zirconium / zircon / hyacinth

A blue zircon

3 May 2024

Zirconium is a chemical element with atomic number 40 and the symbol Zr. It is a lustrous, gray-white metal. The mineral zirconium silicate, also known as zircon, is common in the earth’s crust and has been known since antiquity. Zirconium has a variety of commercial uses, and zircon crystals are considered gemstones.

The etymology follows a rather tortuous route. Zircon is a modern borrowing from the German, which is itself a borrowing from the Italian giargone (fourteenth century), which in turn comes from the Old French jacunce. (In the thirteenth century, Middle English borrowed the French word, forming jacincte and jagounce, but these words didn’t survive into modern English.) The French root comes from the Latin hyacinthus, which in turn is from the Greek ὑάκινθος (hyakinthos). The European words are related to the Arabic الزركون (al zarqūn), although the nature of that connection is uncertain.

The Death of Hyacinth, Alexander Kiselyov, late nineteenth century, oil on canvas

In Greek myth, Hyacinthus was a Spartan prince and lover of Apollo. According to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the two were competing in throwing the discus, but Apollo’s throw accidently struck the prince, killing him. The flower grew on his grave. The hyacinth gemstone is so called because it has the color of the flower.

The modern German Zircon appears by 1780 in Axel von Cronstedts Versuch einer Mineralogie:

Dieser Stein ist gewönlich ponceau oder hiazinthenroth, welches sich zuweilen etwas ins gelbe, zuweilen mehr ins rothe, und oft auch ein wenig ins braune zieht. Selten fömt er von weisser Farbe (Zircon) vor.

(This stone is usually ponceau or hyacinth-red, which sometimes turns a little yellow, sometimes more red, and often also a little brown. Rarely it appears white in color (zircon).)

But it was Martin Klaproth, in 1789, who first identified zirconium as an element, which he dubbed Zirconerde:

Welche eine angemessenere Benennung veranlassen mögten, an ihr fennen lernen wird, den Namen Zirconerde, (Terra circonia) ben.

(Those who would like to use a more appropriate name will learn from it to use the name zircon-earth (Terra circonia).)

Zircon made its way into English in 1794 in Richard Kirwan’s Elements of Mineralogy in the form circon:

Jargonic Earth, or Jargonia.

This earth hath been discovered by Mr. Klaproth; it has as yet been found only in the stone called Jargon, or Circon, of Ceylon, of which more hereafter.

This earth resembles argill more than any other earth, though it differs essentially from it in some respects. Its colour is white, and its specific gravity probably exceeds 4,000.

(Jargon here is another variant of the mineral name and unrelated to the linguistic term.)

But it was Humphry Davy who, in 1808, dubbed the element zirconium:

From the general tenor of these results, and the comparison between the different series of experiments, there seems very great reason to conclude that alumine, zircone, glucine, and silex are, like the alkaline earths, metallic oxides, for on no other supposition is it easy to explain the phenomena that have been detailed.

The evidences of decomposition and composition, are not, however of the same strict nature as those that belong to the fixed alkalies and alkaline earths; for it is possible, that in the experiments in which the silex, alumine, and zircone appeared to separate during the oxidation of potassium and sodium, their bases might not actually have been in combination with them, but the earths themselves, in union with the metals of the alkalies, or in mere mechanical mixture.  And out of an immense number of experiments which I made of the kind last detailed, a very few only gave distinct indications of the production of any earthy matter; and in cases when earthy matter did appear, the quantity was such as rendered it impos­sible to decide on the species.

Had I been so fortunate as to have obtained more certain evidences on this subject, and to have procured the metallic substances I was in search of, I should have proposed for them the names of silicium, alumium, zirconium, and glucium.

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Sources:

Cronstedt, Axel Fredrik. Axel von Cronstedts Versuch einer Mineralogie, 1.1. Leipzig: 1780, 162. Google Books.

Davy, Humphry. “Electro-Chemical Researches, on the Decomposition of the Earths; with Observations on the Metals Obtained from the Alkaline Earths, and on the Amalgam Procured from Ammonia” (30 June 1808). Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 98, 1808, 333–70 at 352–53. DOI: 10.1098/rstl.1808.0023.

