fleabag

Bunks in “seven-cent,” New York City flophouse, c. 1890; Jacob Riis

24 June 2024

Fleabag is a pejorative term for a bed or place of lodging or for a dirty, disreputable person. It is apparently a calque of the German Flohbeutel, a pejorative for a person lacking personal hygiene, although the English word may have been coined independently. An 1805 German-English dictionary has the following entry:

der Flohbeutel, des -s, plur. ut nom. sing. flea-bag, name given to a low person that is full of fleas.

Of course, this is evidence of the German usage, not the English.

We see the English fleabag a few years later, in the sense of a bed, in an account about Daniel McNeal, an American naval captain that appears in the London Chronicle dated 13 September 1811:

At another time, he gave liberty at Leghorn to two of his lieutenants, his surgeon, and purser, to go on shore, and immediately got under way with only one commissioned officer on board. His officers were not able to join him for four months, which they did at last at Malta, after having been cruising up and down the Mediterranean for four months in a Swedish frigate. When they came on board, he accosted them in the following handsome manner, “D—n your liv[e?]s, I thought you were in America before this—I have just done as well without you as if you had been on board, but as you are here I suppose I must take so much live lumber on board—you had better look out for your old flea-bags,” (meaning their cabins).

(It looks as if there was a printer’s error in “lives,” with an extra letter being erased.)

The London Chronicle defines fleabag as “cabin,” although it seems more likely, given the nature of sleeping accommodations on board naval vessels of the era, what was meant was “hammock.”

And there is this bit of dialogue in Charles J. Lever’s 1839 novel The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer uses fleabag more generally to mean a place of lodging, rather than just a bed:

Still I was not to be roused from my trance, and continued my courtship as warmly as ever.

“I suppose you’ll come home now,” said a gruff voice behind Mary Anne.

I turned and perceived Mark Anthony, with a grim look of very peculiar import.

“Oh! Mark dear, I’m engaged to dance another set with this gentleman.”

“Ye are, are ye?” replied Mark, eyeing me askance. “Troth and I think the gentleman would be better if he went off to his flea-bag himself.”

In my mystified intellect this west country synonym for a bed a little puzzled me.

The fact that the German Flohbeutel referred to a person and the English fleabag originally to a bed hints that the English word was independently created and not a calque. English use of the word to refer to a person does not appear until the middle of the twentieth century.

Further muddying the etymological trail is an Irish use of flea-park in a popular song, “De May-Bush,” allegedly from c. 1790. The song recounts a riot that happened in Smithfield, a suburb of Dublin, at around that date that was inspired by or in sympathy with the French Revolution:

Bill Durham, being up de nite afore,
Ri rigidi ri ri dum dee,
Was now in his flea-park, taking a snore,
When he heard de mob pass by his door.
Ri rigidi dum dee!

The problem is that there is no record of the song until it was published in 1843, well after fleabag was well established in English. And if the song does indeed date to c. 1790, there is no guarantee that this particular lyric is that old. Verses get added and dropped from popular songs all the time.

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Sources:

“American Naval Biography” (13 September 1811). London Chronicle, 12–13 September 1811, 262–63 at 262. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Kuettner, Carl Gottlob and William Nicholson. New and Complete Dictionary of the German Language for Englishmen, vol. 1 of 3. Leipzig: E. B. Schwickert, 1805, 669. Google Books.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., s.v. fleabag, n., fleabag, adj.

Lever, Charles J. The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer. Dublin: William Curry, 1839, 266. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

“De May-Bush.” In “Ireland Sixty Years Ago.” Dublin University Magazine, 21.132, December 1843, 655–76 at 671. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2021, s.v. fleabag, n.

Photo credit: Jacob Riis, c. 1890. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

potassium / potash

Pieces of potassium

21 June 2024

Potassium is a chemical element with the atomic number 19 and the symbol K. It is a soft, silvery-white, alkali metal that reacts rapidly and violently with oxygen. Potassium is necessary for life as we know it, required for nerve transmission among other cellular functions, and it has many commercial uses, notably in producing soaps and fertilizers.

Potassium was first derived from potash, the residue from burned plant matter. Potash is, unsurprisingly a compound of pot + ash. The English word appears in the early sixteenth century and has cognates in other Germanic languages. Over the centuries, exactly what is meant by potash has changed. Originally, it literally referred to the ashes of plants. Later, it denoted impure potassium carbonate obtained from such ashes; then, as methods improved, it denoted purer potassium carbonate. Senses over the years have included water with potassium salts and potassium hydroxide or caustic potash. In modern use, potash refers to any of the various salts of potassium, from whatever source, especially as used in fertilizer.

