spitting image

Astronauts and identical twins Mark and Scott Kelly, 2015

14 October 2024

The phrase spitting image, used to describe someone who looks very much like another person, particularly a close family member, is a relatively recent coinage based on a much older idea. That original idea has disappeared from our collective consciousness, making the phrase a dead metaphor, one that is no longer productive or understood. As a result many variations—folk etymologies—of it and etymythologies about spitting image’s origin have arisen.

That original idea is that of spitting out an exact likeness of oneself. (And that, in turn, may be a euphemistic metaphor for male ejaculation during sex.) We see this idea expressed at the beginning of the seventeenth century. From Nicholas Breton’s 1602 Wonders Worth the Hearing, in which he provides an unflattering description of the participants in a country wedding:

and after the rowte of such a fight of Rascals, as one would rake hell for such a rabblement, followes the Groome my young Colt of a Cart bréed, led betwixt twoo girles for the purpose, the one as like an Owle, the other as like an Urchin, as if they had béene spitte out of the mouthes of them.

John Dryden expresses it in his 1668 play Sir Martin Mar-all, when he has a character say:

My dear Father, I know it is you by instinct; for methinks I am as like you as if I were spit out of your mouth.

By the nineteenth century, the underlying metaphor becomes more hidden, and we see the noun spit, in the phrase the very spit of, being used to express the idea. From Charles Dibdin’s 1897 novel Henry Hooka:.

She had low ideas, was the very spit of her mother, no elegant notions of gentility, a perfect stranger to the delicate feelings with which great minds were sensitively and susceptibly touched.

And by mid century we get the phrase spit and fetch, with fetch being an Irish dialectal term for one’s doppelganger or likeness. From George Augustus Sala’s 1859 Gaslight and Daylight, in a passage describing ship’s figureheads:

They all seem to have been chiselled from the same models, designed in the same train of thought. Caucus, now, with the addition of a cocked hat and epaulettes, and minus an eye or an arm, would be twin-brother to Admiral Nelson, bound to Singapore, close by; with a complete coat of gold-leaf, a fiercely-curled wig and a spiky crown, he would do excellently well for “King Odin.” screw-steamer for Odessa; with an extra leer notched into his face, his whiskers shaved off, and in his hand a cornucopia resembling a horse's nosebag, twisted and filled with turnips, he would pass muster for Peace or Plenty; while with a black face, a golden crown and bust, and a trebly-gilt kitchen-poker or sceptre, he would be the very spit and fetch of Queen Cleopatra. Distressingly alike are they, these figure-heads.

The phrase spitten picter is recorded in William Dickinson’s 1878 glossary of the Cumberland dialect. In his entry we see that a commenter with the initials W.W.S. is unfamiliar with the metaphor of spitting out a copy of oneself and thus suggests a false etymology:

Spitten picter, c. a strong likeness. “Yon barn ’s his varra spitten picter.” (I suspect spitten means pricked. One way of getting a an exact copy of a drawing is to prick out the outline with a pin.—W.W.S.)

Finally, by the end of the nineteenth century, the phrase spitting image, as we know it today, is recorded. From a story “Alone in the Smuggler’s Lair” that appeared in the 9 May 1891 issue of The Boy’s Standard:

And so by that means I got to Truro, and from there I tramped to Penzance, about thirty miles, and having found my uncle, who kept a large ship-chandlery store, I rather startled him. He had never seen me before.

“By Jove!” said he, “you are the very spit and image of your poor dead brother. I only hope you will turn out as good and bright a man.”

We’ve seen how the original idea behind the phrase has been lost. The metaphor is dead, and the phrase spitting image is a linguistic fossil. Such fossils often give rise to wrong ideas about their origins as people try to make sense of them. We’ve also seen one false etymology, that of spitten meaning pricked, but it’s not the last. The folk etymology (that is an alteration of an idiom in an attempt to make sense of it) splitting image appears by 1894. We see it in a poem, Kitty Kirkie’s Kersmassing, written in the Westmorland dialect:

We’re nowt bet human natur, barn,
Soa t’ Kersmas up i' t’ fells
El just be t’ splitten image
Ov a Kersmas ’mang yersells.

(We’re nothing but human nature, child [born?], so the Christmas up at the fells will just be the splitting image of a Christmas among yourselves.)

