lanthanum

A chunk of lanthanum

15 December 2023

Lanthanum is a soft, ductile, silvery-white metal with atomic number 57 and the symbol La. Although it is classified as a “rare earth” element, it is actually quite abundant on Earth, over three times as abundant as lead. The name comes from the Greek λανθάνειν (lanthanein, escape notice, latent) because it was first found in the same ore in which cerium, which is next to it on the periodic table, had been discovered, and because they have similar properties it was difficult to discriminate between the two. Lanthanum is also the eponym of the lanthanide series of elements, which run from lanthanum to Lutetium (atomic number 71).

Lanthanum was discovered by Carl Gustaf Mosander in 1839, but he did not initially publish his results. Instead, the discovery was first mentioned in a letter by Jöns Jacob Berzelius, the co-discoverer of cerium, to Théophile-Jules Pelouze. Mosander had studied under Berzelius and had succeeded him as professor of chemistry at the Karolinska Institute. The two also shared a house in Stockholm, so Berzelius was well acquainted with his former student’s work. Pelouze made the discovery known at the French Academy of Sciences in March 1839:

M. Berzélius annonce à M. Pelouze, dans la même letter, que M. Mosander vient d'examiner de nouveau la cérite de Bastnas, mineral dans lequel le cérium a été découvert, il y a trente-six ans, et y a trouvé un nouveau métal.

L'oxide de cérium, extrait de la cérite par le procédé ordinaire, contient à peu près les deux cinquièmes de son poids de l'oxide du nouveau métal qui ne change que peu les propriétés du cérium, et qui s'y tient pour ainsi dire caché. Cette raison a engagé M. Mosander à donner au nouveau métal le nom de Lantane.

(Mr. Berzélius announces to Mr. Pelouze, in the same letter, that Mr. Mosander has just re-examined the cerite of Bastnas, a mineral in which cerium was discovered, thirty-six years ago, and found a new metal.

The oxide of cerium, extracted from cerite by the ordinary process, contains about two-fifths of its weight of the oxide of the new metal which changes but little the properties of cerium, and which remains so to say hidden. This reason prompted Mr. Mosander to give the new metal the name Lantane.)

Mosander finally published his findings in 1842, but that article does not discuss the naming of the element.

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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.

Mosander, C. G. “Något om Cer och Lanthan.” Forhandlinger ved de Skandinaviske Naturforskeres Möde, 3, 1842, 387–98. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

“Nouveau Métal.” Compte Rendu des Séances de l'Académie des Sciences, 8, 11 March 1839, 356–57 at 356. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

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

Photo credit: W. Oelen, 2006. Wikimedia Commons. Used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Santa Claus

13 December 2023

The name Santa Claus is a dialectal variation on the Dutch Sint Klaas. The Sint, or Sante in the Dutch dialect of early New York, obviously corresponds to the English Saint, and the Klaas is somewhat less obviously a hypocoristic form of Nicholas. While in English we typically abbreviate the name as Nick, in Dutch and German it is the final element that is used, resulting in Klaas or Klaus. So Santa Claus is Saint Nicholas.

Almost nothing is known about the historical Saint Nicholas, and it is even possible that he never actually existed. The only thing about him that is known with any degree of confidence is that he was (probably) a fourth-century bishop of Myra, in Asia Minor. Everything else that is “known” about him can be relegated to the status of myth. The most famous story about him, and the one that associates him with gift-giving, is his supposed gift of dowries to three poor, young women in order to keep them from being forced into prostitution. But this, like all of the other stories about him, is a later folkloric addition and was originally ascribed to earlier, pagan mythical figures, only later transferred onto the saint. Saint Nicholas’s feast day is 6 December, hence his association with Yuletide festivities.

Santa Claus is originally a distinctly Americanized and secularized incarnation of the saint. The name arose in colonial New York, a region steeped in Dutch tradition—New York was originally New Amsterdam and ceded to the British and renamed in 1664. The first citation of the name Santa Claus that I’m aware of is from the 20 December 1773 edition of the New York Gazette and Weekly Mercury:

Last Monday the Anniversary of St. Nicholas, otherwise called St. A Claus, was celebrated at Protestant Hall, at Mr. Waldron’s, where a great number of the Sons of that ancient Saint celebrated the Day with great Joy and Festivity.

