troop / troops / trooper

A troop of Buffalo Soldiers from the U.S. 10th Cavalry Regiment, c. 1898

28 August 2024

A troop is a unit of people, most often soldiers, especially a unit of cavalry, but it is also used for other groups of people collected in bands, such as entertainers (in which case it is usually spelled troupe). It is also used for a group of animals, especially apes or monkeys. The plural troops is used to refer to soldiers generally, and colloquially the singular troop is sometimes used to refer to a single soldier, although trooper would be more common.

The word is borrowed from the French trope or troupe, which in turn is from the Latin troppus (flock). The word appears in English in a letter written by Viscount John Lisle to King Henry VIII in 1545:

The maner wherof, with allso our mercheng by lande towardes Treportt, styll in the face of your enymyes, who assemblyd more and more in gret troupes, and now and then, with some horsemen, sceirmished with us, as they dyrste.

And it appears as a verb in a 1565 thesaurus:

Agglomero, ágglómeras, pen. cor. agglomerâre, Ex Ad & Glomero. To make vppe on a heape: to folde vp in a botome: as threed: to prease or gather thicke to gether, as souldiours doe: to trowpe.

By 1590, it is being used specifically to refer to a unit of cavalry, a sense that is still in use in the U.S. Army today, although nowadays the horses have been exchanged for tanks and helicopters. From John Smythe’s Certain Discourses of that year:

By reason, that through the lacke of certaine pay, and no hope of reward for extraordinary deserts, it hath come to passe, that the souldiors thereby being made voluntary, haue obeyed their Captaines no otherwise than hath pleased themselues, altering and changing their weapons, as also themselues out of one band into an other, and sometimes horsemen to become footemen, and footemen to become horsemen; besides their forraging and stragling from their Ensignes without order; as also their negligence and lacke of vigilancie in their watches, bodies of watches and centinels, and by disordering themselues vpon euery light occasion both in battallion, squadron and troupe.

And the plural form, used to denote soldiers generally, is in place by the end of the sixteenth century. From Robert Barret’s 1598 The Theorike and Practike of Moderne Warres, writing of the soldiers serving the Spanish crown:

In his brables in Britayn; besides the incredible nu[m]ber of his pistolets continually flying in (almost) euery nation, to infect, corrupt, and pierce the mindes, hearts, and soules of good Princes subiectes, to their Princes annoyance, and their owne confusion in fine. Italy, Fraunce, and Flanders, too full of his pencionary troupes: I pray God, that other nations tast not of his infection.

Trooper, referring to a single cavalry soldier, is in place by the middle of the seventeenth century. Here we see it in a record of what cavalry soldiers in the Scottish Covenanters Army of 1640 should be paid:

The quhilk day the Committie ordaines, that, the troupe horss to be leviat furth of the Stewartrie for the service of the publict. That, the worste horss be worthe j^c. lib. Monie, and whar horss are better to be apprysed be the Committie according to thair worthe, and the siller peyit thairon, aither in monie or security. And ordaines, that ilk trouper have for the twa pairt of the 40 dayes lone appoyntit be the Committie of Estaites xviij libs., conforme to the general order; and that ilk horsman have for arms, at the leist, ane steill cape and sworde, ane paire of pistolles, and ane lance, and for fornishing thairof, ordaines to be given xx rex dollares.

And by the mid twentieth century, trooper had also come to be used to refer to any stalwart person. Here is an example from poet Roy Campbell’s 1952 autobiography:

I always liked Stuart because he was generous with money, tough and independent. He trusted one and one trusted him. We were all like that, Nina Hammet (she was a find trouper), Rowley Smart, Betty May, Joseph Kramer, and all the other penniless bohemians of whom I as the only one ever to raise any spare cash—by working at sea, or from my indulgent parents at home who always spoilt me.

