basket case

A wounded American soldier arrives at a triage station in France during World War I

22 May 2024

It is not uncommon for a grisly or shocking term to lose its impact over the years, to meliorate. Such is the situation with basket case. As the term is commonly used today, a basket case is someone who is under physical or, more usually, mental distress to the point where they can no longer function. It is also used to refer refers to a dysfunctional organization or situation. But the origins of the term are much more grim and rooted in the horrors of the First World War, or as we shall see, rooted in something of an urban legend that arose during that war.

As originally used, basket case denoted a quadruple amputee. With no arms or legs, the soldier was reduced to being carried around in and living life in a basket. The idea of basket cases arose despite the fact that apparently few, if any, soldiers in such a condition actually existed. The term starts appearing in print in 1919 in denials that such basket cases existed. Here is the earliest that I’ve found, a story in Ohio’s Cleveland Plain Dealer with a dateline of 17 January 1919 and published the following day:

For many weeks there have been rumors that wards of “basket cases”—soldier patients minus both arms as well as both legs—were in existence at this hospital.

[…]

There is not a single “basket case” in “debarkation No. 3” at the present time. And what is more, there has never been a basket case in any of its wards since they were first opened.

[…]

“Every day we have people come here and ask to see the ‘basket cases’,” said Capt. W. E. Lang. “They are well intentioned people who want to do something for these poor unfortunates, as they call them. I have the hardest time convincing them that we have no such cases. If they seem unwilling to believe me I give them the freedom of the hospital and let them search for themselves. We have not had a single basket case since the hospital has been in existence and a good many thousand cases have passed through its ward.

But gradually, as memories of the war faded, basket case lost its tinge of horror, and the figurative sense arose. Here is one, a comment on the division of Czechoslovakia by the Nazis that appeared in New Orleans’s Times-Picayune on 18 October 1938. While the subject is international politics, the allusion explicitly calls out the original meaning:

When the amputations are completed, it appears that Czechoslovakia will be, in hospital parlance, a “basket case”—with the Nazis furnishing the basket.

And by the next war, there is this column that appeared in the Oregonian on 26 October 1942 about comedian Jack Benny making a plea for people to donate their old cars for scrap metal to help the war effort:

Mr. Benny of Waukegan croaked his lines on the March of Time program while propped up in his hospital bed with a rag tied around his neck, and before somebody cut the mike cord throwing him off the air, Jack had given his faithful old friend, his Maxwell, to help out the scrap drive.

The line cut (probably caused by a new interne letting slip with his scalpel while treating an outpatient case) came just as Jack was warming up with a plea to other people to donate their favorite rolling stock too, too, no matter how much it hurts. Mr. Benny’s appeal was so eloquent, despite his bum larynx, that millions of listeners must have decided to turn in their heaps. In giving my own car, an old basket case, I make only one selfish stipulation, and that is that the sacrifice must be no greater than that suffered by Mr. Benny.

The point of the column is that despite Benny’s owning an old, broken-down Maxwell being a running gag in his radio show, he did not actually own a Maxwell car.

The original, amputee sense of basket case received new life during WWII, again despite such cases being vanishingly rare. But following the war, the figurative sense continued unabated. Here is an example from Life magazine of 16 February 1948:

The U.N. has decided that all Palestine should be divided into three parts—a Jewish state, an Arab state and an internationalized Jerusalem. But now we have to think about the problem harder than ever. For the “solution is shaky.”

The decision was the most important one in U.N. history. It was adopted by a two-thirds vote after long study and debate, and it had the backing of both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. Will this unequivocal decision work? If not, the U.N. may become a more pathetic basket case than the old League of Nations after the Japanese nullified the decision on Manchuria. The setback to world peace might be equally profound.

Today, few who use the term are aware of its rather grim, albeit near-mythical, origin.

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Sources:

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., basket, n.1.

Kitchen, Karl K. “Absurd Stories Without Basis: No ‘Basket Cases’ in Big New York Hospital, Correspondent Says” (17 January). Cleveland Plain Dealer (Ohio), 18 January 1919, 8/4. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Moyes, William. “Behind the Mike.” Oregonian (Portland), 26 October 1942, 9/4. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2014, s.v. basket case, n.

“The Palestine Problem.” Life, 16 February 1948, 34/1. Google Books.

Times-Picayune (New Orleans), 18 October 1938, 10/3. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Photo Credit: US Army Signal Corps, c.1918. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

hard-nosed / soft-nosed / dum-dum

A 7.62mm full-metal-jacket rifle cartridge

20 May 2024

To be hard-nosed is to be stubborn, unsentimental, uncompromising. The phrase is an Americanism, dating to the early twentieth century, but why hard-nosed? The answer comes from rifle ammunition.

