Underground Railroad

An 1872 engraving depicting the Underground Railroad

18 October 2023

The Underground Railroad is the name given to the various networks of secret routes and safe houses that escaped enslaved people used to flee the Southern States to the North and to Canada. Some routes also led to Mexico. The networks were run primarily by free African Americans with assistance from white abolitionists. Underground Railroad is a metaphorical phrase referring to its secretive nature, as subways and literal underground rail lines did not exist at the time of the term’s coinage.

Until recently, the origin of the name had been lost in the mists of time, but Scott Shane, writing in the New York Times on 11 September 2023, uncovered the earliest known use of the term and the likely point of origin. This first use was by Thomas Smallwood, a freedman who had purchased his emancipation in 1831, and who was residing in Washington, DC at the time of the coinage. Besides being active himself in helping enslaved persons escape to the North, at this time, Smallwood was writing a series of letters, under the pseudonym Samuel Weller, to the abolitionist newspaper the Tocsin of Liberty recounting tales of escapees and the efforts of their enslavers to recapture them. In a letter in the 10 August 1842 issue of that paper, Smallwood responded to an ad placed by a Thomas Scott, offering a reward for an escaped enslaved man from Washington, DC, a Henry Hawkins. The ad, besides giving a description of Hawkins, also listed a rather extensive wardrobe of clothes that Hawkins was supposedly carrying in a carpet bag:

Pretty accurate Mr. Scott! only not quite so exact as to the clothing.—Poor fellow, he couldn’t take all the clothing you speak of, from his haste! I half suspect you describe so much clothing merely to give northern people the idea that you clothed him well, when you know that he had to buy for himself, and that it was your cruelty to him, that made him disappear by that same “under ground rail-road” or “steam balloon,” about which one of your city constables was swearing so bitterly a few weeks ago, when complaining that the “d----d rascals” got off so, and that no trace of them could be found! […] it is true his boots are “fine,” but I am quite sure you didn’t buy them for him, and you are quite mistaken about the “carpet bag.” He could get it to the depot of the subterranean rail-road, without notice.

By his own account, Smallwood first heard the term under ground rail-road uttered by an exasperated police offer and escaped-slave hunter, who was using the term as a label for the way that escaped enslaved persons disappeared, as if they were mysteriously vanishing into the ground. 

On 21 September in the Tocsin, a notice gives the news that Hawkins successfully reached his destination in the North and again used the phrase:

Sam Weller is requested to tell the Slaveholders that we passed 26 prime slaves to the land of freedom last week and several more this week thus far; don’t know what the end of the week will foot up. All went by “the underground rail road.”

[…]

Henry Hawkins would like to have Sam inform Austin Scott, at Washington city, that he is well and delighted with Northern scenery and society, and hopes he may get along without his services in future. He wants to send the editor of the Tocsin money enough to buy him a new coat, as the linen roundabout is nearly wore out, and it is coming on cold soon. This would only be a very small item in the amount of which Scott has robbed him of his services.

This notice was reprinted in a number of other abolitionist newspapers, including William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator, on 28 September, so we have a record of Underground Railroad spreading from Smallwood’s use of it to wider abolitionist circles.

In a 3 November 1842 missive to the Tocsin, Smallwood gave more details about the coinage, identifying the police officer in question as a Baltimore man named Zell and using the phrase multiple times:

Don’t you think it was wrong to treat that Christian mother as a mere “breeding wench,” and refuse her husband for months together, all access to her society? If you have a mind to confess your wrong to Mrs. Tilly, and bay Dennis Shaw his wages, and make his double and twisted eyes sparkle, I will give you a letter to them, on application at the “office of the underground railroad.”

[…]

Here am I, Samuel Weller, jun., still in the city to scourge and mock at them, and defy all their puny efforts to discover me, or the “underground railroad.”

[…]

At other times they reckon their victims escape in coaches or wagons. Then they imagine they go by water, which is often the case. All this shows that they would give a plum to know where the under-ground Rail Road begins! That name was given to it by constable ZELL of Baltimore.

[…]

I must close my letter without paying my respects to the large number who have recently been afflicted by the loss of their servants! The conductor of the U.G.R. Road tells me that over 20 have gone, this month! you may depend on hearing from them, through me, as soon as I learn of their reaching the other end of their journey.

