berserk / berserker

One of the Torslunda (c. 8th century) plates depicting Odin guiding a berserker or ulfheðinn (wolf-headed warrrior)

Today, to be or to go berserk means to be frenzied or crazed, and the term carries a connotation of violence. The word comes from the Icelandic berserkr, meaning a powerful Norse warrior who displayed a wild and uncontrolled fury on the battlefield. In other words, a stereotypical Viking, or at least how Vikings appear in modern, popular imagination. The etymology of the Icelandic word is disputed, but it probably comes from bear + sark, a type of shirt or tunic. So a berserk or berserker was literally a bearskin-clad warrior.

Berserk enters into English usage around the turn of the nineteenth century, a period when there was great literary interest in things medieval and, in particular, stories related to medieval Scandinavia. The earliest use of berserker that I have found in English is in a summary of the Kristni Saga, an account of the Christianization of Iceland that appeared in the January 1800 issue of Edinburgh Magazine:

After this triumph Thorwald traversed Iceland with the bishop; at Vatnsdal they were encountered by two Manics or BERSERKER, who raved, stormed, and, through the power of their familiar spirits, walked unhurt amid burning fire; but when Frederic had consecrated the fire, they were miserably scorched and slain.

In 1803, William Herbert published a translation of a portion of Hervarar Saga that contained this line:

Then went the sons of Angrym to Sams-ey; and when they arrived there, they found the champions fury come upon them.

Herbert commented on his use of “champion’s fury” to translate the Icelandic berserksgangr:

“Champions fury.” Berserksgangr. I have ventured to translate Berserker by the English word champions; but there is no term in any language, that can exactly answer to it. These extraordinary people have been called by Latin writers berserki. See Kristnisaga, p. 142. They fought without armour, and were subject to a sort of fury, which was called Berserksgangr. Their name is derived from ber, bare, and serkr, a garment or coat of mail. The following account of them is given by Snorre Sturleson. “Enn hanns menn foro bryniolauser, &c.[”] i.e. “And his (Odin's) men went without coat of mail, and were furious like dogs or wolves, bit their shields, and were strong as bears or bulls; they slaughtered mankind, and neither fire nor steel had power ever them. That is called Berserks gangur.” Yngl. Sag. c. 6.

In 1806, Walter Scott would publish a version of the traditional ballad Kempion (or Kemp Owyne, Child's Ballad #34) and commented on his use of warwolf in the poem:

Warwolf, or Lycanthropus, signifies a magician, possessing the power of transforming himself into a wolf, for the purpose of ravage and devastation. It is probable the word was first used symbolically, to distinguish those, who, by means of intoxicating herbs, could work their passions into a frantic state, and throw themselves upon their enemies with the fury and temerity of ravenous wolves. Such were the noted Berserkar of the Scandinavians, who, in their fits of voluntary frenzy, were wont to perform the most astonishing exploits of strength, and to perpetrate the most horrible excesses, although, in their natural state, they neither were capable of greater crimes nor exertions than ordinary men. This quality they ascribed to Odin.

The following year, Sharon Turner would provide this description of berserkers in his History of the Anglo-Saxons:

One branch of the vikingr is said to have cultivated paroxysms of brutal insanity, and they who experienced them were revered. These were the Berserkir, whom many authors describe. These men, when a conflict impended, or a great undertaking was to be commenced, abandoned all rationality upon system; they studied to resemble wolves or maddening dogs; they bit their shields; they howled like tremendous beasts; they threw off covering; they excited themselves to a strength which has been compared to that of bears, and then rushed to every crime and horror which the most frantic enthusiasm could perpetrate. This fury was an artifice of battle like the Indian warwhoop. Its object was to intimidate the enemy. It is attested that the unnatural excitation was, as might be expected, always followed by a complete debility. It was originally practised by Odin. They who used it, often joined in companies. The furor Berserkicus, as mind and morals improved, was at length felt to be horrible. It changed from a distinction to a reproach, " and was prohibited by penal laws. The name at last became execrable.

The phrase to go berserk appears about a century later, indicating that the concept had become thoroughly anglicized and the word was no longer being used exclusively to refer to medieval Norse warriors. The earliest use of the phrase that I’m aware of is in a humorous short story by Rudyard Kipling titled The Child of Calamity (also known as My Sunday at Home). The story was published in numerous newspapers at the time, starting on 30 March 1895. In the story, a doctor encounters a sleeping navvy (i.e., laborer) at a train station, and mistakenly thinking the navvy has been poisoned, administers him an emetic. The navvy subsequently goes into a rage:

Till that moment the navvy, whose only desire was justice, had kept his temper nobly. Then he went Berserk before our amazed eyes. The door of the lamp-room generously constructed would not give an inch, but the window he tore from its fastenings and hurled outwards. The one porter counted the damage in a loud voice, and the others, arming themselves with agricultural implements from the station garden, kept up a ceaseless winnowing before the window, themselves backed close to the wall, and bade the prisoner think of the gaol. He answered little to the point, so far as they could understand, but, seeing that his exit was impeded, he took a lamp and hurled it through the wrecked sash. It fell on the metals and went out. With inconceivable velocity the others, fifteen in all, followed, looking like rockets in the gloom; and with the last (he could have had no plan) the Berserk rage left him as the doctor’s deadly brewage waked up under the stimulus of violent exercise and a very full meal to one last cataclysmal exhibition, and we heard the whistle of the 7:45.