Kirwan, Richard. Elements of Mineralogy, second edition, vol. 1. London: J. Nichols for P. Elmsly, 1794, 14. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Klaproth, Martin H. “Chemische Untersuchung Des Zircons.” Der Gesellschaft Naturforschender Freunde Zu Berlin, 9. 1789, 147–176 at 171. Universität Bielefeld Universitätsbibliothek.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. jacinct(e, n., jagounce, n.

Miśkowiec, Pawel. “Name Game: The Naming History of the Chemical Elements—Part 1—From Antiquity till the End of 18th Century.” Foundations of Chemistry. 1 November 2022. DOI: 10.1007/s10698-022-09448-5.

Ovid. Metamorphoses, book 10. David Raeburn, trans. London: Penguin, 2004, 390–92.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2021, s.v. zirconium, n., zircon, n.; second edition, 1989, s.v. jargon | jargoon, n.2, jacounce | jagounce, n., jacinth, n., hyacinth, n.

Image credits: zircon, Don Guennie, 2011, Wikimedia Commons, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license; hyacinth, Alexander Kiselyov, late nineteenth century, National Museum in Warsaw, Wikimedia Commons, public domain image as a mechanical reproduction of a public domain work

spaghettify / spaghettification

Homer Simpson being spaghettified by a black hole

1 May 2024

Astronomers are often rather creative with the names they come up with for the objects and processes they discover. An example is the verb to spaghettify and the noun spaghettification. The words describe what would happen to a person (or thing) who fell into a black hole. The gravity (tidal force) at the feet of the person would be orders of magnitude stronger than at the head, causing the person to be stretched like a piece of spaghetti.

The earliest use of the words, in this case the noun spaghettification, that I have found is in Nigel Calder’s 1977 book The Key to the Universe, which was published in association with a BBC television program of the same name. In the book, however, Calder implies that the term is already in use by astronomers studying black holes:

The fate of the imagined space-traveller who stumbled upon a black hole became a commonplace way of describing the extra-ordinary work of gravity, in and around a black hole. Before being trapped and crushed, the unwary astronaut would first be stretched into spaghetti.

The first hint of trouble might be his hair standing on end, his feet and hands feeling heavy, his head light. The astronaut’s blood would drain into his limbs, bringing merciful unconsciousness before gravity rendered his body into meat, into molecules, into atoms, and eventually into a long beam of particles hurtling toward the black hole.

Spaghettification was due to the gravity intensifying, metre by metre, in the approach to a black hole. It was a tidal effect, an extreme version of the process by which the Moon would pull more strongly on sea-water immediately beneath it than on the oceans to the far side of the Earth. In the more severe conditions around a black hole, the force of gravity increased so rapidly towards the centre that it could easily be a million times stronger at the spaceman’s feet than at his head. So he would be torn apart by the tide.

And the verb sees print by 1981, when it appears in Nigel Henbest’s The Mysterious Universe:

A simple nonspinning black hole would be no good for interuniverse travel. We have already seen the fate of the unfortunate explorer of such a hole, crushed inexorably by the one-way flow of space within, into the unseen central singularity. The entrance to the interuniverse tunnel must be rotating, or an electrically charged, black hole, large enough for the intrepid explorer not to be spaghettified.

Often scientific jargon (or is it slang in this case?) remains within the discourse of the scientists, but the public’s fascination with black holes and the rather gruesome imagery of the spaghettification process has caused the term to enter into mainstream discourse. Here is an example from, of all places, in a 2000 book review in the magazine Good Housekeeping:

It's a good bet that few guidebooks reveal where you can experience “spaghettifying.” But Around Chicago with Kids (Fodor’s, $10) does. (FYI: You can become long and skinny near a black hole in space…or in front of the wall of mirrors at the city’s Adler Planetarium.)

So that’s spaghettification, a rather grim and graphic description of an astronomical process.

There is, however, an older, non-astronomical use of the term. It appears in a 1965 English translation of Alfred Jarry’s 1897 play Ubu Cocu. Jarry’s (1873–1907) works were precursors to the twentieth-century genres of Dada, Surrealism and the Theater of the Absurd. The passage from Ubu Cocu refers to what will happen to man who cuckolds another:

There’s nothing to be done with him. We’ll have to make do with twisting the nose and nears [sic], with removal of the tongue and extraction of the teeth, laceration of the posterior, hacking to pieces of the spinal marrow and the partial or total spaghettification of the brain through the heels. He shall first be impaled, then beheaded, then finally drawn and quartered. After which the gentleman will be free, through our great clemency, to go and get himself hanged anywhere he chooses. No more harm will come to him, for I wish to treat him well.