While it is highly likely that Smallwood and Zell are the originators of Underground Railroad, there is one claim, that while doubtful, cannot be dismissed outright. Eber Pettit, a white abolitionist who was active in ferrying escapees northward, in his 1879 book Sketches in the History of the Underground Railroad, claims to have first encountered the phrase in an October 1839 Washington, DC newspaper article with the title “Underground Railroad—A Mystery Not Yet Solved.” He includes the text of said article, copied “as closely as I can from memory, not having time to look up the paper.”

In addition to the title, Petit remembers the article quoting an escapee who had been caught saying, "the railroad went underground all the way to Boston.”

I have been unable to find an article that even vaguely resembles the transcript that Pettit has produced from any time prior to the Civil War.

While this is a lead worth investigating further, it hardly constitutes solid evidence. The transcript he produces in his book is from memory, forty years after the fact. It cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, be considered reliable. As a general rule, humans are notoriously bad at recalling verbatim accounts of past texts and conversations, and slipping anachronistic wording into remembered conversations or texts is commonplace. In this case, we must keep our eyes peeled for that 1839 article, if it exists, but until it is found, Smallwood must be considered the likely point of origin.

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Sources:

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

Pettit, Eber M. Sketches in the History of the Underground Railroad. Freedonia, NY: W. McKinstry & Son, 1879, 35–36. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Shane, Scott. “How the Underground Railroad Got Its Name.” New York Times, 11 September 2023.

Smallwood, Thomas [Sam Weller, pseud.]. “Communications” (1 August 1842). Tocsin of Liberty (Albany, New York), 1.45, 10 August 1842, 2/1. Digital Commonwealth.

———. “Communications” (22 October 1842). Tocsin of Liberty (Albany, New York), 2.5, 3 November 1842, 2. Digital Commonwealth.

“Twenty-Six Slaves in One Week.” Tocsin of Liberty (Albany, New York), 1.51, 21 September 1842, 3/3. Digital Commonwealth.

Image credit: Unknown artist, 1872, in Still, William. The Underground Rail Road. Philadelphia: Porter & Coates, 1872, between 102 & 103. Archive.org. Public domain image.

booby / boob / booby hatch / booby prize

Illustration of a booby by Thomas Herbert, 1634

16 October 2023

What I love most about what I do is that my work strikes many cultural touchstones throughout the centuries, but this one takes the cake, running the gamut from nursery slang to Elizabethan drama to seabirds to nautical justice to the Free Silver movement and ending up with Civil War pornography

Booby, and the clipped form boob, can mean many things. It can mean a fool, a type of seabird, or a woman’s breast. A booby hatch is a prison or mental hospital, and booby prizes are awarded to losers. Most of these senses are etymologically related, but the breast sense comes from a different etyma.

The fool/childish sense is the oldest and is of uncertain origin. There are two main contenders as to the origin, and either, or both, may be correct—independent coinages that reinforce one another. It could arise out of a nursery variation on babe or baby. Alternatively, it may come from the Spanish bobo, meaning stupid or a fool. The seabird sense most likely comes from the Spanish, borrowed into English by sailors, as the name of the bird is attested in half a century earlier in that language than English.

Booby, referring to a fool or a childish person, appears at the end of the sixteenth century. George Peele’s 1595 play The Old Wiues Tale has a clown character named Booby. And the word is used as an epithet in the c. 1600 play Club Law:

Why, what a company of bobies were yee? could you not catch him?

And later in the play there is this line:

Make rome Gentlemen, you gamesters what bobies you be.

Thomas Dekker uses the word in its present-day spelling in two of his plays. The first being his 1602 play Satiro-Mastix:

You lye s[i]r varlet sir villaine, I am sir Salamanders, ounds, is my man Master Peter Salamanders face as vrse as mine; Sentlemen, all and Ladies, and you say once or twice Amen, I will lap this little Silde, this Booby in his blankets agen.

And the second being The Pleasant Comodie of Patient Grisill:

By Cod is meane ta let Gwenthyan see what bobie foole loue her, apogs on you.

The name of the seabird (genus Sula) probably comes from their reputation for being none too bright, being easily caught and eaten by sailors. As mentioned above, this sense of word is almost certainly a borrowing from Spanish. The name appears in English in Samuel Purchas’s Purchas His Pilgrimes, a 1625 collection of travel accounts. This passage is found in a description of Sierra Leone:

Of Fowles are Pellicans, white, as bigge as Swannes, with a large and long bill; Hearnes, Curlews, Boobies, Oxe-eyes, with diuers strange kindes of water-fowles.