And the singular troop, referring to a single soldier, makes its appearance in the nineteenth century. From a passage in Basil Hall’s 1832 Fragments of Voyages and Travels in which the author describes an incident when a naval ship’s pet monkey took revenge upon a marine who had been abusing it:

Next morning the monkey stowed himself away behind the pumps, till the same marine passed; he then sprung out, and laid hold of him by the calf of the leg; and, in spite of sundry kicks and cuffs, never once relaxed his jaws till the teeth met amongst what the loblolly boy, in the pride of his anatomical knowledge, called the “gastrocnemii muscles” of his enemy's leg. The cries of murder! from the soldier brought the marines, and many of the sailors, under the half-deck to the poor fellow's rescue, while the author of the mischief scuttled off amongst the men's feet, chattering and screaming all the way. He was not again seen during two or three days; at the end of which, as the wounded “troop” was not much hurt, a sort of truce was proclaimed between the red and the blue factions of the ship.

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Sources:

Barret, Robert. The Theorike and Practike of Moderne Warres. London: William Posonby, 1598, 136. ProQuest: Early English Books Online.

Campbell, Roy. Light on a Dark Horse: An Autobiography. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1952, 208. Archive.org.

Cooper, Thomas. Thesaurus Linguae Romanæ and Britannicæ. London: Berthelet, 1565,  sig. F2r., s.v. agglomero. ProQuest: Early English Books Online.

Hall, Basil. Fragments of Voyages and Travels, second series, vol. 2 of 3. Edinburgh: Robert Cadell, 1832, 124–25. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Lisle, John (later styled John Dudley, Earl of Warwick). Letter to Henry VIII (1545). State Papers (Henry VIII), vol. 1. Commission for Printing and Publishing State Papers, 829. 1830. Google Books.

Minute Book Kept by the War Committee of the Covenanters in the Stewartry of Kirkcudbright, in the Years 1640 and 1641. Kirkcudbright, Scotland: J. Nicholson, 1855, 1–2. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. trooper, n., troop, v.; additions series, 1993, s.v. troop, n.

Smythe, John. Certain Discourses. London: Richard Johnes, 1590, 2r. ProQuest: Early English Books Online.

nepotism / nepo baby

Pope Gregory XV and nepo baby Cardinal Ludovico Ludovisi, Domenichino, c. 1621

26 August 2024

Nepo baby is slang for a child of a famous person who achieves professional success based on who their parents are. The term is from nepo[tism] + baby, and nepotism is from the Latin nepos (nephew) + -ism (cf. Bob’s your uncle) The word nepotism begins to appear in English in 1669 with the publication of an English translation of the 1667 Il nepotismo di Roma, a book about the practice of popes elevating their nephews (often alleged to actually be their illegitimate sons) to the rank of cardinal. In his diary for 27 April 1669, Samuel Pepys makes reference to the work, which seems to have been something of a bestseller:

Up and to the office, where all the morning. At noon home to dinner, and then to the office again, where all the afternoon busy until late; and then home and got my wife to read to me again in The Nepotisme, which is very pleasant, and so to supper and to bed.

The slang nepo baby is much more recent, however, and, rather than to the Vatican, was originally applied in the context of the entertainment industry. The earliest use of this term that I can find is a 9 December 2020 tweet:

just realized jack quaid is a nepo baby omg

Jack Quaid, one the stars of the streaming TV series The Boys (2019– ), is the child of actors Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan.

There are undoubtedly earlier examples out there, but searching Twitter/X is difficult not only because X.com’s infrastructure is falling apart, but also because there are a number of extremely prolific posters who use nepo baby in their screen names, and when a user changes their screen name, all their older posts are updated with that name. So the search results are flooded with thousands of false hits that obscure the true hits. It does, however, seem that the term came into widespread use on Twitter around July 2021, with relatively few uses before that.

And nepo baby made it into Urbandictionary.com that month, on 28 July 2021:

nepo baby

a child of a famous actor/celebrity who got famous due to nepotism.

“Did you hear about Jamie? She’s such a nepo baby.”