In the late nineteenth century, the introduction of cordite and nitrocellulose gunpowder, in addition to be being “smokeless,” created higher muzzle velocities. To limit recoil, lighter bullets were used, but to prevent the smaller, lead projectiles from fouling the barrels of the rifle, the lead core of the bullet was surrounded by a “full-metal jacket” of harder material. But militaries found that full-metal-jacket ammunition was less effective at wounding and killing the enemy, so they began experimenting with ways to make soft-lead ammunition usable. The first of these were produced at the British Arsenal in Dum Dum, India in the 1890s, earning them the sobriquet of dum-dum ammunition.

The development of dum-dum ammo led to the coining of soft-nosed and hard-nosed in the context of rifle bullets. The earliest example of these terms that I can find is in the New York Sun of 24 January 1897:

Hunters have given the 30-calibre smokeless powder rifles a pretty thorough trial during the last year, and most of them are satisfied with its work on game in cases where a soft-nose bullet was used. A hard-nose bullet from the 30-calibre rifle, it appears, when it hits a deer passes through, leaving a “pinhole,” and causes the deer to run all the faster. With a soft nose bullet, that curls over on hitting the flesh, the effect is usually deadly.

The more figurative use is in place by 1913, when it appears in Kansas’s Emporia Gazette of 10 December of that year:

But while Emporia is as she is, the town always will be neighborly and hospitable, and never will get hard-nosed and haughty when a convention comes to town to eat Emporia groceries and make business for the Emporia laundries. We always are willing to spend the unearned increment of these occasions for rubber and gasoline to make the occasion festive and gladsome.

I would have guessed that the figurative sense of obstinacy and determination came out of the world of boxing, a metaphor relying on the ability of a good boxer to take a hit on the nose. But there simply aren’t examples of “hard-nosed boxers” or similar constructions to be found. Instead, searches turn up many examples of hard-nosed and soft-nosed used in terms of bullets.

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Sources:

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., s.v. hard-nosed, adj.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2015, s.v. hard-nosed, adj.

 “Small Calibre Rifle Wounds.” Sun (New York City), 24 January 1897, Section 2, 6/6. NewspaperArchive.com.

“The Town ‘Done Noble.’” Emporia Gazette (Kansas), 10 December 1913, 2/2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

palladium

Calabrian vase (c.350 BCE) depicting Odysseus and Diomedes stealing the Palladium from Troy

17 May 2024

Palladium is actually two words, with distinct, albeit related, etymological paths and meanings. The older use of the word comes from Greek myth, the newer one is the name of element 46.

The original sense of palladium (often capitalized) was the name of a statue of the goddess Athena in the city of Troy. Supposedly, as long as the statue was within its walls, the city could never by conquered. But the Greek warriors Odysseus and Diomedes slipped into the city during the siege and stole the statue. Use of the name in English appears by the late fourteenth century, borrowed from the French and Latin palladium. The Latin comes from the Greek Παλλάδιον (Palladion), formed from Παλλαδ- (Pallad- from the epithet Παλλάς (Pallas) of the goddess Athena) + ‑ιον (-ion, diminutive suffix).

Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (c. 1385) has this:

But though the Grekes hem of Troie suetten,
And hir cite biseged al aboute,
Hire olde usage nolde they nat letten,
As for to honoure hir goddes ful devoute;
But aldirmost in honour, out of doubte,
They hadde a relik, heet Palladion,
That was hire trist aboven everichon.

(But though the Greeks shut in those of Troy,
And besieged their city all about,
They did not wish to leave off their old customs
As to very devoutly honoring their gods;
But in utmost honor, out of reverence,
They had a relic, called Palladium,
That was their trusted object above everything.)

By the beginning of the seventeenth century, palladium had been generalized to refer to some venerated object that served as a safeguard or protector. We see this general sense in Philemon Holland’s introduction to his 1600 translation of Livy’s history:

Now in these 35 bookes, so few as they be, preserved as another Palladium out of a generall skarefire, we may conceive the rare and wonderfull eloquence of our writer in the whole.

The name of the element is much more recent, dating to 1803. Palladium is a silvery metal with atomic number 46 and the symbol Pd. The metal has many uses, with over half the world’s supply used in automobile catalytic converters. But it is also used in electronics, medicine and dentistry, hydrogen fuel cells, and in jewelry.

The element’s name was formed in English from Pallad- (Παλλαδ-) + -ium. But in this case the name is not taken directly from the epithet for Athena, but rather from the newly discovered asteroid Pallas, which in turn is named for the goddess (cf. cerium and asteroid / Ceres / Pallas / Juno / Vesta).