And we see the form Santaclaus in Washington Irving’s Salmagundi of 25 January 1808:

In his days, according to my grandfather, were first in vented those notable cakes, hight new-year cookies, which originally were impressed on one side with the honest burley countenance of the illustrious Rip, and on the other with that of the noted St. Nicholas, vulgarly called Santaclaus—of all the saints in the kalendar the most venerated by true hollanders, and their unsophisticated descendants. These cakes are to this time given on the first of January, to all visitors, together with a glass of cherry-bounce, or raspberry-brandy.

The 1823 poem A Visit from St. Nicholas by Clement C. Moore, another New Yorker, although it does not use the name Santa Claus, created much of the modern lore about the character, including his fur clothing, being fat with a “little round belly,” and his sleigh with “eight tiny reindeer.” But there are differences, notably in that the St. Nicholas of the poem was tiny and elfin. In 1863 cartoonist Thomas Nast depicted Santa Claus in much the way we see him today for the cover of Harper’s magazine. The cover shows Santa visiting Union troops during the US Civil War. In 1881, Nast would depict a more refined image of Santa, seen above, again in the pages of Harper’s.

Like many other aspects of American culture, Santa Claus has been exported and has supplanted or co-exists with other conceptions of St. Nicholas and Christmas gift-givers around the world.

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Sources:

Irving, Washington (pseud. Launcelot Langstaff). “From My Elbow-Chair.” Salmagundi, 2.10, 25 January 1808, 407–08. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

“New-York, December 20.” New-York Gazette and the Weekly Mercury, 20 December 1773, 3/1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. Santa Claus, n.

Image credits: Thomas Nast, “Merry Old Santa Claus,” Harper’s Weekly, 1 January 1881, Wikimedia Commons; Thomas Nast, “Santa Claus in Camp,” Harper’s Weekly, 3 January 1863, Wikimedia Commons. Both images are in the public domain.

gay / gaycat

Pride flag flying over San Francisco’s Castro district, 2010

11 December 2023

Gay traditionally meant joyful or light-hearted but in the last century came to mean homosexual. The word, in its various meanings, is of somewhat uncertain origin. We’ve got a pretty good, albeit by no means beyond doubt, idea where the word originally comes from, and there are several plausible suggestions for how the word became adopted by the queer community.

The English word comes from the Anglo-Norman gai, but where this French word comes from is in question. There are cognates in other Romance languages, notably Provencal, Old Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian, but no likely Latin candidate for a root exists. The word is probably Germanic in origin, with the Old High German gāhi, fast or fleeting, suggested as a likely progenitor.

The Anglo-Norman word had multiple meanings which were carried over into English. It could mean happy or frolicsome, lighthearted or fickle, impetuous or reckless, attractive or amorous, or lascivious and lewd. As a noun, gai referred to a lewd person.

The first appearances of gay in the written record of English is in a marginal note to a copy of the Ancrene Riwle, a medieval guide for anchoresses. This particular copy dates to c. 1225. The line is written in pencil in the margin of one of the manuscripts by that manuscript’s original and primary scribe. It was apparently intended to be the heading of this section, but the scribe subsequently forgot to rubricate the pencil mark (i.e., copy over it in red ink):

Hwi þe Gay world is to fleon.

(Why one is to retreat from the gay world.)

The text to which this marginal note refers reads:

Nuȝe habbeð iherd mine leoue sustren
forbisne of þe alde laȝe & eken of þe ne
owe. hwi ȝe aȝen ane lif swiðe to luuien. ef
ter þe forðbisne hereð nu resuns. hwi me ach
fleo þe world achte.

(Now my beloved sisters, you have heard examples of the old law & also of the new why you should love the solitary life so much. After these examples, now hear some reasons why one ought to retreat from the world.)