The metaphor of spaghetti is original to the English translation. Jarry’s original French reads:

arrachement partiel ou total de la cervelle par les talons

(partial or total removal of the brain through the heels)

But this earlier appearance of spaghettification is probably unrelated to the astronomical usage. While it is possible that some astronomers had read Cyril Connolly’s translation of Jarry’s play or that Connolly was conversant with astronomers and astronomical jargon, both of these seem far less likely than the idea that the two uses are separate coinages.

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Sources:

Calder, Nigel. The Key to the Universe. New York: Viking, 1977, 143. Archive.org.

“Have Tots Will Travel.” Good Housekeeping, March 2000, 69/2. ProQuest Magazine.

Henbest, Nigel. The Mysterious Universe. London: Ebury, 1981, 145. Archive.org.

Jarry, Alfred. Ubu Cocu, 5.2 (1897). In Selected Works of Alfred Jarry. Roger Shattuck and Simon Watson Taylor, eds. Cyril Connolly, trans. New York: Grove, 1965, 50. Archive.org.

———. Ubu Cocu (1897) in Tout Ubu. Maurice Saillet, ed. Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 1962, 244. Archive.org.

Image credit: Moore, Steven Dean (director) and Matt Groening (creator). “Treehouse of Horror XXIII” (TV episode). The Simpsons, 24.2, 7 October 2012. Fair use of a single frame from the animation to illustrate the topic under discussion.

cat's pajamas / whiskers / meow

Advertisement for the 1926 film The Cat’s Pajamas

29 April 2024

The phrase the cat’s pajamas (also cat’s whiskers or cat’s meow), meaning something superlative or excellent, is indelibly associated with the 1920s and the jazz age. The phrase is often credited to cartoonist Thomas Aloysius “Tad” Dorgan, but while he did use the cat’s meow (and perhaps other variants), Dorgan was not the originator.

These three are only the most popular and long-lasting in a series of animal phrases constructed with the definite article the, such as the antelope’s tonsils, bullfrog’s beard, canary’s tusks, caterpillar’s camisole/kimono/spats, clam’s cuticle/garters, crocodile’s adenoids, duck’s quack, elephant’s tonsils, frog’s eyebrows, kipper’s knickers, kitten’s vest, lion’s bathrobe, oyster’s eyetooth,  pig’s scream/whiskers, sandfly garters, snake’s eyebrows, and sparrow’s chirp. Not to mention other items belong to cats, such as cuffs, knee-knuckles, lingerie, nightgown, tonsillitis, and vest. And of course, there is the bee’s knees. It's easy to see how the idea of such rare or impossible things could give rise to a phrase denoting something that is exceptional or especially noteworthy.

The earliest use of the cat’s pajamas that I have found is in the unit newspaper of the US Army’s 21st General Hospital in Denver, Colorado of 17 July 1919. The phrase appears in an announcement that the army baseball team will play the team from the local Armour meat company:

“Say Medina,” said he, “this ball team of mine needs a lotta practice; so I’d like to have ’em come out here to the Coop every Thursday evening and stage a game with the soldiers boys. When we come out, we’ll bring something for the boys every time—some Armour food product you know. We’ll also bring along a couplea [sic] stoves on which we can cook the stuff and serve the hot wienies, fried ham sandwiches and such delectable food. Whad’ye say?”

Well, what else could O’Brien’s Helper say but that he thought it would be the cat’s pajamas to have feed like that dished up to the fellows every Thursday.

A year later in his syndicated column of 5 July 1920, Damon Runyan “records” this fictional conversation between two delegates to a political convention:

Second Delegate (angrily)—I tell you I ain’t been nowhere! I’m out here for business, and all I want now is to get somebody nominated, such as McAdoo, and go back to Springfield. I’m sick of this delay. It’s daffy people like you who are holding us back by runnin’ around town, and not being at the convention on time.

First Delegate (astounded)—Well, now, that’s sure the cats pajamas! Of course, I don’t get to the convention much, but everybody knows I’m for Jimmy Cox and they vote me that way whether I'm there or not.