Another folk etymology/false etymology has it that spitting image is a variation on spirit and image. A nice idea, but wrong.

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Sources:

“Alone in the Smugglers’ Lair.” The Boy’s Standard, 9 May 1891, 28/1. Gale Primary Sources: Nineteenth Century Collections Online.

Breton, Nicholas. Wonders Worth the Hearing. London: E. Allde for John Tappe, 1602, sig. B4r. ProQuest: Early English Books Online.

Dibdin, Charles. Henry Hooka: A Novel, vol. 1 of 3. London: C. Chapple, 1807, 188. Gale Primary Sources: Nineteenth Century Collections Online.

Dickinson, William. A Glossary of Words and Phrases Pertaining to Dialect of Cumberland. English Dialect Society, Series C, 8. London: Trübner, 1878, 92/2. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Dryden, John. S[i]r Martin Mar-all, or the Feigned Innocence. London: H. Herringman, 1668, 5.1, 60. ProQuest: Early English Books Online.

Horn, Lawrence R. “Spitten Image: Etymythology and Fluid Dynamics.” American Speech, 79.1, Spring 2004, 33–38. Project Muse.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, spit, n.2, spitten, adj., spitting image, n., splitting, n.

Sala, George Augustus. Gaslight and Daylight. London: Chapman and Hall, 1859, 334. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Wilson, William. “Kitty Kirkie’s Kersmassing.” In Thomas Clarke and William Wilson. Specimens of the Dialects of Westmorland, part second. Kendal: Atkinson and Pollitt, 1894, 36. HathiTrust Digital Archive. (The OED, in an entry dated 1914, gives this citation an 1880 date, but I can only find an 1894 edition that contains this poem. It’s also unclear whether Wilson is the author of the poem or merely the one who contributed it to the book.)

Wright, Joseph. The English Dialect Dictionary, vol. 5 of 6. Oxford: Henry Frowde, 1905, s.v. spit, 669–70. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Photo credit: NASA/Robert Markowitz, 2015. Wikimedia Commons. Flickr.com. Public domain image.

thallium

Crystals of hutchinsonite, an ore containing thallium

11 October 2023

Thallium is a chemical element with atomic number 81 and the symbol Tl. It was discovered independently by chemists William Crookes and Claude-Auguste Lamy in 1861, but Crookes was the first to publish and was the one to name the element. The name is from the Greek θαλλός (thallos, green plant shoot) + -ium, after the bright green line in the element’s spectrum.

Crookes published his discovery in March 1861, but the announcement did not propose a name. Two months later, he named it:

I have thought it best to give in the present article a few additional observations which I have since made, and also to propose for it, the provisional name of Thallium, from the Greek θαλλός, or Latin thallus, a budding twig,—a word which is frequently employed to express the beautiful green tint of young vegetation; and which I have chosen as the green line which it communicates to the spectrum recals [sic] with particular vividness the fresh colour of vegetation at the present time.

Thallium and its compounds are highly toxic. Thallium sulfate was once widely used as a pesticide, but this use is now generally banned out of safety concerns. Thallium salts were also used to treat various medical conditions, but these uses have largely been superseded by more effective and safer medicines. It is currently used in the manufacture of optical glass and of electronic components. A radioactive isotope is used in nuclear medicine, and the element may have practical applications in high-temperature superconductors.

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Sources:

Crookes, William. “Further Remarks on the Supposed New Metalloid.” The Chemical News, 3.76, 18 May 1861, 303. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

———. “On the Existence of a New Element, Probably of the Sulphur Group.” The Chemical News, 3.69, 30 March 1861, 193–94. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

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

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

Photo credit: Robert M. Lavinsky, before 2010. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

hydro

Sir Adam Beck Generating Complex, Niagara Falls, Ontario

9 October 2024

Moving to another country can be disorienting. But moving to Canada, at least to the anglophone provinces, from the United States is different. To the casual observer, things in Canada seem pretty much the same as in the States. When it comes to language, aside from minor variations like the spelling of licence, favour, and centre, Canadian English is not all that different from that spoken south of the forty-ninth parallel. But one that can trip up migrants from the south is the use of the word hydro. In ads for apartments, one commonly sees the line “utilities, except hydro, included.” When I moved to Toronto in 2010, this baffled me. In the United States, it is common for utilities, with the exception of electricity, to be included in the rent. But here, it seemed that electricity was included and water wasn’t. I was well into the search for a place to live when I discovered that hydro meant electricity.

