Gulf of Mexico

Detail of 1681 French map of North America and parts of South America

14 February 2025

The Gulf of Mexico is the body of water bordered by the United States to the north, Mexico to the west and south, and Cuba to the east. The English name is a calque of the Spanish Golfo de México, which dates to the sixteenth century. The name follows the typical pattern of European colonial powers naming bodies of water after the colony on the other side: the Irish Sea was named by the English because that was the route to its colony; the Indian Ocean is so named because the ships of colonial powers traversed it on the way to and from India.

The Spanish name appears in English discourse as early as 1598 in a translation of Jan Huygen van Linschoten’s Itinerario, a description of the Dutch spy and merchant’s travels to Goa, including second-hand descriptions of places he never visited himself, such as the Americas:

The Island whereof we haue alreadie spoken [i.e. Cuba], which doth almost inclose the sea that runneth betweene Florida and Iucatan, which sea by some men is called Golfo de Mexico, of others Golfo de Florida, and of some others Cortes: the sea that runneth into this gulfe, entreth betwéene Iucatan and Cuba with a mightie streame, and runneth out againe betweene Florida and Cuba, and hath no other course.

The anonymous translator of that work did not render Golfo de Mexico into English, but that would happen within half a century. The calque appears in William Castell’s 1644 A Short Discoverie of the Coasts and Continent of America. This passage is from a description of Panama:

The Bishoprick of Tlascula is next to Guaxaca more to the North-west, though extended also through the whole continent from sea to sea, no lesse then 100. leagues in length, in bredth to the South-sea but 18. where we read of no Haven of note but to the North-sea, here called the gulfe of Mexico, being full 80 leagues.

Another early English use is found in the 1655 America: or an Exact Description of the West-Indies, in a passage that describes Mexico or the Aztec Empire:

The bounds of this Kingdome at present are thus. On the East it hath a large Arm of the Sea, which they call the Bay of New-Spain, or the Gulf of Mexico.

In January 2025, US President Donald Trump, in a move that is best described as childish, directed the Board of Geographic Names to rename the gulf the Gulf of America. The BGN, which answers to the secretary of the interior, is charged with standardizing toponyms in US government usage. It has no authority over private companies and people, much less non-US entities, although US cartographers and publishers often adopt the BGN nomenclature in their style guides. While the US government and some private publishers will adopt the renaming, the name Gulf of Mexico will undoubtedly continue to be the commonly used nomenclature, as top-down directives regarding language almost invariably fail.

Correction (14 February 2025):

Trump’s executive order technically does not rename the entire gulf. It only renames:

the U.S. Continental Shelf area bounded on the northeast, north, and northwest by the States of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida and extending to the seaward boundary with Mexico and Cuba in the area formerly named as the Gulf of Mexico

What exactly is meant by the “seaward boundary” is unclear, perhaps referring to the United States’s exclusive economic zone (which governs mining and fishing rights), which apply the new name to about half of the Gulf of Mexico. So any US government, or other, maps that label the entire gulf as the Gulf of America would not comport with this order. As usual, the policy is half baked and sloppily formulated.

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Sources:

Castell, William. A Short Discoverie of the Coasts and Continent of America. London: 1644, 45. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Executive Order: Restoring Names that Honor American Greatness, 20 January 2025.

Frum, David. “The ‘Gulf of America’ Is an Admission of Defeat.” Atlantic, 13 February 2025.

Linschoten, Jan Huygen van.  Iohn Hvighen van Linschoten. His Discours of Voyages into ye Easte & West Indies. London: Iohn Wolfe, 1598, 226/2. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

N. N. America: or an Exact Description of the West-Indies. London: Richard Hodgkinsonne for Edeard Dod, 1655, 332. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Image credit: Attributed to Claude Bernau, 1681. Library of Congress. Public domain image.

silicon

The “Googleplex,” in Mountain View, California, Silicon Valley

14 February 2025

Silicon is a chemical element with atomic number 14 and the symbol Si. It is a hard, brittle, crystalline metalloid with a blue-gray luster. It is the eighth most common element in the earth’s crust and has a wide variety of uses, perhaps the most common being in glass, ceramics, cement, and as a semiconductor in the electronics industry. It is also the basis for the synthetic polymers known as silicones.

While silicon crystals and their role as a component of glass and ceramics were known to the ancients, it wasn’t until the late eighteenth century that it was recognized as a distinct chemical element. It acquired a number of names in various languages, including le silex (1777), terra silicea (1779) and silica (1787). These all have as their root the Latin silex, meaning flint, which is a form of silicon dioxide. In 1808, Humphry Davy dubbed it silicium, although he was unable to isolate the element and determine its chemical properties.

