bootylicious / babelicious

Cover of Dr. Dre’s single Fuck Wit Dre Day

3 June 2024

Bootylicious is an adjective meaning sexually attractive. It is formed from booty + -alicious, which is derived from delicious. The word is an Americanism that got its start in Black slang. Use of the combining form -alicious to form new words dates to the late nineteenth century and marks the quality of the first element of the compound as being appetizing or attractive.

The earliest known use of bootylicious is by the Los Angeles rap group W.C. and the Maad Circle on their September 1991 song Back to the Underground. It’s being used in the sense of weak or contemptible lyrics:

I'm bucking up these MCs, Rappers are coming in stacks and packs
But on the real; most of y'all ain't saying jack (YEP!)
But the same old, same old, so what you got a little fame!
(Dig a dam) What's up with this Rap Game?
Seems like you gotta be whack or even super Bootylicious to get paid
I gotta wear Fade
I guess I'll be a broke motherfucker with the dollar to my name
Cause I ain't crossing over the fame (Hell No!)

In April 1992, rapper Dr. Dre recorded the word bootylicous in the lyrics to the song Fuck Wit Dre Day (And Everybody’s Celebratin’). The song was written by Snoop Doggy Dog, as he then styled himself, who also performed in the recording along with Dre. The song was released that December on Dre’s album The Chronic. The single was released in May 1993.

The song is diss on fellow rapper Easy-E, who had led the rap group N.W.A., to which both Dre and Snoop had belonged. Dre and Snoop accused Easy-E, along with N.W.A.’s manager Jerry Heller, of cheating the other members of the group. Dre and Snoop use bootylicious to refer to Easy-E’s weak or poor lyrics:

Your bark was loud but your bite wasn't vicious
And them rhymes you were kickin' were quite bootylicious

This sense of bootylicious seems to come from a sexist metaphor of women being poor songwriters. Dre and Snoop are accusing Easy-E of writing like a woman. This sense is evidence that bootylicious was already established in oral use in the sexually attractive sense.

They were not the only ones to use bootylicious in this sense. We see this in the Los Angeles Sentinel, a Black newspaper, on 19 May 1994:

The “Bootylicious” Award” goes to Kool-Aid who also gets the “Worse [sic] Use of a Sample Award.” I don’t know if you’ve peeped this one out, but it has some rooty-poot kid sampling Naughty By Nature’s “Hip Hop Hooray.” First off [sic] all, ole boy sounds stupid as I don’t know what. Then if you check the audience that he’s supposed to be performing in front of, you’ll see that there’s not a black face in the crowd. You know why, ’cause only white folks would sample Naughty’s top hit for a Kool-Aid commercial.

But this sense of bootylicious referring to bad rap lyrics did not have legs, eventually fading from use.

We see the sexually attractive sense by December 1993, with the release of Domino’s (Shawn Antoine Ivy’s) Do You Qualify? on his eponymous album:

She's only sixteen, but looks twenty-two,
And age isn't a factor cuz she's fine to the dude,
And plus she's built like a truck there must be somethin' in her food,
Or her water,
Because she's somebody's daughter
Who's attractive to a son, as well their father's,
And they know this, that ass sticks with us,
And like my homie told me once she's quite bootylicious,
Watch your mouth drop with them dubs that she threw on,
Dandy like candy, so you can get your chew on,
What'cha wanna do?  What'cha gonna do?
When you find out that she's far from twenty-two?

And this sense appears in print two months later in an article about youth slang in Idaho’s Lewiston Tribune on 17 January 1994. Given that it’s Idaho, the article is most likely describing the speech of white youth, which shows how much influence Black rap artists had on teen slang, both white and Black, of the era, and is further evidence that bootylicious was quite active in oral use before seeing print:

Winning the prize for originality: “flippen flappin’,” an expression of anger; “booty-licious,”' as good-looking; “wheaties,” describing any farmers; “womyn,” a slang for a female; and “yum,” an expression for when a girl sees a good-looking guy. 

