eggnog

4 December 2024

Whence comes the name for the drink we know as eggnog? The egg is easy enough—it is made with eggs, but the nog is a stumper for most casual observers of the language.

In an older entry, the Oxford English Dictionary dates eggnog to 1825, but the term has been antedated since that entry was written, and the term may date to before 1775. Jonathan Boucher, an English clergyman who resided in Virginia and Maryland from 1762–75, is supposed to have written a poem which incorporates dialectal words from Maryland while he was resident in the colonies. But the poem was not published until 1833, several decades after Boucher’s death, so its date of composition is not certain. It reads, in part:

Fog-drams i’ th’ morn, or (better still) egg-nogg,
At night hot-suppings, and at mid-day, grogg,
My palate can regale.

The glossary accompanying the 1833 publication contains a gloss of the term, probably written by the volume’s editors, Joseph Hunter and Joseph Stevenson:

Egg-nogg; a heavy and unwholesome, but not unpalatable, strong drink, made of rum beaten up with the yolks of raw eggs.

The earliest unassailable date of the appearance of eggnog was turned up by Yale law librarian Fred Shapiro and is from 1788, when the New Jersey Journal recorded the following on 26 March:

A young man with a cormerant [sic] appetite, voraciously devoured, last week, at Connecticut farms, thirty raw eggs, a glass of egg nog, and another of brandy sling.

On 29 June 1790, Hugh Williamson, a U. S. Representative from North Carolina made a speech in which he describes the stereotype of an old, sea captain spending his remaining days on shore. The old man’s diet is reminiscent of Boucher’s observation:

Egg-nog is his favourite liquor in the morning—grog at eleven o’clock—and such wine as he can afford after dinner, which generally consists of salt pork and pease, with sea biscuit instead of bread.

So we have eggnog appearing in the American colonies or the United States in the latter half of the eighteenth century. But these early citations don’t provide us with a clue as to the origin.

The OED gives the proximate origin of the second element in eggnog as the East Anglian dialectal word nog, referring to a strong variety of beer brewed in Norfolk. This East Anglian nog has been dated to 1693, but the trail ends there. Where this nog comes from is uncertain.

One likely source is noggin, a term for a mug or cup, and hence for a drink of liquor. (It also gives us the boxing slang for head, a sense which dates to 1769.) Noggin as container dates to 1588 and as a measure of spirits to 1648. But the origin of noggin is itself unknown. (The Gaelic noigean and Irish noigín, sometimes proffered as possibilities, are borrowed from English.) It may be from knag, a Scottish term for a small cask or barrel that dates to sometime before 1585, but origin this word is also unknown.

Another possibility is that nog comes from the Orkney and Shetland nugg or nugged ale, a drink warmed with a hot poker. That term may come from knagg, a Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish word for a peg. The OED also suggests that nog could be related to the verb to nudge, although the dictionary doesn’t make clear why this might be so. The phonetics are similar, but there is no apparent semantic link.

So we have a number of proximate possibilities for where the nog comes from, but the ultimate origin remains a total mystery.

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Sources:

Boucher, Jonathan. Boucher’s Glossary. Joseph Hunter and Joseph Stevenson, eds. London: Black, Young, and Young, 1833, l. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

“Elizabeth-Town, March 26.” New-Jersey Journal (Elizabeth), 26 March 1788, 2/3. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2003. s. v. nog, n.2, noggin, n.; nudge, v.; second edition, 1989. s. v. eggnog, n; knag, n.2.

Williamson, Hugh. Speech, 29 June 1790. The American Museum, or, Universal Magazine, September 1790, 140–142 at 142/2. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Zimmer, Ben. “The Origins of ‘Eggnog,’ Holiday Grog.” Word Routes. Vocabulary.com. 24 December 2009.

Photo credit: Didriks, 2011. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

juke / jukebox

2 December 2024

A jukebox is a coin-operated machine that plays selected musical recordings. The box part of the word is understood easily enough, but where does juke come from? Juke is actually two distinct words in English. The one that forms jukebox is recorded from the first half of the twentieth century in Black slang.

That juke is from the Gullah juke or joog, meaning disorderly or wicked. Gullah is an African-American community from coastal South Carolina and Georgia and a creole language spoken by them. The Gullah juke is probably from the Wolof dzug, meaning to live wickedly. Wolof is a language of the Senegambia region of West Africa.

The original sense of juke in Black slang is that of a roadhouse or dance hall, in full the term is jook house. It’s first recorded in the Black newspaper the Kansas City Call on 25 July 1930:

Bear Creek camp has no jook house—dance hall and gambling dive—but the crowd always finds a floo[r] where it can dance to the tunes made by Henry Robinson’s fiddle and Sam Markham’s banjo.

