commode

Thomas Chippendale, 1754, a French commode table

29 July 2024 (Addendum, 31 July 2024)

For many Americans, the primary sense of commode is that of a euphemism for a toilet. But they may encounter a very different meaning in the context of antique furniture, where a commode is an ornate chest of drawers. And the word has other, now historical, meanings of a woman’s wig or that of a madam or female pimp. This may seem an odd collection of meanings at first, but an examination of the word’s history makes sense of it.

English borrowed commode from French, which inherited it from the Latin commodum, meaning an opportunity or thing of advantage or profit. The Latin is also the source of commodity.

Commode first appears in English in the late seventeenth century in the sense of a tall headdress or wig built upon a wire frame, a fontange—think of the elaborate women’s wigs of the court of Louis XIV. It appears in a dialogue, “The Militant Couple,” written by George Villiers, the second duke of Buckingham (1628–87) and published in a posthumous 1704 collection of his works, along with works of others of his era:

Sir John extreamly provok’d at something my Lady had said to him, swore and blunder’d like a Heroe in one of our Modern Tragedies. My Lady, on her side, exercised her Lungs with equal Vigour, and was no less Obstreperous. At last the Knight, unable to contain himself any longer, struck of [sic] her Commode, which Courtesie her Ladyship immediately requited, by throwing Sir John’s Periwigg upon the fire.

That same collection contains a poem, “Upon an Old Affected Court Lady,” by Fleetwood Sheppard (1634–98) that uses the word:

This goodly Goose, all feather’d like a Jay,
So gravely vain, and so demurely gay,
Last Night, to grace the Court, did over-load
Her bald Buff-forehead with a high Commode.

In the eighteenth century, commode could also be used to mean a female pimp or procurer. We see this use in Colley Cibber’s 1725 play Cæsar in Ægypt:

Was it not Bold, front stated Rules to Rove,
And make the Tragic Muse commode to Love?

A bit later in the eighteenth century we see commode being used to refer to an ornate, waist-high chest of drawers, a style that originated in France. This appears to be a reborrowing of the word from French. Cabinetmaker Thomas Chippendale wrote of and included drawings of commodes in his 1754 The Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker’s Director:

Plate XLVII
Is a French Commode Table, with doors or drawers in front, and drawers at each end; the middle part may be made with sliding shelves to hold cloaths [sic]. This Commode, made by a skillful workman, and of fine wood, will give great satisfaction; the feet at each end are different for better choice. A is the half plan; B the end drawer, &c. the mouldings are at large on the right hand.

The connection to toilets is in place by the beginning of the next century, when commode was also used to refer to piece of furniture with a different purpose, a cupboard containing a chamber pot, a close-stool. Courtier and army officer William Dyott writes in his diary for 21 April 1802:

There is no such thing as a garden or even backyard to any house in Cadiz, and the commode is always at the top of the house.

And in the twentieth century, American usage transferred this sense from a piece of cabinetry to the flush toilet. Here’s a classified real estate advertisement from the Dallas Morning News of 14 February 1926:

Small Two-Story Munger Home, Good Location, Good Condition

This place has a very attractive living-room and dining-room, extra nice breakfast-room and kitchen. Lavatory and commode downstairs, four good size bedrooms and bath upstairs. South front, location arrangements and improvements are extra good Price $15,500.

A little bit of research to supply the historical context and the odd collection of meanings makes sense.

Addendum (31 July 2024): Lexicographer Jonathan Green communicated the following anecdote of uncertain origin (perhaps to be found in an old book of jokes or in someone’s familial lore):

An aged French aristo, medal-bedecked résistante was hospitalized (private room) in a London clinic. Enter a brisk nurse, who says, “Madame, have you been on the commode? Please do it now.” The nurse then leaves the room. Mme. X is nonplussed. Finally, she spots a chest of drawer and drags her aged bones from bed and across the room. She manages, after several tries, to gain a seat on top—she's tough and this is hardly fighting the Wehrmacht—and is sitting (no, just sitting) there when nurse returns. Much national incomprehension ensues.