We see a parallel development in white slang at about the same time with the word babelicious. That word is also recorded in 1992, in the film Wayne’s World, starring Mike Myers and Dana Carvey, in which the following exchange takes place:

WAYNE: But before we go, we’d like to take a moment here for a Wayne's World salute to the Guess jeans girl, Claudia Schiffer. Schwing!

GARTH: Schwing!

WAYNE: Tent pole! She's a babe.

GARTH: She's magically babelicious.

WAYNE: She tested very high on the strokability scale.

(Reader Adam Ford notes, quite correctly, that magically babelicious is a riff on the tagline for Lucky Charms cereal, “They’re magically delicious.”)

The two words showcase how white and Black slang interacted in the era. The two are recorded at about the same time, but there is evidence that bootylicious had earlier currency in oral use, so it seems likely that Myers’s use of babelicious was influenced by bootylicious. But it is possible that babelicious had an earlier currency as well. If so, the two would seem to have developed in parallel. But with rap’s growing popularity among white youth in the mid-1990s, bootylicious crossed over and became far more popular than its white counterpart.

Discuss this post

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Sources:

Domino (Shawn Antoine Ivy). “Do You Qualify?” Ohhla.com (The Original Hip-Hop Lyrics Archive), n.d.

Dr. Dre (Andre Romell Young) and Snoop Dogg (Calvin Cordozar Broadus, Jr.). “Fuck Wit Dre Day (And Everybody’s Celebratin’).”.  The Chronic (album), 1992. Azlyrics.com.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., s.v. booty, n.2, bootylicious, adj., babe, n.

Mitchell, Marsha. “Peace from the Editor!” Los Angeles Sentinel, 19 May 1994, C-6/1. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Myers, Mike, Bonnie Turner, and Terry Turner, writers. Wayne’s World (film), Penelope Sheeris, director. Paramount Pictures, 1992. TikTok.com.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2002, s.v. booty, n.3; September 2004, s.v., bootylicious, adj., babelicious, adj.

The Right Rhymes, n.d., s.v. bootylicious, adj. (Shout out to Jesse Sheidlower for pointing this site out to me.)

Vogt, Andrea. “Youth and Language the Dynamics of ‘Dissin’ ‘Wassup? Yo, Homies Are Down with the Code[‘] (Translation: Like Their Predecessors in American Pop Culture, Teen-Agers of the ’90s Have Created Their Own Novel Language.” Lewiston Tribune (Idaho), 17 January 1994. NewsBank: Access World News—Historical and Current.

W.C. and the Maad Circle. “Back to the Underground.” Ohhla.com (The Original Hip-Hop Lyrics Archive), n.d.

Image credit: Death Row Records, 1993. Wikipedia. Fair use of a low-resolution copy of the image to illustrate the topic under discussion.

platinum

31 May 2024

Platinum is a chemical element with atomic number 78 and the symbol Pt. It is a silvery-white, unreactive, dense, malleable, and ductile semimetal. It is a precious metal, at times being more expensive than gold, and is often used in jewelry. Its most common application, however, is in catalytic converters for automobiles, and it has various other applications.

Platinum was unknown to Europeans prior to the conquest of the Americas, where the Indigenous people of South America had been mining it for centuries. The Spanish called the metal platina (little silver), and the name platinum is a Latinization of the Spanish name, platin[a] + -um (after the classical Latin aurum (gold) and argentum (silver)).

The Spanish, however, initially considered it an impurity that tainted gold, and consequently paid it little interest. The first appearance of the name platina in print is in Antonio de Ulloa and Jorge Juan y Santacilia’s 1748 Relacion Historica del Viage a la America Meridional, which described the authors’ travels through South America in the 1730s. The passage in question relates to the Chocò region in what is now Colombia and describes the difficulty in extracting gold from ore that also contains platinum:

En el Partido del Chocò, haviendo muchas Minas de Lavadero, como las que se acaban de explicar, se encuentran tambien algunas, donde por estàr disfrazado, y envuelto el Oro con orros Cuerpos Metalicos, Jugos, y Piedras, necessita para su beneficio del auxilio del Azogue; y tal vez se hallan Minerales, donde la Platina (Piedra de tanta resistencia, que no es facil romperla, ni desmenuzarla con la fuerza del golpe sobre el Yunque de Acero) es causa de que se abandonen; porque ni la calcinacion la vence, ni hay arbitrio para extraer el Metal, que encierra, sino à expensas de mucho trabajo, y costo.

