card sharp / card shark / sharp / sharper / shark

Caravaggio’s The Cardsharps, c. 1595. (The title is a modern one.) Oil on canvas painting depicting men in late sixteenth-century dress cheating at a game of primero, a precursor of poker. On the left is the dupe, unaware that behind him the older card sharp is signaling his accomplice with a hand, the glove having had the fingertips cut out in order to better feel marked cards. At right, the young card sharp reaches behind his back to pull out a card hidden in his breeches

6 November 2023

A card sharp or card shark is a person skilled at playing cards, with a strong connotation of being one who cheats. Pedants will often claim that since card sharp is the older of the two, that is the correct and proper term to use. But while the phrase card sharp is recorded several decades before card shark, that is not the end of the story, as both sharp and shark, in the sense of a cheat or rogue, are much older and of similar vintage, with shark nosing out sharp in the written record. And regardless of the above, both card sharp and card shark are in widespread use with card shark being more than twice as common. So one cannot by any stretch consider card shark to be an incorrect usage.

Shark, the name of the predatory fish, appears in the mid fifteenth century and by the end of the sixteenth century is being applied to predatory humans. This usage comes first as the verb to shark, meaning to prey upon another. The verb appears in Sir Thomas More, an Elizabethan play from c.1592 with later revisions. In the past mistakenly attributed to Shakespeare, the play is the product of a collaborative effort. The manuscript is composed by six different hands, and attribution of authorship is contentious. It may, however, been originally composed by Anthony Munday and Henry Chettle, and later, after 1600, revised by Thomas Heywood and Thomas Dekker. The fifth hand is that of a theater scribe who seems to have supervised the revision process but was apparently not a substantial contributor to original text. The sixth hand, contributing a single scene, has tenuously been identified as Shakespeare’s, but if it is his handwriting, it’s unclear whether the scene he contributed was to the original text or the revision. The passage with shark, which is not in the scene thought to be by Shakespeare, is as follows:

What had you gott? I’le tell you: you had taught
How insolence and strong hand shoold prevayle,
How ordere shoold be quelld; and by this patterne
Not on of you should lyve an aged man,
For other ruffians, as their fancies wrought,
With sealf same hand, sealf reasons, and sealf right,
Woold shark on you, and men lyke ravenous fishes
Woold feed on on another.

The noun appears in another Elizabethan play, this one being Ben Jonson’s Every Man Out of His Humor, which was published in 1600. Sharke appears in the published version’s prefatory material, in Jonson’s description of the character named Shift:

SHIFT.

A Thredbare Sharke. One that neuer was Soldior, yet liues vpon lendings. His profession is skeldring and odling, his Banke Poules, and his Ware-house Pict-hatch. Takes vp single Testons vpon Oths till dooms day. Fals vnder Executions of three shillings, & enters into fiue groat Bonds. He way-layes the reports of seruices, and cons them without booke, damming himselfe be came new from them, when all the while hee was taking the diet in a bawdie house, or lay pawn’d in his chamber for rent and victuals. Hee is of that admirable and happie Memorie, that bee will salute one for an old acquaintance, that hee neuer saw in his life before. Hee vsurps vpon Cheats, Quarrels, & Robberies, which he neuer did, only to get him a name. His cheef exercises are taking the Whiffe, squiring a Cocatrice, and making priuie searches for Imparters.

We see shark’s synonym sharper by the end of the seventeenth century. This word is formed from the verb to sharp + -er (one who performs the action of a verb). The verb to sharp has two potential, and not mutually exclusive, origins. The verb literally means to make something, like a knife, keen or acute but was used metaphorically to mean to cheat or swindle. Alternatively, given that the fish were not commonly known in England at the time, it could come out of re-analysis or folk etymology of the verb to shark. Or both possibilities could apply, independent coinages that reinforced one another.

Sharper appears in the diary of historian Narcissus Lutrell, who wrote of events of 15 June 1681:

The 15th was a project sett on foot in Grayes Inn for the carrying on an addresse for thankes to his majestie for his late declaration; and was moved that day in the hall by some at dinner, and being (as is usuall) sent to the barr messe to be by them recommended to the bench, but was rejected both by bench and barr; but the other side seeing they could doe no good this way , they gott about forty togeather and went to the tavern, and there subscribed the said addresse in the name of the truely loyall gentlemen of Grayes Inn. The cheif sticklers for the said addresse were sir William Scroggs jun., Robert Fairebeard, capt. Stowe, capt. Ratcliffe, one Yalden, with others. to the number of 40 or thereabouts; many of them sharpers about town, with clerks not out of theire time, and young men newly come from the university. And some of these went the 17th to Windsor, and presented the said addresse to his majesty; who was pleased to give them his thanks, and conferr (as is said) knighthood on the said Mr. Fairebeard: this proves a mistake since.

