ass / arse / donkey

2 October 2024

An ass is domesticated equine, Equus asinus, otherwise known as a donkey. But an ass, or arse, can also refer to the human buttocks. These are two distinct words that happen to be, at least in American English, pronounced and spelled the same. Both can be traced with confidence to Old English, but earlier than that the origins of both are somewhat unclear.

The name of the animal is ultimately from the Latin asinus, although the exact route into Old English is uncertain. Donkeys were rare in early medieval Britain, so knowledge of the animal and its name probably chiefly came from written (Irish?) sources. The word may be a direct borrowing from Latin, although that has phonological problems. More likely it is borrowed from a Celtic language, which in turn would have taken it from Latin. Old Irish has assan, and Welsh, Old Cornish, and Middle Breton have asen. Any of these are possible. For its part, Latin probably borrowed it from a Central Asian language, which would give it a non-Indo-European root. The Mycenaean Greek o-no and the ancient Greek ὄνος (onos), which give us onager, also seem to be from a non-Indo-European source.

The Old English assa (weak masculine inflection) meant a donkey of either sex, and assen (strong feminine inflection) was used to refer a female donkey. We see the word in the Old English translation of Genesis 12:16, about the Egyptians who were trying to buy Sarah from Abraham:

& Abram underfeng fela sceatta for hyre: he hæfde ða on orfe & on ðeowum, on oluendum & on asssum mycele æhta.

(And he [pharaoh] offered Abraham many treasures for her [Sarah]; he acquired then many possessions: cattle & servants, & camels & asses.)

Use of ass as a derogatory epithet for a person is almost as old as the name of the animal. From the Old English translation of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy:

Gif þu on hwilcum men ongitst þæt he bið gitsere and reafere, ne scealt ðu hine na hatan mon ac wulf; and þone reðan þe bið þweorteme ðu scealt hatan hund nalles mon; and þone leasan lytegan þu scealt hatan fox næs man; and þone ungemetlice modgan and yrsiendan þe to micelne andan hæfð þu scealt hatan leo næs man; and þone sænan þe bið swa slaw þu scealt hatan assa ma þonne man.

(If you see in some man that he is greedy and a robber, you must not call him a man but a wolf; and the fierce man who is quarrelsome you must call a dog not a man; and the false deceiver you must call a fox not a man; and the excessively proud and angry person who has too much malice, you must call a lion not a man; and the sluggish who is too slow [you] must call an ass rather than a man.)

(Actually, the translation of Boethius, created at the end of the ninth century, is about a century older than the translation of Genesis. These quotations are not intended to be the earliest, and logically the name of the animal had to come first.)

Arse, meaning the buttocks, is from a common Proto-Germanic root, cf. the German arsch and the Dutch aars. The Old English ears appears only once in the extant corpus, in a gloss of the Latin anus, but we also see the root used in compounds, again mainly in glosses and in medical texts, such as earsendu (arse-end, the buttocks), earsgang (arse-privy, a privy or fecal discharge), earslira (arse-flesh, the buttocks), and earsþyrel (arse-hole). These compounds are primarily also found in glosses; earsgang (fecal discharge) appears in medical texts.

The fact that ears only appears once in the corpus is unsurprising. The Old English texts we have today are not a representative sample of the language as a whole, with the texts that are preserved are those that monks and nuns deemed worthy of being copied and kept. The surviving corpus, therefore, overwhelmingly consists of limited range of topics, such as texts of religious significance, legal documents, historical chronicles, and a smattering of mostly religious poetry, none of which are likely to contain references to body parts. The number of compounds, however, indicates the word was in common use. The Middle English ars or ers is much more common, probably a result of that corpus reflecting a wider range of writers and scribes. Consideration of the word as indecent or obscene starts in the Early Modern era and is fully in place by the eighteenth century.

The use of arse as a derogatory term for a person is unequivocally dated to the late nineteenth century, but there is an interesting single use of the word from c. 1785 in poet William Blake’s unfinished manuscript An Island in the Moon. In the manuscript, Blake wrote “Ass * Arse” and then crossed that out, writing in “ass” again. The lines are a parenthetical aside to the reader, appearing after the introduction of a number of characters:

(If I have not presented you with every character in the piece
call me Ass * Arse) ass—

Michael Phillips, editor of the facsimile edition of the manuscript, notes:

Given the parenthetical address to the audience, the second instance, “Arse”, may have been intended as a pun on the Latin ars.

