close, but no cigar

Still from the 1941 film Never Give a Sucker an Even Break

28 October 2024

The phrase close, but no cigar is traditionally uttered when someone falls just short of achieving a goal. The phrase comes to us from the early twentieth-century practice of giving out cigars as prizes for winning games of chance or skill at carnivals, fairs, and other attractions. The following description of the practice appears in Robert Machray’s 1902 book The Night Side of London. In the description, cigars are given out as prizes in what appears to be an early form of the game now known as Skee-Ball. As someone who spent my undergraduate summers as a boardwalk barker and operator of games of chance, I can attest to the accuracy of this description. Little has changed other than the cost of playing the game:

Another penny—and this time you accept defeat, and move on to the next stall, where another penny gives you the privilege of trying to roll three balls into certain holes with numbers attached thereunto. Should you score twenty you will win a cigar. But you do no more than score nine. Undiscouraged, or perhaps encouraged by this fact, you spend another penny, and another, and another—but you don’t get the cigar, and it is well for you that you don’t! For there are cigars and cigars. On you go, and next you try your hand at the cocoa-nuts, or the skittles, or the clay-pipes, or in the shooting-alleys. And so on and on—until your stock of pennies and patience is exhausted.

Another mention of the practice, this time with cigars being prizes for marksmanship, comes from the New York Evening World of 12 June 1905. The paper ran a contest whereby readers who managed to identify a man, “Mr. Raffles,” whose picture was published in the paper, as he went about town would win $100. The paper published after-the-fact descriptions of where Mr. Raffles had been:

Remember the young chap at the rifle range who nearly put the joint out of business winning cigars? Quite a crowd watched the sport, but all failed to grasp the fact that it was Raffles who was getting the smokers.

But the phrase close, but no cigar itself is not recorded until 28 May 1927, when it appears as a headline in the Yale Daily News of New Haven, Connecticut. The use is ironic:

Close but No Cigar

In a close and hard-fought pitchers’ battle the Sophomore delegation of Psi Upsilon defeated their classmates of Delta Kappa Epsilon, 25 to 1.

The next year it appears in a pair of articles in another Ivy League newspaper, the Daily Princetonian, the student newspaper of Princeton University in New Jersey. The first of these is from the 13 January 1928 issue:

The Triangle Club is a great institution and all that, but just the same we wish they would cut down a little on those wisecracks which are applicable to Campus life. Too many undergraduates are getting up “parties of four” to do various inane things, and just a few too many of our friends are telling us that “history will never know” that we forgot to go to Chapel Sunday. But the end of our patience will have come if Professor Cawley hands back a profusely red-inked essay with the sprightly remark, “close, but no cigar”.

The phrase seems to have been something of a catchphrase for the Princeton class of 1928, because this reunion notice for that class appears in the Princeton Alumni Weekly for 2 July 1929:

The long distance trophy, an appropriately inscribed silver cigarette case, was awarded to Em Gooch who had made the trip from Lincoln, Neb. for the occasion. Several other members came close, but no cigar, and we trust that all those in New York and Philadelphia who failed to show up, without reason, will read these lines with a quiver.

The Long Island Daily Press also had a couple of headlines that used the phrase that year, indicating that the phrase was not limited to Princeton. An 18 May 1929 article about a local Long Island man who came in second in successive elections for a local post had “Close, But No Cigar” as a sub-headline.

Then on 13 December 1929, the paper ran the a story about a local fundraising drive that included the following:

“Close—but no cigar!”

The refrain of the “knock ’em-down-and-win-a-smoke” barker still rings in the Christmas Fund Editor’s mind as he considers how close the Christmas Fund came yesterday to having a $200 day—only to miss by a scant half dollar.

So, by 1929 the phrase was well established.

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Sources:

“’28’s First.” Princeton Alumni Weekly, 29.36, 2 July 1929, 1166/2. Google Books.

“Catch the Mysterious Mr. Raffles—Worth $100 to You,” Evening World (New York), 12 June 1905, 11/4. Library of Congress: Chronicling America.

“Close but No Cigar.” Yale Daily News (New Haven, Connecticut), 28 May 1927, 2/3. Yale Daily News Historical Archive.

Daily Princetonian (Princeton, New Jersey), 13 January 1928, 2/3. NewspaperArchive.com.

“Day’s Fund Just Falls Short of Reaching $200.”  Long Island Daily Press (Jamaica, New York), 13 December 1929, 1/6. FultonHistory.com.

Goranson, Stephen. “‘close, but no cigar’ antedated (1929).” ADS-L, 18 January 2013.

