lunatic fringe

Image: Cubist Room, International Exhibition of Modern Art, Chicago 1913

6 March 2024

As commonly used today, a lunatic fringe is an extremist minority in a movement or group. But that’s not its original meaning. The earliest uses of the phrase deprecatingly refer to a woman’s hairstyle, one where the hair is cut straight across the forehead, that is to say, in bangs. The phrase appears in the 1870s as part of a cluster of similar terms for bangs, including idiot fringe and convict style. From these, the underlying metaphor is clear. The hairstyle was called that because they resembled the haircuts given to those who were institutionalized.

The political use of lunatic fringe to denote an extremist group crops up shortly after the name of the hairstyle became popular, but then disappears from published sources until it is reintroduced and popularized in 1913 by Theodore Roosevelt. Whether this political usage remained in slang use in the intervening decades, not seeing the light of publication, or if Roosevelt recoined the term is uncertain.

The phrase idiot fringe first appears in the pages of the London Daily News on 15 March 1873, and the article was reprinted in a number of papers in the United States in the weeks that followed:

Indeed, a great many ideas have been borrowed from that opera [i.e., La Coupe du Roi de Thule] by Paris modistes and hair-dressers, who not unfrequently do up ladies of a respectable age to imitate “the syrens of the Coral Cave.” One of the insensate things decidedly out of date is “the idiot fringe.” Those who wish to limit their foreheads to the depth of the eyebrow should make use of curling-irons, and keep the Roman Empresses in their heads.

And we see convict style alongside idiot fringe in Vermont’s St. Albans Daily Messenger of 26 April 1873:

“Convict style” and “idiot fringe” are the appropriate and suggestive names applied to two of the present styles of arranging the front hair.

And lunatic fringe itself appears twice in a short story, titled Four Days, published in February 1874:

“Was that why you studied so hard all winter, and wouldn’t go to singing-school, you sly thing?” said Lizzie, eyebrows and lunatic fringe almost meeting again.

We see lunatic fringe used in relation to politics in the midst of the hotly contested Tilden-Hayes presidential election of 1876. A letter published in Connecticut’s Daily Constitution of 26 July 1876, and reprinted in papers across the country, has the following. In this passage lunatic fringe is still literally denoting the hairstyle, but it’s also being associated with extreme political positions, in particular the Ku Klux Klan, which the letter-writer claims has engineered the nomination of Tilden against the wishes of the Democratic rank and file:

“Lunatic fringe,” is the term applied now-a-days to the short cropped hair so often seen dangling on a lady’s forehead. But Tilden with a “hard-money” label dangling on his breast, a “soft-money” label on his back, with “reform” painted on his forehead, “free schools” swinging from one ear, for the Protestant “church schools,” and from the other for the Catholic, with one hand filled with “pudding-tickets” to make the illegal vote of New York City overcome the honest vote of the State, and other had filled with stolen Western town and county railroad subscriptions, is the most be-“fringed” spectacle now on exhibition.

But I have been unable to find any other non-coiffure-related uses of lunatic fringe until 29 March 1913, when Theodore Roosevelt published a disparaging review of the seminal, and therefore controversial, International Exhibition of Modern Art, held at the 69th Regimental Armory in New York City from February to March of that year, and therefore popularly labeled as the Armory Show. The show, which would subsequently move on to Chicago and Boston included artists such as Cassatt, Cézanne, Degas, Delacroix, Duchamp, Gauguin, van Gogh, Kandinsky, Toulouse-Lautrec, Manet, Matisse, Monet, Munch, Picasso, Renoir, Rodin, Seurat, and Whistler, among others.

Roosevelt wrote of the exhibit:

Probably in any reform movement, any progressive movement, in any field of life, the penalty for avoiding the commonplace is a liability to extravagance. It is vitally necessary to move forward and to shake off the dead hand, often the fossilized dead hand, of the reactionaries; and yet we have to face the fact that there is apt to be a lunatic fringe among the votaries of any forward movement. In this recent art exhibition the lunatic fringe was fully in evidence, especially in the rooms devoted to the Cubists and the Futurists, or Near-Impressionists.