But juke could also be a verb meaning to dance. That sense is found in the title of a 1933 piano solo piece, Jookit, by Walter Roland.

Zora Neale Hurston wrote about juke in two of her essays. In her 1934 Characteristics of Negro Expression she had this to say:

Jook is the word for a Negro pleasure house. It may mean a bawdy house. It may mean a house set apart on public works where the men and women dance, drink and gamble. Often it is a combination of these.

[…]

Musically speaking, the Jook is the most important place in America. For in its smelly, shoddy confines has been born the secular music known as blues, and on blues has been founded jazz. The singing and playing in the true Negro style is called “jooking.”

And the following year she wrote in Mules and Men:

The little drama of religion over, the “job” reverted to the business of amusing itself. Everybody making it to the jook hurriedly or slowly as the spirit moved.

[…]

The jook was in full play when we walked in. The piano was throbbing like a stringed drum and the couples slow-dragging about the floor were urging the player on to new lows. “Jook, Johnnie, Ah know you kin spank dat old peanner.” “Jook it Johnnie!”¹ “Throw it in de alley!”²

The notes read:

¹Play the piano in the manner of the jook or “blues.”
²Get low down.

Another early use in print is in another Black newspaper, Topeka, Kansas’s Capitol Plaindealer of 21 February 1937 in an article about how white musicians would often attend juke sessions of Black musicians but in many locations could not play with them:

The “white brethren” would been glad to have sat in on the “juke session” to have lent a hand in the “torment” at the slightest urge. The “slightest urge” is not quite permissible down here in Gawgaw as yet, but I’ve seen it happen in places that boasted just as much prejudice and taboo…..Funny thing, but “swing sessions” are piercing the south and and [sic] that means more toleration in the arts

[…]

All of which says (this is not a “for social equality adventure) that the stage and show biz is putting a “new realization” into the American social and economic scheme and that good “juke” (plain playing for pleasure to see how much will come out of the instrument) sessions attract everybody, blue, brown, red, white or black and they forget the echoing “don’t”.

Finally, we get jukebox by 15 April 1939, when it appears in Sunflower Petals, the student newspaper of the Sunflower Junior College and Agricultural High School in Moorhead, Mississippi. The school was a white school:

We may soon have an automat instead of a store—if the present trend toward nickel-in-the-slot machines continues. For some months we’ve had the familiar “jook-box,” and now we can get cokes from the huge metal clerk on the Canteen porch.

That’s the juke in jukebox. The other one, usually spelled jouk or jook, is much older. It means to duck or to bend so as to evade, and it appears in Scots in the early sixteenth century. It’s origin is unknown, first recorded in a Gavin Douglas’s Eneados, a Scots translation of Virgil’s Aeneid:

Syne hynt Eneas, ane Perrellus lance in hand
And it addressis fer furth, on the land
To ane magus that subtell, was and sle
And Iowkit in, vnder the spere as he
The schaft schakand flew furth, about his hede

(Thereupon Aeneas grasped a perilous lance in his hand and aimed it far forth across the ground to slay Magus, who was skillful and juked in and under the spear as the shaft quivering flew forth over his head.)

Despite both words having the same pronunciation and a semantic association with movement, they are not etymologically related.

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Sources:

Billings, Eye G. “Pay-Day Is Play Day at this Colorful Turpentine Camp.” Kansas City Call (Missouri), 25 July 1930, 7B/4. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. [The scan of this page is bad. A clearer example of this same article can be found at Billings, Eye G. “Pay-Day Is Play Day at this Colorful Turpentine Camp.” Kansas City Call (Missouri), 26 July 1930, 5/4. Library of Congress: Chronicling America.]

“Canteen Gets a Coke Vendor.” Sunflower Petals (Sunflower Junior College and Agricultural High School, Moorhead, Mississippi), 15 April 1939, 4/2. Archive.org.

Fowkles, William. “Seeing and Saying.” Capitol Plaindealer (Topeka, Kansas), 21 February 1937, 6/5–6. Readex: African American Newspapers.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., s.v. juke, n.1, juke, v.1, juke, v.3.

Hurston, Zora Neale. Characteristics of Negro Expression (1934). In Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings. New York: Library of America, 1995, 841. Archive.org.

———. Mules and Men (1935). In Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings. New York: Library of America, 1995, 140. Archive.org.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, July 2023, s.v. jukebox, n.; second edition, 1989, s.v. juke, n.1, juke, v., jouk | jook, v.2.