The meaning of gay here is not quite certain, but given that this is a very early use, it is probably being used in the original Anglo-Norman sense of lewd or lascivious, a description of the sinful world which the anchoress should shun.

By the late fourteenth century the sense of gay meaning light-hearted or carefree was well established in English, and this sense would remain the primary sense of the word until the late twentieth century. For example, Chaucer uses gay in this sense in the poem Troilus and Criseyde in a passage where Criseyde listens to a nightingale as she is falling asleep:

A nyghtyngale, upon a cedre grene,
Under the chambre wal ther as she ley,
Ful loude song ayein the moone shene,
Peraunter in his brides wise a lay
Of love, that made hire herte fressh and gay.
That herkned she so longe in good entente,
Til at the laste the dede slep hire hente.

(A nightingale, upon a cedar green,
Under the chamber wall there where she lay,
Sang very loudly facing the moon’s sheen
Perhaps in its bird’s manner a lay
Of love, that made her heart fresh and gay.
She listened to that so long with good intent,
Till at the last the sleep of the dead took her.)

But gay meaning amorous or lascivious was also in use at this time, and this sense would also continue to the present day. In the late fourteenth century, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath uses this sense in describing her fifth husband, a passage that attests that the phenomenon of abused spouses refusing to leave their abusers is nothing new:

Now of my fifthe housbonde wol I telle.
God lete his soule nevere come in helle!
And yet was he to me the mooste shrewe;
That feele I on my ribbes al by rewe,
And evere shal unto myn endyng day.
But in oure bed he was so fressh and gay,
And therwithal so wel koude he me glose,
Whan that he wolde han my bele chose;
That thogh he hadde me bete on every bon,
He koude wynne agayn my love anon.

(Now of my fifth husband I will tell.
God let his soul never go to hell!
And yet he was to the me the greatest rogue;
That I feel on my ribs, one by one,
And will ever until my dying day.
But in our bed he was so lively and gay,
And therefore he could deceive me so well,
When he would have my “pretty thing”;
That though he had beat me on every bone,
He could win back my love straightaway.)

By the end of the eighteenth century, this amorous sense of gay had developed another, more specific sense denoting prostitution. A place or house that was gay would be a brothel. We see it in Mary Robinson’s 1799 novel The False Friend:

It was in vain I assured the person who detained me that I did not legally owe Mrs. Blonzely the sum she demanded. The charge was made for board and lodging, for which I was informed that, though under age, I might be arrested. I pleaded inability to pay the sum; declared that the promissory note had been extorted from me, and that the whole transaction was nothing less than an infamous imposture.

“That you must prove and settle in a court of law,” said the bailiff. “We shall do our duty.”

“Who, and what is Mrs. Blonzely?” said Mr. Pew calmly.

“That is not my business,” replied the bailiff. “She keeps a gay house at the west end of the town. I dare say Miss can inform you for what purpose.” Mrs. Pew changed colour, and Mr. Paisley began to whistle. The two ruffians laughed, and I was near sinking on the floor with confusion.

And at some point, this amorous / promiscuous / prostitution sense developed into another sense denoting homosexuality. Exactly when this happened is difficult to pin down. It was clearly in place by the 1920s but is likely older in queer slang, a genre of speech that was unlikely to make it into publication at the time. The difficulty in pinning down the change in meaning is also due to the word’s multiple meanings and its use as a double entendre. It’s easy to read a queer meaning into a use that would not have been intended or received that way at the time.

Cover for the sheet music of Will S. Hays’s 1868 The Gay Young Clerk in the Dry Goods Store

A good example of the ambiguity of meaning and the potential for reading an anachronistic sense into a text is seen in the 1868 song by Will S. Hays The Gay Young Clerk in the Dry Goods Store:

It’s about a chap, perhaps you know,
I’m told he is ‘Nobody’s beau,’
But maybe you all knew that before,
He’s a lively clerk in a Dry-Goods Store.
O! Augustus Dolphus is his name,
From Skiddy-ma-dink they say he came,
He’s a handsome man and he’s proud and poor,
This gay young clerk in the Dry-Goods Store.