We don’t know if Roosevelt put into print a slang term that was common, but unpublished, at the time or if he recalled its use from the days of his youth, but the combination of avant-garde art and a titan of American politics proved irresistible, and his comment was reprinted in papers across the country and entered American political parlance for good. We see it starting to appear, independent of quotations of Roosevelt, the following month, when this appears in the 20 April 1913 edition of the Duluth News Tribune:

Every new movement has its “lunatic fringe;” the more important and vital the subject the more pronounced this fringe. This is inevitable. In common parlance these effervescent, vociferous extremists are known to politics as demagogues, men who talk more than they think.

Roosevelt would use the phrase again a few months later in the context of politics. From Portland’s Oregonian of 12 October 1913:

As I have already said, there is a lunatic fringe to every reform movement. At least nine-tenths of all the sincere reformists supported me; but the ultra-pacifists, the so-called anti-imperialists, or anti-militarists, or peace-at-any-price men, preferred Croker to me.

I suspect there are political uses of lunatic fringe between 1876 and 1913 that have yet to be found. As more old newspapers are digitized and as more smaller databases are explored, such uses may very well appear. But until then the question of whether Roosevelt recoined the expression or if he simply brought a slang usage into the mainstream cannot be decided.

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Sources:

“Fashionable Frivolities in Paris.” London Daily News, 15 March 1873, 5/7. NewspaperArchive.com.

“In General.” St. Albans Daily Messenger (Vermont), 26 April 1873, 1/6. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

May, Sophie. “Four Days.” Oliver Optic’s Magazine, February 1874, 140–43 at 142/1 and 143/1. Google Books. (The OED has this same citation as coming from the magazine Our Boys and Girls of the same date.)

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, July 2023, s.v. lunatic fringe, n. and adj.; November 2010, s.v. idiot fring, n.

“Our Washington Letter” (26 July 1876). Daily Constitution (Middletown, Connecticut), 29 July 1876, 2/2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Roosevelt, Theodore. “Colonel Roosevelt Turns the Spotlight of Reminiscence on the N.Y. Governorship.” Oregonian (Portland), 12 October 1913, 6/2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Roosevelt, Theodore. “A Layman’s View of an Art Exhibition.” The Outlook, 29 March 1913, 718–20 at 719/1. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

“Solvent Insanity.” Duluth News Tribune (Minnesota), 20 April 1913, 6/1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Tréguer, Pascal. “‘Idiot Fringe’: Meanings and Origin.” Wordhistories.net, 31 August 2023.

———. “‘Lunatic Fringe’: Meanings and Origin.” Wordhistories.net, 1 September 2023.

Image credit: Anonymous photographer, 1913. Wikimedia Commons. Art Institute of Chicago. Public domain photo.

SWAT / swatting

St Charles County, Missouri SWAT Team in Ferguson, Missouri (St. Louis County) following the killing of Michael Brown by police

4 March 2024

SWAT is a US police acronym of the phrase Special Weapons and Tactics. A SWAT team is a paramilitary police unit trained and equipped to engage in situations where violence was expected, such as hostage situations and drug raids.

According to Mitchel P. Roth’s Historical Dictionary of Law Enforcement, the first SWAT teams were formed in Philadelphia in 1964 in response to a series of bank robberies. And from there, the concept expanded to other cities, notably Los Angeles. But I have been unable find any primary source documentation for this claim. Perhaps the Philadelphia police had the concept but not the name. (Despite being labeled a Historical Dictionary, Roth’s book contains no usage citations.)

The earliest use of SWAT or Special Weapons and Tactics that I have found is in a plan to combat riots formulated by Daryl F. Gates, who would later become chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, that was submitted to the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders in October 1967:

SPECIAL WEAPONS AND TACTICS TEAM (SWAT – TEAMS)

[…]

Composed of four permanent team members (including one Special Weapons Marksman, one observer and two shotgun men). SWAT Teams operate as team (or combined with other SWAT Teams as squads or platoons) to form special tactical missions upon request of the Field Commander.

