Black Friday / Cyber Monday

Black Friday, 28 November 2013, Laramie, Wyoming

21 November 2023

In the United States, the Friday after Thanksgiving is known as Black Friday. The day is the traditional start of the holiday shopping season and is the busiest shopping day of the year, with many stores offering sales and discounts. And Black Friday sales have spread beyond the borders of the United States. When I lived in Toronto, there were Black Friday sales on the day after American Thanksgiving, despite it not being a holiday in Canada. (Canadian Thanksgiving is in October.)

Use of Black Friday to refer to the day following Thanksgiving got its start in the 1950s in the Philadelphia police department, whose traffic division referred to the day as such because of its unusually high volume of traffic. In addition to it being a heavy shopping day, the annual Army-Navy football game was held on next day—the city being neutral ground, roughly equidistant between West Point and Annapolis—and out-of-town crowds would stream into the city on that Friday.

The first use of the term in print that anyone has found is in Women’s Wear Daily of 28 November 1960. In an article describing sales forecasts for that Christmas season, the paper had this to say about Philadelphia:

All sources were bitter about newspaper and, particularly, repeated radio news bulletins reiterating Mayor Dilworth’s plea for people to leave their cars at home and take public transportation, and reports from police officials forecasting record traffic jams, both vehicular and pedestrian, for “black Friday.”

And there is this from the newsletter Public Relations News of 18 December of the following year:

Santa has brought Philadelphia stores a present in the form of “one of the biggest shopping weekends in recent history.” At the same time, it has again been proven that there is a direct relationship between sales and public relations.

For downtown merchants throughout the nation, the biggest shopping days normally are the two following Thanksgiving Day. Resulting traffic jams are an irksome problem to the police and, in Philadelphia, it became customary for officers to refer to the post-Thanksgiving days as Black Friday and Black Saturday. Hardly a stimulus for good business, the problem was discussed by the merchants with their Deputy City Representative, Abe S. Rosen, one of the country's most experienced municipal PR executives. He recommended adoption of a positive approach which would convert Black Friday and Black Saturday to Big Friday and Big Saturday. The media cooperated in spreading the news of the beauty of Christmas-decorated downtown Philadelphia, the popularity of a “family-day outing” to the department stores during the Thanksgiving weekend, the increased parking facilities, and the use of additional police officers for guaranteeing a free flow of traffic ... Rosen reports that business over the weekend was so good that merchants are giving downtown Philadelphia "a starry-eyed new look."

In November 1994, long-time Philadelphia newspaperman Joseph Barrett wrote of his recollections about the origin of the term for the Philadelphia Daily News:

The term “Black Friday” came out of the old Philadelphia Police Department’s traffic squad. The cops used it to describe the worst traffic jams which annually occurred in Center City on the Friday after Thanksgiving.

It was the day that Santa Claus took his chair in the department stores and every kid in the city wanted to see him. It was the first day of the Christmas shopping season.

Schools were closed. Late in the day, out-of-town visitors began arriving for the Army-Navy football game.

Every “Black Friday,” no traffic policeman was permitted to take the day off. The division was place on 12 hours of duty, and even the police band was ordered to Center City. It was not unusual to see a trombone player directing traffic.

[…]

In 1959, the old Evening Bulletin assigned me to police administration, working out of City Hall. Nathan Kleger was the police reporter who covered Center City for the Bulleting.

In the early 1960s, Kleger and I put together a front-page story for Thanksgiving and we appropriated the police term “Black Friday” to describe the terrible traffic conditions.

Center City merchants complained loudly to Police Commissioner Albert N. Brown that drawing attention to traffic deterred customers from coming downtown. […]

The following year, Brown put out a press release describing the day as “Big Friday.” But Kleger and I held our ground, and once more said it was “Black Friday.” And of course we used it year after year. Then television picked it up.

Unfortunately, his old paper, the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, has not been digitized, so I can’t search for what he wrote at the time.

It is often said that the day is so called because it is the date when retailers’ annual sales figures become profitable, that is move from the red into the black. But this is a post hoc rationalization dating to the 1980s and is not the original metaphor underlying the phrase.