And this passage, from Thomas Herbert’s 1634 A Relation of Some Yeares Travaile, makes reference to the bird’s supposed low intelligence:

The foure and twentieth of May, we were vnder nineteene degrees and thirty one minutes of South latitude, where one of the Saylers espying a Bird filty called a Booby, hee mounted to the top-mast and tooke her. The foolish quality of which Bird to sit still, not valuing danger, which Bird I haue simply depicted as you see.

Sailors also bequeathed us the term booby hatch. The term originally referred to a cover for a hatch leading down into the lower decks, intended to prevent foolish sailors, or boobies, from falling down into the hold. Over time the term for the hatch cover transferred down to the space below. By the mid nineteenth century, a booby hatch was a place in the hold used as a jail or brig for disobedient sailors.

There is this description an 1842 case before a court in the United States:

The case in the Marine Court was for unnecessarily severe punishment. Plaintiff was ordered to mend a sail, and refused, alleging that he shipped as a seaman and not as a sail maker. He was immediately ordered over the side, to scrape the vessel, but refused, alleging that the employment was dangerous, as the vessel was under way; he was willing to go if a boat were lowered, ready to pick him up in case of his falling overboard.

He was then put in irons, confined in the booby hatch, where he could neither sit nor stand, and could only lie in an uneasy position; kept there till the next morning, then flogged, replaced in the booby hatch, and kept there until afternoon, when, by the advice of his shipmates, he consented to go over the side.

The Court charged that the officers of the vessel had a right to flog a seaman, provided it were done in a proper manner, but they had no right to put a man in irons, unless in case of mutiny, no shade of which appeared to exist in the present case. The general course of the captain and mate seemed to be kind to their crew. Verdict for the plaintiff, $14 damages, and 6 cents costs.

And there is this from the Boston Semi Weekly Courier of 23 October 1851:

The punishment was inflicted on the 27th ult., and Pryson died five days after. The complainant and principal witness, William Frill, testified that the captain flogged the deceased several times with a three-inch rope, for alleged remissness of duty, and subsequently confined him in the “booby hatch,” a most unwholesome place.

By 1859, booby hatch had come ashore and into the jargon of US police forces. In that year George W. Matsell, a former New York City police commissioner, published Vocabulum; or, the Rogue’s Lexicon, which included this entry:

BOOBY-HATCH. Station-house; watch-house.

Presumably such station houses had jails or holding cells for prisoners, because we see this in the Omaha World-Herald of 18 February 1894:

Mr. Sheckles made objections to the manner in which his wealth was distributed, but his objections were overruled. He took exceptions to the ruling and sailed in a la Corbett, but was neatly stopped by Referee Ryan, the man in blue, who called the golden chariot and landed the gang in the booby hatch.

Corbett is a reference to boxer “Gentleman Jim” Corbett (1866–1933), and “Ryan,” the “man in blue,” is obviously a police officer.

The use of booby hatch to refer to a mental hospital was in place by the end of the nineteenth century. Journalist Finley Peter Dunner, creator of the fictional Irish-American bartender Mr. Dooley, put this commentary about advocates for Free Silver in the mouth of his creation on 2 October 1896:

They’re crazy, plumb daffy, Jawnny. In this whole city iv Chicago there ain’t wan hundred silver men that culdn’t give post-graduate insthructions to th’ inmates iv th’ booby hatch out at Dunning. Not wan hundhred.

Finally, to wrap up the discussion of this etymon, the phrase booby prize appears to have arisen in the jargon of the card game of progressive euchre in the 1880s. A booby prize is awarded to the loser of a contest and is usually a gag prize. From the Detroit Free Press of 28 December 1884:

At a recent game a painted pipe tied with ribbon and filled with candy was given as a booby prize.

And this from Michigan’s Jackson Daily Citizen of 14 February 1885 with a less desirable booby prize:

At a recent progressive euchre party the booby prize was a live mouse in a box.

The use of booby to refer to the female breast probably got its start as a seventeenth-century nursery word in the form bubby. It’s likely echoic in origin, reminiscent of the sound of sucking. There are similar words in a number of European languages: Middle High German buobe, Swiss-German Bübbi or Büppi, French poupe, and the Italian poppa.