The report was not initially made available to the public, and the first public reference to SWAT teams that I’m aware of is on 15 February 1968 when the Associated Press reported on the Los Angeles Police Departments plan to create such teams:

A new concept called SWAT is included in a comprehensive antiriot plan developed by the Los Angeles Police Department, which had to cope with the disastrous 1965 Watts riots.

The plan is in a 150-page outline disclosed today but prepared and published last month at the request of the President’s Commission on Civil Disorders.

“We have a SWAT team,” said police inspector Merton W. Howe, commander of tactical operations planning for the department. “That’s our Special Weapons and Tactics team which breaks into four-man groups—a rifleman whose weapon has telescopic sights, a spotter and two officers with shotguns and hand guns to provide cover fire.”

Initially designed as a response to public unrest in the late 1960s, the concept gained traction and rapidly expanded to police departments across the United States as part of the “War on Drugs” and the growing militarization of American police forces.

More recently, swat has become a slang term for harassing someone by making a false report of a violent situation with the intent of having victim arrested or even killed by a police SWAT team. The slang term dates to at least October 2006 when the Journal News of White Plains, New York reported on the practice:

A telephone call had come into the Yonkers police dispatcher moments before that traced back to Fata’s apartment. The caller had told the dispatcher that he had cut his girlfriend’s throat, was armed with an assault rifle and would shoot any police officer who came near him.

[…]

At police headquarters, detectives questioned him for several hours and replayed the 911 call. Although Caller ID said the call came from Fata’s apartment, detectives eventually realized it was his voice on the tape.

And while Yonkers police are now declining to comment on the case, other than to say it was closed, by all appearances Fata was the likely victim of a legal phenomenon known as “spoofing,” coupled with an illegal phenomenon known as “swatting.”

Spoof cards and Web sites have been around for several years. They allow anyone to pay a fee to change the number that appears on the Caller ID service of the person they are calling. But in recent years, there has been a rise in the illegal use of the cards to make false reports to police.

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Sources:

Associated Press. “L.A. Riot Control Plan Is New Concept.” Jackson Sun (Tennessee), 15 February 1968, 9-A/5–6. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Gates, Daryl F. “Model Civil Disturbance Control Plan.” National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, 30 October 1967, 110. In Civil Rights During the Johnson Administration, Part 5: Record of the National Advisory Committee on Civil Disorders (Kerner Commision), Subject Files of the Associate Director for Public Safety (Series 21), Police Mobilization During Riots, October 27, 1967–October 30, 1967. ProQuest.

Hughes, Bill. “Caller ID Pranks Causing Trouble.” Journal News (White Plains, New York), 30 October 2006, 1B/6–2B/1. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

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

Roth, Mitchel P. Historical Dictionary of Law Enforcement. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2001, s.v. Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT), 333–334. Pro-Quest Ebook Central.

Urbandictionary.com, 18 December 2007, s.v. swatting. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Swatting

Photo credit: Jamelle Bouie, 13 August 2014. Wikipedia. Use under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

moscovium

The author in Red Square, Moscow, January 1984

1 March 2024

Moscovium is a synthetic chemical element with atomic number 115 and the symbol Mc. It is extremely radioactive, its longest-lived isotope has a half-life of less than a second. It has no applications other than pure research.

Element 115 was first synthesized in 2003 at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) in Dubna, Russia. But in 2016, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) awarded credit for the discovery to a collaborative project between JINR and the Lawrence Livermore and Oak Ridge National Laboratories in the United States. The name Moscovium was officially announced in a JINR press release of 6 January 2016, although undoubtedly there are earlier uses to be found in internal JINR papers and notes:

Regarding element 115, our proposal has been repeatedly announced; this is Moscovium that honors the Moscow Region as a whole (Moscow and Moscow Oblast)—the place where this research has been carried out and whose officials and organizations strongly contributed to its development (support of the Russian Academy of Sciences, grants of the Ministry for Education and Research of Russian Federation, of Rosatom, of the Russian Foundation for Basic Research, of the Governors of the Moscow region B. V. Gromov and A. Yu. Vorobyov).