Hydro, of course, comes from the Greek ύδωρ and its combining form ύδρο-, meaning water. It is a clipping of the older hydroelectric (1844) or hydropower (1906).

We see hydro power in a Canadian context in an article with a dateline of 29 December 1911 in Toronto’s Globe and Mail:

Hon. Adam Beck turned on the Hydro power in the home of his birth here to-night. In the presence of almost the entire population of the thriving village. Baden is the first of the smaller towns and villages to use Niagara power, and this evening the streets were illuminated for the first time with electricity generated at the Falls.

Adam Beck was the founder of the Hydro-Electric Power Commission of Ontario

And a few years later we see the clipped hydro referring to hydroelectric power. From a short biography of Beck in Augustus Bridle’s 1916 Sons of Canada:

Had there been no cataract at Niagara, not even the political dominie of Ontario could have produced Adam Beck The product of Niagara, according to Beck, is Hydro-Electric—familiarly abbreviated to Hydro, tabloided to H.E.

And because so much of Ontario’s and Quebec’s electricity was generated hydroelectrically, within a couple of decades hydro was being used to refer to electricity regardless of the source. From Frederick Grove’s 1939 Two Generations, a Story of Present Day Ontario:

“I don’t suppose you have word from down south?” Phil asked of the attendant. “Jarvis way, I mean?”

“That where you’re going?”

“Trying to,” Phil said.

Well-l-l, it’s been sleet there: the telephone and hydro wires are down. You want to be on the look-out.

“Milk trucks coming through?”

“Dunno. Haven’t seen any.”

“Well, doesn’t matter.” Phil laughed as if obstacles in their way and difficulties to be overcome were so many attractions.

“Watch for the road-signs.,” Alice said as she inserted herself behind the wheel.

The attendant, having received his money, rand for shelter, averting his face from the wind.

And we get this in Selwyn Dewdney’s 1946 novel Wind Without Rain:

“Then,” he went on inexorably, “there’s travel. Toronto and Montreal: there’s another fifty down the drain—with the rent that makes practically a hundred and fifty. Balance, a hundred and twenty-five. Food, hydro, water, telephone for September, forty dollars.”

So, hydro is a product of a number of etymological processes. It is borrowed from Greek, compounded, then clipped, then semantically shifted to a new sense that can be confusing to those new to Canada.

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Sources:

“Baden’s Ovation to Hon. Mr. Beck” (29 December 1911). Globe and Mail (Toronto), 30 December 1911, 13/1. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Bridle, Augustus. Sons of Canada. Toronto: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1916, 185. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Dewdney, Selwyn. Wind Without Rain. Toronto: Copp Clark, 1946, 236.

Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles, second edition (DHCP-2), 2017, s.v. hydro, n.

Grove, Frederick Philip. Two Generations: A Story of Present-Day Ontario. Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1939, 230.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, July 2023, s.v. hydro, n.2, hydroelectric, adj., hydropower, n.

Photo credit: Ontario Power Generation, 2007. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

tarot

Image of le Fou (the Fool) from a fifteenth-century tarot deck

7 October 2024

Tarot is the name of a type of playing card which is often also used for cartomancy (i.e., divination or fortune-telling using cards). There are a wide variety of games that can be played with a tarot deck. Over the centuries, there have been many variations in what tarot decks contain, but they generally consist of four suits, each containing ten pip cards (ace through ten) and four face cards (king, queen, knight, and jack), plus a trump suit of twenty-one cards, known as trionfi (triumphs), and a fool card. References to the predecessors of what we now know as tarot, that is tarocchi, can be found in Italy from at least 1419. There are accounts of tarrochi decks being used for cartomancy from the early sixteenth century.

The name is a borrowing from the French tarot, which in turn is from the Italian slang/dialectal *tarocco (plural tarocchi) meaning fool or foolish. English references to the games date to the late sixteenth century. The earliest I’m aware of is G. Delamothe’s 1592 The French Alphabeth, a textbook on learning the French language:

Come, what shall we doe? What you will, shall we play? What game will you play at? will you play at Tables, at Dyce, at Tarots, at Chesses, &c. No, let vs play at Cardes, to the end that all the companie may play together.