Virgil. The XIII Bukes of Eneados, Gavin Douglas, trans. (1513). London: William Copeland, 1553, 10.9, 269. ProQuest: Early English Books Online.

Photo credit: Daderot, 2017. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

anticipatory obedience

Joseph Stalin, 1943

1 December 2024

Anticipatory obedience is exactly what one would think, actions taken to obey what one perceives to be the wishes of a superior before being commanded to do so. The phrase is a relatively common in political science literature in reference to subjects’ compliance with the will of a totalitarian regime, but its origins are older and theological. The coinage of the term is often credited to Yale historian Timothy Snyder, but he did not originate it.

The term appears in an 1898 theological analysis of the New Testament letter to the Colossians by Handley Moule. He uses the term to refer to compliance with God’s will:

I touch it again only to point out how it suggests to us the intended intimacy and endearment of the relation of wish and will between the believer and the Lord. We are meant, in the light of this transfigured word, ἀρέσκεια, to think of His will as an affectionateI servant thinks of the wishes (not merely of the spoken or written-down orders) of the master, or the mistress, who has made the house of service a genuine home, and has almost hidden authority away in friendship. Even such an illustration scarcely satisfies the case. This “anticipatory obedience” is rather to be that of a devoted son to a parent, to a loving and beloved parent, to whom perhaps the son has not been always dutiful. How can he now do enough to undo that lamented past? How can he too much try, and delight, to obliterate the scars of past neglect by a present and studious and watchful “meeting of the wishes.”?

It appears in political discourse by 1975. Whether the political usage was influenced by the earlier theological one, or whether it is an independent coinage, is unknown. From a paper by New York University political scientist Kalman H. Silvert written for the U.S. Department of State on the governments of Latin American states:

Thus, on a rough set of guesses concerning degrees of national integration, cohesion, and citizenship, derived from economic statistics, urbanization, literacy, mobility patterns, cultural and racial homogeneity, extent and complexity and completeness of social services, and hunches concerning citizenry loyalty and anticipatory obedience to law, let us range the Latin countries on an approximate scale of national community.

Application of anticipatory obedience to authoritarian regimes dates to at least 1980, when Columbia University professor Seweryn Bialer applied to Stalin’s Soviet Union:

Participation in the rule of terror was not confined to its direct administrators, nor was it restricted to obeying direct commands from above. The members of the political bureaucracy were actively engaged, if not physically involved, in the terror; they were guilty en masse of initiating terroristic acts. They displayed what can be described as “preemptive obedience,” the anticipation of what they considered to be their bosses' wishes and whims. It was an anticipatory obedience encouraged by their superiors and characterized favorably as “vigilance.”

In October 2024, the phrase began to be applied in the context of a second Trump administration when the owner of the Los Angeles Times, Patrick Soon-Shiong, prevented his editorial staff from publishing an endorsement of Kamala Harris and Jeff Bezos, owner of the Washington Post, was considering deciding (and eventually did decide) to not endorse any candidate in the election. Both Soon-Shiong and Bezos had significant business interests that could be adversely affected should Trump fulfill his promise to wreak vengeance upon those who opposed his candidacy. An article in the Columbia Journalism Review by Ian Bassin and Maximillian Potter, both affiliated with the non-profit organization Protect Democracy, used the phrase:

This, it seems to us, is what Timothy Snyder, the Levin Professor of History at Yale University, calls “anticipatory obedience.” In his book On Tyranny, Snyder, who is also an adviser to our organization, writes: “Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.”

Other journalists picked up the phrase. For instance, NPR’s media correspondent David Folkenflik wrote on 24 October:

“Outlets from the Los Angeles Times to perhaps even the Washington Post are engaging in what the historian Timothy Snyder has called anticipatory obedience—pulling back from their obligation to tell the truth in order to placate the tyrant so he doesn't come after them,” Protect Democracy's Bassin says.

The backlash against the two newspapers was substantial; the Washington Post lost a quarter million subscribers, some ten percent of its subscriber base. Bassin and Potter’s quoting of Snyder also resulted in other reporters, such as Folkenflik, incorrectly implying that Snyder was the coiner of the phrase.

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Sources:

Bassin, Ian and Maximillian Potter. “On Anticipatory Obedience and the Media.” Columbia Journalism Review, 8 October 2024.

Bialer, Seweryn. Stalin’s Successors: Leadership, Stability, and Change in the Soviet Union. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1980, 11. Archive.org.