This is passage is also notable in that it’s an early use of Springfield as a non-specific anytown, ala The Simpsons. (Contrary to popular belief, a town called Springfield does not exist in every state but only in thirty-four of them. Riverside, appearing in forty-six states, takes the prize.)

The cat’s pajamas also generated a short-lived dance of that name. From Kentucky’s Lexington Herald of 13 July 1921:

A couple of street dancers recently were arrested in Brooklyn for doing such vulgar steps as the “Frisco Dip” and “Elevated Swing.” Other interesting performances by the pair were the “Lame Dog” and the “Cat’s Pajamas.” Oh, Terpsichore, what outrages are committed in thy name!

And it was only a matter of time before the phrase appeared in that sub-genre of newspaper articles, those that pack an absurd amount of slang into a few column inches. Georgia’s Columbus Enquirer-Sun of 16 March 1922 has this fictional conversation:

Father—“Tell us all about the big city my lad.”

Only Son—“It’s the cat’s pajamas, dad, if you only have the boffos. What’s boffos? Why the berries, the jack, the kale. Of course, if you are a dad they give you the air. Get me mother!”

Mother—“I cannot say that I do my son.”

Unlike cat’s pajamas and the other animal phrases of its ilk, the cat’s meow and the cat’s whiskers have a different etiology, although they appear at about the same time. Cat’s whiskers and meows are common, and the sense of something exceptional arises out of the idea that these are things a cat is proud of.

The earliest such figurative use of the cat’s meow that I’m aware of is cited by the Oxford English Dictionary as coming from Pirate Piece of May 1921. Pirate Piece was the post-war unit newsletter of the 304th US Field Artillery Regiment, a “pirate piece” being a single gun detached from the unit to perform some mission or to go unnoticed by the enemy. I have been unable to find a copy, so I cannot verify the citation or provide it’s wider context:

A good letter, Quig, one like that every month would be the “cat's meow.”

The earliest use that I have verified is from a few months later, in an 11 September 1921 article in Baton Rouge, Louisiana’s State Times about movie stars and Hollywood power couple Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford:

Douglas looked like the cat’s meow, all dolled up in a nice gray flannel yachting suit and everything, and Mary, with a half-Nelson on his right forearm, in a blue silk suit lined with red silk and wearing shoes and stockings and a hat and white kid gloves and smiling like a May morning.

Early use of “the cat’s whiskers,” 1922

The cat’s whiskers makes its print debut, as far as I can tell, in a cartoon, Noozie, Sunshine Kid, appearing in Gulfport, Mississippi’s Daily Herald of 12 April 1922:

A belt is all right but a pair of suspenders is the cat’s whiskers

And three days later it appears in Omaha’s Sunday World-Herald of 15 April 1922 in an article about nine residents of the city:

Mr. Black was wearing a $10 derby at the time, and while in the midst of a sentence a gust of wind came along and blew it into the street. The brewer’s big horses coming down the road, stepped with great accuracy on the crown. Mr. Black cursed drink and all that goes with it and hen decided a $2 hat store would be the “cat’s whiskers” as it were. For sixteen years he covered the blocks of Omaha’s best citizens selling hats first from Sixteenth street near Dodge and then from the old Pease store near Fifteenth and Farnum.

There may, of course, be earlier instances of any of these yet to be found, especially of the cat’s meow or the cat’s whiskers, as literal uses of these phrases abound and it’s difficult to sift the wheat from the chaff.

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Sources:

Carroll, Ramond G. “Women Who Refuse to Bear the Names of the Men They Marry.” Columbus Enquirer-Sun (Georgia), 16 March 1922, 7/4. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“Doug and Mary in Living Picture, ‘Guests of Boy Scouts,’ Make Hit” (11 September 1921). State Times (Baton Rouge, Louisiana), 27 September 1921, 7/3. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Estes. “Sports Chat.” Lexington Herald (Kentucky), 13 July 1921, 6/4. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., s.v. cat’s pyjamas, n., cat’s meow, n., cat’s whiskers, n.

Griswold, Gerard Coburn. “What Nine Omahans Were Doing at 25.” Sunday World-Herald (Omaha, Nebraska), 15 April 1922, Magazine 3 and 11 at 11/2–3. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“Noozie, Sunshine Kind (cartoon). Daily Herald (Gulfport, Mississippi), 12 April 1922, 1/1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. cat, n.1.