Or ça que fero[n]s nous? Ce q[ue] vous voudrez, Iouerons nous? A quel ieu voulez vous iouer? Voulez vous iouer aux Dames, aux Dez, aux Tarots, aux Eschets, &c. Non, iouons au Chartes, afin que toute la compagnie ioue ensemble.

Until the late nineteenth century, almost all English uses of the term are in translations from French or in references to card games played on the Continent. This would indicate that in these early days tarot, both for gaming and cartomancy, was not particularly common in England. Also, these early uses are all in the sense of games that could be played with such a deck, not the cards themselves.

The earliest English-language use of tarot to refer to the cards, as opposed to a game that could be played with them, is in an 1870 English translation of the second edition of Paul Lacroix’s (Bibliophile Jacob’s) 1869 Les Arts au Moyen Age (The Arts of the Middle Ages):

No original specimen has been preserved of the tarots (tarrochi, tarrochini) or Italian cards of this epoch; but we possess a pack engraved about 1460, which is known to be an exact copy of them. Added to this, Raphael Maffei, who lived at the end of the fifteenth century, has left in his “Commentaries” a description of tarots, which were, he says, “a new invention,”—in comparison, doubtless, with the origin of playing-cards.

We see the word used outside of translation in William Skeen’s 1872 Early Typography:

Mr. Planché, while abstaining from the expression of an opinion upon the principal point in dispute, shews, as a matter of fact in regard to playing cards, that “with the exception of those by the Master of 1466 (an engraver only known by that designation), and a set of ‘tarots,’ called the Mantegna Cards, on one of which is the date 1483, all the specimens of printed playing cards that he has met with display the unmistakeable character of the fashions of Germany, France, and England, during the latter half of the Fifteenth century, and the greatest portion those of the latest part,—Louis XI, Charles VIII, of France; Edward IV, and Henry VII, of England; and Maximilian I , Emperor of Germany.”

And a few pages later Skeen writes:

On this subject Mr. Planché writes, “There is plenty of evidence to prove that cards, drawn, painted, and gilded by the hand, like those of Jacquemin-Gringonneur, and to which the name of ‘Tarot cards’ has been given, found their way into Europe from the East in the Fourteenth century, or perhaps earlier.

To which there is this note:

Gringonneur was paid for the cards drawn and painted for Charles VI in 1392, fifty-six sous of Paris, which is calculated to be about £7 1s. 8d. of our present money, and a single pack of “tarots,” admirably painted about 1415 by Marziano, Secretary to the Duke of Milan, cost the enormous sum of 1,500 golden crowns (about £625).

Two years later, Matilda Anne Mackarness (the daughter of Planché, the playwright and antiquary to whom Skeen refers) wrote in her 1874 Children of the Olden Time:

The old story that cards were invented for the amusement of the poor mad King of France (Charles VI.) is disputed. The mistake has probably arisen from the fact that in the treasury register belonging to that monarch, fifty-six sols were paid to one Jacquemin Gringonneur, painter, "for three packs of cards, gilded and painted with divers colours.” It is the opinion of many learned writers that cards were used in Eastern lands long before they were known in Europe, called “tarot cards,” but they were very unlike our present playing-cards. The gipsies used them for telling fortunes, as they do now; and being all pictures, they would amuse children, and probably they were made brighter and gayer to please the poor king.

So it isn’t until the late nineteenth century that tarot becomes fully anglicized. And in the anglophone world, tarot has always been primarily used for cartomancy rather than gaming.

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Sources:

Caldwell, Ross Sinclair. “Brief History of Cartomancy.” Academia.edu. This is an English translation of Caldwell’s “Origine della cartomanzia.” In Il Castello dei Tarocchi. Andrea Vitali, ed. Turin: Lo Scarabeo, 2010, 163–76.

Delamothe, G. The French Alphabeth. London: R. Field, 1592, 150–51. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Lacroix, Paul (Bibliophile Jacob). Les Arts au Moyen Age, second edition. Paris: Didot Frères et Fils, 1869, 235–236. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

———. The Arts of the Middle Ages. James Dafforne, trans. London: Chapman and Hall, 1870, 229.

MacKarness, Matilda Anne (Mrs. Henry S.). Children of the Olden Time. London: Griffith and Farran, 1874, 26–27. Gale Primary Sources: Nineteenth Century Collections Online.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, s.v. tarot, n., taroc, n.