Discuss this post

---

Sources:

Chippendale, Thomas. The Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker’s Director. London: 1754, 13. Internet Archive.

Cibber, Colley. “Epilogue.” Cæsar in Ægypt. London: John Watts, 1725, 78. Gale Primary Sources: Eighteenth Century Collections Online.

Classified ad. Dallas Morning News (Texas), 14 February 1926, section 6, 11/2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Dyott, William. Diary entry for 21 April 1802. In Reginald W. Jeffrey, ed. Dyott’s Diary, vol. 1 of 2. London: Archibald Constable, 1907, 198. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Lewis, Charlton T. and Charles Short. A Latin Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1879. s.v. commodus. Database of Latin Dictionaries.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, January 2018, commode, n.; March 2017, night commode, n.

Villiers, George, Second Duke of Buckingham (1628–87). “The Militant Couple” (a dialogue). In Miscellaneous Works, second edition, vol. 1 of 2. London: S. Briscoe, 1704, 82, 239. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Image credit: Thomas Chippendale, 1754. Plate XLVII, The Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker’s Director. Internet Archive. Public domain image.

radon

Radon test kit, 1988

26 July 2024

Radon is a chemical element, a radioactive noble gas with atomic number 86 and the symbol Rn. It has few practical applications. Radon has long history of use in medical quackery, and is still occasionally used in legitimate nuclear medicine, although it has largely been replaced by other substances. Because radon is emitted from soil, measurements of radon concentrations is used in hydrologic and seismic research.

Radon gas, a decay product of thorium oxide, was discovered in 1899 by Ernest Rutherford and Robert Owens at McGill University in Montreal. A year later, the husband and wife team of Marie Sklodowska Curie and Pierre Curie observed it as a decay product of radium. As a result, the two decay products were initially dubbed thorium emanation, radium emanation, and, later when it was found to be emitted by actinium, actinium emanation.

These names proved cumbersome and didn’t conform to standard chemical nomenclature, so in 1904, William Ramsay and J. Norman Collie proposed three shortened names, exradio, exthorio, and exactino:

Now, it appears advisable to devise a name which should recall its source, and, at the same time, by its termination, express the radical difference which undoubtedly exists between it and other elements. As it is derived from radium, why not name it simply “exradio”? Should it be found that the emanation, which is supposed to be evolved from thorium, is really due to that element, and not to some other element mixed with thorium in exceedingly small amount, a similar name could be given, namely, “exthorio.” If the existence of actinium as a definite element is established, its emanation would appropriately be named “exactinio.” It is unlikely that others will be discovered, but, if they are, the same principle of nomenclature might be applied.

The names didn’t catch on, and in 1910 Ramsay tried again, this time with Robert Wytlaw-Gray and proposed the name niton because of its radioluminescent property, from the Latin nitere (to shine) + the -on suffix used for noble gases:

L'expression l’émanation du radium est fort incommode; il est certain que c'est un élément aussi bien caractérisé,que les autres, avec son spectre, décrit d'abord par Cottie et Ramsay, et étudié par Watson, sous la direction de Ramsay; nous avons maintenant déterminé par des moyens bien connus son poids atomique avec une exactitude approximative;nous l'avons liquéfié et nous avons mesuré des pressions de vapeur; cet élément appartient à la série des gaz inactifs de l'atmosphère, étant même un constituant normal de l'air atmosphérique; et pour le ranger dans sa classe, nous faisons la proposition de le nommer Niton, brillant, pour rappeler ses propriétés phosphorescentes, dont l'abréviation peut s'écrire Ni.

