libel

Thomas Rowlandson, 1810, “Libel Hunters on the Lookout, or Daily Examiners of the Liberty Press”

17 July 2024

In present day legal parlance, according to Black’s Law Dictionary, a libel is “a defamatory statement expressed in a fixed medium, esp. writing but also a picture, sign, or electronic broadcast.” It is also a verb meaning “to defame (someone) in a permanent medium, esp. in writing.”

The word comes from the Anglo-Norman libel, meaning a legal writ or complaint, which is from the Latin libellus, or little book. It makes it’s English appearance by the end of the thirteenth century, when it appears in The Metrical Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester describing events of a century earlier, during the reign of King John:

& after sein Micheles day · þe þridde day he com ·
To douere & þe bissop · of londone wiþ him nom ·
& þe bissop of eli · & þe king sone wende ·
To a maner þer biside · & to hom anon sende ·
Is heye Iustice of is lond · sir · G · le fiȝ peris ·
Þat ȝuf þe erchebissop · oþer eni of his ·
Wolde eni þing · toward him · þat hii sende him libel ·
& esste ek articles · þat nere noȝt to graunti wel ·
Ac vor it nas bote al þe mase · þe erchebissop sone ·
Wende aȝen ouer se · as best was to done ·

[And on the third day after Saint Michael’s day, he (i.e., the archbishop) came to Dover and brought with him the Bishop of London and the Bishop of Ely, and the king soon went to a nearby manor and soon sent for them. Sir Geoffrey le Fitz Piers is the Chief Justiciar of this land, and that if the archbishop or any of his would have anything with respect to him, that they send him a libel and asked also for items that were not to be granted.]

By the late fourteenth century and probably under the influence of the Latin, libel was being used to mean a small book or short treatise. And by the early sixteenth century, the word was being used to denote a printed and publicly distributed leaflet or pamphlet. Such leaflets were often defamatory and dubbed libellus famosus or famous libels, the famous referring to the fact that they were published and distributed. Here is an early example from a 26 June 1521 letter written by John Longland, the bishop of London, to Cardinal Wolsey about a pair of heretic priests in his diocese:

And noo doubte ther arre moo in Oxenford as apperith by suche famous lybells and bills as be sett uppe in night tymes upon Chirche doores. I have twoo of them, and delyvered the third to my Lord of London. I truste your Grace hath seen itt, whereby ye may perceyve the corrupt mynds.

And by the early seventeenth century libel had acquired its present-day legal definition of a written defamatory statement, as opposed to a slander, which is a spoken defamatory statement. At around the same time, the verb to libel, meaning to make such a defamatory statement, also made its appearance.

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Sources:

Garner, Bryan A., ed. Black’s Law Dictionary, 11th edition, 2019, s.v. libel, n., libel, v. Thomson Reuters Westlaw.

Longland, John, Bishop of Lincoln. Letter to Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, 26 June 1521. In Henry Ellis, ed. Original Letters Illustrative of English History, third series, vol. 1 of 4. London: Richard Bentley, 1846, 253. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. libel(le, n.

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

Wright, William Aldis, ed. The Metrical Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester, vol. 2 of 2. London: Stationary Office, 1887, lines 10,227–237, 703. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Image credit: Thomas Rowlandson, 1810. Wikimedia Commons. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Public domain image.

duke / dukes

15 July 2024

The earliest known appearance of duke in English, from the Peterborough Chronicle entry of 1129

A duke is the ruler of a duchy or the highest rank of nobility below the sovereign. The word comes from the Anglo-Norman duc, meaning ruler or general, which in turn is from the Latin dux, leader or general.

The oldest use of the word in English that anyone has found is in the Peterborough Chronicle entry for the year 1129, probably written shortly thereafter and refers to the papal schism that began in that year:

Þes ilces geares forð ferde Honorius papa. Ær he wære wel ded. Þa wære þær coren twa papes. Se an wæs gehaten Petrus. he wæs munec of Clunni. & weas boren of þa ricceste men of Rome. mid him helden ða of Rome. & se duc of Sicilie. Se oðer het Gregorius.

This same year Pope Honorius [II] died. Before he had been dead for very long, there were chosen two popes. One was named Peter [i.e., Antipope Anacletus II]. He was a monk of Cluny and was born of the most powerful men of Rome. Supporting him were those of Rome and the Duke of Sicily. The other was named Gregory [i.e., Innocent II].