On its face, this use of gay would seem to be in the sense of happy, light-hearted. But the picture on the cover of Hays’s sheet music is clearly that of an effeminate—or perhaps metrosexual would be a better descriptor—man, and the fact that Dolphus is “nobody’s beau” hints at his being queer. It’s also claimed that Hays himself sometimes performed in drag. I have seen no evidence of this being true, but it wouldn’t be surprising or necessarily an indication of his sexual orientation. Drag performances were as common, if not more so, back then as they are today, and such performances were less likely to have been received as queer in the nineteenth century.

Furthermore, in the 1860s the comedic trope of the queer and effeminate male store clerk was common (and it still exists today). For example, there is this parody of Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself that appears in the 17 March 1860 issue of Vanity Fair:

COUNTER-JUMPS.
A Poemettina.—After Walt Whitman

I am the Counter-jumper, weak and effeminate.
I love to loaf and lie about dry-goods.
I loaf and invite the Buyer.
I am the essence of retail. The sum and result of small profits and quick returns.
The Picayune is part of me, and so is the half cent, and the mill only arithmetically appreciable.
The shining, cheap-women sarsnet is of me, and I am of it.
And the white bobbinet,
And the moire antique, thickly webbed and strown with impossible flowers,
And the warm winter gloves lined with fur,
And the delicate summer gloves of silk threads,
And the intermediate ones built of the hide of the Swedish rat,
All these things are of me, and many more also.
For I am the shop, and the counter, and the till,
But particularly the last.
And I explore and rummage the till, and am at home in it.
And I am the shelves on which lie the damaged goods;
The damaged goods themselves I am,
And I ask what’s the damage?
I am the crate, and the hamper, and the yard-wand, and the box of silks fresh from France,
And when I came into the world I paid duty,
And I never did my duty,
And never intend to do it.
For I am the creature of weak depravities;
I am the Counter-jumper;
I sound my feeble yelp over the woofs of the World.

But even if the character of Hays’s Dolphus was understood to have been queer in 1868, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the word gay carried that meaning at that time.

Another early appearance that is of ambiguous meaning is from Gertrude Stein’s 1922 short story Miss Furr & Mrs. Skeene which appeared in the July 1923 issue of Vanity Fair. In the story Stein continually repeats the word gay. What Stein may have meant in using the word is polysemous and ambiguous, and given that it’s Stein, the meaning of the word is of less importance than the sound and the rhythm of the prose:

They stayed there and were gay there, not very gay there, just gay there. They were both gay there, they were regularly working there both of them cultivating their voices there, they were both gay there. Georgine Skeene was gay there and she was regular, regular in being gay, regular in not being gay, regular in being a gay one who was one not being gay longer than was needed to be one being quite a gay one. They were both gay then there and both working there then.

But by 1929 we have an obvious, albeit somewhat coded, use of gay to refer to homosexuality. It appears in a song titled “We All Wore a Green Carnation” from Noël Coward’s play Bitter Sweet. The green carnation alludes to the 1894 novel of that title by Robert Hitchens. The novel’s main character, loosely based on Lord Alfred Douglas, sports the green flower and is friends with a character loosely based on Oscar Wilde. Hitchens’s Green Carnation was published shortly before Wilde’s arrest and conviction for “gross indecency” and sold rather well as a result of the notoriety. While the flower was not a symbol of homosexuality in the novel or in real life, Coward’s use of the phrase would certainly evoke such an association from at least some of the audience. The song is sung by “four over-exquisitely dressed young men […] wear[ing] in their immaculate buttonholes green carnations.” The lyrics are:

Blasé boys are we,
Exquisitely free
From the dreary and quite absurd
Moral views of the common herd.

We like porphyry bowls,
Chandeliers and stoles,
We’re most spirited,
Carefully filleted “souls.”

