bullpen

Houston Astros bullpen on 17 August 2005

1 November 2023

One of the mysteries of the game of baseball is the origin of the term bullpen, the name for the area in which relief pitchers warm up. Several competing hypotheses vie for the origin. Of the hypotheses, the most likely is that it stems from an older use of bullpen to mean a holding area or jail.

Of course, the collocation of the words bull and pen to literally mean a place where male bovines are kept goes back centuries. But in the early nineteenth century, bullpen became an American slang term for a jail or holding area. The first known use of this sense is in Peter Horry and Mason Locke “Parson” Weems’s 1809 biography of American Revolutionary War hero Francis Marion:

The tories were all handcuffed two and two, and confined together under a centinel, in what was called a bull-pen, made of pine trees, cut down so judgmatically as to form, by their fall, a pen or enclosure.

This sense of bullpen as jail can be found in American writing to this day.

The association with baseball starts in the late nineteenth century, but in a different sense than that of a pitcher’s warm-up area. Instead, bullpen was the term used for a roped-off area in foul territory or in the outfield for standing-room-only crowds who were admitted to the park at a discount. From the Cincinnati Enquirer of 9 May 1877:

The bull-pen at the Cincinnati Grounds, with its “three-for-a-quarter” crowd, has lost its usefulness. The bleaching boards just north of the north pavilion now hold the cheap crowd which comes in at the end of the first inning on a discount.

One might think that bullpen comes from the idea that it is a holding area for relief pitchers, but this 1877 citation removes that possibility. It appears over a decade before player substitutions and relief pitchers were allowed. Instead, as the above quotation indicates, bullpen presumably comes from the idea of a holding area for the fans with cheap tickets. Later, when relief pitchers were allowed by the rules, their warm-up area was often located where the old bullpen for the crowd had been located. In the early twentieth century, the name would get a boost by the presence of large signs on the outfield fences advertising Bull Durham tobacco. These signs had become ubiquitous in ball fields c. 1910, which is about the time that bullpen acquired the sense of a pitcher’s warm-up area.

In the 19 March 1910 Cincinnati Post we get a list of Reds’ players’ nicknames that includes pitcher Tom Cantwell, who is dubbed “The Bullpen Kid.” Cantwell did not last long in the major leagues, and the nickname may be a reference to him not getting much playing time with the Reds.

The next year we get the first unambiguous use of bullpen in the baseball sense we know today. That comes in the 19 June 1911 Minneapolis Morning Tribune:

Joe Cantillon will probably send either Rube Waddell or Roy Patterson to the firing line today in an attempt to grab the final game of the series from the Senators. Waddell was kept out in the center field bullpen most of the afternoon warming up, while Patterson returned from a brief scouting trip down through Kentucky.

Eight months later, in the 12 February 1912 Fort Worth Star-Telegram, we see this discussion of outfielder Josh Devore, who at the time was playing for the New York Giants under manager John McGraw. The passage in question refers back to events of 1908 when he played for the Meridian, Mississippi Ribboners:

While with Meridian a newspaperman saw him perform and urged Manager McGraw to purchase him, which he did. Muggsy sent the young fielder over to the Newark bullpen, as the Eastern League grounds are called, to get a little seasoning under “Big Chief” Stallings.

Devore moved to the Newark Indians in 1908, and in September of that year made his major league debut with McGraw’s Giants. The question here is whether bullpen was an actual nickname for Newark’s Wiedenmayer’s Park, or if it is a reference to McGraw using the Newark club as a farm team to “warm up” inexperienced players before they were promoted to the Giants.

That’s it. The most likely explanation is that baseball’s bullpen started off as a specialized sense of the word’s meaning as a holding area, first for prisoners and then as fans. It may have been reinforced by advertisements for Bull Durham tobacco that were located near the areas where pitchers warmed up.