Ars means art, knowledge, skill. Personally, I think it looks more like Blake was initially unsure of which word to use, so he wrote both. Later he went back and chose ass, meaning a donkey. But what exactly Blake intended and why he changed his mind are matters of speculation.

Arse also has a long history of referring to the vulva and by extension a woman as an object of sexual conquest. We see this anatomical shift from back to front as early as the fourteenth century. Here’s an example from William Langland’s Piers Plowman (C-text):

For an hore of here ers-wynnynge may hardiloker tythe
Then an errant vserer,

(For a whore may more confidently tithe her arse-winnings than an errant usurer.)

Whether or not sex workers could tithe a portion of their earnings to the church was a matter of theological and popular debate at the time.

The non-equine ass is simply a variant of arse originally found in non-rhotic (i.e., r-dropping) dialects. The two forms are essentially synonymous in all senses. In the United States, ass became the dominant form, even in rhotic dialects. As a result, ass is often considered to be the American form of the word, although in recent years ass has been making inroads into British English.

Donkey is a more recent development, coming into common use because of confusion between ass and arse and the reluctance to use ass in polite circles or to put it into print. It is of unknown origin, perhaps a hypocoristic form of the name Duncan (cf. jackass and jenny-ass). It was probably in dialectal or slang use for some time prior to seeing print, which happened in the late eighteenth century. Its first appearance in print is in a slang dictionary, Grose’s 1785 Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue:

DONKEY, donkey dick, a he, or jack ass, called donkey, perhaps from Spanish, don[-]like gravity of that animal, entitled also the king of Spain’s trum[p]eter.

From this slang use, donkey eventually moved into standard English.

Discuss this post

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Sources:

Blake, William. An Island in the Moon: A Facsimile of the Manuscript. Michael Phillips, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987, 32–33, 73. Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum, MS Charles Fairfax Murray 31, fol. 2r.

Crawford, S. J., ed. The Old English Version of the Heptateuch. Early English Text Society, O. S. 160. Oxford University Press: London, Gen. 12:16, 116.

Dictionary of Old English: A to Le, 2024, s.v. assa, n., assen, n., ears, n.

Godden, Malcolm and Susan Irvine. The Old English Boethius, 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009, 1.504 and 2.175.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., s.v. arse, n.

Grose, Francis. A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. London: S. Hooper, 1785, s.v. donkey. Gale Primary Sources: Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Langland, William. Piers Plowman: A New Annotated Edition of the C-text (c. 1388). Derek Pearsall, ed. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2014, 6.305–06, 133.

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

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2018, s.v. ass, n., ass, n.2, arse, n.; second edition, 1989, s.v. donkey, n., jenny, n.

Photo credits: Donkey: unknown photographer, 2008. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

Lines from the Blake MS: Michael Phillips, 1987. Fair use of a portion of a copyrighted image to illustrate the topic under discussion.

sanewashing

The New York Times building in Manhattan, 2019

1 October 2024

Sanewashing is the portrayal of a radical or beyond-the-pale political idea as being within the mainstream of political discourse, making an insane idea appear sane. It is formed on the model of greenwashing (making an ecologically untenable idea or practice seem environmentally friendly) and whitewashing. It’s a good example of a word being older than most people think; words often have a period of relatively limited use in a specific discourse communities before suddenly being picked up in general discourse and becoming widely used across the board.

In its popular use, the term is most often associated with major media outlets, such as the New York Times, who tend to portray the racist, fascist, and otherwise anti-democratic ideas and statements of Donald Trump as reasonable. But sanewashing apparently got its start outside of politics, in transhumanism movement and discussions of how technology could be used to improve the human race. Use of the word in this discourse community goes back as far as 2007, when it appears in a post by blogger Dale Carrico. The blog post’s title is “Sanewashing Superlativity (For a More Gentle Seduction),” and the relevant lines in the post read:

Although Anissimov wants to reassure the world that transhumanists have no peculiar commitments to particular superlative outcomes one need only read any of them for any amount of time to see the truth of the matter. Far more amusing than his denials and efforts at organizational sanewashing go, however, is his concluding admonishment of those—oh, so few!—transhumanists or Singularitarians who might be vulnerable to accusations of Superlativity: “If any transhumanists do have specific attachments to particular desired outcome,” Anissimov warns, “I suggest they drop them—now.”