Sharper also appears in a fable collected and recorded by Roger L’Estrange in 1692. The fable is especially of interest to the history of the word as it also includes a use of the verb to shark:

FAB. CCXLI.
A Boy and a Thief.

A Thief came to a Boy, that was Blubbering by the Side of a Well, and Ask’d him what he cry’d for. Why, says he, the String's Broke here, and I've dropt a Silver Cup into the Well. The Fellow presently Strips, and down he goes to search for’t. After a while, he comes up again, with his Labour for his Pains, and the Roguy Boy, in the Mean time, was run away with his Cloaths.

The MORAL.

Some Thieves are Ripe for the Gallows sooner then Others.

REFLEXION.

IT must be a Diamond that Cuts a Diamond, and there is No Pleasanter Encounter then a Tryal of Skill betwixt a Couple of Sharpers to Over-reach one Another. The Boy’s beginning so Early, tells us that there are Cheats by a Natural Propensity of Inclination as well as by a Corruption of Manners. It was Nature that taught This Boy to Shark; not Discipline, or Experience. And so it was with Two Ladies that I have known (and Women of Plentiful Fortunes too) they could not for their Bloods keep themselves Honest of their Fingers, but would still be Nimming something or other for the very Love of Thieving. ’Tis an Unhappy Thing, that the Temperament of the Body should have such an Influence upon our Manners, according to the Instance of the Boy in This Fable: For the Morality, or Immorality of the Matter, is not the Whole of the Case.

The word appears several times in Colley Cibber’s 1697 play Woman’s Wit. The first is the adjective sharping, uttered by the character Major Rakish in reference to his son:

Where is this Rogue! This Villain! This sharping Dog?

And a few lines later the same character uses the verb to sharp in response to the idea that he give his son a more generous allowance:

Allowance! a Dog! has not Nature given him a strong Back? let him live by that; let him turn Beau, and live upon tick; let him lye with his Laundress, get in with his Semstress, help his Taylor to Custom, Dine with me, Bilk his Lodging,——and now and then sharp a Play in the side Box.

And then we have this exchange between father and son later in the play:

Ma[jor Rakish]. Ay!—That is give him all, and take the rest to my self! Why really if it were not for a little scandal, a Sharper is a very good Trade, I see.

Y[oung]. Ra[kish]. What's that you say, Sir? Dammee! A Sharper! I suppose you have a mind to tilt for it?

The father wins the subsequent fencing match, taking the money from his son.

We see that both shark and sharp were well established by the end of the seventeenth century. The phrases card sharp and card shark would have to wait, however, until the nineteenth century.

As mentioned above, card sharp is recorded first, in Henry Downes Miles’s 1840 novel Claude du Val:

While thus running on, the knavish card-sharp was slowly and with apparent fairness, cutting the pack, which was prepared by having every card but the honours of each suit cut at the ends, but in so slight a degree as not to shorten them enough to be detectible by an ordinary eye, though sufficiently to be felt by a fine and practiced finger, which could thus ensure a court-card, while the red cards of the pack (or deck of cards, as they were then commonly called,) were deprived of their proper size by a similar process of shaving off the sides, so as to make the turn-up either red or black at the will of the player.

And card sharper is found a year later in an advertisement for a Dublin magic show. From the Freeman’s Journal and Daily Commercial Advertiser of 13 May 1841:

NEW THEATRE ROYAL, ABBEY-STREET.
INCREDIBLE INCREDIBILITIES.

THIS NIGHT the GREAT WIZARD will Animate a Half-Crown, make it dance an Irish Jig, and tell a Lady’s Fortune—Burn all the Handkerchiefs in the Theatre, and restore them perfect—Change a Gentleman’s Hat into a Feather Bed—Card Sharpers exposed—Cheat Cheating Gamblers, and a Thousand Other Mysteries.

Doors open at Half-past Seven—Miracles commence at a Quarter-past Eight.

Private Boxes, 3s.; Boxes, 2s.; Pit 1s.; Gallery, 6d.; Half-price at a Quarter past Nine.

Carriages in attendance at Half past Ten.

Card shark isn’t recorded for some decades, but there is no reason to think it wasn’t in oral circulation much earlier. We see it in an article in Ohio’s Sandusky Daily Register of 7 September 1877. It is about events in Nevada and is reprinted from a Nevada newspaper, which I have been unable to find:

Captain Bob’s Poker Convention

From the Virginia (Nev.) Chronicle

Captain Bob, the Piute politician has called a big poker convention, to be held at American Flat to-day. The subject of this gathering of card-sharks is to definitely settle the relative values of some of the larger denominations of hands. Some years ago Bob learned the dip, spurs, and sinuosities of the game from a white man, and introduced it into the pastimes of his tribe in a manner advantageous to his private exchequer. He did not, so to speak, throw the game to them all at once, but doled out the fine points in judicious driblets. It took experience and money to learn the game of Bob. For instance, one day, with $18.50 in the pot one of the players revealed possession of four aces. A trifle like that did not abash the mental resources of Bob, for he coolly gathered in the pot on a pair of kings and two deuces. His antagonist was easily convinced by Bob’s argument that the two deuces were just equivalent to the four aces, having the same number of spots, while the kings gave the required preponderance. Some of the bucks accuse Bob of having a different poker rule for every change of the moon, and they have demanded a convocation of the tribe to deliberate upon it. Bob, by a diplomatic strike, is now first and foremost in the call for reform, and is louder than all the rest in the demand for a convention. Long Brown has received an invitation to be present, and Jim Orndorff will act as referee.