The mainstream press picked up on the term a few months later, albeit in the web edition of London’s Evening Standard of 29 September 2021. By this time the term had moved beyond the entertainment industry, encompassing the children of politicians:

The billionaire Blair: how did the former PM’s son Euan win the backing of America’s richest family?—The Yale graduate’s apprenticeship startup Multiverse has just secured the backing of the Walmart owners in a deal that values his fortune at £345 million. Katie Strick charts the making of the nepo baby tipped to become a billionaire.

And it was appearing in print by 22 December 2022 when a pair of London papers ran articles about the phrase. This ran in the Evening Standard’s print edition:

Lily Rose Depp doesn’t want to be called a “nepo baby”

The fascination and frustration at “nepo babies”—celebrity progeny, basically—has been a characterising trend of 2022. From Brooklyn Beckham’s outrageous wedding to billionaire heiress Nicola Peltz, to Zoe Kravitz admitting she feels “insecure” about being the daughter of musician Lenny Kravitz and actor Lisa Bonet ahead of her Batman starring role, TikTokers are exhausted by the firm grasp nepotism has over the entertainment industry.

And the following ran in the Guardian on the same day:

Alyx, I keep seeing TikToks about “nepo babies”. What is a nepo baby and why do we hate them?

The answer to your first question is easy: nepo is short for “nepotism”. And a baby, in this instance, means the child of someone who’s already successful. You don’t have to be a baby to be a nepo baby. It is an all-ages phrase.

The Guardian article incorrectly credits a 20 February 2022 tweet about Maude Apatow, a star of the TV series Euphoria and child of director Judd Apatow and actor Leslie Mann, with kicking off the trend of using the phrase, but not only was the term, as we have seen above, already well established by then, that particular tweet doesn’t even use the term nepo baby; it uses nepotism baby.

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Sources:

@bardverse. X.com, 9 December 2020.

@MeriemIsTired. X.com, 20 February 2022.

Gorman, Alyx and Calla Wahlquist. “Nepo Babies: What Are They and Why Is Gen Z Only Just Discovering Them?” Guardian, 22 December 2022.

“Lily Rose Depp Doesn’t Want to Be Called a ‘Nepo Baby.’” Evening Standard (London), 22 December 2022, 9/4. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2003, s.v. nepotism, n.

Pepys, Samuel. Diary entry for 27 April 1669. The Diary of Samuel Pepys, vol 9 of 10 (1971). Robert Latham and William Matthews, eds. Berkeley, California: U of California Press, 2000, 535.

Strick, Katie. “The Billionaire Blair” (headline). Evening Standard (London), 29 September 2021, web edition. NewsBank.

Urbandictionary.com, 28 July 2021, s.v. nepo baby.

Image credit: Domenichino, c. 1621. Wikimedia Commons, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Béziers, Public domain image as a mechanical reproduction of a public domain work.

rubidium

1 gram of high-purity rubidium in an ampule under argon gas

23 August 2024

Rubidium is a chemical element with atomic number 37 and the symbol Rb. It is a soft, ductile, whitish-gray alkali metal. Rubidium had few applications until the 1920s, but since then the element has had wide variety of uses, from giving fireworks a purple color to a component of atomic clocks. Rubidium-87 was used to produce a Bose-Einstein condensate in 1996, which earned the scientists a Nobel Prize in 2001.

Rubidium was discovered in 1860 by Gustav Kirchhoff and Robert Bunsen. It was discovered simultaneously with cesium. These two elements were the first ones discovered through spectrography. The pair took the name from the Latin rubidus (red), due to the two distinct lines in the red portion of the visual spectrum. The pair wrote in their 1861 announcement of their discovery:

Unter denselben sind besonders zwei rothe dadurch merkwürdig, dass sic tiorh jenseits der Fraunhofer'schen Linie A oder der mit dieser zusammenfallenden Linie Ka ɑ, also im alleräufsersten Hoth des Sonnenspetrums liegen. Wir schlagen daher für dieses Alkalimetall, mit Beziehung auf jene besonders merkwürdigen dunkelrothen Spectrallinien die Benennung Rubidium vor mit dem Symbol Rb, von rubidus, welches von den Alten für das dunkelste Roth gebraucht wird.