A few days later in the same discourse thread, another blogger, Richard Jones, picks up on Carrico’s use of the term.

It’s good that Michael [Anissimov] recognises the danger of the situation I identify, but some other comments on his blog suggest to me that what he is doing here is, in Carrico’s felicitous phrase, sanewashing the transhumanist and singularitarian movements with which he is associated.

Nearly a decade later, in 2016, the sanewashing is being used in the context of cryonics, the industry that promises immortality by freezing a person after death, thawing them in the future when a cure for what killed them is available. Reporter Corey Pein writes in the March 2016 issue of The Baffler:

There was another important factor in the sane-washing of cryonics. Alcor had a new chief executive. In contrast to his predecessors, this one looked and sounded almost . . . normal. And yet he was every bit the oddball charlatan that his predecessors were, as well as a longtime keeper of the organization’s secrets.

In a footnote, Pein credits Carrico with the coinage. The fact that these other early uses credit Carrico hints that they may have learned the term directly from his blog and that sanewashing was not yet in wider use.

By 2016 the term had moved out of the realm of wild-eyed speculation of a technological future and into the politics of the present. But it was first used in reference the ideas and discourse of the left. In 2020, a person going by the moniker inverseflorida wrote a post to the subreddit /r/neoliberal with the title:

How did “Defund the police” stop meaning “Defund the police”?—Why mainstream progressives have a strong incentive to ‘sanewash’ hard leftist positions

And within the post itself they wrote:

When people are correctly pointing out that the arguments behind the position people around your space are advancing fail, but you’re not going to give up the position because you’re certain it’s right, what are you going to do? I’m arguing you’re going to sanewash it. And by that I mean, what you do is go “Well, obviously the arguments that people are obviously making are insane, and not what people actually believe or mean. What you can think of it as is [more reasonable argument or position than people are actually making]”.

Two years later, the gerund made it into Urbandictionary with the following definition:

Attempting to downplay a person or idea’s radicality to make it more palatable to the general public. This is often done by claiming that the radicals are taken out of context, don’t truly represent the movement, or that opponents’ arguments about its severity are wrong. Oftentimes, the person doing the sanewashing isn’t radical themselves—they may be doing so because they genuinely don’t believe the movement to be radical, or are trying to justify to themselves how they can support a radical movement.

A portmanteau of “sane” + “whitewashing” (portraying something as better than it is). Coined on the /r/neoliberal subreddit in late 2020 to describe progressives who misrepresent radical stances.

“/r/antiwork isn’t about not wanting to work at all, it’s about wanting to reform wage labor to make it less exploitative.”

“Stop sanewashing it, I found a video of the head moderator who says 20 hours of dog-walking is too labor-intensive.”

The term, however, did not enter widespread use for several years. (Urbandictionary, for example, has as of this writing only one entry on the term. It’s not unusual for popular slang terms to have dozens of people creating entries.)

Sanewashing burst into general political discourse on 4 September 2024, when Parker Molloy wrote the following in the New Republic:

While speaking at an event put on by the extremist group Moms for Liberty, Trump spread a baseless conspiracy theory that “your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation,” referring to transition-related surgeries for trans people. In their write-up of the event, a glowing piece about how Trump “charmed” this group of “conservative moms,” the Times didn’t even mention the moment where he blathered on and on about a crazy conspiracy that has and will never happen.

This “sanewashing” of Trump’s statements isn’t just poor journalism; it’s a form of misinformation that poses a threat to democracy. By continually reframing Trump’s incoherent and often dangerous rhetoric as conventional political discourse, major news outlets are failing in their duty to inform the public and are instead providing cover for increasingly erratic behavior from a former—and potentially future—president.

Dozens of other commentators and pundits followed her lead and started describing the media’s treatment of Trump as sanewashing.

It remains to be seen if sanewashing will continue to be used for the practice regardless of where on the political spectrum it occurs, or if it will become so indelibly associated with the media’s treatment of Trump that its future use will be limited to this one case.

Discuss this post

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Sources:

Carrico, Dale. “Sanewashing Superlativity (For a More Gentle Seduction).” Amor Mundi (blog), 26 October 2007.

inverseflorida. “How did ‘Defund the police’ stop meaning ‘Defund the police’?.” Reddit.com, 2020.