Folkenflik, David. “Did the ‘L.A. Times’ and Other News Outlets Pull Punches to Appease Trump?” NPR: All Things Considered, 24 October 2024.

Moule, Handley C. G. Colossian and Philemon Studies. London: Pickering & Inglis, 1898, 60. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Silvert, Kalman H. “The Changing Dynamics of Hemispheric Politics.” Selected Mid-Term Problems in U.S. Foreign Policy. Hanover, NH: Public Affairs Center Dartmouth College, 1975, 503–37 at 525. Archive.org.

Photo credit: US government photo, 1943, Wikimedia Commons, public domain photo

xenon

27 November 2024

Xenon is a chemical element with atomic number 54 and the symbol Xe. At standard temperature and pressure it is a dense, colorless, odorless, noble gas. It is used in flash and arc lamps and as a general anesthetic.

The name is a transliteration of the Greek ξένον, a neuter singular form of ξένος (xenos), meaning stranger or guest, presumably because of its rarity in the earth’s atmosphere. It was discovered and named by chemists William Ramsay and Morris Travers in 1898, who suggested the name:

The last fractions of liquefied argon show the presence of three new gases. These are krypton, a gas first separated from atmospheric air, and characterised by two very brilliant lines, one in the yellow and one in the green, besides fainter lines in the red and orange; metargon, a gas which shows a spectrum very closely resembling that of carbon monoxide, but characterised by its inertness, for it is not changed by sparking with oxygen in presence of caustic potash; and a still heavier gas, which we have not hitherto described, which we propose to name “xenon.” Xenon is very easily separated, for it possesses a much higher boiling-point, and remains behind after the others have evaporated.

(Metargon was later shown to be contamination of the sample with carbon.)

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Sources:

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. xenon, n.

Ramsay, William and Morris W. Travers. “On the Extraction from Air of the Companions of Argon and Neon.” Report of the Sixty-Eighth Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science Held at Bristol in September 1898. London: John Murray, 1899, 828–30 at 830. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

gremlin

Frame from the Twilight Zone episode “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” aired 11 October 1963, about a man (played by William Shatner) haunted by a gremlin during a flight

27 November 2024

A gremlin is a mythical creature of the upper air who causes damage to airplanes. The term starts appearing in Royal Air Force slang during the interwar years. There are claims that gremlin was in use during the First World War, but while this claim is plausible, and perhaps even probable, no evidence of use that early has surfaced. The origin of the term is unknown.

What is known is that gremlin, as first recorded, originally had a different meaning, that of a low-ranking commissioned or non-commissioned air force officer, one who performed the routine duties that were beneath the dignity of the brass. We see this sense in a poem, titled Flight-Lieutenant Hiawatha, that appeared in the 10 April 1929 issue of the journal Aeroplane, a poem which opens:

Should you ask me way this morning,
Whence this grumbling and this grousing,
Whence these wild reverberations
I should answer, I should tell you:
Why the chaps are discontented.

In His Majesty’s Royal Air Force
There are many ranks and noble
Wing Commanders, fair and pleasant;
Captains of the Group most mighty,
Air Vice-Marshals, Squadron Leaders;
Squadron Leaders with their boots on.
Sergeant-Majors wise and canny,
Full of beer and work-shy methods.
There is a class abhorréd,
Loathed by all the high and mighty,
Slaves who work and get but little,
Little thanks for all their labour;
Yet they are both skilled and many,
Many men with many talents.
They are those below the rank of
Down below the Squadron Leader;
They are but a herd of gremlins,
Gremlins who do all the flying,
Gremlins who do much instructing,
Work shunned by the Wing Commanders,
Work both trying and unpleasant.
In among this herd of gremlins
Some there are with many medals
And with years of hard war service.
Some were captives down in Hunland,
Some are old and very senior,
Senior to some squadron leaders,
Squadron Leaders with their boots on.
These are called the Flight Lieutenants,
Gremlins old and very senior.

The poem is largely a complaint of the RAF’s use of the phrase “All Officers below the rank of Squadron Leader” (and the low pay of those who are so referred) which the poet thinks is demeaning to those experienced airmen who do most of the flying and work of the air force. Also of note is the use of grumbling and grousing in the opening lines, which alliterates with gremlin. Whether the poet was simply making a poetic flourish or whether gremlin was coined with grumbling and grousing in mind cannot be determined.

The sense of the mythical creature is recorded about a decade later. From Pauline Gower’s 1938 book Women with Wings:

Country that was particularly high or enveloped in cloud became known among the pilots as Gremlin country. Chambers told us the old Air Force legend of the Gremlins. These are weird little creatures who fly about looking for unfortunate pilots who are either lost or in difficulties with the weather. Their chief haunts are ravines and the boulder-covered tops of hills. They fly about with scissors in each hand and try to cut the wires on an aeroplane.

