full monty

UK theatrical-release poster for the 1997 film The Full Monty

4 November 2024

If you became aware of the phrase the fully monty from the name of the 1997 film (e.g., you’re an American) you might think the phrase refers to being totally nude, but that is only a particular subsense of the phrase. More generally the full monty means everything, the works, the whole shebang. It’s a Briticism of unknown origin. Numerous suggestions have been offered as to its origin and what monty refers to, but there is no good evidence to support any of them.

The phrase is first recorded in a 22 September 1975 article in London’s Evening Standard newspaper about boxer Chris Finnegan and his number one fan, his wife Cheryl:

Cheryl (she has a laugh that explodes like a swamp bubble) is boxing’s leading female ringsider—and definitely the wrong woman to argue with as the tension mounts.

Sitting or standing Cheryl delivers a non-stop barrage of encouragement to Chris: “Give it the full monty,” she yells. “For Christ’s sake, Chrissie, get those bloody hammers going.”

The association with nudity is recorded two decades later, about the time the film is in production, which is about unemployed, male steelworkers who attempt to make some money by becoming strippers. But even though the first known use of the nudity subsense is in reference to the movie, the 1997 film probably takes its title from a British film-industry jargon sense of the full monty meaning to appear nude in a film.

The nudity subsense is first recorded in an article about the upcoming film that appeared in the New York Daily News on 1 January 1997:

Strapped for cash, and inspired by a visit from the Chippendales dancers to their town, six out-of-town [sic, should read out-of-work] steelworkers try to turn things around by forming an unlikely strip act. Carlyle plays a 30-year-old wild man, who convinces his friends (a well-endowed handyman, a suicidal security guard and an old geezer) to join him in the strip-for-cash scheme. Together they prepare a sexy revue that culminates in going “the full Monty”—baring it all in front of crowds of women and steelworkers.

But eleven days later, on 12 January 1997, the following appeared in an article about actor Steve Waddington in London’s Sunday Mirror that indicates the nudity sense was already in use among film industry insiders:

Those few seconds of nudity—which caused Emma [Thompson] to exclaim: “The man's got the body of a Greek god”—helped further Steve's reputation as Britain's most exciting young sex symbol. In Ivanhoe, a six-part series starting on BBC1 tonight, he is certain to win millions more adoring female fans.

Disappointingly, Steve doesn't get his kit off in Ivanhoe. “I’m bare-chested a couple of times, but not the full Monty,” he says. “For one thing, chain mail is such a long-winded thing to take off, it would need a whole episode to do it. And the love story is romantic rather than overly sexual.”

So the semantic progression seems to be that the general sense of the works developed in the early 1970s, and by the mid-1990s within the British film industry the full monty had developed a specialized sense of appearing nude in a movie. The producers of the 1997 film The Full Monty took the title from the film-industry jargon sense, and that was the sense of the term that was introduced to the North American public when the movie debuted in August 1997.

But none of the evidence sheds any light on the what the significance of monty is. But that hasn’t deterred idle speculation. Some claim that it is from the name of Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery either because of his penchant for supposedly eating a full English breakfast each morning or for his penchant for set piece battles in which infantry, armor, artillery, and air support are all in place and properly coordinated. No one has come up with any evidence linking the field marshal to the term, and it is unlikely that a term inspired by him would start appearing some thirty years after World War II. Others say it originally referred to a bespoke, three-piece suit from London tailor Montague Burton, but again no evidence has surfaced that links the man or the company he founded to the phrase. Others have suggested it comes from the American/Mexican card game of monte, which is played with a deck of forty-five cards, an origin that is improbable for a British phrase. And others claim it is a reference to “breaking the bank” at the Monte Carlo casino, a feat that has been achieved several times, but which is also unlikely to be the origin. Finally, there is a use of monte in Australian and New Zealand slang, dating to the late nineteenth century, meaning a racecourse tipster or a sure thing, a wager that is all but guaranteed to win. This term, perhaps a variation on the name of the con game of three-card monte or after a bookie of that name, could possibly be related to the later British term, although, again, it seems unlikely.

In short, the only thing we can say with any degree of confidence is “origin unknown.”