Jones, Richard. “The Uses and Abuses of Speculative Futurism.” Soft Machines (blog), 30 October 2007.

Molloy, Parker. “How the Media Sanitizes Trump’s Insanity.” New Republic, 4 September 2024.

Pein, Corey. “Everybody Freeze!” The Baffler, March 2016.

Urbandictionary.com, 22 April 2022, s.v. sanewashing.

Zimmer, Ben. “sanewashing.” ADS-L, 11 September 2024.

Photo credit: Ajay Suresh, 2019. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

weird

Samuel John Egbert Jones, c.1825, Macbeth and Banquo encounter the three weird sisters in Act 1, Scene 3 of Shakespeare’s Macbeth

30 September 2024

Weird, as we most often use it today, is an adjective meaning strange, odd, or uncanny. But that’s a relatively new sense, only arising in the last two hundred years or so; the word, with a different meaning, is over a thousand years old.

In Old English, the version of the English spoken until the Norman Conquest in 1066, wyrd meant fate or destiny. It appears in Beowulf multiple times; one such is in this passage where Hrothgar speaks to Beowulf about the predations of the monster Grendel:

Sorh is me to secganne    on sefan minum
gumena ængum    hwæt me Grendel hafað
hynðo on Heorote    mid his heteþancum,
færniða gefremed;    is min fletwerod,
wigheap gewanod;    hie wyrd forsweop
on Grendles gryre.

(It is a sorrow in my heart for me to tell any man what humiliations Grendel has done to me in Heorot, with his hostile thoughts, his sudden attacks. My hall-band, my battle-host is decimated. Weird swept them into Grendel’s dreadful onslaughts.)

This sense of fate or destiny remained in use through the Middle English period, but then faded from use except in Scottish and northern English dialects. If one encounters this sense today, it is almost always in deliberately archaic language or in Scottish literary texts.

In Old English, wyrd could also be used to refer to the Fates of Greek and Roman myth, the three women who spun and cut the threads of destiny for all humans. This sense appears in a Latin–English glossary from the eighth century (Hessels), where the Latin Parcae (the Fates) is glossed as wyrde.

This association of weird with the Fates of myth continued through the Middle English period. Chaucer used the word in this sense. From the “Legend of Hypermnestra” in his Legend of Good Women, c.1386:

The Wirdes, that we clepen Destine,
Hath shapen hire that she mot nedes be
Pyëtous, sad, wis, and trewe as stel,
As to those wemen it acordeth wel.

(The Weirds, that we call Destiny,
Had shaped her that she must needs be
Compassionate, sad, wise, and true as steel,
And this woman it fitted well.)

And the Catholicon Anglicum, an English-Latin dictionary written some time before 1500, uses the phrase Wyrde systres (weird sisters) to gloss Parcae.

But the phrase weird sisters would be immortalized by Shakespeare’s 1606 play Macbeth, when the playwright uses the phrase to refer to the three witches who prophesize about Macbeth’s fate:

The weyward Sisters, hand in hand,
Posters of the Sea and Land,
Thus doe goe, about, about,
Thrice to thine, and thrice to mine,
And thrice againe, to make vp nine.
Peace, the Charme’s wound vp.

Shakespeare undoubtedly intended weyward to evoke the sense of the Fates of ancient myth, after all, there are three of them and they do know Macbeth’s fate. But when Shakespeare penned this, the association of weird with the Fates was falling out of use. The spelling weyward here is significant. It’s an unusual spelling of weird—it’s the only example of this spelling in the Oxford English Dictionary. And one would expect it to represent the present-day word wayward, for which the OED has several examples from this period and earlier, rather than weird.

Holinshed’s Chronicles, which was one of Shakespeare’s sources for the Macbeth story, refers to them as weird sisters:

But afterwards, the common opinion was that these women were eyther the weird sisters, that is (as ye would y^e Goddesses of destinie, or els some Nimphes or Feiries, endowed with knowledge or prophesie by their Necromanticall science, bicause every thing came to passe as they had spoken.