Gower also includes a drawing of a gremlin in her book

And there is this from an article in the 28 March 1939 Daily Mail about RAF slang that purports to give the circumstances of the word’s coinage:

But the Gremlin is the latest imporiation [sic]. Have you met a Gremlin? The earth—or rather, the upper air—is full of them. Paunchy, horrific little men with leering faces and green eyes. They look over your shoulder. They start up from your fuselage. They sit on the joystick. They are the companions of gloom, despondency, and any form of trouble caused by “a job.” In other words, they are what you or I call the blues, the jitters, or spots before the eyes.

I won’t give him away, but a certain squadron leader, a gentleman occasionally of slightly intemperate habits, fathered the Gremlin. He took a machine up one day when, as a matter of strict pink-gin sense he should have stuck to his bicycle or his flat feet.

When the lorries, the ambulance, the fire brigade, and the mechanics picked him out of the bits and straightened the hole in the hedge, he merely sat up blandly, scratched his head and remarked fiercely that it never would have happened at all “if those damned Gremlins hadn’t been at me in the air.”

While we should not take this origin story as in any way authoritative, it is possible that the story details actual events—that is the crash occurred as described, only it wasn’t the first use of the word gremlin. If so, it may mark the transition between the senses. If the crash occurred as described, the pilot may have been blaming the gremlins of the ground crew (i.e., poor maintenance) for the crash, only later to be reinterpreted as due to the mythical creatures. Of course, that may be reading too much into it, and the whole thing may be fanciful.

And here is a use of gremlin from outside the world of aviation, in this case as a beneficial demon or fairy. It appears in a poem, titled Co-Editing, in the 11 February 1943 issue of the Massachusetts Collegian, the student newspaper of the Massachusetts State College. The 1943 date, in the midst of World War II, gives plenty of time for the military term to have insinuated itself into civilian speech:

Oh would there were a brain
Arattling round our head—
Passing courses is much more novel—
Than flunking them instead.

Or would there were a gremlin
Who, unsuspected and unseen,
Could add a point or twenty
To marks before they met the Dean.

The fact that the origin is unknown is no bar to people making claims as to the origin of gremlin. None of these are supported by evidence. The most plausible is that the word is a variant of goblin, although how goblin could be transformed into gremlin cannot be explained. Other unsubstantiated explanations include that the word comes from the Fremlin Bros., a brewery in Kent whose ale was the cause of pilot error; that it comes from the Irish gruaimín, a gloomy or ill-humored person; that it is related to grimalkin, a word that usually refers to a crone or used as the name of a cat, but which appears in Shakespeare’s MacBeth as the name of a demon; or that it comes from either the Dutch gremmelen, meaning to stain or spoil, or griemelen, to swarm. Again, these are all speculation without evidence. We really need more examples of early use in order to determine how the term came about and how it made the transition from low-ranking officer to mythical creature. But such examples, if they were ever recorded, probably do not survive. But there is hope that as more archives are digitized, some will be found.

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Sources:

I found a use of gremlin in a book in Archive.org allegedly from February 1918. All the other sources of this book give its first publication as 1947. As the scanned front matter clearly gives the 1918 date, it seems to be a misprint rather than a metadata error. The book is: Harding, M. Esther. Psychic Energy. Bollingen Series X Pantheon Books. New York: New York Lithographic Corporation, February 1918/47[?], 331. Archive.org.

Day, Wentworth. “There’s a Smile in the Air.” Daily Mail (London), 28 March 1939, 10/5. Gale Primary Sources.

“Flight-Lieutenant Hiawatha.” Aeroplane, 10 April 1929, 36.15, 576.

Gower, Pauline. Women with Wings. London: John Long, 1938, 200. PDF available (with permission) via the blog solentaviatrix.

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

Liberman, Anatoly. “Gray Matter, Part 3, or, Going From Dogs to Cats and Ghosts.” OUPblog, 1 January 2014.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2016, s.v. gremlin, n.

Sperry, Ruth. “Co-Editing.” Massachusetts Collegian, 11 February 1943, 2/4. Archive.org.

Image credits: Rod Serling (writer and creator), “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” The Twilight Zone, Paramount, 1963; fair use of a single, low-resolution frame to illustrate the topic under discussion. Pauline Gower, Women with Wings. London: John Long, 1938, 202; fair use of a drawing to illustrate the topic under discussion.