(Among them, two red ones are particularly remarkable in that they lie far beyond Fraunhofer's line A or the line Ka ɑ that coincides with it, and thus in the very outermost region of the solar spectrum. We therefore propose the name rubidium for this alkali metal, with reference to those particularly remarkable dark red spectral lines, with the symbol Rb, from rubidus, which is used by the ancients for the darkest red.)

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Sources:

Kirchhoff, G. and R. Bunsen. “Chemische Analyse durch Spectralbeobachtungen” (June 1861). Annalen der Physik, 189.7, 1861, 337–81 at 339. DOI: 10.1002/andp.18611890702.

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

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2011, s.v. rubidium, n.

Photo credit: Tomihahndorf, 2006. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain photo.

hot dog

Jim’s Doggie Stand, Philipsburg, New Jersey, c. 1961

21 August 2024

Hot dog has two primary meanings, that of a sausage and that of a person who is superior or expert, especially boastfully so. Both started as American slang in the 1890s, with one, the sausage, eventually moving into standard English. But despite these similarities, the two senses are etymologically unrelated.

The sausage sense comes from the idea that dog meat is used in making the sausages. The idea that sausages are made from various unsavory ingredients is an ancient one, but here are two more proximate examples from nineteenth-century America. The first is an account of a Cockney tourist in New Orleans swearing out a complaint against a sausage vendor that appeared in the Weekly Picayune of 24 May 1841:

“Vy you see, ven I landed from sea I felt like eating a sausenger, or summit nice, and I goes to this ’ere man’s shop, and I says—‘I vants a pund o’ saussengers, but they must be a wery shuperior article. You can’t come cats’ meat over me, ’case I’s Hinglish myself.’ Vit that he gets offended, and says, ‘Ve haint cockneys, old feller; ve doesn’t go that rig.’ Velll, I buy’s ’em, and ven I takes ’em home they all laughs and says, ‘That ’ere’s a reg’lar suck!’ and I asked them vat they means, and they says, ‘Vy bless your hinnocent heyes! haven't you heard of the dog law?’ Vi’ that, your vuship, my suspicions became aroused—I hexamined the harticle, and I’m blow’d if I didn’t find one of the saussengers vos a dog’s tail, hair and all!”

[…]

The cockney expressed his determination to expose the whole transaction in his book of travels, and drawing out his diary he wrote as follows:—

“Mem.—New Orleans is a wery wile, wicious place: they kills men there with Bowie-knives and dogs with pisoned sassengers. They berries the former holesale in the swamp, and retails the latter, tails and all, as sassenger meat. It’s a ’orrible state of society!”

According to the paper, the complaint was dismissed as not being a criminal matter, and the tourist was told he was free to pursue a civil suit. The story is, in all likelihood, a fiction invented by the newspaper’s editors, but it does contain a truth about the public’s apprehension about what goes into those sausage casings.

The second actually uses the noun dog to refer to a sausage. From the Louisville, Kentucky Courier-Journal of 30 October 1881:

“Hot sau-sage! Hot sau-sage! Sau-sa-ges! Tak’ a sausage. All hot!

“Here’s the dog man,” said one of a group of men who were clustered, a night or two ago, round the refreshment counter of a late-closing restaurant in search of a nightcap. “Who’ll have a dog?”

“Nein, not dog. Clean, nice, made of de best ox and pig and little calf which dies. It is already 1 of de clock in de morning. I must sell mine sausage or not have breakfast. Tak’ a sausage? Only five cents!”