(In the District of Chocò, there are many Laundry Mines, such as those just explained, there are also some, where because the Gold is disguised and wrapped with other Metallic Bodies, Fluids, and Stones, it needs the help of Mercury to extract it; and perhaps there are Minerals where the Platina (Stone of such resistance that it is not easy to break it, nor crumble it with the force of the blow on the Steel Anvil) is the cause of their abandonment; because neither calcination defeats it, nor is there any way to extract the Metal it contains, except at the expense of a lot of work and cost.)

In early use, English borrowed the Spanish name platina. We see this in the first mention of the metal in the 1750 volume of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society:

This Semi-metal was first presented to me about nine Years ago, by Mr. Charles Wood, as skilful and inquisitive Metallurgist, who met with it in Jamaica, whither it had been brought from Carthagena in New Spain. And the same Gentleman hath since gratified my Curiosity, by making further inquiries concerning this Body. It is found in considerable Quantities in the Spanish West Indies (in what Part I could not learn) and is there known by the name of Platina di Pinto[,] The Spaniards probably call it Platina, from the Resemblance in Colour that it bears to Silver. It is bright and shining, and of a uniform Texture; it takes a fine Polish, and is not subject to tarnish or rust; it is extremely hard and compact; but, like Bath-metal, or cast Iron, brittle, and cannot be extended under the Hammer.

And the Latin platinum appears by 1783, when it is found in Torbern Bergman’s Sciagraphia regni mineralis (Sketch of the Mineral Kingdom):

Aurum nempe omnibus aliis precipitatur metallis, excepto forte Platino, quod ita explicandum existimo. Calx auri vi majoris attractionis phlogisticon singulis eripit et hoc ipso solubilitatem amittit, reducta decidens. Itaque auro in serie metallorum saltim secundus competit locus. Platinum dejicitur omnibus, auro tamen minus distincte.

(Namely, gold is precipitated by all other metals, except perhaps platinum, which I think should be explained in this way. The calx of gold, having the greatest attraction for phlogiston, frees it from other metals, and thus loses its solubility, falling off as a reduction. Therefore gold deserves at least the second place in the series of metals. Platinum is precipitated by all, but less distinctly than gold.)

The English translation of this work, published the same year, however, continues to use platina. The only mention of the Latin platinum is in the index, which cross-references it to instances of platina.

But within a few years, English had also borrowed the Latin name, and platinum came to be the more common name in that language. We see platinum being used in a 1786 translation of an essay by Carl Wilhelm Scheele:

This matter [i.e., coloring agent or dye] has a more sensible action upon the calces and metallic precipitates: All the calces, however, are not attacked; for it produces no effect upon the calces of platinum, tin, lead, bismuth, iron, manganese, and antimony.

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Sources:

Bergman, Torbern. Outlines of Mineralogy. William Withering, trans. Birmingham: Piercy and Jones for T. Cadell and G. Robinson, 1783, 131. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Bergman, Torbern. Sciagraphia regni mineralis. London: John Murray, 1783, 136–37. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

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, June 2006, s.v. platinum, n. and adj., platinic, adj., platina, n. and adj.

Scheele, Carl Wilhelm. “Dissertation on Prussian Blue, Part 2” (1783). The Chemical Essays of Charles-William Scheele. London: J. Murray, 1786, 391–406 at 394. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

de Ulloa, Antonio and Jorge Juan y Santacilia. Relacion Historica del Viage a la America Meridional, vol. 2, part 1. Madrid: Antonio Marin, 1748, 6.10, 606. Google Books.

