cinch / lead-pipe cinch

A cinch with a belly guard to protect the belly from the horse’s fore hooves during a jump

29 November 2023

A cinch is an Americanism meaning an easy task or, in the context of gambling, a sure thing. The formal etymology is quite straightforward, if not immediately obvious; the word is a borrowing from the Mexican Spanish cincha (strap, band). There is also the phrase lead-pipe cinch, which is an intensified version of the base word, but what lead pipes have to do with easy tasks or sure things is a mystery.

Cinch first appears in the 1860s as a very literal borrowing from the Spanish. The original English sense, one that is still current today, is the belt that runs underneath a horse’s belly and holds the saddle in place. The first use that I’m aware of is in the journal of naturalist John Keast Lord, who on 27 April 1860 had this to say about horsemanship in California:

The breaking-in is a very simple affair: while the animal is down the eyes are bandaged, and a powerful Spanish bit placed in the mouth. This accomplished, he is allowed to get up, and the saddle is firmly “synched.” The saddles commonly used in California differs [sic] very little from those used in Mexico.

Mark Twain, writing home to his mother from the island of Maui on 4 May 1866, used the present-day spelling:

I got the same leg hurt last week; I said I hadn’t got hold of spirited horse since I had been on the island, and one of the proprietors loaned me a big vicious colt; he was altogether too spirited; I went to tighten the cinch before mounting him, when he let out with his left leg (?) and kicked me across a ten-acre lot.

And in a speech given in San Francisco on 2 October 1866 about his stay in the Hawaiian Islands, Twain used cinch as verb meaning to tighten:

They are wild, free riders, and perfectly at home in the saddle—they call it a saddle, a little vile English spoon of thing with a girth that never is tight enough to touch the horse and sometimes without any girth at all. With their loose ideas, they never cinch a Californian’s horse tight enough to suit him.

But very quickly, cinch developed a slang sense meaning to cheat, to tightly control the outcome of some transaction. To be cinched was to be the victim of such a scam, to be squeezed like a horse’s belly by a cinch. From a description of San Francisco slang by Samuel Williams that appeared in Scribner’s Monthly in July 1875:

When stocks are active they are said to be “booming;” a panic in the market is expressed by the term “more mud;” a man who is hurt in a mining transaction is “cinched;” a weak man is said to have “no sand in him;” a lying excuse is denounced as “too thin.”

And such scams were called cinch games. From Carson City, Nevada’s Morning Appeal of 24 June 1877:

Of a wretched, mean trick-game nventedi [sic] for the purpose of the deliberate robbery of the unwary and gullable [sic], the Reno Journal of June 22 says:

Yesterday morning at 7 A.M., one-armed Saulsbury and Jim Walker enticed John Broullette, a French boy who had money, over to the V. & T. bridge, and by certain blandishments got him to bet $35 on a knife trick. They said he lost the bet and then pocketed the money, and walked to Huffaker’s—the boy following them, asking for his money every few steps. They got on the freight train and came back to Reno. The boy stepped into a buggy and got here about as soon as they did, and swore out a warrant and the officers arrested them, but the knife could not be found, they having made away with it. The trick is to bet that the greeny cannot open the blade before fifty is counted. A catch is slipped over the spring which makes opening an impossibility. The case will probably come up to-day, when the prisoners will have an opportunity to explain it. These “cinch” games are getting entirely too frequent, and all law-abiding citizens demand that the sharpers be severely punished.

Complicating the search for nineteenth-century uses of cinch is a very different use. Cinch was also the name of a trick-taking card game developed in the 1880s. The name of the game, which was invented in Colorado, is probably taken from the slang sense meaning to tightly secure the tricks. We see the card game named in the April 1886 issue of Overland Monthly:

The town on a Sunday evening presents a marked contrast—saloons crowded; music, dancing and gambling; faro, licensed by the territory of Arizona, in full blast; Mexican games with Mexican cards; and the all-absorbing poker—poker in all its various forms and attractions, from the small calibre of a freezeout game to that in which each chip stands for a gold piece, and rises with a geometrical ratio after the ante; reckless playing, and drunken playing, with an occasional cinch game; miners, professionals, laborers, business men, all in the throng, and representatives of each in the play.

We can see that the slang sense of cinch developed along a logical, if not immediately obvious path from the literal use to mean a belt and then to tighten or secure and on to mean a sure or easily accomplished thing.

But where does lead-pipe cinch come from? That one is anybody’s guess, and the written record, as we currently know it, offers few clues.