But duke, or more usually its plural form dukes, is also a slang term for the hands, especially the fists. The earliest known record of the slang sense is in George Matsell’s 1859 Vocabulum; or, the Rogue’s Lexicon, which defines dukes as “hands” and also includes the word in an appendix of “Technical Words and Phrases in General Use by Pugilists.” Matsell had been New York City’s first police commissioner, so the word’s appearance here hints at an American origin for the slang usage, but there are other only slightly later appearances in Britain, so we cannot say for certain on which side of the Atlantic the usage started.

How duke acquired this slang meaning is not known, but there are two commonly touted explanations. The one better supported by evidence is that it comes from the Romany dukkering, meaning palm reading. Matsell’s Vocabulum also has an entry for dookin cove, which is defined as “a fortune-teller.”

The other explanation was proffered by the 1874 edition of Hotten’s Slang Dictionary:

Dukes, or DOOKS, the hands, originally modification of the rhyming slang, “Duke of Yorks,” forks=fingers, hands—a long way round, but quite true. The word is in common use among low folk. “Put up your DOOKS” is a kind invitation to fight.

An American origin would work against this explanation, but as mentioned, a US origin is not certain.

Also in 1874, we seek the phrase put up your dukes in the records of London’s Old Bailey court in the trial of a William Onion, who was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to month’s imprisonment:

JAMES HOLMES. I am manager of the Old Rose public-house, St. George's Street—on the night of 12th June the prisoner and deceased were there drinking together with a third man—they were quarrelling—I told them to go outside, which they did—I stood at the door to keep them from coming in—I saw the deceased strike the prisoner two or three times and want to fight him; they were not violent blows—the prisoner said if he gave him one blow that would be enough for him, and he hit him one blow under the nose on the lip; he fell and caught his head against the side of the kerb—I went in and saw no more—they had been drinking, but were not drunk.

Cross-examined by the Prisoner. The deceased had previously been quarrelling with another man—I did not hear you say “What is the use of two old pals quarrelling”—I did not hear you call for a pot of beer and say “You had better quarrel with that”—I would not serve you nor the other houses either—the deceased went on the top of the hill, and said “Come on, you are no man if you don't put up your dukes”—that was before you struck him—you were on the lower part—there are stones there sticking out of the ground—he took every advantage of you.

As with many slang terms, the exact origin is lost in the mists of time, but at least with this one, there is some evidence pointing to the Romany origin.

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Sources:

Anglo-Norman Dictionary, 2007, s.v. duc, n.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., s.v. duke, n.3, dook, n.1.

Hotten, John Camden. The Slang Dictionary. London: Chatto and Windus, 1874, 153. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Matsell, George W. Vocabulum; or, the Rogue’s Lexicon. New York: 1859, 27, 28, 126. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

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

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

Plummer, Charles and John Earle. Two of the Saxon Chronicles, vol. 1 of 2 (1892). Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952 (reprint), 260. HathiTrust Digital Archive. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 636, fols. 87r–v.

Swanton, Michael, trans. and ed. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (1996). New York: Routledge, 1998, 260.

“William Onion. Killing; manslaughter. 13th July 1874.” The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, Reference # t18740713-478.

Image credit: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 636, fols. 87r–v. Public domain image as a mechanical reproduction of a public domain work.

protactinium

Microscopic image of atoms of protactinium-233 (dark area) in the light of their radioactive emission

12 July 2024

The element protactinium is a dense, radioactive, silvery-gray metal in the actinide series with atomic number 91 and the symbol Pa. Due to its rarity and its radioactivity, it has no applications outside of research.

The element was first discovered by Kazimierz Fajans and Oswald Helmuth Göhring in 1913, and they dubbed it brevium, with the symbol Bv, due to its short half-life.

But in 1918 Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn discovered a more stable isotope of the element, dubbing it protactinium (pro[t]- + actinium) because one of its decay products is the element actinium:

Die Vermutung, daß die Pechblenderückstände das geeignete Versuchsmaterial bieten, hat sich bewährt. Es ist uns gelungen, ein neues aktives Element aufzufinden und den Beweis zu erbringen, daß es die Muttersubstanz des Actiniums ist. Wir schlagen dafür den Namen Protactinium vor.

[The assumption that the pitchblende residues provide suitable experimental material has been confirmed. We have succeeded in finding a new active element and providing evidence that it is the parent substance of actinium. We propose the name protactinium for it.]

In early use, the name protoactinium was occasionally used, taking the added < t > to mean the prefix was proto- instead of pro-

In 1949, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) gave priority of discovery to the Hahn and Meitner, and hence protactinium is the name used today.