Watson, William and William Brownrigg. “Several Papers Concerning a New Semi-Metal, Called Platina” (5 December 1750). Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 46, December 1750, 584–96 at 586. DOI: 10.1098/rstl.1749.0110.

Photo credit: Focal Foto, 2023. Flickr.com. Used under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 license.

booty / booty call

Cover for the 2018 song Booty by Spanish rapper C. Tangana (Antón Álvarez Alfaro) and Mexican-American singer Becky G. (Rebbeca Marie Gomez)

29 May 2024

Booty is actually two different words, one meaning plunder or loot and the other referring to sex.

Booty, referring to plunder or loot, of is uncertain origin. It was borrowed from some European language, but there are any number of potential candidates. It’s cognate with the modern German Beute, the Dutch buit, and the French butin. The original Germanic root probably meant to exchange, barter, distribute, ala the Old Norse noun býti and verb býta.

We see the word in William Caxton’s 1474 The Game and Playe of the Chesse:

And for so moche hit behoueth to see well to that whan the tyme of the bataylle cometh that he borowe not ne make no tayllage For noman may be ryche that leuyth his owne hopying to gete and take of other Than all waye her gayn and wynnynge ought to be comyn amonge them exept theyr Armes. For in lyke wyse as the victorie is comune so should the dispoyll and botye be comune vnto them And therfore Dauid that gentyll knyght in the fyrst book of kynges in the last chapitre made a lawe that he that abode behynde by maladye or sekenes in the tentes should haue as moche part of the butyn as he that had be in the bataylle.

(And for so much it behooves to see well that when the time of battle comes that he does not borrow nor make tallage. For no one may be rich that leaves his own hoping to get and take from others. Then in all ways their gain and winnings ought to be common among them, except their arms. For likewise, as the victory is common so should the despoil and booty be common unto them. And therefore David, that gentle knight, in the first book of Kings in the last chapter made a law that he who remained behind in the tents because of malady or sickness should have as much part of the booty as he that had been in the battle.)

Note that Caxton’s version has both the Germanic botye and the French butyn.

Booty can also mean the buttocks or genitals or sexual intercourse, but this sense has a different etymology. It arose in American Black slang, and like the plunder sense of booty, this origin of this sense is uncertain The Oxford English Dictionary says that it may have developed from botty, a nineteenth-century hypocoristic word for the buttocks, originally mostly associated with an infant’s or child’s bottom. We see botty being used in an 1842 letter from Charles Darwin to his wife, Emma. The Annie referenced in the letter is their one-year-old daughter:

What a nice account you give of Charlottes tranquil maternity—I wish the Baby was livlier,—for liveliness is an extreme charm in bab-chicks—good bye.— I long to kiss Annie’s botty-wotty

C.D.—

But to me, this connection to botty is a stretch. More likely, booty is simply a variation on body, or even more likely, butt. And it also seems likely that the plunder sense of booty was an influence on the development of the sexual one, related through the idea of acquisition and conquest.

We’re not quite sure when the sexual sense of booty appeared. Slang is notoriously difficult to pin down, and Black slang even more so, since it is even less likely to appear in publications than white slang. Toward the end of his life in the 1950s, jazz pianist and composer James P. Johnson recalled a song from his youth (1902–08) with the title Don’t Hit That Lady, She Got Good Booty. The interview was published posthumously in the June 1959 issue of Jazz Review:

Q: Did you play anyplace when you were a boy in Jersey City?

A: No, I was too young. Like other kids, I used to work around saloons, doing a little buck dance, playing the guitar and singing songs like Don’t Hit That Lady, She Got Good Booty … Left Her on the Railroad Track … Baby, Let Your Drawers Hang Low. I used to sing through the saloon doorways or at the family entrance since I was in short pants and wasn’t allowed to go inside. Sometimes I used to rush the growler for beer parties so I could learn songs at them.