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Sources:

Benza, A. J. and Michael Lewittes. “Hot Copy: Spotting Trains and More.” Daily News (New York), 1 January 1997, 20/1. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

“The Blackman Interview: Cheryl Finnegan and Her Specialty—The Shadrach.” Evening Standard (London), 22 September 1975, 39/1. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., s.v. monty, n., monte, n.1.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2001, s.v. full monty, n. (& adj.); December 2002, s.v. monty, n.

Tréguer, Pascal. “A Lancashire Phrase: ‘The Full Monty.’” Wordhistories.net (blog), 27 August 2017.

Wills, Colin. “My Sex with Emma Thompson Only Lasted Seconds.” Sunday Mirror (London), 12 January 1997, 24. ProQuest Newspapers.

Image credit: Redwave Films / Channel Four Films / 20th Century Fox, 1997. Wikimedia Commons. Fair use of a low-resolution copy of a copyrighted image to illustrate the topic under discussion.

brat / Brat Pack / brat summer

Cover of New York magazine, 10 June 1985

3 November 2024

A brat is a spoiled or misbehaving child. The origin of the word is not known for certain, although there are at least two hypotheses that have some degree of evidence behind them. It may come from an Old English word of Celtic origin, bratt, meaning a cloak. The same word can be found in Old Irish. The other hypothesis, which I favor, is that it is a clipping of the Scots bratchart, meaning an unruly child.

The Old English bratt is only attested once in the extant corpus. It appears in a tenth-century gloss of the Latin pallium in the Lindisfarne Gospel of Matthew. It remained rare through the Middle English period, where it is only attested in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale:

Yet of that art they kan nat wexen sadde,
For unto hem it is a bitter sweete—
So semeth it—for nadde they but a sheete
Which that they myghte wrappe hem inne a-nyght,
And a brat to walken inne by daylyght,
They wolde hem selle and spenden on this craft.

(Yet of that art they cannot be satisfied,
For unto them it is a bitter sweet—
So it seems—for had they nothing but a sheet
Which they might wrap themselves in at night,
And a cloak to walk in by daylight,
They would sell them and spend it on this craft.)

It starts appearing more frequently at the start of the sixteenth century, and initially in Scottish sources. The poet William Dunbar uses the word twice, once unambiguously to mean a cloak and once where it could be interpreted as either a cloak or an illegitimate child. The ambiguous use appears in his poem “The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedie.” The poem is a depiction of a flyting, a poetic exchange of insults, that took place c. 1500 between Dunbar and fellow poet William Kennedy. In it, Dunbar says of Kennedy:

Iersche brybour baird, vyle beggar with thy brattis,
Cuntbittin crawdoun, Kennedy, coward of kynd,
Evill farit and dryit, as Densmen on the rattis,
Lyk as the gleddis had on thy gulesnowt dynd,
Mismaid monstour, ilk mone owt of thy mynd,
Renunce, rebald, thy rymyng, thow bot royis.
Thy trechour tung hes tane ane Heland strynd,
Ane Lawland ers wald mak a bettir noyis.

(Highland vagabond bard, vile beggar with your brats,
Syphilitic skulker, Kennedy, coward by nature,
Ugly and dried up, like Danes on the wheels,
Like the kites had on the yellow-snout dined,
Deformed monster, each moon out of your mind,
Renounce, rogue, your rhyming, you but rave,
Your treacherous tongue has taken a Highland strain,
A Lowland arse would make a better noise.)

The unambiguous use is in his “General Satyre,” written c. 1510:

This to correct, thay schoir with mony crakkis,
But littill effect of speir or battell-ax,
   Quhen curage lakkis the corss that sowld mak kene;
Sa mony jakkis, and brattis on beggaris bakkis,
   Within this land was nevir hard nor sene.

(This to correct, those who threaten with many boasts,
But have little effect of spear or battle-axe,
   When courage lacks, the body that it should make brave;
So many doublets, and brats on beggar’s backs,
   Within this land was never heard nor seen.)