We see bubby in Youths Lookinglass, a 1660 poem that describes the process of growing up:

Thus void of sense twelve months dully spent,
The child no pleasure knows, nor Nurse content,
But time progreding [sic] the child grows amain
And now some little sense it doth obtain,
Whilst lying in the lap it laughs and smiles
Which pretty charms the mothers heart beguiles,
It gapes and crows and playes before it stands
Grasping the Nurses Bubbies with its hands,
Playing with the breasts, being nourished by sleep
The pretty boy at length begins to creep
About the house, and tumble up and down,
Thus tis with all, though born to great renown.

The present-day spelling booby dates to the mid nineteenth century. And the earliest known use of this spelling, unlike the wholesome Youths Lookinglass, is in the very pornographic 1865 The Love Feast. The following lines describe bridesmaids preparing the bride for her wedding bed:

While one, more wanton than the rest
Seized on love’s moss-bounded nest.
And cried, “Poor puss shall have a treat
For the first time of juicy meat.”
While one my rosy nipples seized,
And my ripe, rounded boobies squeezed,
‘til stiff each little rosebud stood,
Like cuckoo pintles in the bud.

This sense of booby, however, wouldn’t commonly be seen in print until the mid twentieth century.

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Sources:

“City Intelligence.” Boston Semi Weekly Courier (Massachusetts), 23 October 1851, 2/5. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Club Law (c. 1600). G.C. Moore Smith, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1907, 1.4, 5 and 4.6, 79. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Dekker, Thomas. The Pleasant Comodie of Patient Grisill. London: Edward Allde for Henry Rocket, 1603, sig. C3r. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

———. Satiro—Mastix. London: Edward Allde for Edward White, 1602, sig. I3r. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Dunne, Finley Peter. “Philosopher Dooley Talks; In Doubt About His Vote.” Atlanta Journal (Georgia) (orig. published in the Chicago Evening Post), 2 October 1896, 4/5. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“General State News.” Jackson Daily Citizen (Michigan) (orig. published in the Grand Rapids Leader), 14 February 1885, 4/6. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., s.v. booby, n.1, boob, n.2, booby, n.2, boob, n.3, boob, n.1.

Herbert, Thomas. A Relation of Some Yeares Travaile. London: William Stansby and Jacob Bloome, 1634, 10. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

The Love Feast (1865). In Thomas P. Lowry. The Story the Soldiers Wouldn’t Tell: Sex in the Civil War. Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1994, 58. Google Books.

Matsell, George W. Vocabulum; or, the Rogue’s Lexicon. New York: 1859, 13. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

“Never Again.” Omaha World-Herald (Nebraska), 18 February 1894, 9/7. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2018, s.v., booby, n.1, boob, n.1, booby, n.2, boob, n.2.

Peele, George. The Old Wiues Tale. London: John Danter, 1595. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

“Punishment of Sailors.” New York Commercial Advertiser, 22 April 1842, 2/1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Purchas, Samuel. Purchas His Pilgrimes in Five Books. London: William Stansby for Henrie Fetherstone, 1625, 416. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

“Social Bric-A-Brac.” Detroit Free Press (Michigan), 28 December 1884, 14/3. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Youths Lookinglass. London: J. Williamson, 1660, 6. Google Books.

Image credit:

Booby bird, Thomas Herbert, 1634. In A Relation of Some Yeares Travaile. London: William Stansby and Jacob Bloome, 1634, 11. Early English Books Online (EEBO). Public domain image.

helium

A vial of glowing helium

13 October 2023

Helium is the second lightest and second most abundant element in the universe. It has atomic number 2 and the symbol He. It is colorless, odorless, tasteless, non-toxic, and inert, the first of the noble gases on the periodic table. Most of the helium in the universe was created during the Big Bang, but new helium is also continuously being formed through the fusion of hydrogen in stars. Helium is perhaps best known for its use in balloons, but it has numerous industrial uses.

Helium also has the distinction of being the first element discovered outside of earth before it was found on earth, being first seen by astronomer Jules Janssen as a line in the spectra of the sun during the solar eclipse in 1868 in India. Later that year, Norman Lockyer also observed the same spectral line and postulated that it was a new element. Lockyer evidently proposed the name helium, from the Greek ἥλιος (helios, meaning sun) + -ium, but did not include the name in any of his published papers.