There is an earlier, apparently one-off, use of Black Friday to refer to the day after Thanksgiving, but this is a reference to worker absenteeism on that day, not shopping. Since Thanksgiving falls on a Thursday, workers would typically take the next day off to create a long weekend. Nowadays, of course, most non-retail businesses simply close on that Friday. Editor M. J. Murphy wrote the following in the November 1951 issue of Factory Management & Maintenance:

WHAT TO DO ABOUT “FRIDAY AFTER THANKSGIVING”

“Friday-after-Thanksgiving-it is” is a disease second only to the bubonic plague in its effects. At least that's the feeling of those who have to get production out, when the “Black Friday” comes along. The shop may be half empty, but every absentee was sick—and can prove it.

What to do? Many companies have tried the standard device of denying Thanksgiving Day pay to employees absent the day before and after the holiday. Trouble is, you can't deny pay to those legitimately ill. But what's legitimate? Tough to decide these days of often miraculously easy doctors' certificates.

Glenn L. Martin, Baltimore aircraft manufacturer has another solution: When you decide you want to sweeten up the holiday kitty, pick Black Friday to add to the list. That's just what Martin has done. Friday after Thanksgiving is the company's seventh paid holiday.

We’re not suggesting more paid holidays just to get out of a hole. But, if you can make a good trade in bargaining, there are lots of worse things than having a holiday on a day that was half holiday anyhow. Shouldn’t cost too much for that reason, either.

The next February Murphy used Black Friday again in the same context:

MORE ABOUT “FRIDAY-AFTER-THANKSGIVING”

November FACTORY (page 137) told of one company’s solution to heavy Friday-after-Thanksgiving absenteeism. The company added “Black Friday” to its list of paid holidays.

Murphy appears to have been the only one to use Black Friday in the context of worker absenteeism, but he is hardly the first to give that label to a day. The day after Thanksgiving is not the only Black Friday in history. Friday the thirteenth, regardless of when it happens, is often referred to as black Friday. Specific dates that have been christened black Friday include: 6 December 1745, the day when Bonnie Prince Charlie’s arrival in Britain was announced in London; 11 May 1866, a day of a stock market panic in London; and 24 September 1869, a day of a financial panic on Wall Street over falling gold prices.

The use of black + day-of-the-week to designate a date on which something bad happened is even older, dating to at least 1576 when Black Saturday was used to denote 10 December 1547, when the Scottish army was defeated by the English at the Battle of Pinkie Cleugh during the conflict known as the Rough Wooing.

Perhaps the most famous of the black days is Black Thursday of 24 October 1929, the date of the Wall Street stock market crash that precipitated the Great Depression. That name appeared by the next day. From an Associated Press report of 25 October 1929:

Berlin financial circles yesterday decided that “black Thursday” on the New York Stock exchange had brought forth a sigh of relief throughout Europe, which suffered from the exaggerated speculation that had been going on in Wall Street.

Back to the topic of post-Thanksgiving shopping, the Monday after the holiday has been christened Cyber Monday. This term first appears in 2005, at a time when high-speed home internet connections were rare, and most people connected to the web via work computers. The Monday following Thanksgiving, when office workers returned to work, thus became a heavy online shopping day. Cyber Monday first appears in print in the New York Times on 19 November 2005 (although the reporter plumps for the myth about the Black Friday’s origin):

CYBER MONDAY Because the world needs another Officially Named shopping day, the people who dreamed up Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving, when retailers hope to turn a profit) have created a nickname for the following Monday.

Hence the catchy Cyber Monday, so called because millions of productive Americans, fresh off a weekend at the mall, are expected to return to work and their high-speed Internet connections on Nov. 28 and spend the day buying what they liked in all those stores.

Though it sounds like slick marketing, Cyber Monday, it turns out, is a legitimate trend. According to Shop.org, a trade group, 77 percent of online retailers reported a substantial sales increase on the Monday after Thanksgiving last year. “Not good for employers,” observed Ed Bussey, senior vice president for marketing at the online lingerie retailer Figeaves.com.

Cyber Monday continues to be used in marketing copy, advertising post-Thanksgiving online sales, even though the original rationale for why that Monday would be an especially heavy online shopping day no longer applies. And both Black Friday and Cyber Monday have burst their original temporal confines and are now applied as labels for sales that occur anytime within close proximity, before or after, Thanksgiving.