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Sources:

Fajans, Kasimir and Paul Beer. “Das Verhalten der Radio-elemente bei Fällungsreaktionen.” Berichte der Deutschen Chemischen Gesellschaft, 46.3, July 1913, 3486–97 at 3492. DOI: 10.1002/cber.191304603130.

Hahn, Otto von and Lise Meitner. “Die Muttersubstanz des Actiniums, ein Neues Radioaktives Element von Langer Lebensdauer.” Physikalische Zeitschrift, 19.10, 15 May 1918, 208–18 at 211. HathiTrust Digital Library.

Hevesy, G. v. “Diffusion und Valenz der Radioelemente” (7 October 1913). Physikalische Zeitschrift, 14.24, 1 December 1913, 1202–09 at 1205. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Miśkowiec, Pawel. “Name Game: The Naming History of the Chemical Elements—Part 3—Rivalry of Scientists in the Twentieth Century.” Foundations of Chemistry, 12 November 2022. DOI: 10.1007/s10698-022-09452-9.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2007, s.v. protactinium, n.

Photo credit: Unknown photographer, 1969. US Department of Energy photo. Flickr.com. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

yas / yassify

Yassified version of the Quaker Oats logo

10 July 2024

To yassify something is to apply beauty filters to a digital image in an over-the-top manner in order to create a humorous result, and often, in a callback to the term’s roots in 1980s Black and LatinX queer culture, to transform the image of man into that of a woman. It, and its forerunner the exclamation yas, are good examples of how a term can exist in a subculture for decades before exploding into general popularity and then fading from general use once the fad becomes passé.

Yassify appeared and went viral in 2021 with the 13 November launch of the Twitter account @YassifyBot (not really a bot, but an actual person) that featured such transformed images. The viral sensation quickly caught the attention of the press. The following appeared in the student newspaper the Cornell Daily Sun on 22 November 2021:

We probably have all glowed ourselves up with some retouches on a photo editing app at some point. But have you also tried giving yourself a poreless face, a pair of smokey eyes, plumped-up lips, balayaged hair and well-defined cheekbones? In other words, have you “yassified” yourself? Or we should ask ourselves, why are we comfortable doing the former but not the latter?

The past two weeks have given birth to a sea of “yassify” (or “yassification”) memes. These memes first emerged from queer Twitter, where people began sharing heavily edited photos of public figures with the glamazon look.

The trend soon became an internet culture phenomenon when an edited scene from the A24 horror film Hereditary took off. In the clip, Toni Collette turned from screaming in terror to serving her look. After this meme went viral, no one was safe from “yassification.” From celebrities like Timothée Chalamet, politicians like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, to historical figures like Mother Teresa, everyone was turned into exemplars of our beauty ideals.

It might already sound familiar to some of you, but yassification is a derivation of the term “yaaass queen.” Originated from 1980s ballroom culture in New York City, the queer slang-turned internet culture phenomenon went mainstream in 2013 thanks to RuPaul’s Drag Race and a video of a Lady Gaga fan. “Yas queen” has now become part of the everyday lexicon in youth culture that people say in response to someone fabulous.

And the word was featured in the online New York Times on 24 November 2021 and in the Sunday print edition four days later:

“Girl With a Pearl Earring” in a full face of makeup. The first Queen Elizabeth contoured from her neck ruff up. Severus Snape with jet-black hair extensions. Sasquatch sporting a smoky eye.

These are just a few of the altered images that have been shared by YassifyBot, a Twitter account that started popping up in people’s feeds this month.

To “yassify” something, in the account’s parlance, is to apply several beauty filters to a picture using FaceApp, an A.I. photo-editing application, until its subject—be that a celebrity, a historical figure, a fictional character or a work of fine art—becomes almost unrecognizably made up.

Since YassifyBot’s account was activated on Nov. 13, it has tweeted hundreds of photographs in which subjects’ lashes appear thick and spidery; their eyebrows look as though they’ve seen the business end of a pencil; their hair has been lengthened and, often, colored; and their cheekbones and nose are sharply contoured.

Yassify was voted Informal Word of the Year for 2021 by the American Dialect Society.

As stated in these sources, yassify has its roots in the use of yas, a variation on yes, by Black and Latino drag ballroom culture in the 1980s as an exclamation of recognition, encouragement, and support. Many examples of yas being used can be seen in the 1990 documentary on ball culture, Paris Is Burning. The word came to the attention of the general English-language discourse community in 2013 when a video of a Lady Gaga fan using the term went viral and again in 2015 when it was used on the TV show Broad City. Yas was added to the online Oxford Dictionaries in 2017.