We see the phrase hot dog used to refer to sausage meat in Indiana’s Evansville Daily Courier of 14 September 1884. The context is that of saloonkeepers encouraging over-vigorous enforcement of temperance laws to the point that non-alcohol-related businesses would be adversely affected, thereby creating a backlash to the laws. Note that here hot dog is being used as a mass noun for the meat, not for individual sausages:

The line has been drawn upon the saloon only, however, and they, the saloon-keepers, are taking steps toward the dernier resort, (excuse my French,) which had to be taken at Evansville some time ago, as I have heard, i[n] regard to stopping all commercial pursuits that do not come within the pale of necessity. I learn that last night they had spies on the Pioneer Press and Tribune buildings, and they will aid the city government and Y.M.C.A. in enforcing the law to the limit. Even the innocent “wienerworst” man will be barred from dispensing hot dog on the street corner. This of course, is for the purpose of making the city ordinance regarding the patrol district and Sunday enforcement obnoxious.

Finally, we see hot dog used to refer to individual sausages on buns in New Jersey’s Paterson Daily Press of 31 December 1892:

A new adjunct to the sport [i.e., ice skating] is the Wiener wurst man with his kettle of steaming hot sausages and rolls. The he retails at a nickel, and his a very popular individual with the throng, for the sport soon creates an aching void that nothing but substantials will fill, and somehow or other a frankfurter and a roll seem to go right to the spot where the void is felt the most. The small boy has got on such familiar terms with this sort of lunch that he now refers to it as “hot dog.” “Hey, Mister, give me a hot dog quick,” was the startling order that a rosy-cheeked gamin hurled at the man as a Press reporter stood close by last night. The “hot dog” was quickly inserted in a gash in a roll, a dash of mustard also splashed on to the “dog” with a piece of whittled stick, and the order was fulfilled. The gamin had hardly dropped a nickel into the man’s hand before he was skimming off to join his companions. This proceeding was repeated time and again, and the “hot dog” man must be getting rich.

Various false etymologies for the origin of this sense of hot dog have been promulgated over the years. Perhaps the most persistent one concerns sausage vendor Harry Stevens, cartoonist T.A. “Tad” Dorgan, and the famed Polo Grounds of New York. According to the myth, c.1900 Stevens was selling the new type of snack at a New York Giants game. Dorgan recorded the event in a cartoon, labeling the sausages “hot dogs” because he didn’t know how to spell “frankfurter.” Other variants have Stevens naming the delicacy and Dorgan recording it. Unfortunately, the dates don’t work; the 1900 date for the incident at the Polo Grounds is after the term was coined. Also no one has found the Dorgan cartoon in question. There is a 1906 Dorgan cartoon featuring hot dogs at a sporting event, but besides being even later, it is a reference to a bicycle race at Madison Square Garden, not a baseball game at the Polo Grounds.

The second sense of hot dog has an entirely different origin unrelated to sausages or even food.

Dog has been used as a slang term for a person since the fourteenth century, usually in a pejorative sense. But in the late sixteenth century we begin to see uses of dog referring to a person in a sympathetic or affectionate manner. But it isn’t until the closing years of the nineteenth century that we see hot dog used to refer to a person. This use in the 18 October 1894 issue of the Wrinkle, the University of Michigan’s literary magazine, uses the phrase to refer to a man who on the surface would appear to be a desirable prospect in a fraternity’s rush, or membership drive:

A Suit of Clothes, great wonders wrought.
Two Greeks a “hot dog” freshman sought.
The Clothes they found, their favor bought.
A prize! The foxy rushers thought.
                                    Who’s Caught?

And again from the University of Michigan, we see the term defined in a January 1896 glossary of student slang:

hot-dog. Good, superior. “He has made some hot-dog drawings for ——.”

We see this sense of hot dog outside of a collegiate context in humorist William Kountz’s 1899 Billy Baxter’s Letters:

When I came up the subject was Du Bois’ Messe de Mariage. (Spelling not guaranteed.) I asked about it this morning Jim. A Messe de Mariage seems to some kind of wedding march, and bishop who is a real hot dog won’t issue a certificate unless the band plays the Messe.

Another humorist, this time George Ade, uses it to describe an expert professional gambler in his 1904 Breaking Into Society:

After Herbert had signed up all the checks and put a Cold Towel on his Head, he began to Roar somewhat and talk about chopping on the all-night Seances.