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Sources:

Associated Press. “Berlin See Benefit to Europe in Break.” Seattle Daily Times, 25 October 1929, 2/5. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Barbero, Michael. “Ready, Aim, Shop: Five Trends to Watch This Holiday Shopping Season.” New York Times, 19 November 2005, C4/4. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Barrett, Joseph P. “This Friday Was Black with Traffic.” Philadelphia Daily News, 25 November 1994, 80. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Fairchild News Service. “Initial Christmas Sales Run Even to Slightly Ahead.” Women’s Wear Daily, 28 November 1960, 4/5. ProQuest.

Murphy, M. J. “Tips to Good Human Relations for Factory Executives.” Factory Management and Maintenance, 109.11, November 1951, 137.

———. “Tips to Good Human Relations for Factory Executives.” Factory Management and Maintenance, 110.2, February 1952, 133.

Oxford English Dictionary Online. Third Edition. September 2011. s. v. Black Friday, n., black, adj. & n., Black Saturday, n., Black Thursday, n.

Taylor-Blake, Bonnie. “‘Black Friday’ (day after Thanksgiving), 1951.” American Dialect Society Email List (ADS-L). 5 August 2009.

———. “‘Black Friday’ (day after Thanksgiving), 1961.” American Dialect Society Email List (ADS-L). 5 May 2011.

Zimmer, Ben. “The Origins of ‘Black Friday.’” Word Routes. 25 November 2011.

Photo credit: Powhusku, 2013. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

doughboy

A WWI-era doughboy, c. 1919

20 November 2023

Doughboy is a slang word for an American soldier, particularly an infantryman, that is most often associated with the First World War, but the term is almost a hundred years older than that war, dating to at least 1835. Why the soldiers were dubbed doughboys is unknown, but that hasn’t stopped people from speculating.

The earliest use of the doughboy to refer to a soldier that I’m aware of is in a letter published in the Army and Navy Chronicle of 30 July 1835. The letter is critical of the new volume of tactics published that year. The use of doughboy is somewhat cryptic here, but it seems to mean an infantryman (I have no clue as to what “Ghost of Indian Warfare” refers):

Mr. Editor:—I call the Infantry Tactics of ’26, made by a board of officers, a system sufficiently good for the United States’ Infantry as now organized, and I’ll prove it to you. The Military Tactics of ’35, I call a system not so good as that of ’26, for several reasons.

Dough-boy’s Ghost of Indian Warfare. (Extract from “Military Tactics, &c.”) The formation in three ranks, provided for in this system, is, for the present, suspended, and will not be adopted in practice until other orders are given from this department.

From this, you must perceive how valuable and how beneficial this system is to be the army [sic]. A careful comparison of the two systems will show that the three rank formation is the distinguishing feature of that of ’35; that the alterations are trifling, but sufficiently great to cause much confusion and considerable trouble to officers and men for the next twelve months. If the three rank system is not to be used why was it translated? Why could it not remain in French until needed, and then put into the hands o the printer? There is a principle to which all military men concede, viz: never to alter a regulation or order unless such alteration be manifestly beneficial, and that in great degree, and in tactics it is particularly applicable.

The extract reading, “The formation in three ranks […] from this department,” is taken from a notice by then Secretary of War Lewis Cass contained in the front matter of the manual on infantry tactics published that year. But the phrase Dough-boy’s Ghost of Indian Warfare and the individual words doughboy, ghost, or Indian do not appear in that manual. What the letter writer is referring to with this phrase is something of a mystery.

But what the standalone word doughboy means is made clear in another letter published in that newspaper on 27 August 1835. This letter makes clear that a doughboy is an infantryman:

It seems as if the inventive powers of some individuals were endless. When we advised a different colored binding for the several volumes of the Infantry Tactics, for the sole purpose of distinction, it did not occur to us that this distinction, to be complete, should address itself to more senses than one. To effect the omission on our part, the brigadier in charge of the printing and binding has caused the second volume to appear in red and gold; the red cloth, unlike the blue imitation of seal skin, is smooth, and the emblematic bugle horn of the Dough Boys is stamped on the flanks of each book, so that by day or by night the most blind may find which is the Military Tactics and which the Infantry.

Doughboy would remain an army slang term and wouldn’t often make its way into print until much later in the nineteenth century. But we do see it some diaries and correspondence of soldiers. Napoleon J. T. Dana, an Army officer, uses it in his diary entry of 1 January 1847 during the Mexican-American War:

We were off at daylight, and the morning was mighty cold, so our pace was soon quickened almost to what is vulgarly called a dogtrot until we were stopped about eight o’clock at the foot of a large steep hill, where we “doughboys” had to wait for the artillery to get their carriages over. But after we did get over, we went even faster than before.