Skeen, William. Early Typography. Colombo, Ceylon: 1872, 48–49, and 53–54. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Image credit: Unknown artist, fifteenth century. Lacroix, Paul. Les Arts au Moyen Age, second edition. Paris: Didot Frères et Fils, 1869, 235. HathiTrust Digital Archive. Public domain image.

strontium

4 October 2024

Strontium is a chemical element with atomic number 38 and the symbol Sr. It is a highly reactive, soft, silver-white/yellowish metal. The isotopes found in strontium ores are all stable, but nuclear fission produces radioactive ones, including strontium-90, which has a half-life of 28.9 years. Strontium-90 is a product of reactor accidents and nuclear weapons and can cause bone cancer (due to strontium’s ability to replace calcium in bones) and leukemia.

Strontium was heavily used in producing the glass for cathode-ray tubes (CRTs) used in televisions and computer monitors because it blocked X-rays, but with the switch to liquid-crystal display (LCD) devices, this use has fallen away. Strontium aluminate is used in glow-in-the-dark toys; strontium carbonate is used in fireworks, giving them a deep-red color; and strontium carbonate is used in some toothpastes. The shorter-lived radioactive isotopes have applications in nuclear medicine.

The element is named for Strontian, the Scottish village where the mineral was first discovered in the local lead mines. The Gaelic name, sron an t-sithein, translates as nose of the fairies. Chemist and physician Adair Crawford was the first to identify the mineral and posit that it was a distinct element, but he didn’t give it a name, referring to it as the Strontean mineral or the Scotch mineral:

The salt which is obtained from the combination of the Strontean mineral with muriatic acid, is much more soluble in hot water than in cold, and therefore easily chrystallizes by cooling.

And

It is probable, indeed, that the Scotch mineral is a new species of earth which has not hitherto been sufficiently examined.

The first to give the mineral a name were physicians Friedrich Gabriel Sulzer and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach in 1791, calling it strontianite. That name is still used to refer to the raw mineral ore:

Ich habe dieses interessante Fossil, das eine eigne Grunderde zu enthalten scheint, einstweilen in meiner kleinen Sammlung Strontianit getauft, und werde, was ich noch davon habe, zu fernern Versuchen aufopfern.

(I have, for the time being, christened this interesting fossil in my small collection, which seems to contain its own basic earth, strontianite and will sacrifice what I still have of it for future research.)

(Blumenbach is perhaps more famous for being one the founders of now thoroughly discredited “race science.” And his five racial categories survive today in those used by the U.S. Census Bureau.)  

Chemist Humphry Davy was the first to isolate the element some two decades latter using the then-new process of electrolysis. In 1808 Davy successfully isolated and named four alkaline earths, barium, calcium, magnesium, and strontium, adding the -ium ending to the root of the Scottish name:

These new substances will demand names; and on the same principles as I have named the bases of the fixed alkalies, potassium and sodium, I shall venture to denominate the metals from the alkaline earths barium, strontium, calcium, and magnium; the last of these words is undoubtedly objectionable, but magnesium has been already applied to metallic manganese, and would consequently have been an equivocal term.

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Sources:

Crawford, Adair. “On the Medicinal Properties of the Muriated Barytes” (10 November 1789). Medical Communications, vol. 2. London: Joseph Johnson, 1790, 301–359 at 354 and 355. Gale Primary Sources: Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Davy, Humphry. “Electro-Chemical Researches, on the Decomposition of the Earths; with Observations on the Metals Obtained from the Alkaline Earths, and on the Amalgam Procured from Ammonia.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 98, 30 June 1808, 333–70 at 346. Gale Primary Sources: Nineteenth Century Collections Online.

Miśkowiec, Pawel. “Name Game: The Naming History of the Chemical Elements—Part 1—From Antiquity till the End of 18th Century.” Foundations of Chemistry. 1 November 2022. DOI: 10.1007/s10698-022-09448-5.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. strontium, n., strontia, n., strontian, n.

Sulzer, F. G., and J. F. Blumenbach. “Über den Strontianit, ein Schottisches Foßil, das ebenfalls eine neue Grunderde zu enthalten scheint.” Bergmännisches Journal, May 1791, 433–436 at 433. Google Books.

Photo credit: Peter Van den Bossche, 2007. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.