

Open up just about any guidebook or web site about San Francisco and you’ll find this quote. The trouble is, Twain never said it, or at least it doesn’t appear in any of his published works or extant letters and papers. The quote is sometimes attributed to other writers and other cities, but the clear favorite is Twain and San Francisco. (Twain is a “quote magnet,” with hundreds of quotations by others falsely attributed to him.)

But Twain did write about San Francisco’s climate, and his conclusions were completely at odds with this alleged quote. From his 1872 Roughing It:

The climate of San Francisco is mild and singularly equable. The thermometer stands at about seventy degrees the year round. It hardly changes at all. You sleep under one or two light blankets in Summer and Winter, and never use a mosquito bar. Nobody ever wears Summer clothing. You wear black broadcloth—if you have it—in August and January, just the same. It is no colder, and no warmer, in one month than the other. You do not use overcoats and you do not use fans. It is as pleasant a climate as could well be contrived, take it all around, and is doubtless the most unvarying in the whole world.

While San Francisco does get a bit chillier in than the surrounding counties, particularly when the marine layer of fog covers the city—visitors to the city are advised to pack a sweater no matter the month—it never gets really cold in summer or in winter. Twain was right; the climate of the Bay Area is delightful year-round.

Twain did, however, say something similar about Paris. In an 1880 letter he wrote:

For this long time I have been intending to congratulate you fervently upon your translation to——to——anywhere——for anywhere is better than Paris. Paris the cold, Paris the drizzly, Paris the rainy, Paris the Damnable. More than a hundred years ago somebody asked Quin, “Did you ever see such a winter in all your life before?” “Yes,” said he, “Last summer.” I judge he spent his summer in Paris.

But here, it is Twain who is paraphrasing someone else, in this case actor James Quin (1693–1766). Quin’s quip, which doesn’t refer to a specific location, was evidently in circulation in Twain’s day. We even see it in a 1789 letter by English politician Horace Walpole, son of Robert Walpole, who had served as prime minister:

But St. Swithin [i.e., 15 July] played the devil so, that we could not stir out of doors, and had fires to chase the watery spirits. Quin, being once asked if he had ever seen so bad a winter, replied, “Yes, just such an [sic] one last summer!”—and here is its youngest brother!

The current phrasing, naming a specific city, came into being at the turn of the twentieth century, only it was in relation to Duluth, Minnesota, not San Francisco or Paris. From Duluth’s News-Tribune of 17 June 1900:

One of these days somebody will tell that mouldy chestnut about the finest winter he ever saw being the summer he spent in Duluth, and one of these husky commercial travelers, who have been here and know all about our climate, will smite him with an uppercut and break his slanderous jaw. The truth will come out in time.

But even here, the use of mouldy chestnut indicates that by this date the attribution to Duluth was an unoriginal and tired one. And it was widespread. Here is one from Lexington, Kentucky’s Morning Herald of 17 June 1901 that tells of R. Q. Grant who worked for the state weather bureau:

Another assignment was to Duluth, Minn., where he learned to appreciate rapid changes in temperature. He says the coldest winter he ever experienced was the summer he spent in Duluth.

And San Francisco, Paris, and Duluth are not alone. The quip has been attributed to a number of cities over the years. The phrase is what linguists have dubbed a snowclone, that is a formulaic, cliché in which a familiar idiom is modified to fit new circumstances. A classic example is X is the new Y, where the two variables can be substituted, as in blue is the new black.

For a fuller history of this and other dubious quotations, see the Quote Investigator.

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Sources:

“Interesting Experiences. Morning Herald (Lexington, Kentucky), 17 June 1901, 6/2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

O’Toole, Garson. “The Coldest Winter I Ever Spent Was a Summer in San Francisco.” Quote Investigator (blog), 30 November 2011.

Sunday News-Tribune (Duluth, Minnesota), 17 June 1900, 12/3. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Twain, Mark (pseud. Samuel Clemens). Letter to Lucius Fairchild, 28 April 1880. Mark Twain Project.

———. Roughing It. Hartford, Connecticut: American Publishing, 1872, 410. HathiTrust Digital Library.

Walpole, Horace. Letter to Miss Berry, 31 July 1789. The Letters of Horace Walpole, vol. 6 of 6. London: Samuel Bentley, 1840, 333–34. Google Books.

Photo credit: Brocken Inaglory, 2006. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

hafnium / celtium

1 × 2 × 3 cm chunk of hafnium

29 September 2023

Hafnium is a lustrous, silvery metal found in many zirconium ores. It has atomic number 72 and the symbol Hf. Its primary use is in the control rods of nuclear reactors, but it is also used in the manufacture of microprocessors.