Pretty boys, witty boys, too, too, too
Lazy to fight stagnation,
Haughty boys, naughty boys, all we do
Is to pursue sensation.
The portals of society
Are always open wide,
The world our eccentricity condones,
A note of quaint variety,
We’re certain to provide,
We dress in very decorative tones.
Faded boys, jaded boys, womankind’s
Gift to a bulldog nation,
In order to distinguish us from less enlightened minds,
We all wear a green carnation.

We believe in Art,
Though we’re poles apart
From the fools who are thrilled by Greuze.
We like Beardsley and Green Chartreuse.
Women say we’re too
Bored to bill and coo,
We smile wearily,
It's so drearily true!

Pretty boys, witty boys, you may sneer
At our disintegration,
Haughty boys, naughty boys, dear, dear, dear!
Swooning with affectation.
Our figures sleek and willowy,
Our lips incarnadine,
May worry the majority a bit.
But matrons rich and billowy
Invite us out to dine,
And revel in our phosphorescent wit,
Faded boys, jaded boys, come what may,
Art is our inspiration,
As as we are the reason for the “Nineties” being gay,
We all wear a green carnation.

Pretty boys, witty boys, yearning for
Permanent adulation,
Haughty boys, naughty boys, every pore
Bursting with self-inflation.
We feel we’re rather Grecian,
As our manners indicate,
Our sense of moral values isn’t strong.
For ultimate completion
We shall have to wait
Until the Day of Judgment comes along.
Faded boys, jaded boys, each one craves
Some sort of soul salvation,
But when we rise reluctantly but gracefully from our graves,
We’ll all wear a green carnation.

So we can say that by the end of the 1920s, the use of gay within the queer community to refer to themselves was common and was just starting to appear as an obviously coded reference in mainstream culture. But the queer sense of gay would not become common in heteronormative discourse until the 1960s.

Cary Grant going “gay all of a sudden” in 1938’s Bringing Up Baby

The 1938 movie Bringing Up Baby, starring Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn, is often cited as an early appearance of this sense of gay in heteronormative discourse. But again, this is coded reference. At one point in the film Grant, wearing a woman’s fur-trimmed dressing gown, answers the door, and when asked why he is wearing women’s clothing replies, “Because I just went gay all of a sudden.” Gay and to go gay had an established sense of becoming joyously uninhibited or flamboyant, so the line is a clearly a double entendre intended to slip past the censors.

We’ve established that gay had become an in-group term among the queer community by the 1920s, but how did that sense develop? There two leading possibilities. Either, or both, of which could be true. It may have developed from the sense of gay meaning uninhibited or flamboyant, with connotations of hedonism. Alternatively, it may have developed from the prostitution sense, becoming associated with male prostitutes and then to queer men more generally.

There are several other explanations that are commonly proffered that are less likely or even outright wrong.

One is that it developed from the term gay cat, a noun meaning a young tramp who has an older hobo as a mentor. Such relationships sometimes, but by no means always, involved the exchange of sexual favors. The problem is that this particular sense of gay cat does not appear until after the queer sense of gay was already established. Originally a gay cat was a tramp, often young or simply well dressed, who was willing (or unwilling, depending upon the source) to work for money. Early uses of the term vary in meaning. The earliest example of the term I’ve found is in the San Francisco Examiner of 1 October 1893:

The young man had thus given me a good idea of his plans and I told him that I wanted work, and that I would not refuse any kind of job. He then told me that if work was my “lay” I ought to see “the gang” at the park by the Courthouse the next day, and if I wanted to work the “dynamiters,” “gay cats” and “stiffs” could tell me where men were wanted. He promised to meet me at the Courthouse park the next day and aid me all he could. Before we parted I got him to explain that a “dynamiter” was at tramp who carried a blanket as a pretense that he was an honest laborer hunting for a job, but that he would not work longer than necessary to obtain money for a debauch; that a “gay cat” was a “foxy boy” who made great pretenses that he wanted a situation and told pathetic stories to people he was sure had nothing for any one to do, not leaving them until he got money, which he was sorry he could not do something for; that a “stiff” was a tramp would not work under any circumstances.