The earliest use of lead-pipe cinch that I’m aware of is from Camden, New Jersey’s Evening Telegram of 5 November 1887. It, like most of the earliest uses of the phrase, is in the context of horseracing:

Jimmy McLaughlin has a sure thing, and “air tight” and a “lead pipe” cinch on the premier jockeyship now. It was the hardest fight he ever had, and was literally a victory snatched from the jaws of defeat.

Another early use is an article in the Boston Globe with the dateline 28 July 1888:

Jockey Freeman came in for a great ovation every time he returned to the stand after a race. He won two races and finished second in another. The hardest hit the talent received was over the Alabama stakes. They considered Lucky Baldwin’s great filly Los Angeles a “lead pipe cinch,” and put their money on at any odds. Thanks to Jimmy McLaughlin’s riding the stakes went to the Dwyer brothers’ treasury by Bella B.’s victory.

And by the end of that decade, lead-pipe cinch was being used outside the context of horseracing. From an advertisement for a comedy show that appeared in Chicago’s Daily Inter Ocean of 11 November 1889:

CHICAGO OPERA HOUSE—Fireproof.
David Henderson……………….manager

CHICAGO ALSO SAYS “IT IS A LEAD PIPE CINCH.”

RUSSELL’S COMEDIANS
in the
CITY DIRECTORY

A Veritable Surprise in Farce Comedy.
3 Hours of the Most Hilarious Fun with the Greatest Company of Farce Comedians Ever Organized.

Every Evening, Wednesday and Saturday Matinees.

COME * EARLY * AND * GET * SEATS.

And the New-York Tribune of 16 December 1889 uses the phrase in the context of political corruption:

Statements are made showing that Senators were bought for $1,000 each and the Representatives averaged about $500. The money was transferred in a unique manner. The briber and the bribed would sit down to a game of poker. A “lead pipe cinch” was nothing compared to the sure thing that the legislator had in the game.

On their face, these early uses offer little in the way of evidence for how lead pipes became associated with cinches. But that very first citation offers a clue to one possible explanation in its use of air tight. An air-tight cinch makes sense, particular in the context of a horse’s tack. One not only wants the belt to be tight, so there is no air gap between it and the horse, but one also wants to tighten the cinch immediately after the horse has exhaled. Otherwise, the cinch will become loose as the horse breathes. The phrase air-tight cinch, both literal and metaphorical, is common in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. Lead-pipe cinch may have developed as a mishearing, either accidental or intentional and jocular, of air-tight cinch.

For instance, we see this piece written by Lewis Anderson in 1891 for the New York Advertiser and reprinted in newspapers across the country that makes use of a number of such non-sensical types of cinches:

The tout regained consciousness and muttered: “The track will be heavy to-morrow, and I’ve got a copper-riveted, lead-pipe, copyrighted, air-tight cinch. Firenzi in the mud—she swims in it—she can make the pace so hot that the track will be dry before she does the first quarter.

This explanation is far from a certainty. It is speculation with only the faintest bit of evidence behind it. But it is better than other explanations that have been proffered over the years. These include using a lead pipe to twist and tighten the cinch around a horse, or even to knock the wind out of the horse before tightening the cinch (one might want to force the horse to exhale before cinching the saddle, but one would not use a lead pipe, an object unlikely to be found in a stable,  to do it, not one wants the horse in good riding condition). Another has to do with plumbers tightening pipes. All the other explanations I have heard lack evidence or are absurd on their face.

Discuss this post

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Sources:

Advertisement. Daily Inter Ocean (Chicago), 11 November 1889, 8/7. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Anderson, Louis. “I’m After the Starter.” Commercial Gazette (Cincinnati, Ohio), 3 October 1891, 12/7. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., s.v. cinch, n.1, lead, n., cinch, v.

“His Last Race” (28 July 1888). Boston Globe, 29 July 1888, 6/1. Newspapers.com.

“Legislators Bribed in Missouri.” New-York Tribune, 16 December 1889, 3/5. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Lord, John Keast. Journal entry, 27 April 1860. The Naturalist in Vancouver Island and British Columbia, vol. 1 of 2. London: Richard Bentley, 1866, 234. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Morning Appeal (Carson City, Nevada), 23 June 1877, 3/2. Library of Congress: Chronicling America.

“On the Trail of Geronimo.” Overland Monthly, 7.40, April 1886, 349/2. ProQuest Magazines.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. cinch, n., cinch, v., lead-pipe, n.