(The expression emanation of radium is very inconvenient; it is certain that it is an element as well characterized as the others, with its spectrum, first described by Cottie and Ramsay, and studied by Watson, under the direction of Ramsay; we have now determined by well-known means its atomic weight with approximate accuracy; we have liquefied it and measured vapor pressures; this element belongs to the series of inactive gases of the atmosphere, even being a normal constituent of atmospheric air; and to place it in its class, we propose to name it Niton, brilliant, to recall its phosphorescent properties, the abbreviation of which can be written Ni.)

Again, these names didn’t gain widespread acceptance, and the name radon was proposed by Curt Schmidt in 1917:

Daß der von im für die Radiumemanation in Vorschlag gebrachte Name Niton keine allgemeine Annahme gefunden hat, erklärt sich, we SODDY wohl mit Recht bemerkt, hauptsächlich daraus, daß “der ersprüngliche Name offenbare Vorteile dadurch bietet, daß er die radioaktive Verwandtschaft zum Ausdruck bringt, und weil es von Nachteil ist, nur für eine der drei bekannten Emanationen einen neuen Namen vorschlagen.” Demgemäß gestatte ich mir, für die drei Emanationen die aus der ersten und letzten Silbe der bisherigen schwerfälligen Bezeichnungsweise zusammengezogenen Namen

Radon             Ro
Thoron           To
Akton             Ao

in Vorschlag zu bringen, eine Benennung, die nicht nur den in SODDYS Worten liegenden Forderungen gerecht wird, sondern sich außer präziser Kürze noch dadurch auszeichnet, daß die Wortbildung konform mit der für die anderen Glieder der Edelgasgruppe ist.

(The fact that the name Niton proposed by him for the radium emanation has not found general acceptance is explained, as SODDY rightly points out, mainly by the fact that "the original name offers obvious advantages in that it expresses the radioactive relationship, and because it is disadvantageous to propose a new name for only one of the three known emanations." Accordingly, I take the liberty of suggesting the names for the three emanations:

Radon Ro
Thoron To
Akton Ao

in which are drawn from the first and last syllables of the previous cumbersome naming convention, a name which not only meets the requirements of SODDY’s words but is also distinguished by the fact that the word formation is consistent with that for the other members of the noble gas group, in addition to being precise and brief.)

But soon it was discovered that these three were just different isotopes of the same element, and in 1923 the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry chose radon as the official name because it was the most stable isotope of the three, 222Rn, the decay product of radium. It also adopted the symbol Rn, instead of Schmidt’s Ro. Thoron and akton became 220Rn and 219Rn, respectively.

Discuss this post

---

Sources:

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, June 2008, radon, n., December 2003, niton, n.; second edition, 1989, emanation, n.

Ramsay, William and J. Norman Collie. “The Spectrum of Radium Emanation” (18 May 1904). Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, 73.488, July 1904, 470–76 at 476. DOI: 10.1098/rspl.1904.0064.

Ramsay, William and Robert Whytlaw Gray. “La densité de l'émanation du radium.” Comptes rendus hebdomadaires des séances de l'Académie des sciences, 151.2, 11 July 1910, 126–128. BnF Gallica.

Schmidt, Curt. “Periodisches System und Genesis der Elemente” (22 November 1917). Zeitschrift für anorganische und allgemeine Chemie, 103.1, 14 May 1918, 79–118 at 113–14. DOI: 10.1002/zaac.19181030106

Photo Credit: Unknown photographer, National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, 1988. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

unidentified aerial phenomenon / UAP

Frame from the “Gimbal” video of a UAP taken by a U.S. Navy aviator in 2015; while unidentified, the object’s movement is consistent with it being an ordinary jet aircraft

24 July 2024

Unidentified aerial phenomenon, or UAP, is another name for a UFO, that is an unexplained observation of some object in the sky. Sometimes UAP is interpreted as unidentified anomalous phenomenon. The term is also an illustration of two general principles that can be applied to language. One is the recency illusion; the other is Gresham’s law.