Dubna is in the Moscow Oblast, some 80 miles (125 kilometers) from the city.

IUPAC guidelines formulated in 2016 require new elements be named after either a mythological character or concept (or an astronomical object named after such a mythological concept), a mineral, a place, or a scientist. Elements in columns 1–16 of the periodic table take the usual suffix -ium. Those in column 17 take the suffix -ine, and those in column 18 the suffix -on. Moscovium is in column 15, hence the -ium ending. Of course, older names for elements may not conform to these guidelines.

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Sources:

Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR). “Discovery of the New Chemical Elements with Numbers 113, 115, 117 and 118” (press release), 6 January 2016.

Karol, Paul J., et al. “Discovery of the elements with atomic numbers Z = 113, 115 and 117 (IUPAC Technical Report).” Journal of Pure and Applied Chemistry, 88.1–2, 2016, 139–53. DOI: 10.1515/pac-2015-0502.

Miśkowiec, Pawel. “Name Game: The Naming History of the Chemical Elements—Part 3—Rivalry of Scientists in the Twentieth Century.” Foundations of Chemistry, 12 November 2022. DOI: 10.1007/s10698-022-09452-9.

Oganessian, Yuri Tsolakovich, et al. “Experiments on the Synthesis of Element 115 in the Reaction ²⁴³Am(⁴⁸Ca,xn)^291−x115.” Physical Review C, 69, 2 February 2004, 021601-1–5. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevC.69.021601.

critical race theory / critical legal studies

28 June 2021

[28 February 2024: added information about the 1989 t-shirt]

Critical race theory (CRT) is nothing new. The term itself is over thirty years old, and the school of thought has its roots in the early 1970s, making it around fifty years old. Different researchers take different approaches to the topic, and there is no single, agreed definition of what exactly constitutes critical race theory, but it is essentially a lens for examining how present-day institutional power structures serve to benefit white people over Black people.

The key element in critical race theory is that it posits that the procedures and substance of American institutions and law are structured, wittingly or unwittingly, to maintain white privilege. More specifically, there are several tenets of critical race theory that most scholars working the field would agree with:

• Race is a social construction, not a biological one.

• “Color-blind” laws and institutions tend to marginalize and obscure inequality; therefore, race should be made visible.

• Interest convergence. Reforms that are intended to benefit minorities tend to only happen when they also benefit the white majority.

• Intersectionality. Inequality and subordination operate on multiple axes (e.g., race, class, gender, sexuality, etc.; a Black, working-class woman’s experience of oppression is different from that of a white, working-class woman or a Black, professional man.

And just as there is no universally accepted definition, there is no single methodology that CRT scholars use, but many use narrative and story-telling to make visible inequality and oppression and their effects. Critical race theory may be taught in some undergraduate-level university classes, but it is primarily found only at the graduate level. It is not found in primary or secondary education.

There are some right-wing political activists who use the term critical race theory as a political boogeyman to cater to the fears of the white majority in America and advance a racist political agenda. Their strawman of critical race theory bears little or no resemblance to CRT as it is actually studied. It attempts to define CRT as encompassing any discussions of race or racism in the United States today or in its history, and it claims the purpose of CRT is to disparage the United States and white Americans. This strawman, which is not a critique of CRT as it is actually practiced, arose as a response to the New York Times 1619 Project, which on the 400th anniversary of the introduction of slavery to North America produced primary and secondary school teaching materials about the history of slavery and racial oppression in the United States.

The critical in the name comes out of the social philosophy of Critical Theory, which examines society and culture to reveal and challenge power structures. Critical Theory was championed by the Frankfurt school of philosophy in the 1930s and 40s, especially the writings of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, and was further developed in the 1960s by Jürgen Habermas and others.

Beginning in the early 1970s, a group of scholars, including Derrick Bell, Mari Matsuda, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Richard Delgado, Kendall Thomas, Patricia Williams, and Neil Gotanda, started extending critical theory into the law, but with a focus on race, formulating what would become known as critical legal studies (CLS).