Machray, Robert. The Night Side of London. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippencott, 1902, 103. Google Books.

Mullins, Bill. “‘close, but no cigar’ antedated (1929) (UNCLASSIFIED).” ADS-L, 18 January 2013.

O’Toole, Garson. “‘close, but no cigar’ antedated (1929).” ADS-L, 18 January 2013.

Oxford English Dictionary, additional sense, 2004, s.v. cigar, n.

Popik, Barry. “Close, But No Cigar.” The Big Apple (blog), 18 January 2009. BarryPopik.com.

Town Hall Joe. “Civic Gossip.” Long Island Daily Press, 18 May 1929, 16/6. FultonHistory.com.

Photo credit: Universal Pictures, 1941. Fair use of a single frame from a copyrighted motion picture to illustrate the topic under discussion.

tin

A tin of Altoid mints

25 October 2024

Tin is a chemical element with atomic number 50 and the symbol Sn, which is from the Latin name for the metal, stannum. It is a soft, easily cut, silvery metal. It has been known since antiquity and has myriad applications.

The word tin comes from a common Germanic root, with cognates found in almost all the West and North Germanic languages. The word can be found in the late ninth-century Old English translation of the Pope Gregory the Great’s Cura Pastoralis (Pastoral Care):

Ða cwæð Dryhten, “Ðiss Israhela folc is geworden nu me to sindrum ond to are ond to tine ond to iserne ond to leade inne on minum ofne”; suelce he openlice cwæde, “Ic hie wolde geclænsian mid ðæm gesode ðæs broces, ond wolde ðæt hie wurden to golde ond to seolufre, ac hie wurdon gehwierfde inne on ðam ofne to are ond to tine ond to isene ond to leade, forðæm ðe hie noldon on ðæm gesuincium hie selfe gecirran to nyttum ðingum, ac ðurhwunedon on hiera unðeawum.”

(Then the Lord said, “this nation of Israel, has now become dross to me, and to copper and to tin and to iron and to lead in my furnace”; as if his plain meaning were, “I wished to purify them with smelting of tribulation, and wished that they would turn to gold and to silver, but inside the furnace they turned to copper and to tin and to iron and to lead, because in that hardship they would not turn themselves to beneficial things, but persisted in their sins.)

In antiquity and in the Middle Ages, seven of the elemental metals were each associated with a god and with a planet, with tin associated with Jupiter. We see this association in a variety of alchemical writings, including Chaucer’s The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale:

I wol yow telle, as was me taught also,
The foure spirites and the bodies sevene,
By ordre, as ofte I herde my lord hem nevene.

The firste spirit quyksilver called is,
The seconde orpyment, the thridde, ywis,
Sal armonyak, and the ferthe brymstoon.
The bodyes sevene eek, lo, hem heere anoon:
Sol gold is, and Luna silver we threpe,
Mars iren, Mercurie quyksilver we clepe,
Saturnus leed, and Juppiter is tyn,
And Venus coper, by my fader kyn!

(I will tell you, as it was taught also to me,
The four spirits and the seven metals,
In the order as I often heard my lord name them.

The first spirit is called quicksilver,
The second orpiment, the third, indeed,
Sal ammoniac, and the fourth brimstone.
The seven metals also, lo, hear them now:
The Sun is gold, and the Moon we assert silver,
Mars iron, Mercury we call quicksilver,
Saturn lead, and Jupiter is tin,
And Venus copper, by my father’s kin!)

The use of tin to mean a sealed metal container, a can, dates to the nineteenth century, after the tin-plated iron or steel originally used to make the containers. This usage is primary British.

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Sources:

Chaucer, Geoffrey. “The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale.” The Canterbury Tales. In Larry D. Benson, ed. The Riverside Chaucer, 8.819–29, 273. Also, with minor variation in wording, at Harvard’s Geoffrey Chaucer Website.

Fulk, R. D., ed. The Old English Pastoral Care. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 72. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2021, chap. 37, 282.

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. tin, n.

Photo credit: Schyler, 2010. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

beam me up, Scotty

Captain Kirk (William Shatner) and Mr. Spock (Leonard Nimoy) from the original Star Trek television series

23 October 2024

Beam me up, Scotty! is a slang catchphrase inspired by the original Star Trek television series (1966–69). It used as a jocular expression of a desire to be somewhere other than the present place or situation. To beam is a verb used in the series to describe the process of the starship Enterprise’s transporter, and Scotty is the ship’s chief engineer who often operated the transporter. But like many such immortalized “quotations,” it was never actually uttered on the series, although in a few instances it came close to being said. (Cf. my work here is done)

The use of to beam to denote the action of such a transporter predates Star Trek. It appears in Samuel A. Peebles, et al. 1951 A Dictionary of Science Fiction:

MATTER TRANSPORTER—In SF, an apparatus which dissembles [sic] an object, transmits it through space and re-assembles it at another point. The transported matter is usually broken into its component atoms, keyed, “beamed” and reconstructed by a specially keyed receiver. Travel is thus instantaneous.