An unambiguous use of brat to mean a child appears in 1557, in a poem by Henry Howard, the earl of Surrey:

What path list you to tread? what trade will you assay?
The courts of plea, by braul, & bate, driue ge[n]tle peace away.
In house, for wife, and childe, there is but cark and care:
With trauail, and with toyl ynough, in feelds we vse to fare.
Upon the seas lieth dreed: the rich in foraine land,
Doo fear the losse: and there, the poore, like misers poorely stand.
Strife, with a wife, without, your thrift full hard to see:
Yong brats, a trouble: none at all. a maym it seems to bee:
Youth, fond, age hath no hert, and pincheth all to nye.
Choose then the leeser of these twoo, no life, or soon to dye.

(What path do you choose to tread? What trade will you try?
The courts of pleading, by brawling and contention, drive gentle peace away.
In a house, for a wife, and child, there is but anxiety and care:
With travail, and with toil enough, in fields we use to sow.
Upon the seas lies dread: the rich in foreign land.
Do fear the loss; and there, the poor, like misers poorly stand.
Strife with a wife, without, your prosperity very hard to see:
Young brats, a trouble: none at all, a wound it seems to be:
Youth, a fool, age has no heart, and squeezes nearly everything.
Choose then the lesser of these two, no life, or soon to die.)

The connection between a cloak and a child isn’t clear on its face. But in the sixteenth century, the cloak sense specialized to refer to child’s pinafore. This sense of a child’s pinafore could easily have transferred over to the child itself. The pinafore sense appears in the surviving corpus a few decades later than the child sense, but given the gaps in the corpus, we can’t really say which sense came first. The dates are close enough to be labeled as contemporaneous. The word also started appearing more commonly in Early-Modern English, although it’s difficult to say whether this is due to an actual increase in usage or to simply more texts surviving due to the advent of the printing press.

Alternatively, the child sense could stem from the Scots bratchart, which also means child and itself is of unknown origin. If this hypothesis is correct, the cloak sense is etymologically unrelated. The bratchart hypothesis has the advantage of explaining why the early uses of the word are all in Scotland. It has the disadvantage, however, of not being recorded until nearly a century after Dunbar’s ambiguous use and some forty years after Howard’s poem. But given the gaps in the surviving corpus, even a century-long gap is not impossible, and if both of Dunbar’s uses are in the cloak sense, the gap is even narrower.

Bratchart appears in another flyting, Alexander Montgomerie’s Flyting Betwixt Montgomery and Polwart, which was written some time before 1598. This flyting was between Alexander Montgomerie and Patrick Hume, a.k.a., Polwart:

The King of Pharie, and his court, with the Elfe Queen,
With many Elrich Incubus, was rydand that night.
There ane elf, on ane aipe, ane vnsell begat,
   Into ane pot, by Pomathorne;
   That bratchart in ane busse was borne;
   They fand ane monster, on the morne,
      War fac’d nor a Cat.

(The king of Fairy, and his court, with the Elf queen,
With many supernatural incubus, was riding that night.
There an elf, and an ape, a devil begat,
    Into a pot, by Pomothorn;
    That bratchart in a bush was born;
    They found a monster, in the morning,
       Wicked-faced, not a cat.)

Pomothorne is either a reference to Polwarth, a neighborhood of Edinburgh and the home of Hume or to an unincorporated area near Edinburgh with that name.

So that’s what we know about the origin of brat. As to Brat Pack, the commonly told story of its origin is wrong. The Brat Pack was a grouping of young and bankable movie stars in the 1980s, modeled after the famed Rat Pack of the 1960s. But exactly which stars constituted the pack varied in the early years, before settling in on a canonical grouping. The first known use of brat pack, uncovered by researcher Fred Shapiro, is from the Times-Colonist of Victoria, British Columbia of 1 April 1984:

It’s been said here before, in a wrap-up of the best movies of 1983, but it’s worth repeating: film actors Sean Penn and Nicholas Cage, not pre-fab baby macho packages like Matt Dillon, will emerge as the James Deans and Marlon Brandos of the 80s. They need no conditioning—their magical onscreen naturalism is emitted from within.

In Racing With the Moon, a dutifully old-fashioned romantic drama set in a North Carolina town during the Christmas season of 1942, these shining members of Hollywood’s new “brat pack” have found a charming vehicle for their instinctive talents.