We see it in a Civil War context, but only in a text written decades after the fact. Robert Goldthwaite, in his Four Brothers in Blue, which was serialized in 1898, writes of an exchange between Union cavalrymen and infantry on 20 September 1862. The cavalry, returning from a battle, passed an infantry column fording a river:

The cavalry were met returning. The splashing of their horses the water flying into the faces of some of our grumblers, who out of spite, shouted out, “Are there any dead cavalry-men ahead? What guerillas do you belong to?” etc., etc., to which the answer comes back promptly, “Yes, you bummers, we do the fighting and leave the dead cavalry-men for the ‘dough boys’ to pick up. Go to the rear you “worm crushers”!”

It's not until the First World War that the doughboy makes it way out of army slang into general parlance.

There is a much older, probably unrelated, somewhat more literal use of doughboy to mean a boiled or deep-fried dumpling. We see this usage as early as 1685 in Basil Ringrose’s Bucaniers of America:

These men that were landed, had each of them three or four Cakes of Bread, (called by the English Dough-boy’s) for their provision of Victuals; and as for drink, the Rivers afforded them enough.

Also, in the early nineteenth century doughboy was also used as a slang term for a baker’s assistant.

A number of explanations for why American soldiers were called doughboys have been promulgated over the years. Perhaps the name comes from a penchant for consuming doughboys. Or maybe infantryman, because of their youth and inexperience, were likened to bakers’ doughboys. Some suggest it comes from the round buttons on the military uniform, which resembled the pastry. Others say it comes from using white dough to mask blemishes on the white belts worn by the soldiers. But these are all just speculation, with no solid evidence behind them.

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Sources:

Carter, Robert Goldthwaite. “Four Brothers in Blue.” 20/2. The Main Bugle, January 1898. HathiTrust Digital Library. [Green’s Dictionary of Slang dates this source to 1862, which is not quite accurate. The event described happened in that year, but the account was written in 1898.]

Cass, Lewis. Letter, 10 April 1835. As front matter to Winfield Scott. Infantry-Tactics, vol. 1 of 2. New York: George Dearborn, 1835. HathiTrust Digital Library.

“Communications: New Infantry Tactics.” Army and Navy Chronicle (Washington, DC), 30 July 1835, 247. Gale Primary Sources: American Historical Periodicals.

———. Army and Navy Chronicle, 27 August 1835, 277. Gale Primary Sources: American Historical Periodicals.

Dana, Napoleon Jackson Tecumseh. Diary, 1 January 1847. In Ferrell, Robert H., ed. Monterrey Is Ours!: The Mexican War Letters of Lieutenant Dana, 1845–1847. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990, 166. JSTOR.

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

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2014, s.v. doughboy, n.

Ringrose, Basil. Bucaniers of America, vol. 2. London: William Crooke, 1685, 4. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Photo credit: Spurr Studio, Waterloo, Iowa, c. 1919. Library of Congress. Public domain image.

iodine

Iodine evaporating into a purple gas

17 November 2023

The origin of the word iodine is a story of cooperation and rivalry between scientists of warring nations in the Napoleonic era.

Iodine is a semi-lustrous, non-metallic solid at room temperature and pressure with atomic number 53 and the symbol I. Iodine is essential for human health, and a deficiency can lead to goiters in adults and intellectual disabilities in children. (Nowadays, iodide is typically added to table salt to prevent such deficiency.) It has a variety of applications, including medicine, where it has long been used for its anti-microbial properties. More recently it has been used as a radiocontrast material in medical imaging and in treating thyroid cancer.

The name comes from the Greek ἰώδης (iodes, violet colored), after the purple color of its gaseous state.

Iodine was discovered in 1811 by Bernard Courtois. At the time, in the midst of the Napoleonic Wars, France was blockaded by Prussia and Austria on land and by the Royal Navy at sea and was thus unable to obtain nitrate for gunpowder from abroad. Courtois was engaged in finding ways to extract nitrate from kelp. One day, probably in November of that year—the exact date is not known—when using acid and heat to clean out the vats used to extract nitrate from the seaweed, Courtois noticed a purple vapor arising from the vessels and metallic-like crystals forming at their bottoms. Courtois sent samples of the substance to various colleagues for analysis, including Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac and André-Marie Ampère.