Shakespeare—or the compilers of the posthumous First Folio in which the play appears—changed weird to weyward, which the OED defines as “disposed to go against the wishes or advice of other or what is proper or reasonable.” I see three possibilities here. The first is that Shakespeare deliberately intended to conflate weird and wayward, associating the three women with the classical Fates and at the same time marking them as out of the ordinary, as strange. The other is that Shakespeare deviated from Holinshed and intended just the wayward sense. The final possibility is that Shakespeare originally wrote weird, but the compilers of the First Folio, perhaps not consulting Holinshed, emended Shakespeare’s text from the obsolescent weird to the then more current weyward.

Regardless of how the change came about, beginning in the eighteenth century editors of editions of Shakespeare’s texts almost universally emended the text to read weird sisters, as it was spelled in Holinshed, and the spooky and uncanny nature of the witches became the dominant association with the word.

We see the modern strange or uncanny sense of weird in other texts by the early nineteenth century. Here is an example from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s 1816 poem Alastor: or, the Spirit of Solitude:

                               In lone and silent hours,
When night makes a weird sound of its own stillness,
Like an inspired and desperate alchymist
Staking his very life on some dark hope,
Have I mixed awful talk and asking looks
With my most innocent love, until strange tears
United with those breathless kisses, made
Such magic as compels the charmed night
To render up thy charge.

And later in the same poem,

Like clouds suspended in an emerald sky,
The ash and the acacia floating hang
Tremulous and pale. Like restless serpents, clothed
In rainbow and in fire, the parasites,
Starred with ten thousand blossoms, flow around
The gray trunks, and, as gamesome infants' eyes.
With gentle meanings, and most innocent wiles.
Fold their beams round the hearts of those that love.
These twine their tendrils with the wedded boughs
Uniting their close union; the woven leaves
Make net-work of the dark blue light of day.
And the night's noontide clearness, mutable
As shapes in the weird clouds.

That’s how weird moved from meaning fate or destiny to referring to things that were odd or out of the ordinary.

Discuss this post

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Sources:

Chaucer, Geoffrey. “The Legend of Good Women: The Legend of Hypermnestra.” The Riverside Chaucer, third edition. Larry D. Benson, ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987, 628, lines 2579–83.

de Grazia, Margreta and Peter Stallybrass. “The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text.” Shakespeare Quarterly, 44.3, Autumn 1993. 255–83 at 263–64. JSTOR.

Fulk, R.D., Robert E. Bjork, and John D. Niles, eds. Klaeber’s Beowulf, fourth edition. Toronto: U of Toronto Press, 2008, 473–78a.

Herrtage, Sidney J.H., ed. Catholicon Anglicum, an English-Latin Wordbook (1881). Early English Text Society, O.S. 75. Millwood, New York: Kraus Reprint, 1987, 420. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Hessels, J.H. An Eighth-Century Latin–Anglo-Saxon Glossary. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1890, 87. HathiTrust Digital Archive. Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 144.

Holinshed, Raphael. “The Historie of Scotland.” In The First Volume of the Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande. London: John Harrison, 1577, 243–44. ProQuest: Early English Books Online.

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

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. weird, n., weird, adj. weird, v.; third edition, December 2015, s.v. wayward, adj. & n.

Shakespeare, William. Macbeth. First Folio. London: Isaac Jaggard and Ed. Blount, 1623. 1.3, 132.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe. “Alastor.” Alastor: or, the Spirit of Solitude: and Other Poems. London: Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy, 1816, 3, 30–31. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Thompson, Ayanna. “What Is a ‘Weyward’ Macbeth?” In Scott L. Newstok and Ayanna Thompson, eds. Weyward Macbeth: Intersections of Race and Performance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, 3–10 at 3.

Image credit: Samuel John Egbert Jones, c.1825, oil on canvas. Royal Shakespeare Company Collection. Public domain image.

nimrod

Looney Tunes, What Makes Daffy Duck, 1948

27 September 2024

(30 September 2024: added reference to the 1951 Looney Tunes cartoon)

In current usage, nimrod is often used as a disparaging term for an inept or foolish person, but its original and basic meaning is as a term for a hunter. This inept usage is often said to come from young viewers misinterpreting a pair of Looney Tunes cartoons, but while these cartoons undoubtedly played a role in popularizing the sense of an inept person, it’s not the origin.