The commonly told tale is that Brat Pack was coined by David Blum in the pages of New York magazine on 10 June 1985, but the appearance of the term a year earlier shows that it was already in use in film circles. While Blum may not have coined the term, his article certainly brought the term to the attention of the wider world. Blum wrote:

This is the Hollywood “Brat Pack.” It is to the 1980s what the Rat Pack was to the 1960s—a roving band of famous young stars on the prowl for parties, women, and a good time. And just like Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Peter Lawford, and Sammy Davis, Jr., these guys work together, too—they’ve carried their friendships over from life into the movies.

According to Blum, the membership in the Brat Pack depended on who you asked, but his list was all male, like the original Rat Pack, and included Emilio Estevez, Tom Cruise, Rob Lowe, Judd Nelson, Timothy Hutton, Matt Dillon, Nicholas Cage, and Sean Penn. Others would focus on the stars of director John Hughes’s films, dropping Cruise, Hutton, Dillon, Cage, and Penn from the pack, and adding Molly Ringwald, Ally Sheedy, Anthony Michael Hall, Andrew McCarthy, and Demi Moore. It is this latter group that would become the canonical membership of the Brat Pack.

More recently, the summer of 2024 was declared to be brat summer. Three cultural events contributed the name. The novel Brat by Gabriel Smith, published on 4 June 2024; the album Brat by Charli XCX,was released 7 June 2024; and the documentary Brats, written and directed by Andrew McCarthy, about the Brat Pack, debuted on streaming television 13 June 2024. Of these, Charli XCX’s album had the most direct influence on the coinage.

Pinning down the first use of brat summer is challenging, as the phrase is part of the marketing campaign for the album, and merchandise promoting the album started appearing in May, or even earlier. But on 1 June 2024, the artist posted to Instagram:

BRAT SUMMER BITCH GET READY (also lol i literally can never remember if its brat Brat or BRAT oops)

The phrase hit the big time on 14 June with a pair of articles in the New York Times and on Slate. The Times article included this:

Kelly Chapman, a longtime Charli fan based in Washington, D.C., similarly defined a “brat” as “someone who misbehaves in a cheeky way and doesn’t conform to expectations.”

Ms. Chapman, 30, mused that a “brat” summer would involve: “embracing being a woman in your 30s, rejecting expectations, being honest, having fun but making moves, dating a guy from Twitter.”

And the Slate article had this to say:

In 2019, we were promised Hot Girl Summer. In 2022, finally beginning to emerge from the shadow of the pandemic, it was supposed to be Feral Girl Summer. In 2023, Rat Girl Summer poked its head around a corner and then promptly skittered back behind a dumpster. Now, we’re staring down the barrel of what I hereby declare Big Brat Summer: It’s time to let loose and do what you want, because the world is already over.

In 2024, I, like so many of us, feel a little washed and so much older, eager for some hedonism and some revolution. The themes colliding this summer—our fuck-it indulgences, the feeling of being over, a crushing sense of nihilism that has no cure other than, perhaps, dancing in a smoke-filled basement—are perfectly encapsulated by Charli XCX’s new album Brat. It’s already being hailed as a release that speaks to the moment. “Why I wanna buy a gun? Why I wanna shoot myself?” Charli, patron saint of 31-year-old straight women appealing to 21-year-old queers, sings over a synthy beat. We hear a disassociation from grief, even as we can’t escape its pull: “While she’s spinning around on the dance floor she’s also spiraling out in her head,” Rolling Stone wrote in their review of Brat. “[She’s] digging deep into the type of insecurities and fears reserved for the comedown the morning after.” What have we been doing all this time if not trying to outrun that comedown?

But on 21 July 2024, the mood of brat summer changed. That’s the day President Joe Biden ended his reelection campaign, handing the reins to Vice President Kamala Harris. The gloom of the prospect of another Trump presidency turned to elation, and Harris was anointed brat-in-chief. Some on the internet went so far as to create a logo for Harris’s campaign based on Charli XCX’s album’s lime-green art, with the word brat replaced with kamala.