The recency illusion, a term coined by linguist Arnold Zwicky, is “the belief that things you have noticed only recently are in fact recent.” Many think that UAP is a recent coinage, when in fact it is decades old. It first appears in August 1963 in news reports about the U.S. Air Force investigating flying saucers. From Louisiana’s Alexandria Daily Town Talk of 2 August 1963:

Satellites, manned orbital flights and other earthling ventures into outer space seem to have evaporated general interest in the so-called “Unidentified Flying Objects” (UFO’s) or, as the Air Force prefers to label them, “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena” otherwise known as UAP.

According to Google Books Ngram Viewer, unidentified aerial phenomenon spiked in popularity during the 1960s, before falling into obscurity. It then spiked again in the 2000s and has remained popular since, particularly after the August 2020 announcement of a Pentagon task force to investigate UAPs. Such news reports brought the term back into the public consciousness and created the recency illusion.

The term is also an example of Gresham’s law applied to language. The original Gresham’s law applied to money, “bad money drives out good,” or the idea that if two types of coin with the same face value are in circulation and one type contains more precious metal than the other, then the coins with higher commodity value will disappear from circulation as people hoard them or melt them down. Gresham’s law is a nineteenth-century coinage named after Tudor financier Thomas Gresham, who had advocated for monetary reform in Elizabethan England.

As applied to language, the law describes a trend where a term with two senses or uses where one usage is considered offensive or carries negative connotations, the non-offensive usage will become less common. Once a term has acquired such a negative valence, there is a tendency to try and replace it with a more neutral one.

The U.S. Air Force, primarily concerned with earthly threats to national security, coined UAP because UFO had become irretrievably associated with little green men. (According to the unclassified executive summary of the Pentagon task force investigating UAPs, the group’s final report makes no mention of anything extraterrestrial.) Similarly, many believers in an extraterrestrial origin of UAPs prefer that term because disassociates them and their beliefs from the lunatic fringe of their movement.

Discuss this post

---

Sources:

Dunleavy, Jerry. “Pentagon Announces UFO Task Force.” Washington Examiner (Washington, DC), 14 August 2020. Proquest Newspapers.

“‘Flying Saucers’ Hard to Ground.” Alexandria Daily Town Talk (Louisiana), 2 August 1963, 7/3. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. The same article appears in multiple papers two days later with a United Press International (UPI) byline.

Google Books Ngram Viewer, “unidentified aerial phenomenon.” Accessed 22 June 2024.

Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, s.v. UAP, abbr. and n. Accessed 22 June 2024.

Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, 25 June 2021. Archive.org.

Zwicky, Arnold. “Just Between Dr. Language and I.”  Language Log, 7 August 2005.

Photo credit: U.S. Navy, 2015. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image. Analysis of the video demonstrates that the object, while still unidentified, is consistent with what one would expect an ordinary jet aircraft. See Mick West, “The Gimbal Video: Genuine UFO or Camera Artifact?” Skeptic.com, 2 August 2022.

frak

Montage of uses of frak in the TV series Battlestar Galactica

22 July 2024

"Obscene” words are funny things. Supposedly, a word is classified as obscene or not because of its meaning, what it represents. But very often the meaning seemingly has nothing to do with it. Frak is a case in point. Frak is a euphemism for that more familiar four-letter word that you can’t say on U. S. broadcast television without incurring hefty fines from the Federal Communications Commission. So screenwriters use words like freak, frap, frick, and frig as substitutes for the expletive. But frak goes a bit further and takes on all the valences of its more suspect progenitor. Despite meaning exactly the same thing as fuck, and despite being used in exactly the same manner and context as fuck, frak is okay, while fuck is not.

There are older uses of frack in English, but these are unrelated to the euphemistic expletive. Frec is an Old English adjective meaning greedy or eager; frecu is an Old English noun meaning greed or greediness; frecian means to be greedy; and the noun freca plays off the eager sense to produce a noun that means bold one, warrior. These words have survived into the modern period in the Scots dialect. The expletive is also unrelated to the jargon term from the oil and gas industry. Fracking is a process by which natural gas is extracted from shale through the use of high-pressure liquids. The liquid fractures the rock, releasing the gas, hence the jargon term.