The metal was discovered and named by William Hyde Wollaston in 1802, but the chemist, wishing to make a profit from his discovery and to keep the process for refining it secret, did not publish in the usual journals. Instead he anonymously offered samples of the metal for sale. The name palladium first appears in a leaflet advertising the sale. The text of the leaflet is reproduced in a paper on the metal by Richard Chenevix appearing in the 1803 volume of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London:

Palladium, or new silver, has those properties amongst others that shew it to be a new noble metal.

1. It dissolves in pure spirit of nitre, and makes a dark-red solution. 2. Green vitriol throws it down in the state of a regulus from this solution, as it always does gold from aqua regia. […] 8. But, if you touch it, while hot, with a small bit of sulphur, it runs as easily as zinc.

It is sold only by MR. FORSTER, at No. 26, Gerrard-street, Soho, London; in samples of five shillings, half a guinea, and one guinea each.

In 1805, Wollaston finally wrote about his discovery in Philosophical Transactions, revealing himself as the discoverer and the reason for the name:

I shall on the present occasion confine myself principally to those processes by which I originally detected, and subsequently obtained another metal, to which I gave the name of Palladium, from the planet that had been discovered nearly at the same time by Dr. Olbers.

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Sources:

Chaucer, Geoffrey. Troilus and Criseyde. Stephen A. Barney, ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006, lines 1.148–54, 17.

Chenevix, Richard. “Enquiries Concerning the Nature of a Metallic Substance Lately Sold in London, as a New Metal, Under the Title of Palladium” (12 May 1803). Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 93 (1803), 290–320 at 290. DOI: 10.1098/rstl.1803.0012.

Holland, Philemon. “To the Reader.” In Livy. The Romane Historie. Philemon Holland, trans. London: Adam Islip, 1600, n. p. Early English Books Online.

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

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, March 2005, s.v. palladium, n.1, palladium, n.2.

Wollaston, William Hyde. “On the Discovery of Palladium; with Observations on Other Substances Found with Plantina,” (4 July 1805). Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 95 (1805), 316–330 at 316. DOI: 10.1098/rstl.1805.0024.

Photo credit: Bibi Saint-Pol, 2007. Louvre Museum, Paris. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

dollars to doughnuts

Image generated by the DALL-E AI image generator using the prompt “generate an image of betting dollars to doughnuts in the style of a medieval manuscript illumination; include both money and doughnuts in the image”

15 May 2024

The phrase (I’ll bet) dollars to doughnuts is an Americanism dating to the late nineteenth century, referring to the stakes of an imagined wager on a sure thing. While due to inflation, today one would be hard pressed to find a doughnut for less than a dollar, when the phrase was coined one could buy a number of the pastries for that price.

The earliest appearance of the phrase, in the singular a dollar to a doughnut, that I’m aware of is in Kansas’s Leavenworth Daily Commercial of 11 March 1871:

The tresses of a young lady of Illinois are said to be “of that peculiar hue that a field of ripe wheat throws toward a setting sun." It dis-tresses us to think that these newspaper men will write so hifalutin, when they might use “plain language,” like “Truthful James.” The girl has “yaller” hair, that’s what’s the matter with her. All this talk about peculiar wheat throwing out a ripe sun toward a setting field, is bosh and nonsense. It is a dollar to a doughnut that her carroty hair stands out, like quills on a fretful porcupine, except when she soaps it.

I was quite taken with this item. Not only is clever commentary on language that substitutes one metaphor for another in a different dialectal register, but it’s an example of a short item used to fill out the bottom of a column of unrelated text. In this case, it appears at the bottom of a column of business notices. It is also an example of a newspaper editor sniping at the practices of other papers, a common occurrence in nineteenth-century papers. The editor is commenting on a piece that first appeared in Scranton, Pennsylvania’s Morning Republican of 11 February 1871 and was reprinted in a number of other papers:

The most beautiful girl in the United States lives near Lincoln, Ill. Her hair is of that peculiar hue that field of ripe wheat throws toward the setting sun. Her eyes send forth a light so effulgent and magnetic that strangers become spellbound under its influence and stand rudely gazing. Her cheeks bear a bloom like the sunny side of an early peach. A pearl would seem almost black beside her teeth. Her form is so graceful that men worship her before seeing her face. Her hand suggest [sic] the idea of waxen fingers tipped with vermilion. Her smile seems actually to illuminate her presence, and when see [sic] laughs the listener fancies he hears sweet music in the distance.