(Peebles’s dictionary cites two sources that allegedly use beam in this sense, but neither one actually does. Beam is used to refer to a beam of light in one and to a directed-energy weapon in the other. So this dictionary entry is the earliest use found so far.)

In a Star Trek context, beam appears in the 1964 story outline creator Gene Roddenberry used to pitch the show to the networks, where it appears as an adjective:

The cruiser itself stays in space orbit, rarely lands upon a planet. Recon parties (small groups, featuring continuing characters) are set down via an energy-matter scrambler which can “materialize” them onto the planet’s surface. This requires maximum beam power and is a tremendous drain on the cruiser’s power supply. It can be done only across relatively short line-of-sight distances.

The verb appears in the 29 June 1964 first draft of the script of The Cage, which would become the pilot for the series:

The landing party is beamed to materialize on arid, rocky Sirius IV a quarter mile from the wrecked ship.

In the 1968 book The Making of Star Trek, Roddenberry is recorded as commenting:

If someone had said, “We will give you the budget to land the ship,” our stories would have started slow, much too slow. The fact that we didn’t have the budget forced us into conceiving the transporter device—“beam” them down to the planet—which allowed us to be well into the story by script page two.

As for the phrase appearing on the show, Captain Kirk uttered, “Beam us up” at the end of the episode The Gamesters of Triskelion, and he put Scotty at the head of the phrase in The Savage Curtain when he said, “Scotty, beam us up fast.” But the exact phrase, “Beam me up, Scotty” was never uttered on the show.

The phrase Beam me up, Scotty appears in print by 1976 when the 19 June issue of the Houston Chronicle has an article about Houstoncon ’76, a nostalgia convention that featured Star Trek actors and memorabilia. The article concludes:

“This is really about the seventh convention we’ve had,” Bonario says. “But, in all honesty, it’s only the third really huge one. The attendance has gone up from 125 the first year to 4,000 last year. We’re expecting about 5,000 this year.”

Tickets and detailed schedules are available at the registration table on the second floor of the hotel.

Beam me up, Scotty.

To confirm that the term was in slang use around this time, linguist Connie Eble’s Campus Slang of 4 April 1978 has this entry:

all right, Spock, beam us up!—exclamation of a need to get out of a party or any uncomfortable situation

Eble’s record has Spock rather than Scotty. While Spock rarely operated the transporter, he was often at the receiving end of communications requesting a beam up, so it’s certainly possible that early uses of the slang phrase had considerable variation before settling on a canonical form.

And the Oxford English Dictionary has a use of beam me up, Scotty in the 31 July 1984 issue of American Banker, of all places, a publication that indicates the slang phrase had become widespread by this date:

“Beam me up Scotty, there's no prospect of finance down here.” Undoubtedly, that's what Star Trek's Captain Kirk, commander of the science-fiction Starship Enterprise, would say if he came here in search of bank loans to fund extraterrestrial activities.

And the following month on 23 August 1984, we get a Usenet post by someone with the moniker Lt. Suvok, the name of a character in Star Trek fan fiction:

Beam me up,Scotty,it's millertime!!

and

Beam me up,Scotty,I'm getting some strange looks here!!

(The lack of spaces after the commas is in the original post.)

The phrase is now often seen in an extended form: Beam me up Scotty, there’s no intelligent life down here, which could be an apt description of the internet.

Discuss this post

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Sources:

Adamson, Dale. “Big Bucks Time at Houstoncon.” Houston Chronicle, 19 June 1976, 2.1/4. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., s.v. beam me up, Scotty!, excl.

Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction, 2021, s.v. beam, v.

Liss, Kenneth M. Reader comment, 23 October 2024. (Pointing out the Houston Chronicle article.)

Lt. Suvak. “STIV In Search Of...Dr. Who,” Usenet: net.startrek, 23 August 1984.

Oxford English Dictionary, Additions Series, 1993, s.v. beam, v.

Peeples, Samuel A., David A. Kyle, and Martin Greenberg. “A Dictionary of Science Fiction.” In Travelers in Space. Martin Greenberg, ed. New York: Gnome Press, 1951, s.v. matter transporter, 24. Archive.org.