The name Nimrod is biblical, from the Hebrew נִמְרוֹד (Nimród). Nimrod was a great-grandson of Noah. The name is probably a variant of Ninurta, a Mesopotamian god of war and the hunt. He appears in Genesis 10, with early English translations spelling his name as Nenroth, Nemroth, and similar variations. From the Old English translation of Genesis:

An þære wæs Nenroth; þe Nemroth wæs mihtig on eorþan. & strang hunta ætforan Gode. Be þam wæs gecweden bigword, swa swa Nemroth strang hunta ætforan Gode. His rices angin wæs Babilon & Arah, & archat & Cahanne on þam lande Sennar. Of þam [l]ande ferde Asur, & getimbrode þa buruh Niniuen, & burhga streta. Oþre burh he getimbrode eac, þe hatte Chale. Oþre burh he getimbrode eac, þe hatte Chale. The þriddan burh þe he arærde het Reson, betwux Niniuen & Cale; þeos is micel burh

(Another [son of Cush] was Nimrod; this Nimord was mighty on earth and a powerful hunter before God. A proverb was said about him, just as Nimrod a powerful hunter before God. His kingdomes were Babylon and Uruk, and Akkad and Kalneh in the land of Shinar. From that land he went to Assyria, & built the city of Ninevah, & the streets of that city. He built another city also, which is named Calah. The third city that he erected is named Resen, between Ninevah and Calah; this is a great city.)

In folklore, Nimrod is often associated with the Tower of Babel, often depicted as the king who ordered it constructed. But this association has no biblical basis. The Middle English poem The Story of Genesis and Exodus, probably composed in the mid thirteenth century and with a manuscript witness penned sometime before 1325 depicts him as a conqueror who seized the land where the tower had stood:

Babel, ðat tur, bi-lef un-mad,
ðat folc is wide on lon[de] sad;
Nembrot nam wið strengðhe ðat lond,
And helde ðe tur o babel in his hond.

(Babel, that tower, remained unmade,
That folk were widely throughout the land scattered;
Nimrod took with force that land,
And held the tower of Babel in his hand.)

Geoffrey Chaucer makes mention of him in his poem The Former Age. That poem ends with this stanza, depicting Nimrod as a conqueror who built “towers high” and symbolic of the evil that had befallen the world:

Yit was not Jupiter the likerous,
That first was fader of delicacye,
Come in this world; ne Nebrot, desirous
To regne, had nat maad his toures hye.
Allas, allas, now may men wepe and crye!
For in oure dayes nis but covetyse,
Doublenesse, and tresoun, and envye,
Poyson, manslawhtre, and mordre in sondry wyse.

(Jupiter, the lecherous, that first was the father of wantonness, had not yet come into this world; nor had Nimrod, desirous to reign, made his towers high. Alas, alas, now may men weep and cry! For in our days there is nothing but greed, deceitfulness, and treason, and envy, poison, manslaughter, and many ways to murder.)

And in Early Modern use, the idea of Nimrod as a conquering tyrant was the dominant one. Here’s another example, this one from John Bale’s c.1548 The Image of Bothe Churches, in which Nimrod is used as a general epithet for a tyrant, in this case the ruler of Sodom:

The boystuouse tyrauntes of Sodoma wyth their great Nemroth Winchester, and the execrable cyteʒe[n]s of Gomorra w[ith] their shorne smered captaines, wyll sturre abought them.

(The boisterous tyrants of Sodom with their great Nimrod Winchester, and the execrable citizens of Gomorrah with their shorn, smeared captains, will stir about them.)

By the sixteenth century the English form settled on nimrod, probably from influence from Hebrew sources. And early in the next century, nimrod starts to be used as a metaphor for a hunter, recalling his description in Genesis. From a 1623 poem by William Drummond:

This World a Hunting is,
The Prey poore Man, the Nimrod fierce is Death,
His speedie Grayhounds are,
Lust, Sicknesse, Enuie, Care,
Strife that neere falles amisse,
With all those ills which haunt vs while wee breath.

And Washington Irving in his 1835 A Tour on the Prairies uses the word to refer to hunters:

I have observed that the wary and experienced huntsman and traveller of the prairies is always sparing of his horse, when on a journey; never, except in emergency, putting him off a walk. The regular journeyings of frontier-men and Indians, when on a long march, seldom exceed above fifteen miles a day, and are often about ten or twelve; and they never indulge in capricious galloping or curvetting. With us, however, many of the party were young and inexperienced, and full of excitement at finding themselves in a country abounding with game. It was impossible to retain them in the sobriety of a march, or to keep them to the line. As we broke our way through the coverts and ravines, and the deer started up and scampered off to the right and left, the rifle-balls would whiz after them, and our young Nimrods dash off in pursuit.