But critical legal studies and the subsequent critical race theory diverge sharply from their progenitor, Critical Theory. For one, they focus on race, which is absent from Critical Theory, and they do not focus on social class and economics as primary factors in their analysis. (Class and economics can enter into critical race theory via intersectionality, but they are not the core focus.) Furthermore, both CLS and CRT differ from the modernist Critical Theory in that they abandon the universalist and teleological Marxist elements of the latter in favor of a more localized and relative approach. They are post-modern schools of thought in that they seek to situate power structures and inequality in particular and dynamic historical and cultural contexts. Therefore, the labeling of critical race theory as Marxist, as many critics of the approaches do, is incorrect. Critical race theory doesn’t even fit the loosest definition of Marxist, that is analysis that focuses on social class and economics.

Derrick Bell’s 1973 book Race, Racism, and American Law, is the foundational document in critical legal studies, but that book doesn’t use the term itself. The phrase critical legal scholars is in place by 1982, when it appears in the May issue of the Harvard Law Review:

The discipline’s growing self-consciousness is largely attributable to the critical legal scholars, a small group of academics who emerged as a self-identified school in the late 1970’s.

And another Harvard Law Review article, this one a review of Derrick Bell’s And We Are Not Saved: The Elusive Quest for Racial Justice from February 1988, uses the phrase critical legal studies and gives an apt definition:

The central tenet of the critical legal studies movement—insofar as there is one—is that law and legal consciousness mask the collective choices implicit in existing social arrangements. By making institutions appear fair and rational, law induces ideological consent to hierarchical systems. Litigation and legal change, in this view, also entrench oppression by making remaining inequities seem inevitable and even just

Critical legal studies remains an unorthodox viewpoint in legal studies, although its methodology of using narrative to advance an argument, much criticized in the early years, has become a standard practice in the law.

By the late 1980s, the critical legal scholars were expanding their approach beyond the law, into the humanities and other social sciences, and the term critical race theory first appears in the summer of that year. From an article by Anthony E. Cook in the summer 1989 issue of the Florida Law Review:

While I will not repeat those concerns here, suffice it to say that African-American history (and the African-American critical race theory that builds upon it) illustrates the need to connect theoretical reflection on what constitutes the good life to pragmatic efforts to secure that state of existence in the real world.

Also that summer, a conference on critical race theory was held in Madison, Wisconsin, 7–12 July 1989 that moved the scholarly movement beyond legal studies. Fred Shapiro obtained a photo of t-shirt from that Wisconsin workshop with lettering that reads:

1st
Critical Race Theory Workshop
St. Benedict Center
Madison, Wisconsin
July 7–12, 1989

So between Cook’s article and the t-shirt, the phrase critical race theory was clearly in use among scholars of that sub-field that summer, if not earlier.

Later in 1989, Randall Kennedy, a professor at Harvard Law School teaching contracts, criminal law, and the regulation of race relations, published an article arguing against the critical legal studies approach, and a 5 January 1990 article about Kennedy’s piece in the New York Times appears to be the first use of the critical race theory outside of narrow circle of CLS scholars. Richard Delgado, who is quoted in the Times piece using the term, was an attendee at the Wisconsin conference:

In the article, “Racial Critiques of Legal Academia,” Prof. Randall Kennedy of Harvard Law School sharply criticizes several prominent examples of a new approach to scholarship that is often called “critical race studies,” or “new minority scholarship.”

The new scholars take an avowedly racial or ethnic view of the law, arguing that the legal system and the nation’s elite law schools perpetuate a form of institutional racism.

[...]

In many of their works, they disregard cases and statutes, the usual fodder for law review articles. They use stories to make points on how racial issues are dealt with by society and the courts. And the stories are often intensely personal, a dramatic departure from the neutral, analytic approach of most law reviews.

[...]