Roddenberry, Gene. “’The Cage’: Pilot Story Outline” (first draft, 29 June 1964). In Stephen E. Whitfield and Gene Roddenberry. The Making of Star Trek. New York: Ballantine, 1968, 48. Archive.org.

Roddenberry, Gene. “Star Trek” (story outline, 1964). In Stephen E. Whitfield and Gene Roddenberry. The Making of Star Trek. New York: Ballantine, 1968, 26. Archive.org.

Roddenberry, Gene, Arther Heinemann, and Arthur H. Singer (writers). “The Savage Curtain.” Star Trek, Herschel Daugherty (director), airdate: 7 March 1969.

Roddenberry, Gene and Margaret Armen (writers). “The Gamesters of Triskelion,” Star Trek, Gene Nelson (director), airdate: 5 January 1968.

Whitfield, Stephen E. and Gene Roddenberry. The Making of Star Trek. New York: Ballantine, 1968, 43–44. Archive.org.

Photo credit: NBC Television, c. 1966. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

holt

Phone box in Holt Forest, Dorset, England

23 October 2024

Holt, a word for a wooded area, a copse, goes back to Old English. Its root is common Germanic, with cognates found in Old Norse, Old Frisian, Old Saxon, Old High German, and others.

The word appears in Beowulf when the hero’s men abandon him when faced with the dragon:

Nealles him on heape    handgesteallan,
æðelinga bearn     ymbe gestodon
hildecystum,    ac hy on holt bugon,
ealdre burgan.

(His companions in the company, sons of nobles, did not at all stand by him valorously, by they fled into the holt to save their lives.)

But perhaps the most famous appearance of the word is in opening lines of General Prologue to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and its description of spring:

Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
Tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his half cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye
—So priketh hem Nature in hir corages—
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
And specially from every shires ende
Of Engelond to Caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for to seke,
That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.

(When April with its showers sweet
The drought of March has pierced to the root,
And bathed every vein in such liquid
By which is engendered the vitality of the flower;
When Zephyr also with his sweet breath
Has in every holt and heath breathed life into
Tender buds, and the young Sun
Has in Aries run half its course,
And small birds make melodies,
Those that sleep all the night with open eyes
—So Nature goads them in their hearts—
Then folk long to go on pilgrimages,
And pilgrims to seek foreign shores,
To distant shrines, known in sundry lands;
And especially from every shire’s end
Of England to Canterbury they go,
To seek the holy blessed martyr,
Who helped them when they were sick.)

In the modern period, holt developed another sense, that of a wooded hill. This probably developed from poetic descriptions of copses in highland regions. For instance, we see this use of highest holts in a poem by George Turberville published in 1567:

What Tongue can tell the wo?
what Pen expresse the plaint?
Vnlesse the Muses helpe at néede
I féele my wits to faint.
Yée that frequent the hilles
and highest Holtes of all,
Assist mée with your skilfull Quilles
and listen when I call.

But another of Turberville’s poems in the same collection uses holt in the sense of a wooded area, so when he wrote highest holts, the holt isn’t a hill, but a woods on a high hill:

For water slipped by
may not be callde againe:
And to reuoke forepassed howres
were labour lost in vaine.
Take time whilst time applies
with nimble foote it goes:
Nor to compare with passed Prime
thy after age suppoes.
The holtes that now are hoare,
both bud and bloume I sawe.

And by the mid-eighteenth century, the sense of holt as the hill itself was clearly established, as we can see from John Dyer’s use of craggy holt in his 1757 poem The Fleece:

High Cotswold also ’mong the shepherd swains
Is oft remember’d, though the greedy plough
Preys on its carpet: He, whose rustic muse
O’er heath and craggy holt her wing display’d,
And sung the bosky bourns of Alfred’s shires,
Has favour’d Cotswold with luxuriant praise.

It's worth noting, however, that in Old Icelandic holt meant both a woods and a stony hill or ridge. Iceland isn’t known for its trees, and it seems likely that the word changed in this language because there wasn’t much call for words meaning a wooded area. It is most likely that this parallel semantic development is unconnected to the one in English, but the possibility of an Icelandic influence on English usage cannot be completely discounted.

There is another holt, spelled and pronounced the same but with an entirely different meaning and origin. It is a variant of hold, meaning a fortress or refuge, as in stronghold, but referring to an animal’s den, particularly the den of an otter. This sense dates to the late sixteenth century. From Thomas Cockaine’s 1591 A Short Treatise on Hunting:

An Otter sometimes will be trayled a mile or two before he come to the holt where he lyeth, and the earnestness of the sporte beginneth not till he be found, at which time some must runne up the water, some downe to see where he beats, and so pursue him with great earnestness till bee he kild.