But we can’t let it go without including the wisdom, almost certainly factually incorrect, of baseball legend Casey Stengel, who held forth on the etymology in the 10 March 1967 New York Times:

Why is a bull pen called a bull pen in baseball!

“You could look it up and get 80 different answers,” Casey Stengel said today, “but we used to have pitchers who could pitch 50 or 60 games a year and the extra pitchers would just sit around shooting the bull, and no manager wanted all that gabbing on the bench.

“So he put them in this kind of pen in the outfield to warm up, it looked like a place to keep cows or bulls.”

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Sources:

“BASE-BALL. The Battle for the League Pennant Opened.” Cincinnati Enquirer (Ohio), 9 May 1877, 2/5. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

“Big League Stars Who Will Be Seen in Texas This Spring.” Fort Worth Star-Telegram, 21 February 1912, 8/5. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Dickson, Paul. The Dickson Baseball Dictionary, third edition. New York: W.W. Norton, 2009, 143–46, s.v. bullpen.

Durso, Joseph. “Bull Pen of Mets is a ‘Disaster Area’” (9 March 1967). New York Times, 10 March 1967, 44/7. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

“Floto’s Column.” Denver Post (Colorado), 6 May 1905, 8/7. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

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

“‘Handles’ Reds Bear on Field of Action.” 19 March 1910, Cincinnati Post (Ohio), 6/3. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Horry, P. and M. L. Weems. The Life of Gen. Francis Marion (1809). Philadelphia: Joseph Allen, 1829, 225. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

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

“Senators Win Second in Ninth Inning Rally.” Minneapolis Morning Tribune (Minnesota), 29 June 1911, 14/4–5. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Image credit: D. L., 2005. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

gonzo

Ralph Steadman’s illustration that accompanied the 1971 serialization of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in Rolling Stone magazine

30 October 2023

The word gonzo is inextricably linked to writer Hunter S. Thompson, famed for his style dubbed gonzo journalism. Gonzo is a highly subjective, first-person style, characterized by distorted and exaggerated facts. From this name for a journalistic style, the word quickly shifted in meaning to refer to anything eccentric, bizarre, or out of control. Thompson first used the word in print on 11 November 1971 in his book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which first appeared serialized in the pages of Rolling Stone magazine:

“Right,” I said. “But first we need the car. And after that, the cocaine. And then the tape recorder, for special music, and some Acapulco shirts.” The only way to prepare for a trip like this, I felt, was to dress up like human peacocks and get crazy, then screech off across the desert and cover the story. Never lose sight of the primary responsibility.

But what was the story? Nobody had bothered to say. So we would have to drum it up on our own. Free Enterprise. The American Dream. Horatio Alger gone mad on drugs in Las Vegas. Do it now: pure Gonzo journalism.

When asked where the word came from, Thompson would credit editor Bill Cardoso with coining the word in 1970 in a conversation with him about his article “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved” which appeared in Scanlon’s Monthly that year. For instance, a 1977 interview on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has this exchange between Thompson and the interviewer:

Gzowski: Where did the word “Gonzo” come from?

HST: It’s an old Boston street word. It’s one of the Charles River things that started when you’re twelve years old on the banks of the Charles River. “Gonzo” is a word that Bill Cardoso, who’s an editor at the Boston Globe, came up with to describe some of my writing. I just liked it. And I thought, “Well, am I a new journalist? Am I a political journalist?” I’m a Gonzo journalist … And why not?

And in another 1977 interview, this time with High Times magazine, Thompson said:

One of the letters came from Bill Cardozo, who was the editor of the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine at the time. I’d heard him use the word Gonzo when I covered the New Hampshire primary in ’68 with him. It meant sort of “crazy,” “off-the-wall”—a phrase that I always associate with Oakland. But Cardozo said something like, “Forget all the shit you’ve been writing, this is it; this is pure Gonzo. If this is a start, keep rolling.” Gonzo. Yeah, of course. That’s what I was doing all the time. Of course, I might be crazy.

