tacit

Illustration of socage, the requirement of service to a lord’s estate in a 14th-century manuscript, peasants harvesting wheat for their lord

11 March 2024

Tacit is an adjective that denotes something that is silently or wordlessly understood. It’s etymology is quite straightforward, a borrowing from the Latin tacitus, the past participle of the verb tacere, meaning to be silent.

Thomas Eliot’s 1538 dictionary records the Latin. Early dictionaries like this one included only foreign words, proper nouns, or otherwise “hard” words. It’s an indication that the word might be encountered by an English reader, but not necessarily that it had yet been assimilated into the language:

Tacenda, those thynges whiche are not to be spoken.
Taceo, ta, cui, tacêre, to kepe sylence, to be in reste, to be quyete, to be sure.
Tacito pede, softely, by stelthe.
Tacitum est, not a worde is spoken of it.
Taciturnitas, tatis, sylence.
Tacitus, he that holdethe his peace, and is secrete.
Tacitus, citius audies, be styl, thou shalt here the sooner.
Tacitè, without speakynge one worde.

Eliot includes a nearly identical set of entries in his 1542 Bibliotheca Eliotæ.

The earliest use of tacit in English discourse that I know of is in Richard Taverner’s 1540 The Principal Lawes, Customes, and Estatutes of England, in a passage that describes what constitutes an unspoken manumission of a serf:

Lykewyse yf the Lorde maketh a feoffement to his villayne, and maketh vnto hym lyuery of seysin, thys also is an enfranchisment and secret manumission[n]. Brefely to speke, where so euer the lorde compelleth his vyllaine by the course of the lawe to do that thyng that he myght otherwyse e[n]force him to do or to suffre without the auctoritie and compulsion of the lawe, he doth by implication enfranchise his villayne, as if the lorde wyl bryng agaynst his villayne an action of det, an action of accompt, of couenant or of trespace, these and such lyke be in the eye of the lawe enfranchisementes and manumissions, bycause that the lorde in all these cases may haue the effecte and purpose of his suite (that is to saye) the goodes, catels, and correctio[n] of his bondman without the compulsion of the lawe euen by his owne propre power and authoritie whyche he hath vpon hys villayne. But if the lord doth sue his vilayne by an appeale of felonye, the villayne beyng lawfully endyted of the same before, this is no tacite manumission or infranchiseme[n]te, for the lorde though he haue power to beate his villaine and to spoyle him of his goodes, yet he can not by the lawe of this Realme put him to deathe.

(Likewise, if a lord invests one of his serfs with a fief, and gives him title to land, this is also an enfranchisement and silent manumission. In short, wherever a lord compels one of his serfs by recourse to the law to do something that he might otherwise have the power to make him do without the authority and compulsion of the law, he by implication enfranchises that serf; for example, if a lord brings against one of his serfs an action of debt, an action of account, of covenant, or of trespass, these and like actions are enfranchisements and manumissions in the eyes of the law, because a lord in all these cases has the effect and purpose of his suit, that is to say the goods, chattel, and correction of his bondman without compulsion of the law by his own proper power and authority which he has over his serfs. But if a lord sues one of his serfs by an appeal of felony, the serf being lawfully indicted of the same, this is no tacit manumission or enfranchisement, for a lord, though he has power to beat his serfs and to take their goods, he cannot by the law of this realm put them to death.)

In other words, if a lord takes a legal action that treats a serf as if they were free, then it is a tacit admission that the serf is indeed a free person, and the serf is indeed free.

Since the sixteenth century, tacit has pretty much come through the centuries unchanged in meaning or form.

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Sources:

Eliot, Thomas. The Dictionary of Syr Thomas Eliot Knyght. London: Thomas Bertelet, 1538, sig. Bb.6r. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

———. Bibliotheca Eliotæ. London: Thomas Berthelet, 1542, s.v. tacitè. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Lexicons of Early Modern English (LEME). Accessed 28 January 2024.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. tacit, adj.

Taverner, Richard. The Principal Lawes, Customes, and Estatutes of England. London: 1540, fol. 52v–53r. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Image credit: Queen Mary Psalter, British Library, Royal MS 2 B.vii, fol. 78v. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

neon

Broadway and Times Square, New York City, at night

8 March 2024

Neon is a chemical element, a noble gas, with atomic number 10 and the symbol Ne. It was discovered in 1898 by William Ramsay and Morris W. Travers, who named it after the Greek νέον (new). Neon has a small number of applications, the most well known of which is, of course, in lighting and signage because it emits a distinctive reddish-orange glow when an electrical current is applied to it.

The word is also used as an adjective to describe something that brightly or gaudily colored. We see this adjectival use as early as 1930. There is this article from the Omaha World-Herald of 2 February 1930 describing plans for an upcoming airshow:

A new sport trainer, as yet unfinished, will be shown by Overland Airways. The craft is being assembled for government tests for an approved type certificate from the department of commerce, and should be completed within the next 10 days, according to Roy Furstenburg, president of the company. It is to be painted a “neon red” color.

While neon signs glow red, the adjective is not restricted to that color. For instance, we have this note on golfers’ sartorial choices that appeared in the Oregonian on 17 March 1933:

Somewhat more brightly hued, almost to the point of being lurid, is a chiffon frock in a blue that might be called Neon blue, and which is sashed in bright fuchsia red.

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Sources:

“Air Concerns Co-Operate in Offering Plane Show.” Omaha World-Herald (Nebraska), 2 February 1930, 2-C/4. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Jones, Catherine. “Three-Piece Dress New for Golfers.” Oregonian (Portland), 27 March 1933, 6/3. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

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, third edition, September 2003, s.v. neon, n. and adj.

Ramsay, William and Morris W. Travers. “On the Companions of Argon.” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, 63, 13 June 1898, 437–40 at 438–39. JSTOR.

Photo credit: Willem van Bergen, 2006. Flickr. https://www.flickr.com/photos/willemvanbergen/271211849/ Used under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.

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.