Runyan, Damon. “Two Delegates Talk.” Commercial Appeal (Memphis, Tennessee), 5 July 1920, 4/5. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“Wieners, Fried Bacon, Salisbury Steaks for Loyal Rooters.” ’Tenshun, 21! (US Army General Hospital 21, Denver, Colorado), 17 July 1919, 1/6. ProQuest Magazines.

Image credits: The Cat’s Pajamas (advertisement), Paramount Pictures, 1926. Public domain image; Noozie, Sunshine Kid, unknown artist, 1922. Public domain image.

oganesson

2017 Armenian postage stamp honoring Yuri Oganessian and the discovery of element 118

26 April 2024

Oganesson is a synthetic chemical element with atomic number 118 and the symbol Og. The element is named for Yuri Oganessian (b. 1933), a lead researcher at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia. Oganesson is the second element to be named after a living person, the other being seaborgium, named for chemist Glenn Seaborg, the discoverer of plutonium. Oganesson was first synthesized in 2002 in a collaborative effort between the Joint Institute and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

On the periodic table, oganesson is grouped with the other noble gases, and it was given the -on suffix because of this. But the element’s chemical properties are largely unknown, and it may be that the element is more reactive than the other inert noble gases.

The first public mention of the name oganesson is a speculative one. In April 2016, the journal Nature Chemistry published a commentary by four scientists guessing at what would be the names of elements 113, 115, 117, and 118, which had been synthesized but not yet officially named:

Will a modern scientist be honoured, as in Philip’s selections of ghiorsonine or oganesson? Or one of the greats, such as Eric and Brett’s suggestion of moseleyon for 118? Or might they, perhaps, pick something that no one else has thought of so far? We’ll just have to wait and see.

Two months later, on 8 June 2016, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) announced the official name:

For the element with atomic number 118 the collaborating teams of discoverers at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, Dubna (Russia) and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (USA) proposed the name oganesson and symbol Og. The proposal is in line with the tradition of honoring a scientist and recognizes Professor Yuri Oganessian (born 1933) for his pioneering contributions to transactinoid elements research. His many achievements include the discovery of superheavy elements and significant advances in the nuclear physics of superheavy nuclei including experimental evidence for the “island of stability.”

New 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. Of course, older names for elements may not conform to these guidelines.

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Sources:

Burdette, Shawn C., Philip Ball, Kat Day, Eric R. Scerri and Brett F. Thornton. “Another Four Bricks in the Wall.” Nature Chemistry, 8.4, April 2016, 283–88 at 288. DOI:10.1038/nchem.2482

International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC). “IUPAC Is Naming the Four New Elements Nihonium, Moscovium, Tennessine, and Oganesson (press release), 8 June 2016.

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.

Image credit: Armenia Post, 2017. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

ham

A ham is a bad or overly dramatic and emotive actor. But why ham? What does the meat have to do with the theater? In this case the etymology, where the word comes from, is reasonably clear, but the etiology, why it is so, remains mysterious, with the only answers being speculative.

The word ham goes back to a Proto-Germanic root. The Old English word hamm referred to the back or hollow or bend of the knee. It was only applied to people. There are two instances, out of twenty-two in the surviving Old English corpus, where the meaning of hamm is extended to refer to either the thigh or the calf of the leg. Similarly in Middle English, there are a handful of the instances of the word referring to the thigh or specifically to the hamstring muscles.

By the seventeenth century, ham starts to be used for animals as well as for humans. We see it applied to horses in Edward Topsell’s 1607 The Historie of Fovre-Footed Beastes:

Of the Selander

This is a kind of scab breeding in the ham, which is the bent of the hough, and is like in al points, to the Malander, proceeding of like causes, and requireth like cure, and therefor resort to the Malander.

Selander is a dry scab that can form on a horse’s hock.

