war crime / war criminal

Nazi defendants in the dock at the Nuremburg Trials, 1946. Left to right, front row: Hermann Göring, Rudolf Hess, Joachim von Ribbentrop, and Wilhelm Keitel; second row: Karl Dönitz, Erich Raeder, Baldur von Schirach, and Fritz Sauckel.

30 November 2023

The ideas of a war crime, that is a violation of the generally accepted rules of warfare, and that of a war criminal, one who violates those rules, are modern concepts, only starting to coalesce at the end of the nineteenth century. Within the framework of international law, war crimes include, but are not limited to, the killing of prisoners of war, deliberate targeting of civilians, bombing civilian targets, the taking of hostages, and the use of chemical or biological weapons. In general, non-legal use, the terms can be more expansive, taking in horrific acts committed during wartime that may not fall within the legal definitions set forth in various treaties.

The term war crime first appears in a somewhat different definition, that of a violation of the a nation’s military rules and laws (what in the US military today constitute the Uniform Code of Military Justice). The term first appears in the context of an attempt by some in the US Congress to reduce the number of such offenses that were punishable by death. From the St. Louis Republic of 29 October 1892:

Suggestion is made by the report that the articles of war authorizing capital punishment might, to some extent, be modified even as to time of war, but that the death penalty should be reserved for the soldier in the time of war who deserts to or in the immediate presence of an enemy. Desertion, however, of a less degree should not be punishable with death as in a time of war. The entire abolition of the death penalty for war crimes, as proposed in a bill now pending in Congress, the report thinks impracticable.

We see the beginnings of the present-day definition in the case of Dr. Ricardo Ruiz, whose arrest and death were among the events that led to the Spanish-American War of 1898. Ruiz was a Cuban-born, naturalized US citizen and dentist who was arrested by Spanish authorities in Cuba on 4 February 1897 and charged with the derailment and robbery of a passenger train. He was held incommunicado and died in jail some two weeks later. There was evidence that had been tortured. From the Boston Herald of 8 June 1897:

Dr. Ruiz’s case is not even as strong as some of the other cases in [sic] behalf of American citizens in Cuba. He was charged with a crime not regarded as a war crime, but, nevertheless, it furnishes ample provocation for a vigorous demand for redress on behalf of widow, and also some apology for the violation of the treaty.

The phrase war crime appears in a newspaper sub-headline in the Wisconsin Weekly Advocate of 10 April 1902. Here the relevant case is that of crimes committed by British officers during the Boer War. The events of this case were dramatized in the 1980 film Breaker Morant. From the Wisconsin Weekly Advocate:

Alleges War Crime.

Liverpool, April 8.—A former trooper of the Bushveldt Carbineers, who has returned here, is quoted as saying that the convicted Australian officers belonging to that corps, since disbanded, murdered from thirty-five to forty persons. As an instance of their cold-bloodedness, the trooper relates how three Dutch children, 2 and 12 years of age, respectively, and their little sister, arrived at the Carabineers' camp to surrender, in order to be given food. The girl and one of the boys were wounded. The uninjured boy took his little brother on his back and was carrying him off when a second shot killed both boys. The girl died shortly afterward.

War crime and war criminal were first given formal legal definition in L.F.L. Oppenheim’s 1906 International Law: A Treatise. Oppenheim, considered to be “the father of modern international law,” was a German-born jurist residing in England:

§ 252. However, in spite of the uniform qualification of these acts as war crimes, four different kinds of war crimes must be distinguished on account of the essentially different character of the acts. Violations of recognised rules regarding warfare committed by members of the armed forces belong to the first kind; all hostilities in arms committed by individuals who are not members of the enemy armed forces constitute a second kind; espionage and war treason belong to the third; and all marauding acts belong to the fourth kind.

§ 253. Violations of rules regarding warfare are war crimes only when committed without an order of the belligerent Government concerned. If members of the armed forces commit violations by order of their Government, they are not war criminals and cannot be punished by the enemy; the latter can, however, resort to reprisals. In case members of forces commit violations ordered by their commanders, the members cannot be punished, for the commanders are alone responsible, and the latter may, therefore, be punished as war criminals on their capture by the enemy.

Since World War II, Oppenheim’s idea that a soldier is not a war criminal if they were simply following orders has been rejected. The defense that they were “just following orders” is not a valid one. And this rejection even predates Oppenheim’s treatise in that the Morant and the other officers of the Bushveldt Carbineers attempted to use it as a defense at their court martial and were unsuccessful.

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Sources:

“General Acquitted” (8 April 1902). Wisconsin Weekly Advocate (Milwaukee), 10 April 1902, 2/3. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Oppenheim, Lassa Francis Lawrence. International Law: A Treatise, vol. 2 of 2. London: Longmans Green, 1906, 2:264–65. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. war crime, n., war criminal, n.

“Spain Must Settle It” (8 June 1897). Boston Herald (Massachusetts), 9 June 1897, 1/3. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“Suggestions as to Military Punishment.” St. Louis Republic (Missouri), 29 October 1892, 7/1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Photo credit: Office of the U.S. Chief of Counsel for the Prosecution of Axis Criminality, 1946. US National Archives, Record Group 238: National Archives Collection of World War II War Crimes Records, Series: Photographs relating to Major Nuremberg Trials, NAID: 540128. Public domain image.

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.

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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.

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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.”