“You must not Beef,” said Cousin Jim. “A True Sport never lets on, even when they unbutton his Shoes.”

“Do you know, I sometimes suspect that I am not qualified to be a Hot Dog,” said Herbert. “I find that I begin to pass away about 2 A.M. Perhaps it is owing to some Oversight in my Early Training, but I notice that after I have taken a thousand Drinks I cannot put the Red Ball into the Corner Pocket. I have a Timid Nature, and somehow I cannot learn to whoop the Edge on a Pair of Nines. I’m afraid that I drank too much Rain-Water in my Youth. And, besides, I got into the Habit of going to bed.”

The verb, meaning to boastfully show off, dates to at least 1959.

So that’s how two phrases with much in common have startling different origins.

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Sources:

Ade, George. Breaking Into Society. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1904, 184. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Cohen, Gerald Leonard, Barry A. Popik, and David Shulman, Origin of the Term “Hot Dog” (Rolla, Mo.: Gerald Cohen, 2004)

Gore, Willard C. “Student Slang.” The Inlander (University of Michigan), 6.4, January 1896, 145–55 at 148. Google Books.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., s.v. hot dog, n.1., hot dog, n.2.

Kountz, William J. “In Society” (1 February 1899). Billy Baxter’s Letters. Harmarville, Pennsylvania: Duquesne Distributing, 1899, 34. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

“On the Flashing Steel.” Paterson Daily Press (New Jersey), 31 December 1892, 1/7 & 5/2. Google News.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2008, s.v. hot dog, n., adj. & int., hot dog, v.

“A Sausage Man’s Tale.” Courier-Journal (Louisville, Kentucky), 30 October 1881, 8/4. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

“A Tourist in Trouble.” Weekly Picayune (New Orleans, Louisiana), 24 May 1841, 1/4. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“A Very Dry Letter.” Evansville Daily Courier (Indiana), 14 September 1884, 2/5. Newspapers.com.

Wrinkle (University of Michigan), 2.1, 18 October 1894, cover page. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Image: unknown photographer, c. 1961, Reddit.com. Fair use of a copyrighted image from unidentifiable source used to illustrate the topic under discussion.

bit / two bits

Spanish pesos, divided into segments worth one, two, and four bits

19 August 2024

(For the computing term, click here.)

Two bits, in American speech, literally means twenty-five cents, but it is also used more generally to refer to a small valuation or as an adjective meaning cheap or insignificant. How it came to mean these things is wrapped up in the history of money in North America.

Bit itself comes from the Old English bita, literally meaning a morsel of food, a bite, but in pre-Conquest England it could also be used more generally to mean a fragment or portion of something.

In the sixteenth century, bit started to be used in underworld slang as a noun meaning money. We see this usage in the 1555 book A Manifest Detection of the Moste Vyle and Detestable Vse of Diceplay:

And whensoeuer ye take vp a cosin, be suer as nere as ye can to knowe a forehand what store of byt he hath in his buy, that is what mony he hath in his purse, & whether it bee in great cogs or in small, that is gold or siluer, and at what game he wil sonest stoupe that we may fede him wt his owne humor & haue coules redy for him.

And by the seventeenth century a more specific sense of bit had developed, that of a Spanish real, or one eighth of a peso. The Spanish peso (Spanish dollar) was the most common coin in circulation in colonial North America. The reals were also known as pieces of eight. We see this phrase in Edmund Scott’s 1606 An Exact Discourse of the Subtilties, Fashishions, Pollicies, Religion, and Ceremonies of the East Indians, in which Scott gives a rather racist account of the greediness of Chinese people:

I profered them a peece of eight a man, which they much scorned, I asked them if it were not enough for halfe an houres worke: they aunswered againe, that if they had not helped vs, we had had our house burnt, and so had lost all.