By the middle of the seventeenth century, ham is being used to refer to pig meat, specifically the cut from the thigh of a pig. John Row’s 1650 The History of the Kirk of Scotland contains this, relating to events of May 1619, in which minister is accused of having puritan sympathies and banished to a distant church where he can do no harm. Row includes, for no apparent reason, the fact that the minister in question has an aversion to the meat:

And Mr Henrie Blyth was transported to a ministrie in the Mers, not far from Berwick, called Eckells, (i.e., as I conjecture, Ecclesiæ, for it is two Kirks, a kirk and a cross kirk, or four equall yles;) thus he is far removed from Edinburgh, and putt in a place, (as the Prelats thought,) scarce capable of puritanicall principles, hard upon the Border. It is remarkable that Mr Henrie Blyth had such antipathie aganis an ham, that no sooner did he heare a ham spoken of but he swarfed [i.e., fainted].

So that’s where the common meaning of ham comes from. But what about the theatrical sense? It seems that the theatrical ham is a clipping of hamfatter. Or at least that’s what the common wisdom is. But there are a couple of early uses of ham that call that into question.

Hamfatter comes from a Civil War-era, blackface-minstrel song titled The Ham Fat Man. The earliest reference to the song that I know of is in the 1861 song book Songs for the Union. It appears as a direction to sing another song to the tune of The Ham Fat Man, so it would seem the song was well established by 1861.

The earliest lyrics to The Ham Fat Man that I have found are in 1863 sheet music by a composer named A. Jones. The lyrics make reference to the Civil War, so if the song does predate 1861, these are not the original words:

White folks I come before you now, to try to please you all;
I’m right from old virginny, sassy ragged fat and tall;
you talk about your comfort; ole mass am de man,
dat gibs de n[——]r ham fat smoking in de pan.

[Chorus]

Ham fat, ham fat, Zigga Zolla zan, Ham-fat, ham fat, Tickle olla tan; oh!
Ham fat, ham fat, Zigga Zolla zan, Ham-fat, ham fat, Tickle olla tan; oh!
walk into de kitchen, as quick as you can,
Hoochee Koochee Koochee, says the Hamfat man.
walk into de kitchen, as quick as you can,
                                               says the Hamfat man.

When wittels am so plenty, oh! I bound to get my fill;
I know a pretty yaller gal, and I love her to kill,
If any n[——]r fools wid her, I’ll tan him if I can,
A Hoochee, Koochee, Koochee, says the Hamfat man.

Oh! Fare you well good white folks! I now must go away,
I’ll lay back and stay back, in clover all the day;
I’ll tell you what it is now, as long as I can stand,
I’ll stick to the Union, and the Ham fat man.

The earliest use of hamfatter that I have found is rather cryptic. The available context doesn’t make it clear. It appears in brief item Nashville’s Daily American from 20 November 1876. It’s in a snippet from a longer story, The Bulldozer: A Romance of the Sunny South by a Jim Bloodyroad, almost certainly a pseudonym. I have been unable to locate the full story, which was evidently to be published in an election Campaign Supplement to the New York World on 27 November. The snippet concerns the lynching of a Black man by the Klan:

“Gag the — — — — — —— — —!” yelled the leader, and Peter was throttled till his tongue protruded several feet, when the slack of that member of the Ku-Klux took a couple of turns abuot [sic] the kneeling man’s neck, tying it securely in two clove-hitches and a slip-knot at the nape.

And this in the Centennial Year and the Land of Freedom!

“Ho, Hamfatter!” hissed the leader of the Ku-Klux, “bring forth the Bull-doz—”

But ere he had concluded his order, the door again opened and—

(For the remainder of this blood-curdling and hair-raising romance…

Is the Klan leader calling his victim a hamfatter? That would align with the existence of the blackface-minstrel song. Or is it a nickname of one of his men? In which case what it means is anyone’s guess.

But by the 1880s, we get the abbreviation ham, and this is clearly in a theatrical context. The earliest use I know of is in an article about theatrical slang in the Los Angeles Herald of 13 August 1881:

If this representative of the burnt cork branch of the business desired to express his contempt for “Gilhooly and McGinnis, Ireland’s peerless characterizationists,” he would wither the peerless pair by calling them “jays,” or “chumps,” or “duffers,” or “ranks,” or perhaps “hams.”

“Burnt cork” refers to the substance used to create blackface, so we have a clear reference to minstrelsy here.

The following year we get this use of ham, in the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News. While the publication is British, the reference is to American performers. The banjo, of course, was a staple instrument in minstrelsy:

What is a “ham,” by the way, apart from pork? “Banjo hams” are held up to scorn, and one writer proudly describes himself as “no ham, but a classical banjo player.”