Two years passed with no discernable progress made on identifying the substance. Then in October 1813 English chemist Humphry Davy and his young lab assistant, twenty-two-year-old Michael Faraday, were traveling through France on their way to Italy. (It was a different time then, and despite being at war with England, Bonaparte was happy to grant passports to English scientists, especially an eminent one like Davy.) While in France, Davy met with Ampère, who shared his sample of the unknown substance. Davy, using the traveling laboratory he always took with him, got to work. Upon hearing this, Gay-Lussac was furious; he had already determined it was an element but had been slow in publishing his findings and did not want to be scooped by his English rival.

Davy and Gay-Lussac engaged in a bitter quarrel over who had priority in the discovery. Gay-Lussac was the first to publish, but he did so under Courtois’s name in October 1813, dubbing the new element iode:

La substance nouvelle, que depuis on a nommée iode à cause de la belle couleur violette de sa vapeur, a bien tout l’aspect d’un metal.

(The new substance, which has since been named iode because of the beautiful purple color of its vapor, has all the appearance of a metal.)

Davy wrote up his findings in December 1813, when he was still in Paris, changing Gay-Lussac’s coinage to iodine, and sent them off to the Royal Society, where they were read and published the following year:

The name ione has been proposed in France for this new substance from its colour in the gaseous state, from ἴον, viola; and its combination with hydrogen has been named hydroionic acid. The name ione, in English, would lead to confusion, for its compounds would be called ionic and ionian. By terming it iodine, from ἰώδης, violaceous, this confusion will be avoided, and the name will be more analogous to chlorine and fluorine.

Thus iodine was born out of a scientific rivalry between warring nations (not unlike the transuranic elements discovered during the Cold War of the twentieth century). Ironically, the young lab assistant Faraday would end up eclipsing both Davy and Lussac with his scientific achievements.

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Sources:

Courtois, B. (Gay-Lussac, Joseph Louis) “Découverte d’une substance nouvelle dans le Vareck.” Annales de Chimie, 88, 31 October 1813, 304–10 at 305. Bibliothèque Nationale de France: Gallica.

Davy, Humphry. “Some Experiments and Observations on a New Substance Which Becomes a Violet Coloured Gas by Heat” (10 December 1813, read 20 January 1814). Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 104, 74 at 93 at 91. DOI: 10.1098/rstl.1814.0007. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstl.1814.0007

Kelly, Francis C. “Iodine in Medicine and Pharmacy Since Its Discovery—1811–1961.” Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine, 54.10, October 1961, 831–926. DOI: 10.1177/003591576105401001.

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. iodine, n.

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

dope

Cooking heroin or “dope”

15 November 2023

Dope has a variety of meanings. The ones I’m going to consider here all, with one exception, originally come from a sense of a thick, viscous liquid. The word’s origin is uncertain. It could be variation on daub, originally referring to a plaster used in construction, but later used to refer to various viscous substances like lubricants. Or it may be a borrowing from the Dutch doop, meaning sauce.

The use of dope, referring to a sauce or gravy, dates to the early nineteenth century. It’s first recorded in the writing of Washington Irving, who clearly thought it came from the Dutch. Here is Irving proffering a specious etymology for the name of Philadelphia in his Salmagundi #10 of 16 May 1807:

According to the good old rule, I shall begin with the etymology of its name, which, according to Linkum Fidelius, Tom. LV, is clearly derived, either from the name of its first founder, viz. PHILO DRIPPING-PAN,* or the singular taste of the aborigines who flourished there on his arrival. Linkum, who is as shrewd a fellow as any theorist or F. S. A. for peeping with a dark lantern into the lumber-garret of antiquity, and lugging out all the trash which was left there for oblivion by our wiser ancestors, supports his opinion by a prodigious number of ingenious and inapplicable arguments; but particularly rests his position on the known fact, that Philo Dripping-pan was remarkable for his predilection to eating, and his love of what the learned Dutch call doup. Our erudite author likewise observes that the citizens are to this day noted for their love of “a sop in the pan,” and their portly appearance, “except, indeed,” continues he, “the young ladies, who are perfectly genteel in their dimensions”—this, however, he ill-naturedly enough attributes to their eating pickles, and drinking vinegar.

* I defy any travel monger to excel friend Jeremy in forcing a derivation.