(The use of beat here is in a hunting sense meaning to attempt to escape, especially along a stream or river.)

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Sources:

Chaucer, Geoffrey. “General Prologue.” The Canterbury Tales, lines 1.1–18. Harvard’s Geoffrey Chaucer Website.

Dictionary of Old English: A to Le, 2024, s.v. holt, n.

Dyer, John. The Fleece: A Poem in Four Books. London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1757, lines 2.381–86, 65.

Fulk, R. D., Robert E. Bjork, and John D. Niles. Klaeber’s Beowulf, fourth edition, Toronto: Toronto UP, 2008, lines 2596–99a, 89.

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

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. holt, n.1.

Turberville, George. Epitaphes, Epigrams, Songs and Sonets. London: Henry Denham, 1567, 56, 33. ProQuest: Early English Books Online.

Zoëga, Geir. A Concise Dictionary of Old Icelandic (1910), University of Toronto Press, 2004, s.v. holt, n.

Photo credit: Toby, 2006. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

thorium

Tors strid med jättarna (Thor's Fight with the Giants), Mårten Eskil Winge, 1872

18 October 2024

Thorium is a chemical element with atomic number 90 and the symbol Th. It is named after the Norse god Thor + -ium. It is a soft, malleable, silver-colored metal. All the isotopes of thorium are radioactive, but the most stable one, 232Th, has a half-life of over 14 billion years, or equal to the age of the universe. Thorium has some uses in scientific instruments, high-end optics, gas mantles, and vacuum tubes, but these uses are dwindling. It has been suggested as a possible fuel for nuclear reactors, and a few experimental reactors using the element as fuel have been constructed.

In 1815 chemist Jöns Jacob Berzelius announced what he thought to be a new element, and three years later he dubbed it thorjord (thor’s earth; thorina in French), after the ancient Norse god Thor. But Berzelius was mistaken, and the mineral was actually a compound of yttrium. The chemist retracted his discovery in 1824. But in 1829, Berzelius identified the element in a different ore, which had been found and given to him by amateur minerologist Morten Thrane Esmark, and he recycled the earlier name:

Detta mineral innehåller en förut obekant metallisk kropp, hvilken, i afseende till sina egenskaper hörer till dem, som bilda de så kallade egentliga jordarterna, och dess oxid är en jord, som närmast liknar zirkonjorden och som, bysynnerligt nog, har största delen af de egenskarper och kännetecken, dem jag i min äldre beskrifning af thorjorden has denna funnit. Denna omständighet föranledde mig att, i början af denna undersökning, fästa namnet thorjord vid den nya jorden; och ehuru jag, vid en förnyad undersökning af hvad some ännu âterstod af det mineral, i hvilket jag trott mig finna den äldre thorjorden, icke kunde upptäcka det minsta spår af den nya sâ har jag dock trott mig med så mycket större skäl kunna för den sistnämda behålla samma namn, som den äldre beskrifningen till det mesta passar derpå, och detta namn en gång är i vetenskapen infödt. Detta medförer en gifven grund för det nya mineral, som jag kallar Thorit.

(This mineral contains a previously unknown metallic body, which, in regard to its properties, belongs to those which form the so-called proper earths, and its oxide is an earth which most closely resembles zircon ore, and which, curiously enough, has the greater part of the characteristic features and characteristics, those I have found in my older description of thorjorden. This circumstance induced me, at the beginning of this investigation, to attach the name thorjord to the new earth; and although, on a renewed examination of what still remained of the mineral in which I thought I found the older thor soil, I could not discover the smallest trace of the new one, yet I have believed myself with much greater reason to be able for the latter retain the same name, as the older description mostly fits it, and this name is once native to science. This provides a given basis for the new mineral, which I call Thorite.)

In early English use, the element was called the element thorina or thorinum, after the French name thorina, but these names had gone out of use by the late nineteenth century, and the form thorium was universally adopted.

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Sources:

Berzelius, Jöns Jacob. “Undersökning af ett nytt mineral, som innehåller en förut obekant jord” (1829). Kungl. Svenska vetenskapsakademiens handlingar. Stockholm: P. A. Norstedt & Söner, 1830,1–30 at 2–3. Biodiversity Heritage Library.

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. thorium, n., thorina, n., thorinum, n.

Image credit: Mårten Eskil Winge, 1872. Nationalmuseum Sweden. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.