“Sporting Brevities.” Evening Telegram (Camden, New Jersey), 5 November 1887, 1/3. Library of Congress: Chronicling America.

Twain, Mark. Letter, 4 May 1966. Mark Twain’s Letters, vol. 1 of 2, ed. Albert Bigelow Paine. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1917, 105. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

———. “The Sandwich Islands” (2 October 1866). Mark Twain’s Speeches, ed. Albert Bigelow Paine. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1923, 13. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Williams, Samuel. “The City of the Golden Gate.” Scribner’s Monthly, July 1875, 266–85 at 277/1. Gale Primary Sources: American Historical Periodicals.

Image credit: Ger1axg. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

free lunch (no such thing as) / TANSTAAFL

“A Free Lunch,” Currier & Ives, 1872

27 November 2023

At least two different legions of fans misassign credit for the coinage of the phrase there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. The first are science fiction aficionados who falsely credit Robert Heinlein for coining the phrase and its acronymic child, TANSTAAFL. The second are devotees of economist Milton Friedman, who published a 1975 collection of essays using the phrase as its title. Neither Heinlein nor Friedman originated the catchphrase or its acronym, although both undoubtedly helped popularize them.

Instead, the phrase arose out of debates between capitalists and socialists in America at the turn of the twentieth century.

The literal free lunch is the practice of saloons offering free food to attract customers. The marketing ploy took hold and became ubiquitous in the United States in the mid nineteenth century. The earliest reference I have found to an establishment offering a “free lunch” appears in an ad in the Illinois State Register on 3 February 1840 (and on the same page is a summary of a speech by Abraham Lincoln given in the Illinois House of Representatives, a fact that is irrelevant to the history of the phrase, but is an example of the tidbits one turns up when doing research of this nature):

N. B.—Free Lunch set every day, at 11 o’clock, A. M, Hot Coffee at all hours.

By the century’s end, free lunch had entered the realms of politics and economics, becoming equated with socialism and the labor movement. There is this piece on labor negotiations between the New York Tribune and Typographical Union Local #6 that appeared in the Yonkers Herald on 26 July 1892. It uses free lunch ranter to describe a pro-union politician:

The action of a political party, which action is inseparable from this discussion, clearly shows that somebody has been trying to make fools of organized workingmen. Chauncy M. Depew, president of that corporation which is so friendly (?) to labor organizations, and a leader in Mr. Reid’s party, says: “Mr. Reid is the labor candidate. His nomination was practically made by the Typographical union.” This is only the mouthing of a free lunch ranter and clearly misrepresents the attitude of No. 6; but the union put itself in a position to be made the byword and boast of political shysters and capitalistic clowns.

Later than year, we start see precursors to the catchphrase appearing. There is this one that questions whether there is such as thing as a free lunch. But here the meaning is quite literal, referring to the presence or absence of the saloonkeepers’ practice, and not questioning whether or not the food is truly provided at no cost. Originally printed in the San Francisco Examiner on 25 September 1897, the piece was reprinted widely across the United States in the following weeks:

With bread selling at three loaves for a dollar at Dawson City, the question whether there is such a thing as a free-lunch route up there becomes one of almost international importance.

Months later we see the exact phrasing there is no such thing as a free lunch in Illinois’s Rockford Daily Register-Gazette of 24 December 1897. Here the phrase is occupying a middle ground between the literal sense of gratis bar food and the metaphorical economic sense. Mr. Pricket is literally referring to the food coming at no cost to the customer, but he is couching the literal observation in the context of a larger economic argument:

Edward L. Pricket of Edwardsville, Ills., late United States consul to Kehl, Germany, was here recently on his way home. He spoke freely and in an interesting manner of his experiences abroad. He said: “There is no such thing as a free lunch in all Europe. In fact nothing is free there. Even in Germany you have pay for your pretzels, and they do not even give a match gratuitously. I went to Europe a free trader. I return a protectionist.”

And there is this use of the phrase in the Washington Herald of 2 November 1909, which is entirely figurative:

Mr. Tillman’s idea that free lunch is good enough for anybody—or even Presidents—may appear sound to some people, but, as a matter of fact, there is no such thing as a free lunch. Somebody has to pay for it.

The phrase, with is no replaced by ain’t no, is used as the punchline of an economist’s joke in Texas’s El Paso Herald Post of 27 June 1938. The piece was originally anonymous, but the writer was later identified as columnist Walter Morrow. The joke tells of a king who asks his economic advisors to summarize the wisdom of their field for him. Economist after economist fails at the task, unable to do so without using volumes of texts and charts. The king has them summarily executed, one after another. Finally, only one economist is left, who says:

“Your majesty, I have reduced this subject of economics to a single sentence, so brief and so easily remembered that it was not necessary to put it on paper. Yet will I wager my head that you will find my text a true one, and not to be disputed.”