That same year we see hamfatter being used as a derogatory term without reference to the theater. This may be because it had a more general sense, or perhaps because the writer, an Englishman, misunderstood its context:

Every American who does not wish to be thought “small potatoes” or a “ham-fatter” or a “corner loafer,” is carefully “barbed” and fixed up in a hair-dressing saloon every day.

And the 1889 Century Dictionary connects hamfatter with the theater:

Hamfatter (ham´ fat´´ ėr), n. A term of contempt for an actor of low grade, as a negro minstrel. Said to be derived from an old-style negro song called “The Ham-fat Man.”

So it looks like ham is a shortening of hamfatter, which comes from an 1860s blackface minstrel song. While this is likely the case, there are few early citations that indicate hamfatter was used in a wider context than just the theater, and in the record, ham predates clear use of hamfatter in a theatrical context. These are not necessarily deal killers for the hypothesis, but they give one pause.

But why did hamfatter/ham come to mean a poor or inept performer? Here we enter into the realm of pure speculation. A 25 May 1902 article in the New York Sun gives two competing hypotheses:

At this Bowery theatre [Tony] Pastor used to give presents to his patrons. He gave away tons of coal, silk dresses, barrels of flour, hats and ham. Tickets with certain numbers were sold and the fortunate possessor of the lucky ticket got the present it called for. That advertised Pastor’s theatre all over the country. Perhaps from the giving away of ham at Pastor’s the impression may prevail that that’s just how the term “hamfatter” for a bad performer originated but this is not so.

The expression is an old minstrel term and came from the refrain of a song and dance which goes something like this:
“Ham fat, ham fat, smoking the pan.”
This song became popular, and the performers and later the public caught up the term. When a minstrel or a variety actor appeared and was not up to the standard they used to yell at him, “Ham fat, ham fat, smoking in the pan.” And this was abbreviated until poor actors were known as “hamfatters.”

Another, similar, alternative is that instead of not living up to the standard expected of a well-known piece in the repertoire of every minstrel band, performers were derisively labeled hamfatters because they did not play original or new material and the audiences would quickly grow bored.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang offers up the idea that ham fat (lard) was used by impoverished performers as a base for the makeup powder, rather than the more expensive oils and creams. What evidence there is for this explanation I don’t know, and it ignores the evidence that the terms are related to the minstrel song.

Take your pick as to which explanation you prefer or make up your own. One is as good as another.

And we can’t go without mentioning ham radio operators, that is amateur radio enthusiasts. That term comes from the acting sense, originally referring to a novice or student radio operator, one who is not very good. It dates to the earliest days of radio telegraphy, at least to 1919. By the late 1920s its meaning had morphed from novice to amateur. Cf. jabroni.

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Sources:

Brown, Peter Jensen. “Part II—The History and Etymology of the ‘Hoochie-Coochie’ Dance.” Early Sports and Pop Culture History Blog, 8 July 2016.

The Century Dictionary of the English Language, part 10. New York: Century: 1889, 2696, s.v. hamfatter, n. Internet Archive.

“Circular Notes.” Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News (London), 23 December 1882, 355/2–3. ProQuest Historical Periodicals.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., ham, n.2, hamfatter, n.

Jones, A. The Ham Fat Man: A Comic Song [sheet music]. Cincinnati: John Church, Jr., 1863. Library of Congress: Performing Arts Databases.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. hamme, n.(1).

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. ham, n.1 & adj., hamfatter, n., fatter, n.

“A Romance of the Day.” Daily American (Nashville, Tennessee), 20 November 1876, 2/4. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers

Row, John. The History of the Kirk of Scotland, from the Year 1558 to August 1637 (1650). Edinburgh: Wodrow Society, 1842, 324. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Sala, George Augustus. America Revisited, vol. 1 of 2. London: Vizetelly, 1882, 66. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Songs for the Union. Philadelphia: A. Winch, 1861, 32. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

“Theatrical Slang.” Los Angeles Herald, 13 August 1881, 2/3. Library of Congress: Chronicling America.

Topsell, Edward. The Historie of Fovre-Footed Beastes. London: William Jaggard, 1607, 407. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

“Vaudeville Then and Now.” Sun (New York City), 25 May 1902, 36/7. Library of Congress: Chronicling America.

Photo credit: Renee Comet, National Cancer Institute, 1994. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.