The sense of dope meaning drugs comes out of this sense of a viscous liquid, with opiates and other such substances often consumed in a liquid form. The earliest use of dope to refer to drugs, that I’m aware of is from Ohio’s Ashtabula Weekly Telegraph of 4 December 1858. The article in question contains a transcript from a murder trial. In this passage, a defense witness is testifying as to why the defendant would legitimately have the toxic substance on hand:

He came to my house frequently—came with a horse and buggy; think he visited there oftener when his wife was there than when she was not; think one horse he called Tiger, another Charlie; think I learned something of his giving dope to his horses about the time he moved from Garrettsville to Chagrin Falls—gave some to Charlie horse.

And the specific sense of an opiate dates to at least 20 May 1883, when this appeared in the pages of the New York Sun:

It would be very fine if you could float off into space to invisible music, see Spanish castles in thick clouds of blue smoke, or think yourself in a land of purple daisies and blue-eyed sirens. Education was not neglected in our family, and they say I don’t lack imagination; but I never got any such effect from smoking “dope” (opium).

Pennsylvania’s Juniata Sentinel and Republican of 3 November 1897 has this story that mentions how prospectors in the Klondike, taking a myth about jimson weed to heart, would dope up their children in the hope that the tots would lead them to gold. Not only is the myth ludicrous, but I have my doubts about Klondikers ever doing this, but regardless of the veracity of the story, it’s good evidence of the word’s usage:

The lowly jimson weed belongs to a family not only interesting, but of great importance from an economic point of view. The Jamestown weed is only another species of the plant from which the priests of Apollo mad a decoction to induce that state of ecstasy in keeping with the prophetic character of their revelations. Tonga is drink made from the seeds which the Indians of Darien give to their children that they may discover the location of gold. Klondikers might take a baby along and a few jimson weed seeds to make tea, and when the baby has its “dope” and falls down, there daddy could dig, sure of a find.

Dope could refer to any type of adulterant, not just to medicine or drugs. There is this from the Chicago Daily Tribune of 24 December 1872 that sounds a lot like the health info peddled by present-day internet “influencers”:

It is his chief delight to concern himself with what we eat and drink, and, just as we flatter ourselves that we have got a good dinner on the table and sit down to enjoy it, he bounds in like a harlequin and bids us beware of the sugar, for it is full of flour and sand; of the pickles, for they have been soused in muriatic acid and are colored with arsenic; of the biscuits, for they have been raised with some chemical abomination; of the milk for it is compounded of dope; and so on, to the end of the chapter; and thus succeeds in spoiling our dinner, without telling us how or where we can get pure articles.

The sense of dope meaning information also arises from the drug sense, but in this case it comes out of horse racing and the knowledge of which horses had been administered performance-enhancing drugs. We see the information sense, in the context of horse racing, by the end of the nineteenth century. From Frank Hutcheson’s 1896 The Barkeep Stories:

“Why didn’t you send me dat getaway money I staked you to last spring? Been too busy figurin’ dope an’ countin’ money t’ t’ink o’ trifles, I s’pose?”

“Well, on de square, I was goin’ ——"

“You was goin’ t’ send it w’en you beat a ten to one shot wid a fifty-dollar not, I s’pose—but you took a chance an’ bet de hull works on a t’ree-to-five shot, and—de lamp wen out. Youse guys make me sick! Blow back t’ town after bein’ round de race-tracks all summer wid a paper suit an’ a screwy overcoat an’ a pair o’ yellow shoes an’ stand round an’ look wise an’ tell bout how you come near ownin’ dat black filly dat just win de stake down east, an’ how if dis one could have win you’d be makin’ book now, an’ a few more smoke-up stories.”

That’s it. A viscous liquid eventually gave rise to inside information.

But the sense of a dope meaning someone who is foolish or stupid has a very different origin. That sense arises in the dialect of Cumberland, England, where it is recorded as early as 1851.

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Sources:

“Adulterations.” Chicago Daily Tribune, 24 December 1872, 4/4. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Bostwick, C. B. “Trial of Hiram Cole for Murder.” Ashtabula Weekly Telegraph (Ohio), 4 December 1858. 1/7. Newspapers.com.