While it is all but certain that Cardoso was the first to apply gonzo to Thompson’s style of journalism, where Cardoso got the word is very much up in the air. Cardoso said it was a South Boston slang term for “guts and stamina of the last man standing at the end of a marathon drinking bout.” But it does not appear to be a Boston slang term, or at least there is no record of any such word. On another occasion, Cardoso claimed that it came from the French Canadian gonzeaux, meaning “shining path.” That too is a fiction, as if Cardoso was creating a gonzo etymology for gonzo.

Corey Seymour and Jann Wenner’s 2007 Gonzo: The Life of Hunter S. Thompson gives a different story about the origins of the term from Doug Brinkley, the literary executor of Thompson’s estate:

The Internet is full of bogus falsehoods propagated by uninformed English professors and pot-smoking fans about the etymological origins of “gonzo.” Here’s how it happened: The legendary New Orleans piano player James Booker recorded an instrumental song called “Gonzo” in 1960. The term “gonzo” was Cajun slang that had floated around the French Quarter jazz scene for decades and meant, roughly, “to play unhinged.” The actual studio recording of “Gonzo” took place in Houston, and when Hunter first heard the song he went bonkers—especially for this wild flute part. From 1960 to 1969—until Herbie Mann recorded another flute triumph, “Battle Hymn of the Republic”—Booker’s “Gonzo” was Hunter’s favorite song.

When Nixon ran for president in 1968, Hunter had an assignment to cover him for Pageant and found himself holed up in a New Hampshire motel with a columnist from the Boston Globe Magazine named Bill Cardoso. Hunter had brought a cassette of Booker’s music and played “Gonzo” over, and over—it drove Cardoso crazy, and that night, Cardoso jokingly derided Hunter as “the ‘Gonzo’ man.” Later, when Hunter sent Cardoso his Kentucky Derby piece, he got a note back saying something like, “Hunter, that was pure Gonzo journalism!” Cardoso claimed that the term was also used in Boston bars to mean “the last man standing,” but Hunter told me that he never really believed Cardoso on this. Just another example of “Cardoso bullshit” he said.

The bit of it being Cajun slang or Louisiana jazz jargon is unsubstantiated. I have found no uses of the word in relation to Louisiana until the appearance of Booker’s tune in 1960. But the rest of Brinkley’s tale seems plausible and match, in the essential elements, the accounts of the word’s origin that Thompson gave. But Thompson is not exactly a reliable source, and it seems that Brinkley’s main source is Thompson, so take it with a grain of salt.

But if we take Brinkley’s story as true, where did Booker get the name of his song from? According to a February 2002 article in BluesNotes magazine by Greg Johnson, James Booker took the name of his song from a character in the 1960 film The Pusher. That movie is based on Ed McBain’s (pseud. Evan Hunter) 1956 novel of the same name. In the novel, the character receives his nickname as a mishearing of the slang word gunsel, a gunman:

We know what happened at the card game. We know all about the gunsel routine and the way your goofed and called it “gonzo” and the way it brought down the house, and the way you were called Gonzo the rest of the night. Batman told us all about it, and Batman’ll swear to it. We figure the rest like this, pal. We figure you used the Gonzo tag when you took over the Hernandez’s trade because you didn’t figure it was wise to identify your own name with your identity as a pusher. Okay, so these kids were looking for Gonzo, and they found him, and one them bought a sixteenth from you, and he’ll swear to that too.

But as with the other stories, we have little substantiation that the word comes from the McBain novel.

Dictionaries have attempted to give gonzo an etymology, but like the above stories, they cannot be trusted. The Oxford English Dictionary says it is “perhaps a borrowing from Italian,” giving either the Italian gonzo, meaning foolish, or the Spanish ganso, meaning goose or fool, as the etymon. While Green’s Dictionary of Slang gives a more complex etymology, saying it is either a blend of gone + crazo (an eccentric person) or gone + the Italian suffix -zo, with an allusion to gung-ho. These explanations are plausible but seem be by etymologists using traditional tools of etymology, borrowing and derivation, to reach for an answer that is simply not known.