“Speak on,” cried the king, and the palace guards leveled their crossbows. But the old economist rose fearlessly to his feet, stood face to face with the king, and said:

“Sire, in eight words I will reveal to you all the wisdom that I have distilled through all these years from all the writings of all the economists who once practiced their science in you kingdom. Here is my text:

“There ain’t no such thing as free lunch.”

Morrow may or may not have originated the joke, but he was the first to put it in print.

The phrase also appears in a book review published in the Columbia Law Review of September 1945. By this date the catchphrase has clearly become a buzzword of the political right:

Dr. Skilton apparently expects and welcomes more intrusion of government both to regulate mortgage loans and provide money for them. […] One can obviate that by government loans at arbitrarily lows rates, but this simply means the taxpayers are asked to subsidize one group in the population. Dr. Skilton might recall this profound economic truth, “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.” Government has nothing to give anybody. What it gives to one man it must take from another.

Economic satire is also the origin of the phrase’s acronym, TANSTAAFL. The acronym first appears, as far as I can tell, in a 35-page, 1949 satirical, anti-Communist pamphlet titled TANSTAAFL: A Plan for A New Economic World Order, written by a Pierre Dos Utt and published by Cairo Publications of Canton, Ohio. Both the writer and publisher are fictional entities. The pamphlet using obfuscatory equations and charts as “evidence,” proposes what it says is the optimal world political and economic order, an order that in many ways resembles the Soviet Union under Stalin or Orwell’s Big Brother. The pamphlet concludes with a version of Morrow’s economics joke:

The name “TANSTAAFL” is derived from the ancient language of the Babylonians It is the subject of an old Sumerian fable. The story runs something like this:

In the days of Nebuchadrezzar a great depression settled over the valley of the Euphrates very much like the one our country experienced back in 1932.

[…]

Quaking with fear the little bald-headed man fell face down upon the floor, and sobbed:

“Most venerable King, Protector of all Babylonia, Wisest of all men—I have but one piece of advice to give. In my humble opinion,

There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch”

Science fiction writer Robert Heinlein doesn’t enter into the history of the phrase until some seventeen years later, with the serialized publication of his novel The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress in the magazine Worlds of IF in February 1966. The novel depicts a libertarian political revolution in a lunar colony. Heinlein, an ardent libertarian, undoubtedly had encountered the phrase and its acronym elsewhere and incorporated them into his book:

“Gospodin,” he said presently, “you used an odd word earlier—odd to me, I mean.”

“Call me ‘Mannie’ now that kids are gone. What word?”

“It was when you insisted that the, uh, young lady, Tish—that Tish must pay too. ‘Tone-stapple,’ or something like it.”

“Oh, ‘tanstaafl.’ Means ‘There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.’ And isn’t,” I added, pointing to a FREE LUNCH sign across room, “or these drinks would cost half as much.”

Friedman enters the picture a decade later with his book of that title.

So that’s how a marketing ploy by nineteenth century saloonkeepers became an anti-socialist catchphrase.

Discuss this post

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Sources:

Dos Utt, Pierre. TANSTAAFL: A Plan for a New Economic World Order. Canton, Ohio: Cairo Publications, 1949.

Felts, David V. “Second Thoughts.” Decatur Herald (Illinois), 23 September 1949, 6/3. Newspapers.com.

Hanna John. “Government and the Mortgage Debtor (1929 to 1939) by Robert H. Skilton” (review). Columbia Law Review, 45.5, September 1945, 803–05 at 805. JSTOR.

Heinlein, Robert A. “The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress.” Worlds of IF, February 1966, 108–09. Archive.org.

“Little Too Radical.” Rockford Daily Register-Gazette (Illinois), 24 December 1897, 11/2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Morrow, Walter. “Economics in Eight Words.” El Paso Herald Post (Texas), 27 June 1938, 4/1. Newspaper Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2008, s.v. free lunch, n.

San Francisco Examiner, 25 September 1897, 6/2. Newspapers.com.

Shapiro, Fred R. The New Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale UP, 2021, 176, 368, 576.

“Springfield Exchange Coffee-House,” Illinois State Register (Springfield), 3 February 1840, 3/1. Newspapers.com.