Here gay cat is associated with youth and an unwillingness to work, but there is no notion of mentorship by an older tramp. The use of foxy is apparently in the sense of sly or cunning, but the sexually attractive sense was current in the 1890s, so that’s a subtext.

And there’s this one from Wisconsin’s Racine Times of 3 August 1895 that says that a gay cat is simply a well-dressed tramp:

These tramps have a language of their own, or at least you might call it a language, as persons not familiar with their slang would be able to under stand hardly anything they said. For instance if a tramp should wish to send in the alarm that a policeman was coming, he would say: “Duck here comes de bull.” A well dressed tramp is called a “gay cat,” beer or whiskey “slops.” a drink “lickup,” a sleep “a flop,” arrest, “slow,” alcohol “white line,” begging “mocking” and there is a whole lot more expressions which are original with them which would fill a small sized book.

Attestations linking a young gay cat with an older tramp don’t appear until well into the twentieth century. In this case, it seems that gay in gay cat comes from wearing good clothes and later, once the queer sense of gay had been established, came to imply a homosexual relationship among tramps.

An incorrect etymology that is sometimes proffered is that the queer sense of gay is a borrowing from the French gaie, a feminine cognate of the English word that supposedly was used to describe queer men dating back to the sixteenth century, as opposed the masculine gai. But the queer sense of the French word does not date back nearly so far. It is a late twentieth-century borrowing from English, not the other way around.

And one that can be dismissed out of hand is that gay is an acronym for good as you. If the acronym was ever actually used, it was created after the queer sense of gay was well established and is not the origin of the word.

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Sources:

Anglo-Norman Dictionary, 2008. s.v. gai1, adj. & n.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. Troilus and Criseyde (c. 1385). Stephen A Barney, ed. New York: W.W. Norton, 2006, 109, lines 2.918–24.

———. “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue” (c.1390). The Canterbury Tales, lines 3.503–12. Harvard’s Geoffrey Chaucer Website.

“Counter-Jumps.” Vanity Fair, 17 March 1860, 183. Alexander Street: Illustrated Civil War Newspapers and Magazines.

Coward, Noël. “We All Wore a Green Carnation” (1929). Collected Plays: Two. London: Methuen, 1986, 134–36. ProQuest.

Dobson, E.J., ed. The English Text of the Ancrene Riwle. Early English Text Society 267. London: Oxford UP, 1972, 127. London, British Library, Cotton MS Cleopatra C.vi, fol. 68v.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., s.v. gay, adj. [Green’s citations in this entry should not be taken at face value. Many of the early ones are of ambiguous meaning, and at least one, the 1922 citation of Fred Fisher’s song Chicago is to 1970s-era lyrics sung by a drag performer, not a citation dating to 1922.]

“Haven for Tramps.” Racine Times (Wisconsin), 3 August 1895, 5/1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Hays, William Shakespeare. The Gay Young Clerk in the Dry Goods Store (sheet music). New York: J. L. Peters, 1868. Johns Hopkins University: Lester S. Levy Sheet Music Collection.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. gai, adj.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2022, s.v. gay, adj., adv., & n., gay cat, n.

Robinson, Mary. The False Friend, vol. 2 of 4. London: T. N. Longman and O. Rees, 1799, 2.292–93. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Stein, Gertrude. “Miss Furr and Miss Skeene.” Geography and Plays. Boston: Four Seas, 1922, 17–22 at 17. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

“Tramping with Tramps.” Examiner (San Francisco), 1 October 1893, 11/3. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Image credits: Pride flag—Benson Kua, 2010, Wikimedia Commons, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license; Gay Young Clerk—J. L. Peters, 1868, public domain image; Bringing Up Baby—RKO Pictures, 1938, fair use of a single screenshot from the film to illustrate the topic under discussion.

krypton

Krypton gas glowing greenish-blue in a discharge tube

8 December 2023

This post is about the element, not Superman’s home planet.

Krypton is colorless and odorless noble gas with atomic number 36 and the symbol Kr. It is used in various lighting applications, such as flashes for high-speed photography and luminous signs, for which, when mixed with mercury vapor, it gives off a greenish-blue light.