One usually has to be skeptical about reminiscences about language usage since memories are malleable and anachronistic elements are often inserted into memories. But in this case, it seems likely that Johnson, of all people, would be able to recall with accuracy the songs that influenced him.

The earliest use of booty, or more precisely boody, in print is in Carl Van Vechten’s 1926 novel N[——]r Heaven:

The Creeper had swirled into a dance with a handsome mulatto. His palms were flat across her shoulders, his slender fingers spread apart. There was an ancient impiety about the sensual grace of their united movement.

Take your eyes off the golden-brown, Dick warned, laughing.

You know my type!

It wouldn't take long to learn that.

Byron turned to his companion and looked at him earnestly. Dick, I want to ask you something, he said. Now ... now … that you've gone white, do you really want … pinks for boody?

Dick averted his eyes. That’s the worst of it he groaned. I just don’t. Give me blues every time.

And Zora Neale Hurston uses the phrase in her 1935 novella Mules and Men:

Over at the Florida-flip game somebody began to sing that jook tribute to Ella Wall which has been sung in every jook and on every “job” in South Florida:

Go to Ella Wall
Oh, go to Ella Wall
If you want good boody
Oh, go to Ella Wall

Oh, she’s long and tall
Oh, she’s long and tall
And she rocks her rider
From uh wall to wall

Oh, go to Ella Wall
Take yo’ trunk and all—

“Tell ’em ’bout me!” Ella Wall snapped her fingers and revolved her hips with her hands.

“I’m raggedy, but right; patchey but tight; stringy, but will hang on.”

So booty was clearly established in Black slang in the first half of the twentieth century.

A booty call, not to be confused with a butt dial, is a late-night phone call asking if the person is available for sex. This phrase appears in the 1990s. The rap duo Duice had a 1993 song titled Booty Call; the lyrics, however, have nothing to do with booty calls but are rather about playing music in a club. And the phrase is attested to in the Black teen magazine YSB in April 1994:

YSB: Here at Virginia Union University, do people date anymore or is it just a get together and then “hi” and “bye” type of thing?

Frank Reese, 21, Landover Hills, MD: I don't think people date anymore, we just basically get together to have sex.

YSB: Why is that?

Frank: Dating is an outdated thing. I don't think people really court nowadays. Females just want to have sex, just like males just want to have sex. That's what's going on.

Dominique Alfonse, 21, Brooklyn, NY: That's really a terrible statement to make,' cause I think the girls who do that now are in trouble because there are so many men out here who just want sex. They just figure the only way to keep up is to just join the gang. But I don't feel that the ladies who I interact with on campus are [joining the gang]!! It's all just a state of mind, but I don't feel as though it's something that ladies or men are doing as a fad. I think that it just happens like that.

Frank: Nowadays girls are kinda fast. I've had girls come up to me making the “booty” calls. Guys don't have to make the “booty” calls nowadays.

Discuss this post

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Sources:

Caxton, William. The Game and Playe of the Chesse (1474). London: Elliot Stock, 1883, 50. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Darwin, Charles. Letter to Emma Darwin, 9 May 1842. University of Cambridge: Darwin Correspondence Project.

Davin, Tom. “Conversations with James P. Johnson.” Jazz Review, 2.5, June 1959, 15–17 at 16. Jazz Studies Online (PDF). (Green’s Dictionary of Slang has this quotation but erroneous states the issue date and page.)

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., s.v. booty, n.2.

Hurston, Zora Neale. “Mules and Men” (1935). Hurston: Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings, Cheryl A. Wall, ed. New York: Penguin Putnam, 1995. 146. Archive.org.

“Posse Talk: Campus Creepin’” YSB, 30 April 1994, 54. ProQuest Magazines.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2002, s.v. booty, n.3, booty call, n.; June 2016, s.v. botty, n.; second edition, 1989, s.v. booty, n.1.

Van Vechten, Carl. N[——]r Heaven. New York: Knopf, 1926, 215. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Image credit: Sony Spain (2018). Wikipedia. Fair use of low-resolution copy of the work to illustrate the topic under discussion.

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.