The spelling potasse, after the French, starts to be used in English-language chemistry circles by the end of the eighteenth century.

In 1807, chemist Humphry Davy was the first to isolate the element, distinguishing it from the chemically similar sodium, and he proposed the name potassium, after the French spelling:

Potasium [sic] and Sodium are the names by which I have ventured to call the two new substances: and whatever changes of theory, with regard to the composition of bodies, may hereafter take place, these terms can scarcely express an error; for they may be considered as implying simply the metals produced from potash and soda. I have consulted with many of the most eminent scientific persons in this country, upon the methods of derivation, and the one I have adopted has been the one most generally approved. is perhaps more significant than elegant. But it was not possible to found names upon specific properties not common to both; and though a name for the basis of soda might have been borrowed from the Greek, yet an analogous one could not have been applied to that of potash, for the ancients do not seem to have distinguished between the two alkalies.

But the name was not universally accepted. Earlier, in 1797, German chemist Martin Heinrich Klaproth had suggested the names kali and natron for the alkalis of plant and mineral matter, respectively:

Mein Vorschlag gehet dahin: slatt der bisherigen Benennungen, Pflanzenalkali, vegetabilisches Laugenfalz, Pottasche, u.s.w. den Namen Kali sestzusetzen; und statt der Benennungen Mineralalkali, Soda u.s.w. zu dessen ältern Namen Natron zurück zu kehren,

(My suggestion goes like this: based on the previous names, plant alkali, vegetable lye, potash, etc. to establish the name Kali; and instead of the names mineral alkali, soda, etc. to return to its older name Natron.)

Kali is from the post-classical Latin alkali, which was borrowed from the Arabic القَلْيَه (al-qalyah, potash). In 1809, German chemist Ludwig Wilhelm Gilbert proposed calling the newly discovered element Kalium, rather than Davy’s potassium, and that name became the common one in German and the source for the symbol K.

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Sources:

Davy, Humphry. “The Bakerian Lecture: On Some New Phenomena of Chemical Changes Produced by Electricity, Particularly the Decomposition of the Fixed Alkalies, and the Exhibition of the New Substances Which Constitute Their Bases; And on the General Nature of Alkaline Bodies” (19 November 1807). Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 98, 1808, 1–44 at 32. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Klaproth, Martin Heinrich. “Beitrag zur Chemischen Naturgeschichte des Pflanzenalkai” (1797). Sammlung der Deutschen Abhandlungen, Welche in der Königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin. Berlin: Georg Decker, 1799, 68–71 at 71. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

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, December 2006, s.v. potassium, n., potass, n., potash, n.; September 2009, s.v. alkali, n. and adj.

Photo credit: Dennis S.K., 2007. Wikimedia Commons. Used under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

flack / flak

An American B-24 bomber emerging from a flak barrage with one engine on fire, c. 1943

19 June 2024

Flack and flak are two very different words that are often confused and conflated. A flack is a publicist, while flak is anti-aircraft fire. Both start appearing in American English in the 1930s, but in very different spheres.

The origin of flack is uncertain, but it may be after Gene Flack, a noted film press agent in the 1930s. This explanation is plausible, perhaps even likely, but there is only second-hand evidence linking the word with the man. Flak, on the other hand, comes from the German flak, an abbreviation of flug(zeug)abwehrkanone (air(craft) defense cannon). The German word was coined during World War I, and references to the German word saw occasional use in American military writing during that war. For instance, flak makes an appearance in the Navy Air Pilot and Military Aeronautic Review of April 1918:

The anti-aircraft batteries of the interior (Flugabwehrkanone in Heimatgebiet), were commanded by an officer called “Inspekteur der Flak im Heimatgebeit”, who was normally called Kommander des Heimatsluftschutzes, with headquarters at Frankfort-on-Main [sic].

(Heimatsluftschutzes = homeland air defenses)

But the word wasn’t anglicized until the rearming of Germany starting in 1933, and it saw widespread English-language use during World War II. During the war, flak quickly became an integral and productive part of the military vocabulary, with a variety of flak-related terms appearing in military slang. Cities were defended with continuous barrages of fire called flak curtains; a flak alley was a heavily defended airspace; aircrew wore flak jackets, flak vests, and flak suits; and airman could go flak happy from the stress of aerial combat and be sent to a flak shack to recover, perhaps with the help of sodium pentothal, or flak juice.