Ben Hecht’s and Gene Fowler’s 1933 play The Great Magoo uses nimrod to refer to a hunter of a different type, a man who relentlessly pursues women. The following exchange is between an older woman and a younger one who has fallen for an unfaithful lover:

TANTE: Now, dearie, I wouldn’t let anybody else in the world say one word against him, but I’m beginning to get disillusioned. He’s got a dame now….

JULIE: Please don’t tell me.

TANTE: Might as well know the truth, and not make a monkey of yourself. She’s an equestrienne. A fine little piece, and he’s in love with her. That makes about the tenth. The same old Nimrod. Won’t let her alone for a second. Jealous of her horse, even. But he claims it’s forever this time. It’s disgusting. It’ll wind up just the same, with this poor little circus artist crying her heart out, just like you—and Nicky hop-scotching after some new victim.

And in the 1940s, we start seeing the phrase nitwit nimrod used to refer to inept hunters. Here is one from an advertisement for a car dealership that appears in Greenville, Pennsylvania’s Record-Argus on 17 November 1948, around the same time as the Daffy Duck cartoon:

1948 advertisement for a Pontiac car dealership

The relevant line in the caption reads:

We’re sorry, but there’s nothing we can do about Knucklehead Newt, the nit-wit nimrod.

The ineptitude here is being carried by nitwit, but as nitwit nimrod becomes something of an alliterative catchphrase, nimrod starts to become guilty, as it were, by association.

This is where the Looney Tunes cartoon comes in. In the 1948 the animated short What Makes Daffy Duck, Elmer Fudd, the hunter, and Daffy Duck, the putative prey, have this exchange:

ELMER FUDD: How am I ever going to catch that screwy duck?

DAFFY DUCK: Precisely what I was wondering, my little nimrod.

Daffy is using nimrod to simply denote hunter, but he is using it in a condescending tone, and Elmer is most certainly inept, so it would be easy, especially if one is unfamiliar with the biblical reference, to hear nimrod as meaning an inept person. And that is precisely what a generation of children raised on Saturday-morning cartoons on television would do.

The usage is repeated in another Looney Tunes cartoon, the 1951 Rabbit Every Monday, in which Bugs Bunny says of Yosemite Sam (who is a hunter in this animated short), “Nah, I couldn’t do that to the little Nimrod.”

By the 1970s, an era when young adults would have grown up watching Daffy Duck and Elmer Fudd on Saturday-morning cartoons, the slang sense of nimrod, divorced from hunting, is in place. We see this enigmatic personal ad in the 19 April 1977 issue of the Connector, the student newspaper of the University of Massachusetts, Lowell:

Bll Boob: Heard you are a Philly fan. What more can you expect from a nitwit, nimrod, R.O.T.C.

                 Anti C.T.O.R.

P.S. I hope you don’t pretend not to read this.

While the main point behind this ad is lost to the ages, it’s another example of nitwit nimrod, only this time apparently divorced both from any hunting context and, by a comma, from the word nitwit.

Finally we see the unadorned nimrod used as an insult in Lawrence Swaim’s 1980 novel The Killing:

“Buy me a drink!”

Quinn lit a cigarette. “The knifethrower is outta money.”

“I got more money than you got trouble.”

“Well—money talks and bullshit walks. Ask old Escobar there.”

“My good looks ain’t good enough?”

“If good looks could get you a trip to the moon, you wouldn’t get ten feet off the ground." Quinn turned to the other patrons. “The poor bastard is down there at that City Hall zoo getting reamed every day by those uncouth bastards, and he thinks it’s because of his good looks! It’s a fringe benefit—haven’t you figured that out yet?”

“Fuck you nimrod!”

“Fuck you? I ain’t even kissed you, yet!”

There was more appreciative laughter. Quinn bought his friend a drink and Old Escobar brought sandwiches. Now that the insult part of their meeting was over, they could get down to more substantive matters. They went to a booth at the back and spoke in low voices.

There are certainly instances that predate 1980 to be found.

So while Daffy Duck did not invent the insult, its use in the cartoon certainly did popularize and cement the sense in American slang.