The first person to use the name helium in publication was William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) in his August 1871 presidential address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Thomson credited Lockyer, along with chemist Edward Frankland with the name in a footnote in the published address:

During six or eight precious minutes of time, spectroscopes have been applied to the solar atmosphere and to the corona seen round the dark disk of the Moon eclipsing the Sun. Some of the wonderful results of such observations, made in India on the occasion of the eclipse of August 1868, were described by Professor Stokes in a previous address. Valuable results have, through the liberal assistance given by the British and American Governments, been obtained also from the total eclipse of last December, notwithstanding a generally unfavourable condition of weather. It seems to have been proved that at least some sensible part of the light of the “corona” is a terrestrial atmospheric halo or dispersive reflection of the light of the glowing hydrogen and “helium”* round the sun.

[…]

* Frankland and Lockyer find the yellow prominences to give a very decided bright line not far from D, but hitherto not identified with any terrestrial flame. It seems to indicate a new substance, which they propose to call Helium.

In 1881 physicist Luigi Palmieri detected helium in the spectra of material erupted from Mount Vesuvius, and in 1895, chemist William Ramsay was the first to isolate helium on Earth.

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Sources:

Miśkowiec, Pawel. “Name Game: The Naming History of the Chemical Elements: Part 2—Turbulent Nineteenth Century.” Foundations of Chemistry, 6 December 2022. DOI: 10.1007/s10698-022-09451-w.

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

Thomson, William (Lord Kelvin). “Address of Sir William Thomson, Knt., LL.D., F.R.S., President.” Report of the Forty-First Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science; Held at Edinburgh in August 1871. London: John Murray, 1872, lxxxiv–cv at xcix. Biodiversity Heritage Library.

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

blind pig / blind tiger / striped pig

Entrance to the Krazy Kat speakeasy, Washington, DC, 1921

11 October 2023 (Update 14 October: striped pig added)

You don’t hear about blind tigers, blind pigs, or striped pigs much anymore. Occasionally, one may happen upon a bar or tavern with the name Blind Tiger or see the terms in historical fiction, but that’s about it. They are old slang terms for establishments that sell illicit liquor. The names arose in the days when sideshow or roadside attractions offered a glimpse of exotic or weird creatures. The two names come from the signs advertising the establishments, offering a peep at said animal but actually delivering a drink instead in an attempt to evade laws restricting the sale of alcohol.

The terms were not only differentiated by the title animal, but by region as well. Blind tiger was more common in the American South and West Midlands. Blind pig was primary found in the Inland North and West Coast. But the granddaddy of them all, the striped pig, got its start in Massachusetts.

Striped pig started when the Massachusetts legislature passed a law on 1 July 1838 prohibiting the sale of liquor in quantities less than fifteen gallons (the act was repealed in 1840) on days when the militia mustered. The original striped pig sprang up on the muster field in Dedham, Massachusetts on 11 September 1838:

YANKEE SHREWDNESS.—Coming it over the fifteen gallon law.—We understand that previous to the Division Muster at Dedham, yesterday, a shrewd one hit upon the following novel expedient to evade the license law. He made application to the Selectmen for a license to exhibit a striped pig during the parade day, which was granted.—He accordingly procured a pig, and with a brush painted some stripes on his back, and yesterday morning he had a tent erected on the field, with due notice on the exterior, that a striped pig was to be seen within: price of admission, six and a quarter cents. The rate being so low, numerous visitors were induced to call upon his swinish majesty, and, every one on coming out appeared highly gratified with the kind and courteous reception he met with from the keeper of the remarkable pig, for each comer was treated to a glass of brand and water or gin, or whatever liquor he might prefer, without any extra charge. Some were so well pleased that they were induced to take a second look at the animal, and were as kindly and liberally treated as at their first visit. At the last accounts the exhibitor was driving a brisk business, and was likely to make a profitable day’s job in exhibiting his “striped pig.”

The striped pig was a nationwide sensation, widely reported in newspapers throughout the United States. The America’s Historical Newspaper database records nearly nine hundred articles referencing striped pigs appearing between 1838 and 1840, when the law was repealed. And uses continued well beyond that date.