What we can say for certain about the origin of gonzo, as we know it today, is that it was coined by Cardoso, and beyond that no one can say.

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Sources:

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., s.v. gonzo, adj.1.

Gzowski, Peter. 90 Minutes Live, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 12 April 1977. In Anita Thompson, ed. Ancient Gonzo Wisdom: Interviews with Hunter S. Thompson. Cambridge, MA, Da Capo Press, 2009, 70–71. ProQuest Ebook Central.

Hirst, Martin. “What is Gonzo? The Etymology of an Urban Legend.” University of Queensland, Australia, 19 January 2004.

McBain, Ed (pseud. Evan Hunter). The Pusher (1956). New York: Penguin, 1963, 149. Archive.org.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. gonzo, adj. & n.

Rosenbaum, Ron. “Hunter S. Thompson: The Good Doctor Tells All … About Carter, Cocaine, Adrenaline, and the Birth of Gonzo Journalism.” High Times, September 1977. In Anita Thompson, ed. Ancient Gonzo Wisdom: Interviews with Hunter S. Thompson. Cambridge, MA, Da Capo Press, 2009, 91–92. ProQuest Ebook Central.

Thompson, Hunter S. (Raoul Duke, pseud.). “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.” Rolling Stone, 11 November 1971, 36–48 at 38/4. ProQuest Magazines.

Wenner, Jann S. and Corey Seymour. Gonzo: The Life of Hunter S. Thompson. New York: Little, Brown, 2007, 125–26.

Image credit: Ralph Steadman, 1971. Fair use to illustrate the topic under discussion.

hydrogen

The hydrogen-filled zeppelin Hindenburg on fire and crashing into the ground at Lakehurst, New Jersey, 6 May 1937

27 October 2023

Hydrogen is a colorless, odorless, tasteless, non-toxic, and highly combustible gas at room temperature and pressure. It is also the lightest and most abundant element in the universe, comprising about seventy-five percent of all normal matter. It has atomic number 1 and the symbol H. The name is a borrowing from the French hydrogène, which is a modern construction based on the Greek υδρο (hydro, water) + γένος (genus, kind).

Over the centuries, a number of alchemists and chemists managed to produce hydrogen, but it wasn’t until 1766 that British chemist Henry Cavendish recognized it as a discrete substance. Cavendish, however, only referred to the element as inflammable air. The name hydrogène wasn’t applied to the gas until 1787, when Louis-Bernard Guyton de Morveau, Antoine Lavoisier, Claude-Louis Bertholet, and Antoine- François de Fourcroy published their Methode de Nomenclature Chimique:

Les 55 substances simples de la première colonne, sont divisées en cinq classes suivant la nature comparée de chacune d’elles. La première division comprend quatre corps, qui semblent se rapprocher le plus de l’idée qu’on s’est formée des élémens, & qui jouent le plus grand rôle dans les combinaisons

[…]

l’hydrogène (case 4), ou la base du fluide élastique, appellé gaz inflammable, être qui existe solide dans la glace, puisqu’il est un des principes de l’eau.

(The 55 simple substances in the first column are divided into five classes according to the compared nature of each of them. The first division includes four bodies, which seem to come closest to the idea that we have formed of the elements, and which play the greatest role in the combinations.

[…]

hydrogen (box 4), or the base of the elastic fluid, called inflammable gas, which exists solid in ice, since it is one of the principles of water.)

Hydrogène was quickly adopted into English, becoming hydrogen.

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Sources:

Cavendish, Henry. “Three Papers, Containing Experiments on Factitious Air” (12 May 1766). Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 56.56, December 1766, 141–84 at 144. DOI: 10.1098/rstl.1766.0019.