Discuss this post

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Sources:

Bale, John. “Preface.” The Image of Both Churches. London: Richard Jugge, 1548, sig. Bv. ProQuest: Early English Books Online.

Brewer, J.W. (comment). “Nimrod.” Languagehat.com (blog), 29 September 2024.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. “The Former Age.” In The Riverside Chaucer, third edition. Larry D. Benson, ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, lines 56–63, 651.

Crawford, S. J. and N.R. Ker, eds. The Old English Version of the Heptateuch (1922). Early English Text Society, O. S. 160. London: Oxford University Press, 1969, Genesis 10:8–10, 109. London, British Library MS Cotton Claudius B.iv.

Drummond, William. “This World a Hunting Is.” Flowres of Sion. Edinburgh: 1623, 20. ProQuest: Early English Books Online.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., s.v. nimrod, n.

Hecht, Ben and Gene Fowler. The Great Magoo. New York: Van Rees Press, 1933, 3.1, 183–84. Archive.org.

Irving, Washington. A Tour of the Prairies. London: John Murray, 1835, 138. HathiTrust Digital Archives.

Lucas Pontiac (advertisement), Record-Argus (Greenville, Pennsylvania), 17 November 1948, 9/1. Newspapers.com.

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

Personal ad. Connector (Lowell, Massachusetts), 19 April 1977, 12/5. Archive.org.

Scott, Bill and Lloyd Turner, writers. What Makes Daffy Duck. Arthur Davis, dir. Looney Tunes, 1948.

The Story of Genesis and Exodus, second and revised edition. Richard Morris, ed. Early English Text Society London: N. Trübner, 1873, lines 671–74, 20. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Image credits: What Makes Daffy Duck (animated short), Warner Brothers: Looney Tunes, 1948, fair use of a portion of a single frame from a film used to illustrate the topic under discussion; Lucas Pontiac, 1948, fair use of a portion of an advertisement to illustrate the topic under discussion.

tennessine

Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tennessee

27 September 2024

Tennessine is a synthetic chemical element with atomic number 117 and the symbol Ts. It was first synthesized in 2010 by an international team of researchers from Russia and the United States. The collaborating institutions included the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) in Dubna, Russia; the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Oak Ridge, Tennessee; Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee; the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in Livermore, California; the Research Institute of Atomic Reactors (RINR) in Dimitrovgrad, Russia; and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Tennessine has no practical applications other than pure research.

The element is named for the state of Tennessee, home to both Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Vanderbilt University, which participated in its discovery. The earliest mention of the name that I have found is in the April 2016 issue of Nature Chemistry, in which chemist Shawn Burdette speculated on what the name would be:

I have an inkling that the tripartite research collaboration between ORNL, LLNL and JINR on elements 115 and 117—while 118 is LLNL and JINR alone—is going to result in a compromise where each laboratory gets to take the lead on naming one of the three. ORNL is the outlier in the transuranium name game since they hadn’t been credited with an element before the most recent announcement. In pondering this, I wonder if they would follow suit with californium and use the state of Tennessee as the root name. I like the sound of “tennessine” as the halogen -ine suffix echoes the pronunciation of the state name itself.

The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) announced the proposed name in a press release dated 8 June 2016:

For element with atomic number 117, the name proposed is tennessine with the symbol Ts. These are in line with tradition honoring a place or geographical region and are proposed jointly by the discoverers at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, Dubna (Russia), Oak Ridge National Laboratory (USA), Vanderbilt University (USA) and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (USA).

[…]

Tennessine is in recognition of the contribution of the Tennessee region, including Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Vanderbilt University, and the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, to superheavy element research, including the production and chemical separation of unique actinide target materials for superheavy element synthesis at ORNL’s High Flux Isotope Reactor (HFIR) and Radiochemical Engineering Development Center (REDC).

IUPAC made the name official later that year.

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Sources:

Burdette, Shawn C., et al. “Another Four Bricks in the Wall.” Nature Chemistry, 8.4, April 2016, 283–88 at 284. DOI: 10.1038/nchem.2482.

International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC). “IUPAC Is Naming the Four New Elements Nihonium, Moscovium, Tennessine, and Oganesson” (press release), 8 June 2016. IUPAC.org.

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

Photo credit: Unknown photographer, 2014, U.S. Department of Energy. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain photo.