How long the political valence of the phrase will last remains to be seen, but I can make one solid prediction. Like its predecessor hot girl summer, the phrase brat summer itself, will fall out of use by September, recalled only in “remember when” lists and on websites like this one.

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Sources:

Blum, David. “Hollywood’s Brat Pack.” New York, 10 June 1985, 40–47 at 42. Google Books.

charli_xcx. Instagram, 1 June 2024.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. “The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale.” The Canterbury Tales, lines 8.877–82. Harvard’s Geoffrey Chaucer Website.

Dictionary of Old English: A to Le, University of Toronto, 2024, s.v. bratt, n.

Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue (up to 1700). Dictionaries of the Scots Language | Dictionars o the Scots Leid, 1937, s.v. bratchart, n.

Dunbar, William. “The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedie” (c. 1500). William Dunbar: Selected Poems. Priscilla Bawcutt, ed. London: Longman, 1996, lines 49–56, 266.

———. “A General Satyre.” The Poems of William Dunbar, vol. 2 of 2. David Laing, ed. London: Laing and Forbes, 1834, 25. lines 36–40. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Friedman, Nancy. “Word of the Week: Brat.” Fritinancy, 17 June 2024.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., s.v. brat pack, n. https://greensdictofslang.com/entry/hpl4dmy

Howard, Henry, Earl of Surrey. “Mans life after Possidonius, or Crates.” Songes and Sonettes. London: Richard Tottel, 1557, fol. 114r. ProQuest: Early English Books Online.

Koul, Scaachi. “Get In, Loser: It’s Big Brat Summer.” Slate, 14 June 2024.

Madden, Emma. “It’s the Summer of ‘Brats.’” New York Times, 14 June 2024.

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

Montgomerie, Alexander. The Flyting Betwixt Montgomery and Polwart (before 1598). Edinburgh: Andro Hart, 1621, sig. Bv. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Online Etymology Dictionary, n.d., brat, n.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. brat, n.2, brat, n.1., bratchet, n.; Additions Series, 1998, s.v. brat pack, n.

Reid, Michael D. “Film: Racing with the Moon.” Times-Colonist (Victoria, British Columbia), 1 April 1984, D-1/1. Newspapers.com.

Shapiro, Fred. “Antedating of ‘Brat Pack.’” ADS-L, 2 November 1984.

Zimmer, Ben. “’Brat’: Maybe that Spoiled Kid Is Cool After All: A Once-Scornful Label About Immaturity Is Getting a Pop-Culture Renaissance.” Wall Street Journal, 7 June 2024, ProQuest Newspapers.

Image credit: New York magazine, 10 June 1985. Photo by Greg Gorman/Columbia Pictures. Fair use of a copyrighted image to illustrate the topic under discussion.

titanium / menaccanite

A Lockheed A-12 reconnaissance aircraft which is manufactured 93% out of titanium

1 November 2024

Titanium is a chemical element with atomic number 22 and the symbol Ti. It is a lustrous, silver, transition metal with low density and high strength. It is also corrosion resistant. It is widely used in alloys for objects ranging from spacecraft to jewelry.

The element was independently discovered by Cornish minerologist William Gregor, in 1791, and German chemist Martin Klaproth, four years later. Gregor, writing in a German journal, dubbed the element and the ore in which he found it menaccanite (in German Menakanite), after Manaccan, a village and valley in Cornwall where the ore was found:

Verbunden mit den außerordentlichen Eigenschaften des Sandes, haben mich bewogen, zu glauben, daß er eine neue metallische Substanz enthalte. Um diese von andern zu unterscheiden, habe ich es gewagt, ihr einen, von der Gegend, wo sie gefunden wird (nemlich in Kirchspiele Menaccan) hergenommenen Namen zu geben, und deswegen fonnte das Metall also Menakanit gesnannt werden.

(This, together with the extraordinary properties of the sand, have led me to believe that it contains a new metallic substance. To distinguish this from others, I have ventured to give it a name taken from the place where it is found (namely in the parish of Menaccan), and therefore the metal could be called Menacanite.)