Guyton de Morveau, Louis-Bernard, Antoine Lavoisier, Claude-Louis Bertholet, and Antoine- François de Fourcroy. Methode de Nomenclature Chimique. Paris: Cuchet, 1787, 78–79. Bibliothèque Nationale de France: Gallica.

Miśkowiec, Pawel. “Name Game: The Naming History of the Chemical Elements—Part 1—From Antiquity till the End of 18th Century.” Foundations of Chemistry, 1 November 2022. DOI: 10.1007/s10698-022-09448-5.

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

Photo credit: Murray Becker/Associated Press, 1937. Wikipedia Commons. Public domain image.

spooky season

23 October 2023

One of pitfalls in thinking about language is the recency illusion, the idea that a word or phrase is of rather recent vintage when in fact it is much older. Even experts can fall victim to this cognitive bias. I did with the term spooky season, referring to the season leading up to Halloween. Since I had only recently noticed the term, I had thought the alliterative phrase was rather new, when it is actually over a century old.

The earliest appearance of spooky season that I have found is in a headline in the Whittier Daily News for 1 November 1905. The California newspaper places the word spooky in quotation marks, indicating that the editors did not yet consider it a stock phrase:

Mirthful Events
Halloween Parties Many and Delightful
“Spooky” Season is Observed

The next year, another California paper, the Fresno Morning Republican, did the same on 27 October 1906:

This concluded the conventional part of the evening, later the audience being escorted to the social hall down stairs, where ghosts and hobgoblins, pumpkins and apples vied with each other in carrying out the Hallowe’en sentiment. At a mysterious fortune telling booth in one corner the present, past and future was the subject of the witches’ discourse, and all the tricks known to the “spooky” season were tried. The affair was most successful in every way and the ladies are to be congratulated upon having entertained well.

But a week later we get spooky season without any quotation marks in New Orleans’s Daily Picayune of 4 November 1906:

Misses Bertie Moore and Stella Relly entertained the Young Ladies’ Auxiliary to the Y.M.C.A. at a social in which Halloween was celebrated, Wednesday afternoon. The young hostesses, beautifully gowned in white, received their guests in a darkened parlor illuminated only by grotesque jack-o’-lanterns. All the mysticisms of the spooky season bewitched the guests, whose fortunes were told by two forlorn witches that resided in a darkened tent. The refreshments served were appropriate to the occasion.

And within a few years we see the phrase in papers from the Midwest. Omaha’s Evening World-Herald of 28 October 1911 has this:

Ghosts, ghosts everywhere; in the yard, on the porch, in the hall and every room in the home of Mr. and Mrs. Jay Laverty of South Omaha, who entertained at a Halloween party Friday evening for the members of the Frances Willard union of the Women’s Christian Temperance union. The beautiful home of Mr. and Mrs. Laverty had a most elaborate decoration of autumn leaves and yellow pumpkins cut from cardboard. The green and yellow eyes of black cats gleamed from dark corners, and witches with their brooms swept all the remaining cobwebs from the spirits of the guests.

Upstairs, in the attic, there was a wealth of decoration, all suggestive of the “spooky” season. A gayly dressed gypsy read palms and foretold all sorts of good fortunes for the guests.

A buffet supper of doughnuts, apples, and coffee was served to the 200 guests present. Before going to the attic, a delightful musical program was given by Mr. James Colvin, who has recently returned from abroad. Mrs. Richabau of South Omaha sang a solo in a most pleasing manner.

 And this from Iowa’s Atlantic Evening News of 1 November 1911:

Hallowe’en is always the season for many delightful social affairs and this year was no exception to the rule in that respect for there were many pleasant affairs about the city and in this vicinity last evening, appropos [sic] the spooky season.”