With the rearming of Germany in 1933, flak began once again to appear in English-language writing, at first only in reference to the German military. We see this usage in an article in the Milwaukee Journal of 13 May 1934, in a description of paramilitary German police units:

Each division has its own flying, gas, armored car, and mine thrower corps, special “Flak” (anti-aircraft) and gas protection divisions.

By 1938, the word was being used to refer to non-German anti-aircraft defenses. From a description of Czech defenses in the Buffalo Evening News of 19 March 1938:

Heavy artillery and Flak (anti-aircraft) guns placed on the surface are also operated from below the ground by efficient range-finding periscopes and wireless apparatus. Thus the invaders would find not a single soldier on the surface, yet terrific activity would be carried on from under the earth.

After the Second World War, flak acquired a figurative sense interference or negative criticism. Jazz pianist and petty thief James Blake used this sense of flak in a 26 March 1956 letter he wrote from prison:

I’ve encountered a certain amount of flak and static from Sandy’s cell partner, a converted Jew who poses as some kind of an evangelist on the campus—I think of Savonarola, I think of Rasputin—and while I have never been a man of violence, I have always been a man of ingenuity and cunning. We shall see.

There is this description of figurative flak directed at the US Air Force Academy’s football team from New York’s Daily News of 14 October 1957:

There’s a struggling, young service academy out in Colorado which is shooting for the moon in intercollegiate athletics. It has growing pains; it suffers from lack of money for proper facilities and it is being riddled by political flak. Read all about the new Air Force Academy in a penetrating, three-part series by Gene Ward starting in tomorrow’s NEWS.

And in his 1970 book Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, writer Tom Wolfe coined the term flak-catcher, meaning a publicist, conflating both flak and flack:

And then it dawns on you, and you wonder why it took so long for you to realize it. This man is the flak catcher. His job is to catch the flak for the No. 1 man. He’s like the professional mourners you can hire in Chinatown. They have certified wailers, professional mourners, in Chinatown, and when your loved one dies, you can hire the professional mourners to wail at the funeral and show what a great loss to the community the departed is. In the same way this lifer is ready to catch whatever flak you’re sending up. It doesn’t matter what bureau they put him in. It’s all the same. Poverty, Japanese imports, valley fever, tomato-crop parity, partial disability, home loans, second-probate accounting, the Interstate 90 detour change order, lockouts, secondary boycotts, G.I. alimony, the Pakistani quota, cinch mites, Tularemic Loa loa, veterans’ dental benefits, workmen’s compensation, suspended excise rebates—whatever you’re angry about, it doesn’t matter, he’s there to catch the flak. He’s a lifer.

That publicist sense of flack first had first seen print in the pages of Variety in the Fall of 1933. The earliest that I have found is from the 19 September 1933, a brief article with printing error that duplicated a line of text:

Flacks Outsmarted

Jean Harlow–Harold Rosson elopement to Yuma, Ariz., was a scorch on a marriage between the two for a month and were planning a great for a marriage between the two for a month and were planning a great [sic] publicity cavalcade when the wedding took place. But the plane hop-off spoiled all the pre-arranged plans for pages of pictures and society stuff blurbs.

And there is this in the next day’s Variety:

Peripatetic Flack

Press agent at one of the downtown radio stations, owners of which were also in the automobile business, bought a new car this week, but not from his bosses.

He’s now afraid to drive his car to work but has his wife doing the chauffering [sic], dropping him off two or three blocks away from the station and picking him up again at a similarly safe distance.

A string of the uses of flack appears in Variety in the following weeks. (See below for more early uses.) And the verb to flack, actually in the form of a gerund, appears in the 20 November 1933 issue:

San Francisco, Nov. 10—Jack Hess back to his flacking on the Majestic film payroll after spending several days up here setting campaigns for “Sin of Nora Moran” and “Divorce Bed” which are due at the Fox within a month.

None of these early uses by variety point to Gene Flack, although he was well known in the industry at the time, and the term could very well by an eponym for the man.

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Sources:

“Air Force New Grid Power?” Daily News (New York City), 14 October 1957, C24/3. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Blake, James. Letter, 26 March 1956. In The Joint. New York: Doubleday, 1971, 119.