According to the Massachusetts’s Gloucester Telegraph on 22 September 1838, bars in New York were serving drinks called the striped pig:

A new beverage, called the “Striped Pig,” is said to be all the go at the Astor and other fashionable hotels in New-York.

And Rhode Island’s Providence Daily Journal of 28 September 1838 reports a stage show of that name being performed in Boston:

A new burletta, called the “Striped Pig,” has been performed at the National, in Boston, to full houses. The Gazette says it was written by one the first men in Boston, and is said to be a SQUEALER.

Dedham’s Norfolk Advertiser of 6 October 1838 tells of a political “party” being formed dedicated to the repeal of the law. Evidently this was not a formally organized party, so much as a caucus of candidates opposed to the law:

The Striped Pig Party in Hampden Co. have nominated for the Senate George Ashmun and Matthew Ives Jr.

And by the end of October, copycat striped pigs were in place. From the Norfolk Advertiser of 20 October 1838:

Not less than four “striped Pigs” were brought before Mr Justice Wells last week, and fined for violating the laws of the Commonwealth. One of these “poor shoats” has been shut up in the county “pig pen.”

But elsewhere in the nation, other animals took the place of the swine, and instead of being striped, they were blind. From Tennessee we have mention of a blind tiger in a debate in the state House of Representatives on 13 October 1841. On the agenda was a bill to repeal the state’s strict liquor laws, with proponents arguing that the ban was ineffective and only served to promote illicit trade in booze and all the societal ills that accompanied it:

The gentleman from Henry, who introduced that bill, had told the House about a Blind Tiger in Henry, that people went to see and got something to take on his premises. He knew of one of these destructive Blind Tigers in Cannon county, which was terrible enough. This question should not be made a theological one. Bad[?] as he was himself, he was a member of a church and was repealing the present law. So were the preachers in his county.

Another early example of blind tiger, also from Tennessee, comes in the Memphis Daily Eagle of 29 December 1849:

On the subject of Sunday tippling, or of selling spirits to negroes, it appears necessary that a witness shall testify that himself or other person actually paid down at the time for what he drank, although in a house notoriously open for tippling purposes. We believe that all “Blind Tiger” artifice, and other cunning evasions should be circumvented by the higher skill of a virtuous and patriotic Legislature.

By 1855 blind tigers were appearing in Texas. From the Texas State Gazette of 26 May 1855:

The liquor sellers at Marshall are seeking to evade the law by the game of the Blind Tiger. The council are expected to make it the dead tiger shortly.

And we see this fuller description of a blind tiger in Porter’s Spirit of the Times of 23 May 1857. This account is supposedly from a traveler passing through the state of Mississippi:

After a while I goes up in town, leavin’ Ben in charge of the boat; and after crusin’ around a little, I sees a kinder pigeon-hole cut in the side of a house, and over the hole, in big writin’, “Blind tiger, ten cents a sight.” I walks straight up, and peepin’ in, sees a feller standing’ inside, stirrin’ somethin’ with a stick. I immejiately recognised a familiar kinder menajery smell about the place. “Hello, there, you mister showman,” says I to the feller inside, “here’s your ten cents, walk out your wild cat.” Stranger, instead of showin’ me a wild varmint without eyes, I’ll be dod-busted if he didn’t shove out a glass of whiskey. You see, that “blind tiger” was an arrangement to evade the law, which won’t let ’em sell licker there, except by the gallon. It is useless to say that my visits wur numerous to that animal what couldn’t see.

Blind pig appears a decade or so later. There is this account in David MacRae’s 1870 The Americans at Home that describes a blind pig without using the term (he uses blind and pig, but not blind pig) in a section of the book that details prohibition laws in New England:

It was a new thing for me to walk for hours along the streets of a large and populous city like Boston and not see a single spirit-shop. That is one point gained. The traffic, no doubt, goes on. But it has to creep away into back streets, or conceal itself behind window-blinds that offer nothing but cigars, or soda-water, or confectionary, to the uninitiated passerby. When the people become more vigilant, it has to supply its customers through clubs or city agencies, or under medical prescription. In desperate cases it has to betake itself to the exhibition of Greenland pigs and other curious animals, charging 25 cents for a sight of the pig and throwing in a gin cocktail gratuitously. Natural history, in such cases, becomes a study of absorbing interest. People have no sooner been to see the Greenland pig once, than they are seized with an irresistible desire to go back and see him again.