But the expletive frak has its origins in the television show Battlestar Galactica, which ran from 1978-79 and was reimagined and remade from 2003-09. In the original series, the word, spelled frack in the scripts, was just a simple expletive. The character Starbuck, a hotshot pilot, was particularly fond of exclaiming “Frack!” when he got into bad situations.

In the reimagined Battlestar Galactica, the screenwriters dropped a letter and made the word frak, presumably to make it literally a four-letter word. Not only was the spelling changed, but the word was used in a much wider variety of situations. In the new series, frak could be used as a substitute for its infamous cousin in any and all situations. So Starbuck (still the hotshot pilot, but now a woman) could use it literally to mean carnal intercourse, as in, “you’re not still frakkin’ Dualla are ya?” She was also heard to use “motherfrakker,” and to use the word as in infix, as in, “I guaran-frakkin-tee you.” Other characters uttered “frak you!” and “frak me!” in rage and despair, respectively. On various occasions in the new series we also heard “frakkin’ A,” “clusterfrak,” “frak-all,” and “for frak’s sake.”

Unlike the original series which ran on broadcast television, the reimagined series ran on cable and therefore was not subject to FCC regulation. Presumably the producers continued to use the euphemism in order to make the series easier to run in syndication on broadcast channels. Another modified profane word in the reimagined series was goddamn, which was altered to godsdamn in the series, but this change was presumably because the culture depicted in the series is polytheistic and not just to avoid government censorship.

Euphemisms like frak have a long history. They’ve been around for as long as people have been getting upset by particular words. But seldom has a euphemism been used as a perfect synonym in 100% of original word’s uses. There is no semantic difference between frak and its forbidden cousin; the only difference is a couple of phonemes. It is not the meaning or the sentiment that is considered offensive and therefore censored, it is the sound of the word. It is not the idea that is banned, but the particular form that idea takes. It makes no frakking sense, but there it is.

Discuss this post

---

Sources:

Battlestar Wiki, s.v. frak (21 February 2024), frack (29 April 2008).

Dictionary of Old English, A–I Online, 2018, s.v. frec, adj., frecu, n.

Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction, s.v. frak, v. (28 January 2021).

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2023, s.v., frack, adj. & adv.

Video credit: Battlestar Galactica YouTube channel, 2017.

broligarchy

Elon Musk (2015) and Peter Thiel (2022)

21 July 2024

Slang terms often exist for years before the general public takes notice of them. Broligarchy and broligarch are examples of this. The words are a play on bro + oligarchy. And a broligarchy is small group of men who control a situation or political power structure. It differs from an ordinary oligarchy in that a broligarchy carries with it a connotation of toxic masculinity.

Neither broligarchy nor broligarch appear in any traditionally published media outlets until July 2024, but the word existed in social media and the alternative press, especially Twitter/X for many years before that. The first example of the word that I can find is on Twitter from 7 December 2009, when a user posted:

the broligarchy has spoken. you are cool.

The context of this tweet is unclear

The word makes into the Urbandictionary on 22 May 2011:

Broligarchy

A small cadre of Bros who snatch control of any scenario.

I tried to play beer-pong at that party last night, but that table was such a fuckin' broligarchy.

And the blog The Belle Jar includes the term in a glossary of bro-terms on 19 December 2014:

Broligarchy—A form of power structure in which power effectively rests with a small number of bros, most often distinguished by the power of their bro-ness.

On 3 March 2023, the Arkansas Times, an alternative newspaper, has this in an article on the state legislature:

The Arkansas Legislature, aka the broligarchy, does not believe in the people’s right to the ballot process. This is as disappointing as is it unconstitutional, though the unconstitutionality isn’t stopping the bill’s sponsors.