“The Trib and Big Six.” Yonkers Herald (New York), 26 July 1892, 3/3–4. Newspapers.com.

Washington Herald (Washington, DC), 2 November 1909, 6. Library of Congress: Chronicling America.

Image credit: Currier & Ives, 1872. Library of Congress. Public domain image.

iridium / osmium

Cluster of osmium crystals

24 November 2023

The elements iridium and osmium were discovered together by chemist Smithson Tennant in 1803. Iridium, atomic number 77 and symbol Ir, is a hard, brittle, silvery-white metal. It is the second densest naturally occurring metal. Only osmium, atomic number 76 and symbol Os is denser. That metal is also hard and brittle but bluish-white in color. Both elements are primarily found in platinum ores, and both are rare—osmium is the rarest stable element in the earth’s crust.

At the turn of the nineteenth century, it was discovered that when platinum was dissolved in aqua regia (a mixture of hydrochloric and nitric acid), a black residue resulted. A number of chemists speculated on what the residue might contain, but the amount of residue produced was insufficient for further study. In 1803, chemist Smithson Tennant managed to obtain a larger sample of the residue and discovered it contained the two new elements. The following year he read a paper to the Royal Society of London in which he announced his discovery and named the two metals.

He named one iridium, from the Latin iris (rainbow) + -ium:

As it is necessary to give some name to bodies which have not been known before, and most convenient to indicate by it some characteristic property, I should incline to call this metal Iridium, from the striking variety of colours which it gives, while dissolving in marine acid.

The other he named osmium, from the Greek ὀσμή (osme, odor) +-ium:

When the alkaline solution is first formed, by adding water to the dry alkaline mass in the crucible, a pungent and peculiar smell is immediately perceived. This smell, as I afterwards discovered, arises from the extrication of a very volatile metallic oxide; and, as this smell is one of its most distinguishing characters, I should on that account incline to call the metal Osmium.

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Sources:

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. iridium, n.; third edition, September 2004, osmium, n.

Tennant, Smithson. “On Two Metals, Found in the Black Powder Remaining after the Solution of Platina” (21 June 1804). Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 94, 1804, 411–18 at 414 and 416. JSTOR.

Photo credit: Periodictable.ru. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

my work here is done

Clayton Moore as the Lone Ranger on his horse Silver

22 November 2023

A recent post on Languagehat.com takes a look at the phrase my work here is done. The cliché is a good example of how difficult it is to determine when a simple collocation of words becomes a catchphrase and when a catchphrase starts to be used ironically.

In current usage, the phrase is often used in jest, either taking undue credit for some accomplishment or after fomenting some state of chaos. But when did this serious phrase become comic? Simply doing a search for the string of words does not help in sussing out the transition points from collocation to cliché to irony.

The earliest use of the collocation of the words my work here is done that I have found is in a 1652 pamphlet by Thomas Tany, a.k.a. Theaurau John Tany, an apocalyptic preacher and religious visionary:

Now I hope I shall offend none that now sits, for I speak in the truth of the Nations, true birth-right linially discending, duely conjoyned, and of right chosen, Magna Charta being their foundation stone or Center. Now if yee be offended by thar [sic], I know you to be but shaddows, for if ye be trve, then no offence; for it is a shadoe or weakness that is jeolous or offended, for truth is strong standing Centered in the main rock, which is God, for God is Truth who hath been made a Colour to colour all your false, falices under, & for his glory alone I contest with this Nation only to charge it with the works wrought in it, then my work here is done, for judgement follows the sound, but men by the sound shall be left without excuse.

But the words of an obscure seventeenth-century preacher hardly constitute a likely source of inspiration for a present-day catchphrase. And a search of the databases Eighteenth Century Collections Online and Nineteenth Century Collections Online fail to turn up a single instance of the phrase my work here is done. Of course, there are undoubtedly instances of the collocation from those centuries that didn’t make it into those collections, but its absence from the databases is strong evidence that it wasn’t a stock phrase.

Also from the seventeenth century is the use of my work is done, reportedly uttered in 1658 by Oliver Cromwell on his deathbed:

Again, hee said, I would bee willing to live to bee further serviceable to God and his People, but my work is done, yet God will bee with his People.

Cromwell was not an obscure preacher, and his words might realistically be taken up as a catchphrase, but I doubt this is the origin of the modern cliché. First, it is missing the here. There are, of course, older uses of my work is done, and it is a rather pedestrian phrase. It is the here that elevates it from the pedestrian to the memorable.