But those of us who have fallen victim to the recency illusion regarding spooky season are not completely off the mark. The phrase has skyrocketed in popularity in recent years. The News on the Web (NOW) Corpus, which tracks usage in online newspapers and magazines shows that between 2011 and 2015 the phrase’s appearances in the corpus number in single digits. It rises to double digits in 2016, and then jumps to over two hundred appearances in 2019. Since then, there has been a steady rise in spooky season’s frequency, reaching 854 in 2022. It’s too early to tell what the number for this year will be, but it looks like last year was peak spooky season. Whether that marks the beginning of a declining trend or if the frequency is just leveling off remains to be seen.

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Sources:

Davies, Mark. Corpus of News on the Web (NOW), accessed 7 October 2023.

“Mirthful Events.” Whittier Daily News (Whittier, California), 1 November 1905, 1/2. Newspapers.com.

Schwedel, Heather. “When Did this Time of Year Become ‘Spooky Season’?” Slate.com, 19 October 2021.

“Social and Club News.” Fresno Morning Republican (Fresno, California), 27 October 1906, 8/4. Newspapers.com.

“Social Events of the City.” Atlantic Evening News (Atlantic, Iowa), 1 November 1911, 1/1. NewspaperArchive.

“Social Whirl.” Evening World-Herald (Omaha, Nebraska), 28 October 1911, 4/1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“Society.” Daily Picayune (New Orleans, Louisiana), 4 November 1906, Section 2, 4/3. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Photo credit: Aglampet Gruodje, 2020. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

holmium / thulium

Portion of the periodic table containing holmium (Ho) and thulium (Tm)

20 October 2023

Holmium, atomic number 67 and symbol Ho, and thulium, atomic number 69 and symbol Tm, are soft, malleable, silvery metals. Their oxides were first isolated by Per Teodor Cleve in 1879, although the existence of holmium had been observed spectrographically the previous year by Jacques-Louis Soret and Marc Delafontaine. Holmium is used in the production of lasers and spectrometers, as well as magnets, and it is used as a neutron regulator in nuclear reactors. Thulium is used in some portable x-ray devices and in lasers, but its rarity and resulting high price limit its practical utility.

Cleve proposed the names for both elements. Holmium is named for Stockholm, whose modern Latin name is Holmia. Thulium is named for Thule, a classical Latin name for a specific but vaguely identified land in the North Sea region. In the announcement of his discovery, published 1 September 1879, Cleve wrote of the names:

Pour le radical de l’oxyde placé entre l’ytterbine et l’erbine, qui est caractérisé par la band x dans la partie rouge du spectre, je propose le nom de thulium, dérivé de Thulé, le plus ancient nom de la Scandinavie.

[…]

Le troisième metal, caractérisé par les bandes y et z et qui se trouve entre l’erbine et la terbine, doit avoir un poids atomique inférieur à 108. Son oxyde paraît être jaune; au moins toutes les fractions d’un poids moléculaire inférieur à 126 sont plus ou moins jaunes. Je propose pour le metal le nom de holmium, Ho, dérivé du nom latinsé de Stockholm, don’t les environs renferment tant de minéraux riches en yttria.

(For the radical of the oxide placed between ytterbia and erbia, which is characterized by the band x in the red part of the spectrum, I propose the name of thulium, derived from Thule, the ancient name of Scandinavia.

[…]

The third metal characterized by the bands y and z, and which is found between erbia and terbia, must have a lower atomic number than 108. Its oxide appears to be yellow; at least all the fractions of the molecular weight lower than 108 are more or less yellow. I propose for this metal the name Holmium, Ho, derived from the latinized name of Stockholm, in the neighborhood of which so many minerals rich in yttria are to be found.)

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Sources:

Clève, P. T. “On Two New Elements in Erbia.” Chemical News, 40.1033, 12 September 1879, 125–126 at 126. HathiTrust Digital Library.

———. “Sur deux nouveaux éléments dans l’ erbine.” Comptes rendus hebdomadaires des séances de l'Académie des sciences, 89.9, 1 September 1879, 478–80 at 480. Biodiversity Heritage Library.

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. holmium, n., thulium, n.

Image credit: N. Hanacek, 2019, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Public domain image.