Mr. [Richard] Delgado of Wisconsin [Law School], who is of Hispanic descent, said some who see the legal world as hostile to minority views have already expressed the fear that “appointment committees across the land will seize on this article and say, ‘See, even Harvard Law School has declared this new critical race theory junk,’ and use that as a way of justifying business as usual—that is, minorities won’t get hired.”

The Times piece is unusual in that it is published before the papers from the Wisconsin conference. Those started coming out in early 1990, including this one from Delgado in the Virginia Law Review of February 1990, which also shows a widening of the field beyond legal studies:

These and other scholars writing in this vein occasionally refer to themselves as the Critical Race Theory or New Race Theory group. I shall use these terms interchangeably.

Whatever label is applied to this loose coalition, its scholarship is characterized by the following themes: (1) an insistence on "naming our own reality"; (2) the belief that knowledge and ideas are powerful; (3) a readiness to question basic premises of moderate/incremental civil rights law; (4) the borrowing of insights from social science on race and racism; (5) critical examination of the myths and stories powerful groups use to justify racial subordination; (6) a more contextualized treatment of doctrine; (7) criticism of liberal legalisms; and (8) an interest in structural determinism-the ways in which legal tools and thought-structures can impede law reform

Yet another illustrative early use is in an article about the implementation of budget cuts at the City University of New York (CUNY) in the premiere issue of the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education in the fall of 1993. The article opens:

There is a mildly radical school of opinion in this country called "critical race theory." This group of black, Hispanic, and white intellectuals contends, among other things, that when liberal whites and other well-intentioned people take action to solve one of the nation's problems, the outcome will usually favor whites. The thesis holds that no matter how noble the motives and ostensibly fair and even-handed the solution, blacks will lose ground and be left with one more message that they are socially and educationally marginal and just do not belong.

And the closing paragraph of the article reads:

Clearly the decision of the CUNY trustees and the Goldstein Committee Report, upon which it is based, were not racially motivated. Yet possibly, as the critical racial theorists contend, the unequal impact on blacks is simply what happens when those who hold power make decisions that control the lives of those who don't.

That’s how critical race theory, both the term and the practice arose.

Discuss this post

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Sources:

Ansell, Amy E. “Critical Race Theory.” In Richard T. Schaefer, ed. Encyclopedia of Race Ethnicity, and Society. Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications, 2008, 345–47.

“The Battleground of Experience.” Harvard Law Review, 101.4, February 1988, 849n. JSTOR.

Bell, Derrick A. Race, Racism, and American Law. Boston: Little Brown, 1973. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Bohman, James. “Critical Theory.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 8 March 2005.

Capers, I. Bennett. “Critical Race Theory.” The Oxford Handbook of Criminal Law. Markus D. Dubber and Tatjana Hörnle. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2014. Oxford Handbooks Online.

Cook, Anthony E. “The Postmodern Quest for Community: an Introduction to a Symposium on Republicanism and Voting Rights.” Florida Law Review, 41.3, Summer 1989, 441. HeinOnline.

Cross, Theodore L. “Race, the Humanities, and Downsizing at CUNY. The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, 1.1, Autumn 1993, 10. JSTOR.

Delgado, Richard. “When a Story Is Just a Story: Does Voice Really Matter?” Virginia Law Review, 76.1, February 1990, 95. JSTOR.

Kennedy, David. “Critical Theory, Structuralism and Contemporary Legal Scholarship.” New England Law Review, 21.2, 1985–86, 209–90. HeinOnline.

Kennedy, Randall, L. “Racial Critiques of Legal Academia.” Harvard Law Review, 102.8, June 1989, 1745–1819. JSTOR.

Rothfeld, Charles. “Minority Critic Stirs Debate on Minority Writing.” New York Times, 5 January 1990, B6. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

“‘Round and ‘Round the Bramble Bush: From Legal Realism to Critical Legal Scholarship. Harvard Law Review, 95.7, May 1982, 1669. JSTOR.

Shapiro, Fred. “Earliest Citation for ‘Critical Race Theory.’” ADS-L, 7 November 2021.