In 1817, Thomas Thomson recognized that the element had properties like that of boron and carbon and named it silicon:

The base of silica has been usually considered as a metal, and called silicium. But as there is not the smallest evidence for its metallic nature, and as it bears a close resemblance to boron and carbon, it is better to class it along with these bodies, and to give it the name of silicon.

But the name silicium persisted through much of the nineteenth century before silicon became the universally accepted name.

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Sources:

Davy, Humphry. “Electro-Chemical Researches, on the Decomposition of the Earths” (30 June 1808).  Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 98. London: W. Bulmer, 1808, 333–70 at 353. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

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, silicon, n., silica, n., silicium, n., silex, n., silicone, n.

Thomson, Thomas. A System of Chemistry, fifth edition, vol. 1 of 4. London: Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy, 1817, 252. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Photo credit: Austin McKinley, 2013. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

rawdog

12 February 2025

The American Dialect Society selected rawdog as its 2024 Word of the Year (WOTY). The word is interesting not only because it was, at the time of selection, a popular and trending slang term, but it is of linguistic note in that its meaning has gone through a series of semantic changes over the course of its life, broadening in meaning.

When rawdog entered into general slang discourse it had a meaning relating to engaging in sexual intercourse without a condom. (There was an older sense in Black slang meaning to abuse or cause harm.) But within a few years it broadened in meaning to mean to engage in an activity without preparation. This broadening occurred long before most people think it did. Furthermore, many people associate the term with queer discourse, but the evidence shows that early use was by no means limited to the queer community, getting its start in Black slang before spreading into musical discourse via hip-hop, and then into use more generally.

The oldest known use of the term is recorded by Green’s Dictionary of Slang in a Black slang glossary prepared for Los Angeles police officers, Todd R. Houser’s 1985 Central Slang: A Police Officer’s Training Guide:

raw dog To treat someone worse than a dog. To bring cruel abuse and heartless harm to bear.

The sexual sense seems to be in place a decade later when rap disc jockey Tony Touch released his 1995 mix tape Hip Hop 43 which contains the line, “Giving it to you rawdog, baby.” I can’t find the wider context for this line, but it would seem to refer to unprotected sex. The progression from to abuse or cause harm to engage in unprotected sex seems rather obvious, especially given the AIDS pandemic in the 1980s and 90s, before effective treatments for the disease were available.

But the sexual sense is unambiguously in place by 1999, when it appears in rapper DMX’s song “Good Girls, Bad Guys” on the album …And Then There Was X:

Turn a church girl to a straight Ruff Ryder
Take her to the Ramada make it an all nighter
Oh no, I only go to the Swiss hotel)
Fuckin with me? I have you in the back of the Chevelle
Like what (what) hittin it raw dogg in the butt
You was good this mornin, but tonight you a slut

If one searches Usenet for instances of term, one finds hundreds of hits from the 1990s for raw dog being used as a label for various musical projects and artists, but exactly what meaning or meanings this label was intended to convey is unclear.

But within five years of DMX’s song, the sexual sense of rawdog underwent its first broadening in meaning. Connie Eble’s Campus Slang for 2004 defines the verb as “to engage in wild fun, particularly sex: I totally rawdogged her.”

For further examples of the progression of the shift in meaning one needs to turn to Urbandictionary.com. Now, Urbandictionary is hardly an authoritative source, but when used carefully, it can be a source for evidence of slang use. And on 26 December 2005 a user posted the earliest known use of the broadened sense of to engage in some activity unprepared:

To go into something unprepared, without thinking

I went into that test Raw Dog!

What follows is a series of posts to Urbandictionary that give various specific applications of and even more broadening of the term’s meaning. On 26 November 2006 a user applied as an adjective referring to uncooked food:

Food that is uncooked.

I aint eatin that raw dog hamburger. Fuck dat shit.

On 19 October 2007 we get this even more general sense:

go all out, throw caution to the wind, go all the way

Noah went raw dog and decided to get a Bachelor's of Science in Engineering rather than a weak Bachelor's of Applied Science.

On 1 July 2009 we get a specific application of the noun rawdog that links back to the older unprotected sex meaning:

#1- v. sexual intercourse without using a condom.

#2- v. The act of masturbating with no pornography.

#1-
Dane: “Mary, I don't have a condom.”
Mary: “Oh thats OK just stick it in raw dog!”

#2-
Mike: “Oh dude my computers been broken for like a week.”
Alex: “Shit dude, no porn!?”
Mike: “Nah!”
Alex: “So have you jerked it?”
Mike: “Yeah man, fucking raw dogin it all week.”