The element was discovered by chemists William Ramsay and Morris Travers in 1898. They named it after the Greek κρυπτός, or kryptos, meaning secret or hidden because of the difficulty in detecting it. The discovery was first announced at a meeting of the French Academy of Sciences on 6 June 1898, as reported by the Westminster Gazette the following day:

At yesterday’s meeting of the Academy of Sciences in Paris M. Berthelot read a letter from Professor Ramsay, the co-discoverer with Lord Rayleigh of argon, giving the first announcement of another discovery of the same nature. The new gas he proposes to call krypton. The discovery was effected, like that of argon, by the aid of the spectroscope. The presence of krypton was detected by the existence in the spectrum of a green line, which M. Berthelot saw yesterday (the Times correspondent notes) in a minute tube containing the two-millionth of a pound which Professor Ramsay has sent with his letter. According to the description forwarded to M. Berthelot, krypton belongs, not to the argon, but to the helium family, and its density is somewhat greater than oxygen. It appears to be a simple body and monatomic.

Ramsay and Travers read their paper on the discovery at the Royal Society of London meeting on 9 June 1898:

From what has preceded, it may be concluded that the atmosphere contains a hitherto undiscovered gas with a characteristic spectrum, heavier than argon, and less volatile than nitrogen, oxygen, and argon; the ratio of its specific heats would lead to the inference that it is monatomic, and therefore an element. If this conclusion turns out to be well substantiated, we propose to call it “krypton,” or “hidden.” Its symbol would then be Kr.

But this was not the first time that Ramsay had attempted to use the name krypton. In 1895, he detected what he thought to be a new element, and his laboratory notes show that he intended to call it krypton. But it turned out that what Ramsay had found was not a new element but rather helium, which had previously been detected in the spectra of the sun and in volcanic effluvia. But Ramsay’s disappointment in this case was assuaged by his being the first to isolate helium in a laboratory.

Krypton as the name of Superman’s home planet is the invention of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster and is first mentioned in Action Comics #1 of June 1938, the issue in which Superman makes his debut.

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Sources:

Jensen, William B. “Why Helium Ends in “-ium.” Journal of Chemical Education, 81.7, July 2004, 944. DOI: 10.1021/ed081p944.

“Krypton and Dynammon.” The Westminster Gazette, 7 June 1898, 4/2. The British Newspaper Archive.

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. krypton, n.

Ramsay, William and Morris W. Travers. “On a New Constituent of Atmospheric Air” (9 June 1898). Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, 63, 1898, 405–08 at 407. JSTOR.

Photo credit: Heinrich Pniok, 2006. Wikimedia Commons. Used under a Creative Commons ‘Attribution-NonCommercial-NonDerivative 3.0 (US) license.

G.I.

G.I.s waiting to advance against the Japanese on the island of Vella Lavella in the Southwest Pacific, 13 September 1943

6 December 2023

A G.I. is an American soldier, and G.I. is used as an adjective denoting things related to the U.S. military. The term came into its own during World War II, but its origins go back somewhat further.

G.I. started out as a U.S. military abbreviation for galvanized iron. A War Department list of supplies from 1909 lists G.I. as a type of pipe. And an operations order for a 1913 training exercise by the Nebraska National Guard lists “Three Pails G.I.” as items to be loaded onto a supply wagon.

And during World War I, artillery shells and bombs were called G.I. cans by American soldiers. A poem by Albert J. Cook published in 1919 includes these lines:

There’s about two million fellows and there’s some of them who lie
Where eighty-eights and G.I.’s gently drop;
Where the trucks and trains are jamming and the colonel he is damning
Half of the earth and in particular the Service of Supply.

And by World War I that G.I. was informally applied to all sorts of items, from clothing to weapons. Most likely, soldiers had seen G.I., referring to galvanized iron on various supply inventories and reinterpreted it to mean Government Issue. The December 1918 unit newsletter of Ambulance Company 33, jocularly titled La Trine Rumor, contains a cartoon of Santa Claus delivering a bag of goodies to the company with the caption “A G.I. Christmas.”