———. “Unconventional Earliest Citation for the Term ‘Critical Race Theory.’” ADS-L, 14 February 2024.

bachelor

1947 movie poster for The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer

28 February 2024

This word for an unmarried man has had several meanings over the centuries. Bachelor is borrowed from Anglo-Norman bacheler, which is presumably from the Latin baccalaria, a division of land. The normal sound changes would lead us to conclude that the French is from the form baccalaris, but that form is rare and not attested to until the medieval period, and those instances may be borrowings from one or more of the Romance languages that had by then split from their Latin ancestor. The adjectives baccalarius and baccalaria appear in the eighth century, applied to male and female farm workers, so bachelor may have originally referred to a man who worked on a farm.

By the turn of the fourteenth century we see bachelor appear in English, and here it had the meaning of a squire or young knight. We see it in the life of St. John the Evangelist in the Early South English Legendary. The story is of St. John turning ordinary items into precious metals and gems for two dissolute and penniless young knights:

Seint Iohan tornede þis ȝeordene sone : in-to puyr gold and cler,
And þe stones to ȝimmes preciouse : þoruȝh ore louerdes pouwer,
And þis twei wilde Bachilers : he ȝaf it euer-ech del.

(Saint John soon turned these arrows into pure and bright gold and the stones to precious gems through our Lord’s power, and these two impetuous bachelors he gave each one a portion.)

By the end of the that century the word added two new senses, that of a university graduate and the one most familiar to us today, that of an unmarried man. Both of these senses appear in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The first, that of a university graduate is in The Franklin’s Tale:

He hym remembred that, upon a day,
At Orliens in studie a book he say
Of magyk natureel, which his felawe,
That was that tyme a bacheler of lawe,
Al were he ther to lerne another craft,
Hadde prively upon his desk ylaft;

(He remembered that one day in Orleans, in a study, he had seen a book of natural magic, which his fellow who has at that time a bachelor of law, although he was there to learn another craft, had covertly left upon his desk.)

And the second, that of an unmarried man, is found in the Merchant’s Tale:

And trewely it sit wel to be so,
That bacheleris have often peyne and wo;
On brotel ground they buylde, and brotelnesse
They fynde whan they wene sikernesse.
They lyve but as a bryd or as a beest,
In libertee and under noon arreest,
Ther as a wedded man in his estaat
Lyveth a lyf blisful and ordinaat
Under this yok of mariage ybounde.

(And truly it is well to be so that bachelors often have pain and woe. They build on brittle ground, and they find mutability when they expect security. They live as but a bird or as a beast, in liberty and under no restraint, whereas a wedded man in his estate lives a blissful and orderly life bound under this yoke of marriage.)

These two senses are the most common today.

But there are other senses of the word. In Canada and South Africa, a bachelor apartment is a single room with attached bathroom, what in the United States is termed a studio apartment. From a classified advertisement in Toronto’s Globe and Mail from 27 November 1945:

BACHELOR
Apartment wanted by demobilized naval officer returned from five years overseas. Bank references. Apply Box 341, Globe and Mail.

By 1963 the phrase bachelor apartment was being clipped to simply bachelor.

Discuss this post

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Sources:

Anglo-Norman Dictionary, 2007, s.v. bacheler, n.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. “The Franklin’s Tale.” The Canterbury Tales, lines 5.1123–28. Harvard’s Geoffrey Chaucer Website.

———. “The Merchant’s Tale.” The Canterbury Tales, lines 1277–85. Harvard’s Geoffrey Chaucer Website.

Classified advertisement. Globe and Mail (Toronto), 27 November 1945, 25/1. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles (DCHP-2), second edition, 2017, s.v. bachelor apartment, n.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. bacheler, n.

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

“Saint John the Evangelist.” The Early South English Legendary. Carl Horstmann, ed. London: N. Trübner, 1887, 410, lines 263–65. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud 108, fol. 171v.

Image credit: 1947, RKO Radio Pictures. Wikipedia. Fair use of a low-resolution copy of a copyrighted work to illustrate the topic under discuassion.