An example of yas being used by a queer student is quoted in a 2015 University of Alabama master’s thesis:

To be honest with you, sometimes I am self-conscious about my voice. I know I have to get over that, because it’s just what I sound like…  I’m working on that. I mean, it isn’t like I’m some stereotypical sassy queen who walks around saying, “Yas queen! Ya! Slay!” We all know that one gay who is always snapping and showing out. I don’t put on a show like that! I mean, don’t get me wrong, I like a bitchy kiki at the Pride Parade as much as the next queen… I just wish I didn’t sound as squeaky while I dish!

After 2021, however, the word faded from use once the novelty wore off. It can still be heard, just not at the rate of its peak in popularity.

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Sources:

Amatulli, Jenna. “Here’s the Real Origin of the Word ‘Yas.’” Huffpost.com, 19 July 2017 (updated 4 September 2017).

Forst, Michael. Understanding Marginalized Queer Voices: An Ethnography of LGBTQ Spaces. University of Alabama (Master’s Thesis), 2015, 58. ProQuest Dissertations.

Levine, Jon. “Yaaass, You Have Black Drag Queens to Thank for the Internet’s Favorite Expression.” Mic.com, 7 October 2015.

O’Neill, Shane. “What Does It Mean to ‘Yassify’ Anything?” New York Times (online), 24 November 2021. ProQuest Blog, Podcast, or Website. Print version: 28 November 2021, Sunday Styles 2.

Oxford Dictionaries, 2017, s.v. yas, excl.

Yang, Stephen. “Yassification: Contestation of the Extremes and the Binaries.” Cornell Daily Sun (Ithaca, New York), 22 November 2021. ProQuest Wire Feed.

“Yas Gaga.” YouTube.com, 21 August 2013.

Zimmer, Benjamin, Kelly E. Wright, Brianne Hughes, and Charles E. Carson. “Among the New Words.” American Speech, 97.3, August 2022, DOI: 10.1215/00031283-10096035.

Image credit: @YassifyBot, X.com, 22 November 2021. Fair use of a copyrighted image to illustrate the topic under discussion.

gerrymander

Reprint of the original gerrymander cartoon in the Newburyport Herald, 31 March 1812

8 July 2024

Political jargon terms often have a short life. Terms such as to bork or hanging chad which once briefly dominated the news cycle are now historical footnotes. Gerrymander, however, is one of the most successful political jargon terms of all time, but its survival is somewhat unfair to its namesake, Elbridge Gerry (1744–1814), a signer of The Declaration of Independence, governor of Massachusetts, and vice president of the United States. To gerrymander is to draw a state’s voting districts in such a way as to give political advantage to one’s own political party, but Gerry was only reluctantly associated with the practice.

The U.S. Constitution requires a census be taken every ten years and that state legislatures redraw the districts from which U.S. representatives are elected to reflect changes in population. The legislatures of the several states define their districts in a similar manner. Of course, this creates lots of opportunities for political mischief or even outright corruption as each political party seeks to redraw the district boundaries to favor their own electoral chances.

The idea that one could fashion district boundaries to favor one side or the other is almost as old as the republic itself, and one of the early egregious examples of this practice occurred in 1812 in Essex County, Massachusetts. The Massachusetts legislature, dominated by Democratic-Republicans (the forerunner of the modern Democratic Party) drew one district so that it snaked around the outskirts of the county, favoring their party over the competition, the Federalists. Gerry, who was a Democratic-Republican and governor at the time, actually objected to the plan, but he signed it into law out of party loyalty, and by doing so, he became the public face of the convoluted district. 

Map of the redistricting of Essex County, Massachusetts, Boston Gazette, 9 March 1812

The Boston Gazette, a Federalist paper edited by John Russell, first reported on the redistricting plan in an extra edition on 9 March 1812, but it did not at first use the term gerrymander, instead referring to it as a “Crooked S,” “concave,” and “egg-shell district.” The extra edition published redistricting maps of Worcester and Essex Counties and said of them:

The above representation has been procured to show, so far as can be shown by the instances of two Counties only, in what mode the present ruling party have dissected the Commonwealth; “carved it as a dish fit for the Gods” but “hewn it as a carcase [sic] fit for hounds.”