The existence of hafnium was predicted in 1871 by Mendeleev’s periodic table, but the element was not discovered until Dirk Coster and George de Hevesy of Copenhagen’s Universitets Institut for Teoretisk Fysik identified it in 1922. Its existence was announced by Niels Bohr, Coster and Hevesy’s supervisor in the lab, in his 11 December 1922 Nobel lecture:

In these circumstances Dr. Coster and Prof. Hevesy, who are both for the time working in Copenhagen, took up a short time ago the problem of testing a preparation of zircon-bearing minerals by X-ray spectroscopic analysis. These investigators have been able to establish the existence in the minerals investigated of appreciable quantities of an element with atomic number 72, the chemical properties of which show a great similarity to those of zirconium and a decided difference from those of the rare-earths.

But the name hafnium was not proposed until Coster and Hevesy did so a few weeks later in a 20 January 1923 letter in the journal Nature:

For the new element we propose the name Hafnium (Hafniae = Copenhagen).

Hafnia is a modern Latin name for Copenhagen, a combination of the Danish havn (harbor) + the Latin suffix -ium.

The search for Mendeleev’s predicted element #72 kicked off a rather fierce debate in chemical circles, with many scientists scrambling to be the first to identify it. In 1911, Georges Urbain claimed to have identified the missing element, which he named celtium:

During repeated fractionation of the nitrates in the isolation of lutecium from gadolinite earths, a few drops of a mother liquor were obtained that did not crystallise. This contained a new oxide belonging to the rare earths and characterised by a magnetic susceptibility three or four times less than that of lutecia. The name celtium is given to the corresponding element, and the symbol Ct assigned to it.

Urbain’s supposed discovery was eventually proven incorrect, but not after considerable debate and in-fighting. This particular debate over the discovery of an element was especially significant because it marked a shift in methodology. Urbain had used traditional chemical methods in his search for the element, while Coster and Hevesy had used the new technique of x-ray spectroscopy, and their discovery marked a shift in elemental research away from chemistry and toward physics. Hafnium turned out to be the second-to-last stable element to be discovered.

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Sources:

Bohr, Niels. “The Structure of the Atom” (Nobel lecture), 11 December 1922, 42. Nobelprize.org.

Coster, D. and G. Hevesy. “On the Missing Element of Atomic Number 72” (2 January 1923). Nature, 111, 20 January 1923, 79/2. DOI: 10.1038/111079a0.

Fernelius, W. Conard. “Hafnium.” Journal of Chemical Education, 59.3, 1 March 1982, 242. DOI: 10.1021/ed059p242.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, hafnium, n.; third edition, March 2022, celtium, n.

Scerri, Eric. A Tale of Seven Scientists and a New Philosophy of Science. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2016, 208–209. ProQuest Ebook Central.

Urbain, Georges. “A New Element Accompanying Lutecium and Scandium in Gadolinite Earths: Celtium.” Journal of the Chemical Society, 100.2, 1911, 115. Archive.org.

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

geek

27 September 2023

Geek is a general term of opprobrium that has, over the centuries, developed some specialized senses. And while it is generally negative, in some contexts it has been reclaimed as a proud marker of identity.

The word dates to the sixteenth century when it had the sense of a fool or simpleton. It was generally spelled geck, with variations being common. We see it Alexander Barclay’s 1530 Ecloges:

And he is a fole / a sot and a geke also
Whiche choseth a place / vnto the same to go
And where dyuers ways / lead thether dyrectly
He chosed the worst / and moost of Jeopardy

Shakespeare uses the word in two of his plays. In Twelfth Night, composed c.1601 and first published in the 1623 First Folio, the character of Malvolio, a servant, uses it in speaking to Olivia, his mistress:

Why haue you suffer’d me to be imprison’d,
Kept in a darke house, visited by the Priest,
And made the most notorious gecke and gull
That ere inuention plaid on? Tell me why?

And in Cymbelene, which was first staged no later than 1611 and again first published in the First Folio, the ghost of Sicilius Leonatus uses the word in speaking to Posthumus, his son:

Why did you suffer Iachimo, slight thing of Italy, To taint his nobler hart & brain, with needlesse ielousy, And to become the geeke and scorne o’th’others vilany?

This general sense of a worthless or despised individual persisted through the nineteenth century. And in the latter half of that century geek starts appearing in American slang. The Oxford English Dictionary treats the British geck and the American geek as distinct words, presumably because of the difference in pronunciation, with geek being a variant on the older word. Geck being pronounced /ɡɛk/, and geek being pronounced /ɡik/. In recent decades, the American pronunciation of geek has recrossed the Atlantic to colonize the mother country.

In the early twentieth century, the American term developed a specific meaning in the carnival or circus world, that of a performer who would eat live animals or do other repellant or painful things on stage—or more usually feign doing so. The earliest use of this specialized sense that I’m aware of is in an advertisement in the entertainment newspaper Billboard of 18 May 1918:

WANTED FOR THE GREAT WORTHAM CIRCUS SIDE SHOW

Strong Freak or Attraction for a single Pit or Platform Show, either on salary or per cent. No salary too high or no attraction too strong. Ten big fairs to get the money at. I want a real Geek, man or woman, for my Snake Show.