Farago, Ladislas. “Czechoslovakia Closes Steel Ring.” Buffalo Evening News (New York), 19 March 1938, Magazine 1/4. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“Frisco ‘Bedded,’ Hess Goes Home.” Variety, 20 November 1933, 3/3. Variety Archive.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., s.v. flak, n., flack, v.

“Hollywood Inside.” Variety, 19 September 1933, 2/2. Variety Archive.

“Hollywood Inside.” Variety, 20 September 1933, 2/2. Variety Archive.

Lore, Ludwig. “Reporting on Some Glimpses of What Germany Is Doing to Arm Itself.” Milwaukee Journal (Wisconsin), 13 May 1934, Editorial 3/3. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. flak, n., flack, n.2; addition series, 1993, flack, v.2.

Pollock, Granville Alexander. “Organization of the German Military Air Service.” Navy Air Pilot and Military Aeronautic Review, 4.1, April 1918, 1/1. ProQuest Magazines.

Shapiro, Fred R. “The Etymology of Flack.” American Speech, 59.1, Spring 1984, 95–96. JSTOR.

Wolfe, Tom. Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers. New York: Doubleday, 1970, 110. Archive.org.

Photo credit: Unknown photographer, US Army Air Forces, c. 1943. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain photo.

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Other early uses of flack from the pages of Variety:

“Flack Writes.” Variety, 7 October 1933, 4/2. Variety Archive.

Flack Writes

Lyndsley Parsons, Monogram press agent, writes his second western for the firm, starting next week.

“Chatter.” Variety, 21 October 1933, 2/1. Variety Archive.

Landy and Hunt, flacks, announce the addition of the Screen Actors’ Guild to their clientele.

“Flack Quits.” Variety, 24 October, 6/2. Variety Archive.

Flack Quits

Blake McVeigh resigned from the Paramount publicity staff, effective Saturday.

He goes East to affiliate with an advertising agency.

“Flack and Wife in Auto Mixup.” Variety, 25 October 1933, 3/3. Variety Archive.

Flack and Wife In Auto Mixup

John Miles, of the Fox publicity aggregation, and Mrs. Miles were slightly injured in an auto crash.

“Paramount Flacks Must Be Watched.” Variety, 27 October 1933, 3/3. Variety Archive.

Paramount Flacks Must Be Watched

Joseph Von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich no likee [sic] some of the publicity being sent out about them by the Paramount studio press department so they now have the higher ups’ permission to censor all the blurb copy. Same goes for stills.

fantastic

17 June 2024

Fantastic comes via Old French from the Latin fantasticus or phantasticus, which in turn is from the Greek φανταστικός (phantastikos). The Greek verb φαντάζειν (phantazein) means to make visible and φαντάζεσθαι (phantazesthai) means to imagine, to have visions. Words like fantasy, phantom, and fancy come from the same root. [Cf. trip the light fantastic]

The adjective fantastic was brought to England by the Normans and has been recorded in English use since the late fourteenth century, when it could mean either “something false or supernatural” or “something produced by the mental faculty of imagination.” Fourteenth-century physicians believed the brain to be divided into three parts or cells. The fore-brain controlled imagination, the middle-brain judgment, and the rear-brain memory. In his Knight’s Tale, written c.1385, Chaucer alludes to this neurological understanding in a passage which is also one of the earliest recorded uses of fantastic in English:

And in his geere for al the world he ferde
Nat oonly lik the loveris maladye
Of Hereos, but rather lyk manye,
Engendred of humour malencolik
Biforen, his celle fantastik.

(And in his behavior for all the world he acted
Not only like the lover’s malady
Of heroes, but rather like mania,
Engendered of humor melancholic
In the fore-brain, his cell fantastic.)

By the end of the next century, fantastic had come to mean “imaginative, fanciful, or capricious,” and the older senses began fading away, although uses in these early senses can be found as late as the eighteenth century. And by the sixteenth century the word had also adopted the meaning of “extravagant or grotesque.”

But it wasn’t until the middle of the twentieth century that fantastic came to be used in the modern sense of “excellent, really good.” The transition is easy to understand, going from unbelievably good to simply good.

Both the Oxford English Dictionary and Green’s Dictionary of Slang have English crime novelist Margery Allingham use of fantastic in her 1938 novel The Fashion in Shrouds as their first citation for this “excellent” sense. But I believe this is in error, a misinterpretation caused by looking at snippet of text, with a significant portion elided, without context. Allingham uses the word five times in her novel. Four of those uses are clearly in the older sense of something that is beyond belief, something conjured by fantasy, and they are also used in negative contexts, to describe something horrible or unfortunate.