So the next time someone tells you that the proper term is card sharp and that card shark is an error, you will have the facts to refute them. (If you wish to do so, but you should probably let it pass. There’s no sense in arguing with such people.)

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Sources:

Advertisement. The Freeman’s Journal and Daily Commercial Advertiser (Dublin), 13 May 1841, 1/1. Newspapers.com.

“Captain Bob’s Poker Convention.” Sandusky Daily Register (Ohio), 7 September 1877, 2/4–5. NewspaperArchive.

Cibber, Colley. Woman’s Wit. London: John Sturton, 1697, 9. Early English Books Online.

Davies, Mark. Corpus of Global Web-Based English (GloWbE), accessed 1 October 2023.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., sharp, n.1., sharp, v., sharper, n.

Jonson, Ben. Every Man Out of His Humor. London: William Holme, 1600, sig. Av. Early English Books Online.

L’Estrange, Roger. “Fables of Anianus.” In Fables of Æsop and Other Eminent Mythologists. London: R. Sare, et al., 1692, 209–10. Early English Books Online.

Luttrell, Narcissus. Diary (16 June 1681). In A Brief Historical Relation of State Affairs, vol. 1 of 6. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1857, 99. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Miles, Henry Downes. Claude du Val. London: Thomas White, 1840, 129. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Munday, Anthony, et al.. Sir Thomas More (c.1592). Dyce, Alexander, ed. London: Shakespeare Society, 1844, 2.4, 27. London, British Library, Harley MS 7368. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2021, s.v. card sharp, n., card sharper, n.; 2020, card shark, n.; second edition, 1989, s.v. sharp, adj. & n., n.8., sharper, n.1.

Image credit: Caravaggio, c. 1595. Wikimedia Commons. Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas. Fair use of a mechanical reproduction of a public domain work.

bromine

3 November 2023

The element bromine, atomic number 35 and symbol Br, is a volatile, reddish-brown liquid at room temperature. It has a wide variety of commercial applications. Bromine is a borrowing of a French word brome, which in turn is a modern coinage based on the Greek βρωμος (bromos), meaning odoriferous or smelly.

The element was independently discovered by chemists Carl Jacob Löwig, in 1825, and Antoine Balard, in 1826. But Löwig delayed announcement of his discovery, allowing Balard to publish first and get the honor of naming the element. In his 1826 paper announcing his discovery, Balard says this about his choice of name:

M. Anglada me conseilla d’appeler cette substance Brôme, en déduisant cette denomination du grec βρωμος (fœtor). Ce nom se prête à merveille à la formation des denominations composes que nécessitent ses combinaisons, et je l’adopte pour la facilité du langage.

(Mr. Anglada advised me to call this substance Brome, deducing this name from the Greek βρωμος (fetor). This name lends itself wonderfully to the formation of the compound names that its combinations require, and I adopt it for ease of language.)

And appended to Balard’s paper is commentary by Louis Nicolas Vauquelin, Louis Jacques Thénard, and Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac which, among other things, discusses the name:

M. Balard a donné à la nouvelle substance le nom de muride; mais plusieurs objections pouvant être faites contre cette denomination, nous l’avons remplacée, avec le consentement de l’auteur, par celle de BRÔME, de βρωμος, mauvaise odeur.

(Mr. Balard gave the new substance the name muride; but several objections could be made against this name, we have replaced it, with the consent of the author, by that of BRÔME, from βρωμος, bad odor.)

The -ine suffix was added in English to conform with the names of other halogens existing at the time, chlorine and iodine.

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Sources:

Balard, Antoine Jérôme. “Mémoire sur une Substance particulière contenue dans l’eau de la mer.” Annales de Chimie et de Physique, 32, 1826, 337–81 at 341. 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. bromine, n.

Vauquelin, Louis Nicolas, Louis Jacques Thénard, and Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac. “Rapport sur le Mémoire de M. Balard relative à une nouvelle Substance” (14 August 1826). Annales de Chimie et de Physique, 32, 1826, 382–84 at 382. Bibliothèque Nationale de France: Gallica.

Image credit: Heinrich Pniok, 2009. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Germany license.

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.

Discuss this post

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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

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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.

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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.