If the cliché is not from the nineteenth century or earlier, we must look to the twentieth, and the source that most people point to is the Lone Ranger, the western hero who reportedly frequently used my work here is done as a sign-off. The Lone Ranger began as a radio show in 1933, and the television series ran from 1949–57. The shows are certainly well known enough to have spawned the catchphrase.

The trouble is that I have been unable to find an actual example of the phrase from an episode of the Lone Ranger. I’ve gone through a number of the radio and television episodes that are available online (but by no means all), and the line my work is done here simply does not appear. There are, however, a number of episodes where the Lone Ranger says things like, “Tonto, our work here is finished” or “Tonto, our job is done here.” And in one case, another character says, “He never stays around once his work is done. He’s the best friend we’ve ever had. He’s the Lone Ranger.”

These similar lines hardly constitute anything like a routine signoff to the show; most episodes end with nothing like the phrase being said. Attributing my work is done here to the Lone Ranger is a misquotation along the lines of Casablanca’s “Play it again, Sam,” or The Treasure of the Sierra Madre’s “Badges, we don’t need no stinking badges.” But whether or not he actually said it doesn’t really matter for our purposes. Since something akin to the phrase was said often enough to make people think the Lone Ranger said it, then it is the likely inspiration for the catchphrase.

And as to when the phrase started to be used ironically, that is an even more difficult question to answer. Undoubtedly there are multiple people who independently used the phrase ironically. But my vote for the likely turning point, when the catchphrase gained traction as irony, is Mel Brook’s 1973 movie Blazing Saddles. A portion of the closing scene has Sheriff Bart saying farewell to the townspeople Rock Ridge:

HOWARD JOHNSON: Sheriff, you can’t go now. We need you.

(Townsfolk ad lib)

BART: My work here is done. I’m needed elsewhere now. (MUSIC: BEGINS POMP AND CIRCUMSTANCE.) I’m needed wherever outlaws rule the West, wherever innocent women and children are afraid to walk on the streets, wherever a man cannot live in simple dignity and wherever a people cry out for justice.

TOWNSPEOPLE (in unison): BULLSHIT!!!

BART: All right, ya caught me.

Of course, Brooks and his fellow screenwriters (which included comedian Richard Pryor) were clearly evoking the belief that the Lone Ranger used the phrase when they had Bart say, my work here is done.

Discuss this post

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Sources:

Thanks to Ben Zimmer for pointing me to the recordings of the Lone Ranger radio show and to Stephen Goranson for helping me find episodes of the television series.

Brooks, Mel, et al. Blazing Saddles (screenplay), 6 February 1973 (revised 22 February 1973), 122. The Script Lab (pdf).

Languagehat. “My Work Here Is Done” (blog), 29 September 2023, Languagehat.com.

Tany, Thomas. Theavrau Iohn His Epitah and Evrops Looking-Glass. London, 1652, 7. Early English Books Online.

Walker, Henry, Ironmonger. A Collection of Several Passages Concerning His Late Highnesse Oliver, Cromwell, in the Time of His Sickness. London: Robert Ibbitson, 1659, 12. Early English Books Online.

Photo credit: ABC Television, 1956. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

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A selection (by no means complete) of the relevant lines from the Lone Ranger radio and television shows:

“Along the Oregon Trail” (radio show). The Lone Ranger, 10 April 1942, 26:50. Archive.org.

“Our work here is done, Tonto.”

“Outlaw Point” (radio show). The Lone Ranger, 6 May 1942, 26:00. Archive.org.

“Now that his work is done, he’s on his way.”

“The Gunpowder” (radio show). The Lone Ranger, 17 September 1954, 22:00. Archive.org.

“Then our work is done, here, Colonel.”

“White Hawk’s Decision.” The Lone Ranger, S5.E6, 8 October 1956, 21:09. ABC Television. YouTube.com.

“Yes, Tonto. Our work here is finished.”

“Two Against Two.” The Lone Ranger, S5.E28, 21 March, 1957, 20:36. ABC Television. YouTube.com.

“Come on, Tonto. Our job is done here. Adios.”

“The Law and Miss Aggie.” The Lone Ranger, S5.E31, 11 April, 1957, 20:33. ABC Television. YouTube.com.

“Well, Tonto, our work is finished here.”

Unidentified episode. The Lone Ranger, 41:43. ABC Television. YouTube.com.

“He’s gone, Dad. He never stays around once his work is done. He’s the best friend we’ve ever had. He’s the Lone Ranger.”

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.