The fifth use of fantastic is the one included in the two dictionaries. Both give the citation as:

Oh, Val, isn’t it fantastic? […] It’s amazing, isn’t it?

The pairing with amazing makes it seem as if the word is being used in the positive sense, but what is omitted by the ellipsis and the lack of surrounding context is essential to understanding how Allingham is using the word. The immediate context of the quotation is a conversation about the sudden taking seriously ill by one of the characters in the novel, the speaker’s husband. The fuller passage reads:

 “They’ve been preparing me for it [i.e., his death]. Oh, Val, isn’t it fantastic? I mean, it’s frightful, terrible, the most ghastly thing that could have happened! But—it’s amazing, isn’t it.”

On the next page there is this exchange:

Oh, Val, don’t look at me like that! I’m broken-hearted, really I am. I’m holding myself together with tremendous difficulty, darling. I am sorry. I am. I am sorry. When you’re married to a man, whatever you do, however you behave to one another, there is an affinity. There is. It’s a frightful shock. It’s a frightful shock.

This use of fantastic is clearly not in the sense of “excellent, really good.” We see that sense in a 1 January 1955 article in the Cincinnati Post about RCA-Victor reducing the price of its phonographs:

Roland Davis of Ohio Appliances, in charge of Victor Records distribution in this area is optimistic. “We had a fantastic Christmas sale. Dealers’ shelves ought to be pretty well cleaned out.

But while Davis clearly meant fantastic to mean good, the article makes clear that perspective was not shared by the record store owners, who faced a loss in revenue from the price cuts.

Fantastic has come a long way, from hallucinations and medieval neurology to simply being something really neat.

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Sources:

Allingham, Margery. The Fashion in Shrouds (1938). London: Penguin, 1950, 118, 119. Archive.org.

Bell, Eleanor. “RCA-Victor Announces Price Cuts.” Cincinnati Post (Ohio), 1 January 1955, 5/1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. “The Knight’s Tale” (c. 1385), The Canterbury Tales, lines 1:1372–76. Harvard’s Geoffrey Chaucer Website.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., s.v. fantastic, adj. https://greensdictofslang.com/entry/ib5agny

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. fantastik, adj.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. fantastic, adj. & n.

Image credit: Unknown artist, 1949. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

polonium

Pierre and Marie Curie, c. 1904

14 June 2024

Polonium is a chemical element with atomic number 84 and the symbol Po. It is a highly radioactive metal. Once used widely in various commercial applications, such uses have largely been abandoned out of safety concerns. Its use today is primarily as a source for alpha radiation in laboratories and as a heat source for thermoelectric generators, such as those used for satellites and deep-space probes. The name comes from polon[ia] (Poland) + -ium.

The element was discovered by Pierre and Marie Curie in 1898 and named for Marie’s native land. From the published announcement of their discovery:

Nous croyons donc que la substance que nous avons retirée de la pechblende contient un métal non encore signalé, voisin du bismuth par ses propriétés analytiques. Si l'existence de ce nouveau métal se confirme, nous proposons de l'appeler polonium, du nom du pays d'origine de l'un de nous.

(We therefore believe that the substance that we removed from the pitchblende contains a metal not yet reported, close to bismuth in its analytical properties. If the existence of this new metal is confirmed, we propose to call it polonium, after the country of origin of one of us.)

At the time, Poland did not exist as an independent state, partitioned into three parts ruled by Russia, Germany, and Austria-Hungary. Curie hoped that naming the element for her native land would raise awareness of Poland’s political situation.

Polonia is a post-classical Latin name for the land, appearing in the eleventh century and widely used in Latin texts since.

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Sources:

Curie, Pierre and Marie Curie. “Sur une substance nouvelle radio-active, contenue dans la pechblende.” Comptes Rendus Hebdomadaires des Séances de l'Académie des Sciences, 127, July–December 1898, 175–178 at 177. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Miśkowiec, Pawel. “Name Game: The Naming History of the Chemical Elements: Part 2—Turbulent Nineteenth Century.” Foundations of Chemistry, 8 December 2022. DOI: 10.1007/s10698-022-09451-w.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2006, s.v. polonium, n., polony, adj. & n.2.

Image credit: Unknown photographer, c. 1904. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.