Glossary of Provincial Words Used in the County of Cumberland. London: John Gray Bell, 1851, 8. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., s.v. dope, n.1, dope, n.2, dope, n.3, dope, adj.1, dope, v.1. Green’s contains an 1859 citation for dope as medicine, but this is erroneous. The reference is to a 1959 issue of the Waukesha, Wisconsin Freeman which celebrates the centennial of the town. The passage in question is from a WWI-era remembrance of one of the town’s early doctors. NewspaperArchive.com’s metadata incorrectly lists this 1959 issue as being from 1859.

Hutcheson, Frank. The Barkeep Stories. Chicago: E.A. Weeks, 1896, 6–7. Internet Archive.

“An Interesting Family.” Juniata Sentinel and Republican (Mifflintown, Pennsylvania), 3 November 1897, 4/3. Library of Congress: Chronicling America, Historic American Newspapers.

Irving, Washington (pseud. Launcelot Langstaff). Salmagundi, 10, 16 May 1807. In Salmagundi, vol. 1 of 2. New York: D. Longworth, 1808, 199–200. Google Books.

“Opium Smoking.” The Sun (New York), 20 May 1883, 2/7. NewspaperArchive.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. dope, v., dope n., doping, n., daub, n.; third edition, December 2001, dope, adj.

Image credit: Psychonaught, 2010. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

Davy Jones's locker

1892 illustration by John Tenniel in Punch of Davy Jones sitting on his locker, wearing a pirate captain's uniform, while viewing a 1789 chart of Ferrol Harbor, Spain, that had belonged to HMS Howe. The ship had run aground at the mouth of the harbor on 2 November 1892, allegedly after using a poorly prepared naval chart to navigate its waters.

13 November 2023

Davy Jones (also David Jones) is a spirit of the sea, a nautical demon whose appearance is said to foretell storms and shipwrecks. His locker is the bottom of the sea, where he keeps sunken ships and which is the grave of drowned sailors.

The origin of the term is obscure. The name Davy Jones suggests a Welsh connection, referring to St. David, the patron saint of Wales, and Jones being a common Welsh surname. The Jones may also be an alteration of Jonah, of the biblical story. In the story, the prophet Jonah disobeys God and attempts a sea voyage. God sends a storm, and the sailors, who determine that Jonah is to blame, cast him overboard, and the storm suddenly abates. Jonah was sailor slang for a person who brought bad luck onboard a ship.

The earliest known reference to Davy Jones and his locker is in Daniel Defoe’s 1726 The Four Years Voyages of Capt. George Roberts. In the novel, the title character is taken prisoner by pirates who debate whether or not to give him provisions when they set him adrift:

Some of Loe’s Company said, They would look out some Things, and give me along with me when I was going away; but Russel told them, they should not, for he would toss them all into Davy Jones’s Locker if they did; for I was the Scooner’s Prize, and she had all my Cargo and Plunder on Board of her, and therefore what was given to me should be given to me out of her.

A more detailed description of Davy Jones appears in Tobias Smollet’s 1751 The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle. This passage details an attempt to frighten a man by dressing up as the evil spirit:

“By the Lord! Jack, you may say what you wool; but I’ll be damn’d if it was not Davy Jones himself: I know him by his saucer-eyes, his three rows of teeth, his horn and tail, and the blue smoak that came out of his nostrils, What does the black guard hell‘s baby want with me? I’m sure I never committed murder, nor wronged any man whatsomever since I first went to sea.” This same Davy Jones, according to the mythology of sailors, is the fiend that presides over all the evil spirits of the deep, and is often seen in various shapes, perching among the rigging on the eve of hurricanes, shipwrecks, and other disasters to which the sea-faring life is exposed; warning the devoted wretch of death and woe.

That’s about all we know about the origin of Davy Jones and his locker: references to it appear in the early eighteenth century, and the myth and term may be older in sailor slang.

Claims that David Jones was the name of real pirate and that Davy is from the West Indian duppy, a spirit or ghost, are without evidence.

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Sources:

Defoe, Daniel (pseud. George Roberts). The Four Years Voyages of Capt. George Roberts. London: A. Bettesworth and J. Osborn, 1726, 89. Eighteenth Century Collections Online.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., s.v. Davy Jones’s locker, n.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. Davy Jones, n.

Smollett, Tobias. The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, vol. 1 of 3. Dublin: Robert Main, 1751, 101–02.  Eighteenth Century Collections Online.

Image Credit: John Tenniel, 1892. Punch, 103, 10 December 1892, 271. Heidelberg University Library. Public domain image.