In the article, the word broligarchy is hyperlinked to an article from two days earlier about how Arkansas has relatively few female legislators, so the implication of toxic masculinity is clear.

But slightly earlier a different, a more specific type of bro with a slightly different connotation appeared. The element of toxic masculinity was still there, but broligarch became linked to Silicon Valley, where the power structure revolves around tech-bros. There is this tweet from 27 May 2018:

Elon Musk is a real life Tony Stark but if Tony Stark just stayed a cunt instead of becoming Iron Man. Give me 1000 journalists @ the top of their game over 1 “fun” Broligarch who shits out a flame thrower, launches his car into space & spends money on efforts to impugn reporters

On 25 February 2024, the politically activist, alternative dance/industrial musical group Consolidated, posted a song to the Bandcamp website titled Serfin’ U.S.A./The Broligarchy. The word appears only in the song’s title, but the lyrics show that the tech-bro sense is clearly intended:

Hey baby baby check it do u wanna free music with me?
Hey baby baby we can kick it and hasten the end of the industry
Hey baby baby hold up ur still clinging to ur fantasy
Where u say ur an artist and ur makin the do re mi
But we all know it's $.03
He's an AssEt, she's a commodity
He's volatile, she's his security
He's a crypto, she's a NFT
He's a merger, she's an acquisition
Together they're a contradiction.. neuz guitar.

And there is this exchange posted to Threads.net on 19 July 2024:

dncndenise: What is TRULY frightening is the Silicon Valley dudes who want Twitler because they want the dollar to DROP in value so they can get CRYPTO to be the "world currency". That screws ALL of us and makes them RICH! Apparently realizing that they were losing their @$$3$ because Crypto is a Ponzi scheme, doesn't matter. They want their money back and they'll be OK destroying the US to get it. Read Mark Cuban's Xitter post on it. I'm SO disgusted.

Pcrritesgood: Tech Broligarchy.

Dncndenise: Yup!

Broligarch would finally hit the mainstream press on 20 July 2024 with Donald Trump’s selection of J. D. Vance as his running mate in the 2024 U.S. presidential election. Vance had long been linked to Silicon Valley entrepreneur and icon of toxic masculinity Peter Thiel. The Guardian newspaper printed an article by Carole Cadwalladr with the headline “Tech Broligarchs Are Lining Up to Court Trump,” and which contained this line:

Thiel is betting—again—on the same phenomenon in America. Betting that he will be first among a new breed of tech bro oligarchs—a new super-class of broligarchs.

The article generated a spike in the use of the term across social media.

It’s too early to tell what will happen with the word. It may be a flash in the pan, as often happens when the mainstream press gets hold of a slang term. Or it may become a staple of political commentary for years to come. In the latter case, the tech-bro sense will probably dominate the more general plain-bro sense. But for now, both the more general and the specific senses are coexisting.

Discuss this post

---

Sources:

Andre (The Wet Gamer) Cole, @coolsl4w. X.com, 7 December 2009.

“The Bronomicon.” The Belle Jar (blog), 19 December 2014.

Cadwalladr, Carole. “Tech Broligarchs Are Lining Up to Court Trump. And Vance Is One More Link in the Chain.” Guardian, 20 July 2024.

Consolidated. “Serfin’ U.S.A./The Broligarchy.” Bandcamp.com, 25 February 2024.

“Legislators Try New Tricks to Tank Citizen’s Right to Put Issues on the Ballot.” Arkansas Times (Little Rock), 3 March 2023.

pcrritesgood. Threads.net, 19 July 2024.

Thischarminham, @Thischarminham. X.com, 27 May 2018.

Urbandictionary.com, 22 May 2011, s.v. Broligarchy.

Photo credits: Elon Musk: Steve Jurvetson, 2015; Wikimedia Commons; Flickr.com; licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license. Peter Thiel: Gage Skidmore, 2022; Wikimedia Commons; licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.