[…]

The County of Essex has been divided into Districts, described by the dotted lines, to which the ingenious carvers have been unwilling to assign names. The District, of which the extremes are Salisbury, on the North side of the Merrimack River, and Chelsea (which last was cut off from Suffolk to prevent that District from sending six Senators) may be properly called by the name which children give to a letter in the alphabet, “Crooked S;” or one District may be denominated concave, and the other convex, as one of the fits into the other, very much as the half of a small egg may be put into half the shell of a larger egg.

[…]

By the new division it is expected, by the democratic legislators, the Worcester South District will send two senators of their party to the next legislature, and that three of the same description will be returned from the semicircular, crooked S, concave, or egg-shell district in Essex. If such should be the result, these counties, containing an immense federal majority of more than two thousand eight hundred electors, would exhibit the strange spectacle of being represented by four federalists and five democrats in the first branch of the legislature. But we confide in the spirit, the intelligence, and the virtue of the good people of these districts of [sic] defeat this attempt to control the constitutional right of suffrage.

Allegedly, upon seeing the map one of the editors the Boston Gazette compared the district to a salamander. In reply, another editor reportedly said, “Salamander! Call it a Gerrymander.” There is considerable doubt as to these details, however, and exactly who coined gerrymander is not known. The likeliest candidate is the Gazette’s editor, John Russell. Other candidates include Russell’s brother Benjamin, who edited the Federalist Columbian Centinel and who used the word the following month, and Nathan Hale, editor of the Boston Weekly Messenger, another Federalist newspaper, and nephew of the Revolutionary War patriot who had regretted he had “but one life to lose for his country.”

What we do know for certain is that the word gerrymander first appears in the pages of the Boston Gazette on 26 March 1812, accompanied by a political cartoon that depicted the snake-like district as a winged serpent. The drawing was probably a creation of engraver Elkanah Tisdale, and not painter Gilbert Stuart who is often given credit. The cartoon bore the headline of:

The Gerry-mander.
A new species of Monster, which appeared in the Essex South District in January last.

And the accompanying text read, in part:

From these premises the sagacious Doctor most solemnly avers there can be no doubt that this monster is a genuine Salamander, though by no means perfect in all its members; a circumstance however which goes far to prove its legitimacy. But as this creature has been engendered and brought forth under the sublimest auspices, he proposes that a name should be given to it, expressive of its genus, and at the same time conveying an elegant and very appropriate compliment to his Excellency the Governor, who is known to be the zealous patron and promoter of whatever is new, astonishing and erratic, especially of domestic growth and manufacture. For these reasons and for other valuable considerations, the Doctor has decreed that this monster shall be denominated a Gerry-mander, a name that must exceedingly gratify the parental bosom of our worthy Chief Magistrate, and prove so highly flattering to his ambition, that the Doctor may confidently expect in return for his ingenuity and fidelity, some benefits a little more substantial than the common reward of virtue.

The said “Doctor Watergruel” is a satirical invention of the Gazette’s editors.

The cartoon and the word gerrymander were reprinted in papers across Massachusetts and the United States. Thus a political term was born, the term became a Federalist rallying cry in the 1812 election, and Gerry lost his gubernatorial re-election bid because, at least in part, of it.

Gerry pronounced his name with a hard g (IPA: /g/) but over time the pronunciation of gerrymander shifted to a soft g (IPA: /dʒ/), probably because as Elbridge faded from memory (he would go on to the political oblivion that is the vice presidency of the United States*) people gave it the pronunciation of the first name Gerry or Jerry and perhaps with the influence of jerry-built, a term meaning of shoddy construction.

(* There is the old story of two brothers, one who went to sea and the other who became vice president. Neither were ever heard from again.)

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Sources:

Davis, Jennifer. “Elbridge Gerry and the Monstrous Gerrymander.” In Custodia Legis: Law Librarians of Congress (blog), 10 February 2017.

“Essex County; Worcester County.” Boston Gazette, Extra 9 March 1812. Library of Congress.

“The Gerry-Mander: or, Essex South District Formed into a Monster!!” Newburyport Herald and Country Gazette, 31 March 1812, 5. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

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

Tréguer, Pascal. “Why ‘Gerrymander’ Was Originally the Name of a Monstrous Salamader.” 3 November 2018, Wordhistories.net.

Image credits: Elkanah Tisdale, “The Gerry-Mander: or, Essex South District Formed into a Monster!!” Newburyport Herald and Country Gazette, 31 March 1812, public domain image; “Essex County; Worcester County.” Boston Gazette, Extra 9 March 1812, Library of Congress, Public domain image.