A 1931 American Speech glossary of circus and carnival slang gives a putative origin for this particular sense:

geek, n. A freak, usually a fake, who is one of the attractions in a pit-show. The word is reputed to have originated with a man named Wagner of Charleston, W. Va., whose hideous snake-eating act made him famous. Old timers still remember his ballyhoo, part of which ran:

“Come and see Esau
Sittin’ on a see-saw
Eatin’ ’em raw!”

Wagner’s act certainly helped popularize this sense of the word, but whether or not he was the origin is anyone’s guess.

Note, that geek’s general use to refer to someone deserving of opprobrium continued to be the more common sense of the word; the carnival sense did not replace it. And another specialized sense, more common than the carnival sense at the time but less well known today, is that of a weak man, especially one prone to various ailments or even hypochondria. Here is an example from a newspaper article on hemorrhoids that appeared in the Colorado Springs Gazette of 2 January 1920:

When the inflammation subsides, as it does in a few days, as a rule, the pile still remains, of course, altho [sic] many a poor geek at this time gives a testimonial to the effect that whatever treatment he used has “cured” his piles—and by the time his next attack comes the testimonial is embalmed in indelible printer’s ink.

This sub-sense of a weak and sickly man continued well into the 1950s, often in the phrase poor geek. And it is probably from this sub-sense that the sense of an overly bookish, non-athletically inclined student developed. Both the Oxford English Dictionary and Green’s Dictionary of Slang list the first use of this studious sense as being by writer Jack Kerouac in a 1 October 1957 letter to Allen Ginsberg:

Unbelievable number of events almost impossible to remember, including earlier big Viking Press hotel room with thousands of screaming interviewers and Road roll original 100 miles of ms. rolled out on carpet, bottles of Old Granddad, big articles in Sat. Review, in World Telly, everyfuckingwhere, everybody mad, Brooklyn College wanted me to lecture to eager students and big geek questions to answer.

But as one can see from the context, the meaning of Kerouac’s geek isn’t clear. Additionally, his use here would be a very early example. The use of geek to mean a studious student would not become common until the 1980s. Kerouac could have meant questions from studious Brooklyn College students, or he could have just meant that he had to answer a lot of foolish questions from all sorts of people.

Early use of the studious sense was often in the slang of Black youth, before it transferred over to university slang in general. For instance, we have this entry in a glossary of Black teen slang in Edith Folb’s 1980 Runnin’ Down Some Lines:

geek 1. Weird, unusual, or different person. 2. Studious person.

And with the advent of the personal computer in the early 1980s, the studious sense of geek became attached to the world of high-tech. A user posted the following to the Usenet group net.misc on 16 February 1983:

I eschew the use of “foo” “bar” and other dill-beak geek dull unimaginative temporary filenames!

And Eric Raymond’s 1991 New Hacker’s Dictionary included this entry:

computer geek, n. One who eats (computer) bugs for a living. One who fulfills all the dreariest negative stereotypes about hackers: an asocial, malodorous, pasty-faced monomaniac with all the personality of a cheese grater. Cannot be used by outsiders without implied insult to all hackers; compare black-on-black usage of ‘n[——]r’. A computer geek may be either a fundamentally clueless individual or a proto-hacker in larval stage. Also called turbo nerd, turbo geek.

Despite Raymond’s allusion to the carnival sense of geek, there is no reason to think that the tech (or any other) sense of geek derives from the carnival one. Rather the various specialized senses all developed independently from the general term of opprobrium.

As seen in these last two quotations, the tech sense started out as a negative one. But by the late 1990s geek would be reclaimed and used proudly by computer engineers, coders, and other technical specialists.

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Sources:

Advertisement. The Billboard, 18 May 1918, 29. ProQuest Magazine.

Barclay, Alexander. Ecloges. London: P. Treveris, 1530, sig. Ciii-v. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Brady, William. “Health Talks.” Colorado Springs Gazette, 2 January 1920, 4/6. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Folb, Edith A. Runnin’ Down Some Lines: The Language and Culture of Black Teenagers. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 1980, 239. Archive.org.

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

Kerouac, Jack. Selected Letters: 1957–1969. Ann Charters, ed. New York: Viking, 1999, 66.

Maurer, David W. “A Glossary of Circus and Carnival Slang.” American Speech, 6.5, June 1931, 327–337 at 331. JSTOR.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. geck, n.1.; third edition, March 2003, s.v. geek, n.

Raymond, Eric S. The New Hacker’s Dictionary. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1991, 102. Archive.org.

Shakespeare, William. Cymbelene. In Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies. London: Isaac Jaggard and Edward Blount, 1623, 5.4, 393–93. Folger Shakespeare Library.

———. Twelfth Night. In Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies. London: Isaac Jaggard and Edward Blount, 1623, 5.1, 275/1. Folger Shakespeare Library.

Photo credit: Charles Hutchins, 2007. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

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.