And we see the phrase blind pig complete in a 27 February 1878 article in the Minneapolis Tribune:

At Rochester, an establishment known as “Blind Pig,” where the law was evaded and liquor sold, has been broken up and a young man named Charles Hall arrested, tried, and found guilty. He was fined $100 and costs, and in default sent to jail for ninety days.

There is this from the Tacoma Weekly News of 23 July 1886 in the then territory of Washington:

About half past 8 o’clock this morning there was considerable excitement among the habitues of Pacific avenue. It was caused by the appearance of a body of laboring men strolling along the sidewalks having come from the wharf. After they reached the Halstead house, they divided into squads and then circulated through the city taking in all the sights that included tips to the “blind pig.”

And this delightful story in the same paper two weeks later, on 6 August 1886:

A day or two ago at Puyallup, a sow’s six piggies ran under a coach of the train bound for Tacoma, while stopping at the depot. After the train started the pigs trotted along under the car, for nearly a block, while pig mater stood behind looking for her offspring with surprised alarm. The youngsters desiring to learn the significance of “blind pig,” and having heard of such an asylum for the distressed, rushed into a saloon and stayed there until driven out by the bar keeper. It was a thrilling pig’s tale all around.

Finally, there is this excerpt from a sermon printed in the Boston Herald of 24 January 1887:

Now, in Kansas, after prohibition had been carried, they found all the old topers were as drunk as before. Finally, one fellow with a nose went peeking around, and he found there was a place where a man was running what he called a blind pig.

These exotic animals and the beverages served to those who viewed them are things of the past, although there are present-day equivalents, only they don’t advertise animals and liquor is not the intoxicant they serve. Such establishments are a product of prohibition.

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Sources:

Thanks to Peter Reitan for alerting me to the existence of the phrase striped pig.

“Additional Laborers for the Front.” Tacoma Weekly News (Washington), 23 July 1886, 3/4. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“Brevities.” Tacoma Weekly News (Washington), 6 August 1886, 3/1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Dictionary of American Regional English, 2013, s.v. blind tiger, n. also attrib., blind pig, n., striped pig, n.

Gloucester Telegraph (Massachusetts), 22 September 1838, 2/5. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., s.v blind pig, n., blind-pigger, n., blind tiger, n.

A History of the “Striped Pig.” Boston: Whipple and Damrell, 1838, 9–10. Gale Primary Sources: American Fiction.

“’Lige Simmons of Sinkum.” Porter’s Spirit of the Times (New York), 23 May 1857, 182/1–2. American Antiquarian Society (AAS) Historical Periodicals Collection: Series 4.

MacRae, David. The Americans at Home: Pen-and-Ink Sketches of American Men, Manners, and Institutions, vol. 2 of 2. Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1870, 315. HathiTrust Digital Library.

Norfolk Advertiser (Dedham, Massachusetts), 6 October 1838, 2/1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

———, 20 October 1838, 2/1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“Our Table.” Texas State Gazette (Austin), 26 May 1855, 309/1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. blind pig, n., blind tiger, n.

“Presentments.” Memphis Daily Eagle, 29 December 1849, 6/3. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Providence Daily Journal (Rhode Island), 28 September 1838, 2/1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Small, Sam. “Liberty for All. How the Fetters of Sin Can be Broken.” Boston Herald (Massachusetts), 24 January 1887, 3/2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“State News.” Tribune (Minneapolis, Minnesota), 27 February 1878, 2/6. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

“Tennessee Legislature. House of Representatives” (13 October 1841). Daily Republican Banner (Nashville), 15 October 1841, 3/1. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

“Yankee Shrewdness.” Columbian Centinel (Boston), 12 September 1838, 2/3. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Photo credit: Cleon Throckmorton, 1921. Library of Congress, LC-F8- 15145 (P&P). Public domain image.

belfry / bats in the belfry

9 October 2023

To have bats in one’s belfry is slang for being mentally unbalanced, eccentric, or odd. A belfry, in the most common sense in use today, is a bell chamber at the top of a tower, which in the slang phrase is a metaphor for the head. The slang expression is American in origin and relatively recent, but belfry is a word that dates back centuries.