The term continued to be used in soldier slang during the interwar years. Ray Hoyt’s 1935 account of life in the Civilian Conservation Corps, a Depression-era work-relief program that was managed by the U.S. Army includes a reference to G.I. blankets:

No man of the million who have been in the C.C.C. will forget his first days in “conditioning” camp. Memories of the “needle,” or his “ankle chokers,” or his first “snipe” hunt will stay with him always. He will never forget the first time he tried to balance a mess kit full of food, his first night on woolen G.I. blankets, nor his first contact with an Army sergeant.

And it is in 1939 that we first see a published source use G.I. to refer to a soldier. The 1939 edition of Bugle Notes, a handbook for cadets at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point contains a glossary with an entry that reads: “G.I., n. An enlisted man.”

But it was World War II that made the obscure U.S. Army slang term into a household word. The 1942 War Dictionary has this entry for the term that attests to the ubiquity of the term:

G.I. (abbrv.), Government Issue, said for anything and everything in food, clothing and equipment issued to the army: G.I. soap, G.I. ash cans, G.I. buckets. However, “G.I. ash cans” may also mean heavy artillery shells. “G.I. hop” stands for a government-sponsored dance for soldiers, while “G.I. girls” are the girls brought by official chaperons to such dances.

And the inaugural, 17 June 1942 issue of Yank magazine, a publication by the U.S. Army for soldiers serving around the world, on 17 June 1942 contains multiple uses of G.I., such as this one:

The inaugural “G.I. Joe” cartoon by David Breger

Sixty-cent cables and microfilm mail are now available to American expeditionary forces.

A list of 103 fixed-test phrases, covering practically every situation in the life of a G.I., have been written. The sender may incorporate up to three of these texts in a cable or radiogram. Cost of the entire message will be 60 cents plus Federal tax, including address and signature. The ordinary cable rate is 20 to 40 cents a word.

G.I. Joe is another term used to refer to a generic American soldier. Green’s Dictionary of Slang has a citation of the term from 1935, but I have been unable to verify it, and the snippet is too short to determine its context. But G.I. Joe became popular through its use as a title of a cartoon series whose main character was a soldier. The cartoon, by David Breger, began publication in that same issue of Yank magazine on 17 June 1942.

The G.I. Joe toy debuted in 1964.

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Sources:

Breger, David. “G.I. Joe” (cartoon). Yank, 17 June 1942, 24. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

“Cable Home at 60¢ Per.” Yank, 17 June 1942, 3/4. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Cook, Albert J. “There’s About Two Million Fellows.” In Paul S. Bliss. Victory: History of the 805th Pioneer Infantry. St. Paul, MN: 1919, 220–21 at 221. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

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

Hoyt, Ray. We Can Take It. New York: American Book Company, 1935, 51. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

La Trine Rumor, December 1818. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Lighter, J. E. Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, vol. 1 of 2. New York: Random House, 1994, 888–89, s.v. GI, n., GI, adj.

Ottosen, P. H. Trench Artillery A.E.F. Boston: Lothrop, Lee, & Shepard, 1931, between 240–241. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. G.I., n., G.I. Joe, n. [Note: the 2023 update to the OED has a glitch in this entry. Section C.1. in the old version, compounds formed from G.I., have been orphaned in a separate entry that does not appear in search results. There is a link to the compounds in the main entry.]

Parry, Louise G. The War Dictionary. Chicago: Consolidated Book Publishers, 1942, s.v. G.I. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Quartermaster-General, War Department. List of Class A Supplies. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1909, 54. Hathi Trust Digital Archive.

State of Nebraska Adjutant General’s Office. “BULLETIN No. 2. Plans and Regulations for Maneuvers of Nebraska National Guard August 11–20 Inclusive.” Lincoln, NE: 19 May 1913. HathiTrust Digital Archive. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uiug.30112112096943&seq=6

Image credits. Vella Lavella photo: US Army Signal Corps Photo, 1943. Public domain image. G.I. Joe cartoon: David Breger, 1942. Public domain image.