The editor of the Leavenworth paper was quite right to object to this overly flowery, purple prose. (And fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer will get a kick out of the use of effulgent.)

But back to the phrase at hand. The plural form, dollars to doughnuts, appears a few months later in Portland, Maine’s Portland Daily Press of 18 October 1871:

We will bet Dollars to Doughnuts that we are offering goods at lower prices than any house in Portland.

But doughnuts were not the only things of little value being wagered. There is the slightly earlier phrase dollars to buttons. Here is one in a letter dated 19 October 1870 printed in New York’s Pomeroy’s Democrat newspaper:

Some years ago, when we began life, dating back to the days of our infancy, the family physician said it would be dollars to buttons that we never lived to articulate the first letter of the alphabet. But we did.

The America’s Historical Newspapers database has five instances of dollars to buttons in 1870–71, all from Pomeroy’s Democrat. This version did not have the legs that dollars to doughnuts had, probably because it lacks the alliteration.

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Sources:

“Alas Poor Yorick!” (letter, 19 October 1870). Pomeroy’s Democrat (New York City), 9 November 1870, 5/5. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., s.v. dollar, n.1. (Green’s includes an 1803 citation for dollars to doughnuts, but this is an error. The “1803” is the page number, not the date, in a three-volume collection of Jack London’s works. London used the phrase three times in his 1911 short story The Meat.)

“Items.” Morning Republican (Scranton, Pennsylvania), 11 February 1871, 4/8. Newspapers.com.

Leavenworth Daily Commercial (Kansas), 11 March 1871, 4/2. Newspapers.com.

“Miscellaneous Notices” (advertisement). Portland Daily Press (Maine), 18 October 1871, 3/3. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

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

Image credit: David Wilton, 2024 using the DALL-E image generator in the ChatGPT-4 AI. Public domain image.

memestock

A GameStop retail storefront in Manchester, Connecticut

13 May 2024

A meme stock is a publicly traded stock that experiences a sudden rise in value due to a concerted effort by a number of retail investors who organize over social media. The price of a meme stock usually has no relation to actual value of the company in question; they tend to be highly volatile and are often a bubble. The classic example of a meme stock is the brick-and-mortar video game retailer GameStop, whose stock rose some 600 percent in January 2021 due to the efforts of a group of investors organizing on the subreddit r/wallstreetbets.

The term is, of course, a compound of meme + stock.

The earliest examples I have found are on Twitter. This one, in the form of a hashtag, is from 2 May 2017:

$AMD inching towards that $10 mark as the #memestock is down another 2.4% AH after already -24% during the day.

And this one from 13 September 2018:

Every time i look at $AMD i cry a little bit because i was in at $8. And also because it was a memestock that actually blew up after i got out.

Meme stocks are not necessarily shares in companies with little or no value. AMD is an example of a meme stock whose underlying company had sound financial fundamentals, but its value was driven to excessive heights by small investors.

Mainstream journalism began using the term in early 2021 in response to the GameStop phenomenon. The earliest professional use of meme stock that I know of is by Techcrunch.com on 16 January 2021, about a week before the GameStock surge began:

Band 3 is the retail cohort, the /r/WallStreetBets, meme-stock, fintech Twitter rabble that are both incredibly fun to watch and also the sort of person you wouldn’t loan $500 to while in Las Vegas. They are willing to pay nearly infinite money for certain stocks—like Tesla—and often far more than the more conservative public money. Demand from the retail squad can greatly amplify the value of a newly listed company by making the supply/demand curve utterly wonky.

And there is this use in the National Review on 31 January 2021 in the midst of the GameStop bubble:

Robinhood and other brokerages halted trading not due to some shady desire to help Wall Street, but because they could not afford to shoulder the risks their customers were taking. A sizable portion of retail traders’ speculative investments in “meme stocks” were made with money borrowed from brokerages on margin. In response to increased volatility, Robinhood twice issued “margin calls,” decreasing the amount of borrowed money customers were allowed to invest in GameStop—first to 20 percent, then to zero.

There are a couple of older senses of meme stock. The first is one’s collection of internet memes that are ready to deploy at a moment’s notice. The second is a jocular usage that operates on the premise that internet memes can be traded like stocks.

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Sources:

Alex @mintauntaun, Twitter.com, 13 September 2018.

“The GameStop Bubble.” National Review, 31 January 2021.

Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, 16 April 2024, s.v. memestock, n.

North Bluff Capital @bluff_capital, Twitter.com, 2 May 2017.

Wilhelm, Alex. “No One Knows What Anything Is Worth.” Techcrunch.com, 16 January 2021.

Photo credit: Mike Mozart, 2014. Wikimedia Commons. Used under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.