And we see bit being used to refer to a Spanish real in the minutes of a 1683 inquiry into a counterfeiting ring in Philadelphia:

The Gov^r telleth Ch: Pickering & Sam^ll Buckley of their abuse to y^e Governm^t, in Quining of Spanish Bitts and Boston money, to the Great Damage and abuse to y^e Subjects thereof. The Gov^r asked them whether or no they are Guilty of y^e fact. They confess they have put of some of those new bitts, but they say that all their money was as good Silver as any Spanish money, and also deny that they had any hand in this matter. Charles Pickering saith he will Stand by it and be Tried; he declareth that he heard Jno. Rush Swere that he Spent halfe his time in making of Bitts.

The Gov^r asketh Sam¹¹ Buckley whether he did not help to melt money, or to put in y^e Copper allay into y^e Silver more than Should be, and to have been at y^e Stamping of new Bitts, and Strikeing on the Stamp.

And after the American Revolution, the Spanish coins continued to be widely used. (Spanish coinage would remain legal tender in the United States until 1857.) A June 1792 resolution of a group of Philadelphia merchants on the value of various forms of foreign currency uses the phrase two bits to refer to a quarter dollar:

It was Resolved,

That they will reject the said German Coin in all Payments that shall be rendered to them.—

The following Resolutions were also proposed and agreed to:—

That Johannesses weighing under Eight pennyweights will be rejected in all payments and not be received at more than they weigh; that all other Gold will be received by weight as heretofore, except only the pieces which have always passed at Fourteen Shillings.

That they will receive in payments the new pieces called Quarter Dollars, which pass at the value of Pistreens in Madeira, at 19 1–2d or two bits and a dog, ant the bitt pieces of the same stamp at 10 1-2d or one bitt and a dog.

(A pistreen was a Spanish silver coin. A dog is a coin of low value, particularly a copper coin issued in the West Indies.)

This would be the state of affairs until the turn of the twentieth century, when two bits began to be used as an adjective meaning cheap, of little value. Here is an example from Montana, in the 29 November 1900 edition of the Butte Weekly Miner:

Since the recent overwhelming defeat of everything that goes by the name of republicanism in the state of Montana, every two-bit republican newspaper in the state is busily engaged in hatching plans for the successful reorganization of the national democracy. How kind and thoughtful you are, gentlemen! However, you better attend your own funeral. The great national democratic party is perfectly capable of attending to their own business.

And this from the Idaho Daily Statesman of 26 January 1901:

One of the very gratifying features of political developments is that there is no organized opposition to the navy. While we have two-bit politicians seeking to arouse apprehension that the army will be used to subvert our liberties, there is no such cry respecting the naval arms of the service.

So that’s it, how bit made the journey from a morsel of food to a description of low-rent politicians.

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Sources:

“Attitude Toward the Navy.” Idaho Daily Statesman (Boise), 26 January 1901, 2/2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., s.v. bit, n.1, two-bit, adj., two-bits, n.

A Manifest Detection of the Moste Vyle and Detestable Vse of Diceplay. London: Abraham Vele, 1555, sig. C.iii.r–v. ProQuest: Early English Books Online.

Minutes of 24 August 1683 Meeting. Minutes of the Provincial Council of Pennsylvania, vol. 1 of 13. Colonial Records of Pennsylvania. Philadelphia: Jo. Severns, 1852, 185. HathiTrust Digital Archive. (Reprint of an 1831 edition).

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, July 2023, s.v. bit, n.2 & adj.2; March 2006, s.v. piece, n.; second edition, 1989, s.v. two-bit, adj.

“Philadelphia, 7th June, 1792.” Federal Gazette and Philadelphia Daily Advertiser, 7 June 1792, 3/1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Scott, Edmund. An Exact Discourse of the Subtilties, Fashishions, Pollicies, Religion, and Ceremonies of the East Indians as Well Chyneses as Iauans, there Abyding and Dweling. London: W. White for Walter Burre, 1606, sig. E3.v. ProQuest: Early English Books Online.

“Will Look After Itself.” Butte Weekly Miner (Montana), 29 November 1900, 4/7. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Photo credit: Tina Shaw, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, 2012. Wikimedia Commons. Flickr.com. Public domain image.