Belfry comes into English from the Anglo-Norman berfrai, a word that is first recorded in the late twelfth century. The French term comes from either the medieval Latin berefredus or a proto-Germanic word *bergfrid, meaning castle or keep. The Norman dialect of Old French, from which Anglo-Norman descends, differs from standard Old French in that it was heavily influenced by Germanic words; Norman comes from Norseman. The Norman dialect may have gotten the word from either source. But in either case, the Latin word is itself a borrowing from the Germanic, so that is the ultimate source regardless.

The shift from /ɹ/ to /l/ occurred by the fifteenth century, we see the shift in Anglo-Norman by the late fourteenth century, and in English by the fifteenth. This particular consonant shift is unsurprising. The English liquid consonants, that is /ɹ/ and /l/, are easily interchangeable. And in this particular case, the association with bell probably influenced the shift to /l/ as well.

The original sense of berfrai was that of a shelter from missiles used during a siege. Later it came to refer to such a shelter at the top of a wooden tower on wheels used as a siege engine. We see this sense in the late fourteenth-century poem Cleanness:

“Þenne watz þe sege sette þe ceté aboute,
Skete skarmoch skelt, much skaþe lached;
At vch Brugge a berfrey on basteles wyse
Þat seuen syþe vch a day asayled þe ȝates.

(Then the siege was set about the city,
Skirmishes sharply fought, much injury suffered;
At each drawbridge a belfry in a moveable tower,
That seven times each day assailed the gates.)

The bell tower sense appears by the mid fifteenth century. We see it in a poem about Thomas Becket from that period:

Thomas rides fro Rome, þe man þat right kennes;
he faris forth by a faire towne, Pise it is hotyne.
There fyndes he masons, upon a toure makand
A belfry of alabastre, þere belles shul hengyne.

(Thomas rides from Rome, the man that teaches rightly,
He travels by a fair town, Pisa it is called,
There he finds masons building upon a tower
A belfry of alabaster, where bells shall hang.)

The tower here is what would become known as the Leaning Tower of Pisa, which was under construction during Thomas’s lifetime in the twelfth century.

The phrase bats in the belfry, however, would have to wait a few hundred years. It starts appearing in print in the closing years of the nineteenth century. Here is the earliest use I know of, from the Searchlight newspaper of Redding California of 7 September 1897. The editor of that paper is sniping at a rival publication:

THE SHASTA COURIER waxes sarcastic about that “awful eastern cyclone.” Bro. Carter seems to think that Redding reporters have “bats in the belfry” and “rats in the garret.” It’s all a mistake. The reporter in question has not passed the wind on the stomach epoch of his existence. Paregoric is wanted, Bro. Carter, not sarcasm.

And there is this, a few months later, Memphis, Tennessee’s Commercial Appeal of 27 February 1898. The piece supposedly records the conversation between two dogs:

“We’re all mad, you know, they say,” I ventured—

“We have a neat little way of saying it in French,” he said, flipping his tail impertinently around.

“What is it in English?”

“Bats in the belfry!”

“Ha-ha!”

Of course, the phrase is not from French. The joke is playing on the fact that the readers will recognize it as a current slang phrase. This quotation is evidence that the phrase was in widespread use by this point.

As to why bats, that is twofold. First, belfries are common roosting places for bats. Second, it alliterates. And the idea of creatures flitting about inside one’s head is an apt, if rather insulting, metaphor for insanity.

Discuss this post

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Sources:

“All Sorts and Conditions.” Commercial Appeal (Memphis, Tennessee), 27 February 1898, 4/7. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Anglo-Norman Dictionary, 2007, s.v. berfrai, n.

“Cleanness.” In The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript, fourth edition. Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron, eds. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2002, lines 1185–88. London, British Library, MS Cotton Nero A.x, fols. 73r–v.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., s.v. belfry, n.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. berfrei, n.

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

Searchlight (Redding, California), 7 September 1897, 4/1. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

“Seint Thomas of Caunterbery.” In A. Brandl, “Thomas Beckets Weissagung über Eduard III un Henrich V,” Archiv für das Studium der Neueren Sprachen und Literaturen, 102, 1899, 354. Oxford, Bodleian Library, Hatton 56, fol. 45a. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Image credit: Unknown artist, 1937. Collins Crime Club. Wikimedia Commons. Fair use of a low-resolution scan of the image to illustrate the topic under discussion.