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Sources:

“The Gleaner, No. XV.” Edinburgh Magazine, or Literary Miscellany, January 1800, 3/2. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Herbert, William. “The Combat of Hialmar and Oddur” (1803). Select Icelandic Poetry, vol. 1. London: T. Reynolds, 1804, 71, 82–83. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Kipling, Rudyard. “The Child of Calamity.” Argus (Melbourne, Victoria, Australia), 30 March 1895, 4/5. NewspaperArchive.com.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. berserk | berserker, n.

Scott, Walter. “Notes on Kempion.” Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, vol. 3 of 3. Edinburgh, James Ballantyne, 1806, 32. HathiTrust Digital Archive.  

Turner, Sharon. The History of the Anglo-Saxons, vol. 1. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, & Orme, 1807, 210. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Zoëga. Geir T. A Concise Dictionary of Old Icelandic. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1910, s.v. berserkr, n., 50. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Image credit: Sören Hallgren, 1996. Statens Historiska Museer, Stockholm. Wikimedia Commons. Used under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

phosphorus

The planet Venus, taken by the Mariner 10 spacecraft, 1974

24 May 2024

Phosphorus comes into English from classical Latin, where Phosphorus is a name for the planet Venus. The name comes ultimately from the Greek; the roots are φως- (phos-, light) + -φόρος (-phoros, bringer). So phosphorus is the light-bringer, and the element is named for its luminescent properties. (Lucifer also literally means light-bringer in Latin, and it is also a name for the planet Venus. But unlike Lucifer, phosphorus is not a name for the angel that rebelled against God in the Christian mythos.) One also sometimes sees the clipped form phosphor.

It appears in a Latin-English dictionary of 1538, although this is a use of the Latin, not the English word:

Phosphorus, the daye sterre.

And again, we see the Latin name in an English text in a 1587 book on botony:

This tyrant (Nabuchadnezzar) is compared for the great magnificence and glorious pompe of his huge empire, vnto the goodlie Planet and glittering morning star, Lucifer: which being seene after the Sunne is gone downe, is called Vesperugo and Hesperus, and heereof speaketh Virgil where he saith,

Trudge, trudge apace home, full fed Goates,
The Euening Starre appeeres.

But in the morning, preceeding and going afore the Sunne, it is called Lucifer, and Phosphorus: and (of the glittering brightnes and amiable beautie, and shining colour which it hath) named also Venus.

The translation from Virgil’s Eclogue 6 is a rather loose one. The poem, which uses the name Vesper, reads:

Omnia quae Phoebo quondam meditante beatus
audiit Eurotas iussitque ediscere lauros,
ille canit (pulsae referunt ad sidera valles),
cogere donec ovis stabulis numerumque referre
iussit et invito processit Vesper Olympo.

(All the songs that of old Phoebus rehearsed, while happy Eurotas listened and bade his laurels learn by heart—these Silenus sings. The re-echoing valleys fling them again to the stars, till Vesper gave the word to fold the flocks and tell their tale, as he set forth over an unwilling sky.)

Finally, we get an anglicized use of the word in John Harvey’s 1588 A Discovrsive Probleme Concerning Prophesies in a passage about the 1572 supernova in the constellation Cassiopeia. Here phosphorus is being used to simply mean a star, not specifically the planet Venus:

Sithence his decease it is lately supposed by diuers Mathematicians, that the new strange star in Cassiopeia, which appéered, Anno 1572. was this Tyburtine sydous; but how vnequall is that paraphrase to the phrase of this prophesie? Or how vnlike is this description, to the manner, and effect of that new Phosphorus?

And we see Venus referred to as Phosphorus in Robert Parry’s 1595 Moderatus, the Most Delectable and Famous Historie of the Blacke Knight:

When Phosphorus declining West her tracke,
Commaunding Nox her charge to take in hand
And for to spread abroad her curtaine blacke,
By Natures course to couer both sea and land

Allotropes of phosphorus: white phosphorus (left), red phosphorus granules (center left), red phosphorus chunk (center right), and violet phosphorus (right)

The chemical element, with atomic number 15 and the symbol P, was discovered in 1669 by alchemist Hennig Brand, who distilled it from urine, which contains a significant amount of phosphates. Phosphorus is the first element not known the ancients to be discovered. It was recognized as an element by chemist Antoine Lavoisier in 1777.

The name of the element appears in Latin by 1675 and in English by 1680. It is so called because it can emit a glow and some forms will spontaneously combust in the presence of oxygen.

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Sources:

The Dictionary of Syr Thomas Eliot Knyght. London: Thomas Berthelet, 1538, sig. R.v.r. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Harvey, John. A Discovrsive Probleme Concerning Prophesies. London: John Jackson for Richard Watkins, 1588, 42–43. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

An Herbal for the Bible. London: Edmund Bollifant, 1587, 255. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

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.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2006, s.v. phosphorus, n., phosphor, n. and adj.

Parry, Robert. Moderatus, the Most Delectable and Famous Historie of the Blacke Knight. London: Richard Jones, 1595, sig. D.2.v. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Virgil. “Eclogue 6.” In Eclogues. Georgics, Aeneid: Books 1–6. Jeffrey Henderson, ed. H. Rushton Fairclough, trans. Revisions by G. P. Goold. Loeb Classical Library 63. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1999, lines, 82–86, 66–67.

Photo credit: Peter Krimbacher, 2005. Wikimedia Commons. Used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

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.