Menaccanite is still in use for the magnetic ore in which the element can be found, although as a name for the element it has been superseded by Klaproth’s name, titanium.

In 1795, Klaproth published his findings, naming the element after the titans of Greek mythology, which is in line with his early naming of uranium:

Diesem zufolge will ich den Namen für die gegenwärtige metallische Substanz, gleichergestalt wie bei dem Uranium geschehen, aus der Mythologie, und zwar von den Ursöhnen der Erde, den Titanen, entlehnen, und benenne also dieses neue Metallgeschlecht: Titanium; wovon dieses durch Sauerstoff vererzte Titanium, oder der Titankalk, die erste, vielleicht aber nicht einzige, Gattung ist.

(Accordingly, I will borrow the name for the present metallic substance, in the same way as I did with uranium, from mythology, namely from the original sons of the earth, the Titans, and thus name this new metal family: Titanium; of which this titanium ore—formed by oxygen, or titan-lime, is the first, but perhaps not the only, species.)

Unfortunately for the relatively obscure Gregor, the significance of his discovery was not immediately recognized and the more famous Klaproth’s name for the element stuck. Gregor is, however, generally recognized as having discovered it first.

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Sources:

Gregor, William. “Beobachtungen und Versuche über den Menakanit, einem in Cornwall gefundenen magnetischen Sand.” Chemische Annalen Für Die Freunde Der Naturlehre, Arzneygelahrtheit, Haushaltungskunst Und Manufakturen, 1791, vol. 1, 103–119 at 118–19. Google Books.

Klaproth, Martin Heinrich. “Chemische Untersuchung des sogenannten hungarischen rothen Schörls.” In Beiträge zur chemischen Kenntniss der Mineralkörper, vol. 1. Posen: Decker, 1795, 233–244 at 244. Google Books.

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, third edition, January 2018, s.v. titanium, n.; September 2001, menaccanite, n.

Photo credit: US Air Force, c. 1967. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

acre

Farm fields in the Cotswolds, Frocester, UK

30 October 2024

Acre, the unit of land measurement, comes down to us from the Old English æcer, which inherited it from a common Germanic root. The word has cognates in other Indo-European languages too, like the Latin ager (which gives us the agri- in agriculture), the Greek ἀγρός (field), and the Sanskrit ajra (plain, open country). The modern spelling is influenced by the Norman French version of the word.

An example of Old English use of the word can be found in Ælfric of Eynsham’s Colloquy, a dialogue between a teacher and student used in teaching Latin. Beyond the linguistic value of the text, the Colloquy is useful for the view it gives into everyday life in early medieval England:

Eala, leof hlaford, þearle ic deorfe. Ic ga ut on dægræd þywende oxon to felda, & iugie hig to syl; nys hit swa stearc winter þæt ic durre lutian æt ham for ege hlafordes mines, ac geiukodan oxan, & gefæstnodon sceare & cultre mit þære syl, ælce dæg ic sceal erian fulne æcer oþþe mare.

Oh, dear master, I work too hard. I go out at dawn driving the oxen to the fields & yoke them to the plow; it is not so harsh a winter that I dare lie at home for fear of my master, but with yoked oxen, & with the plow fastened to share and coulter, each day I have to plow an entire acre or more.

A share and coulter are the blades of a plow. The Latin word in the Colloquy corresponding to æcer is ager.

Originally, an acre was defined as an area that could be plowed by a team of oxen in a day. Later, was more precisely defined in law as 1/640 of a square mile, that is 4,840 square yards or 0.405 hectares. It is still a statute measure in the United States, but its use in other anglophone countries is now customary rather than legal. The plural acres is also used to refer to an expanse of land of indeterminate size; this plural usage dates from the mid eighteenth century.

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Sources:

Ælfric. Ælfric’s Colloquy (1939). G. N. Garmonsway, ed. Exeter Medieval Texts & Studies. Exeter: U of Exeter Press, 1991, lines 23–27, 20. London, British Library, MS Cotton Tiberius A.iii, fols. 60v–64v.

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

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. aker, n.(1).

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2011, s.v. acre, n.

Photo credit: Nilfanion, 2013. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

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.

Discuss this post

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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.