Not all of Urbandictionary’s entries reflect a broadening of the sense. An entry from 18 November 2009 records a semantic shift of the unprotected sex sense from verb to noun, a condomless penis, although the example sentence given doesn’t match the definition:

a clean, condomless, steamy, piping hot dick ready to fuck a bitch

woman: oh my god just put it in me!!!
man: i cant i seem to be lacking a condom
woman: i dont care! put it in raw dog!!

Urbandictionary has a 2 February 2010 entry for the phrase raw dog and bail:

To completely exploit someone or something in a quick and greedy manner, usually involving theft, consumption, or abuse of someones good will.

Adam: "Freshman kegger down the street."
Bob: "Let's raw dog and bail that shizz then go to the bar."

"I only offered you a slice and now half my pizza is gone, way to raw dog and bail it."

Subsequent entries define the phrase to mean to engage in unprotected sex and then ghost one’s partner. It seems likely that despite the more general sense of raw dog and bail being recorded first, the sexual sense of the phrase is the older one.

A 5 January 2010 entry has this definition and example:

eating food with your hands while shitfaced

"dude, i was so hammered new year's eve I was raw dog-n' that mac 'n cheese right outta the pot"

And on 15 July 2010, one Urbandictionary contributor, Jwk93, posted three entries, giving various examples of the general sense of rawdog:

To enter blindly into an unfamiliar or unsafe situation, with little regard for any harmful potential consequences.

Hank: Hey, let's go skydiving.
Sam: But the instructor isn't certified.
Hank: Dude, calm down. Let's raw dog it, and don't worry, we'll be totally safe.

Terry: Excited for the party?
Bill: No. We weren't invited, and the host actually wants us dead.
Terry: Woah now -- relax, bro. Just raw dog it and you'll be fine.

The second:

to put forth a lackluster effort.

Gus procrastinated so much on his term paper that he was forced to raw dog it the night before it was due.

And the third:

to undergo a task, paying little attention to detail.

Jon: Hey Betty, would you make me a sandwich?
Betty: Sure, what would you like on it?
Jon: Doesn't matter. Just raw dog it.

Hairdresser: Do you care how I cut your hair?
Samantha: No, just raw dog it, I only have 20 minutes.

On 12 April 2011 we have this entry from a contributor going by the handle theduderuns, indicating that the term had a specific meaning to the running community:

(verb) To run barefoot.

1. Screw shoes I'd rather raw dog it.

2. I saw a dude rawdogging through midtown manhattan today.

We get this on 23 June 2011:

The act of not giving a fuck about consequences, just living life.

Casey: Yo I hit 120 in my car the other day.
"The Raw Dog Crew": Thats so Raw Dog.

And another very specific application of the term on 14 June 2012:

v. making direct contact with a public toilet.

They were out of sanitation wraps so I had to raw dog the toilet.

There is this example from 5 June 2013 that rather obviously and inventively extends the sense of unprotected sex to protecting one’s smartphone from damage:

Not protecting one's iPhone/smartphone with a case.

Generally considered a risky practice, it appeals to reckless individuals who think a bare phone feels and looks better.

“Even though I bought an Otter Box, I never use it. I don't like how it feels when I try and slide it into my pocket.”

“I was raw dogging it at the bars this weekend. I woke up with some weird-looking little bumps on my screen. I rubbed it down with alcohol, so I think I'll be OK.”

Applications of rawdogging to uncooked food continue to remain relevant. Here is one from 3 September 2014:

To eat an uncooked food.

Aren't you going to cook that pop tart? You're not raw dogging it are you?

An entry from 5 May 2015:

Ordering a sheet cheese pizza with uncooked pepperoni

“Yo let me get two raw dogs for delivery”

And another from 22 March 2018:

eating a meat product, say a hamburger or hot dog without a bun

“Ugh, you took the last bun?! Guess I'll have to raw dog this hot dog then...”

The sexual sense of rawdog may have originally been inspired by the AIDS pandemic, but decades later the Covid-19 pandemic had its own form of rawdogging. From 26 January 2021:

When a person goes to public places without any sort of face mask on while in the middle of a pandemic.

"Hey, do you want to go inside the store for some groceries?"
"Nah man. Too many people raw dogging the air."
"You're right. We'll just do a pick-up order"

Finally there is this entry from 9 February 2022, which is unusual for Urbandictionary in that it was clearly written by a linguist or lexicographer:

To perform any act recklessly or without preparation. A semantic broadening of the original sense of unprotected intercourse based on connotations of risk. In response to interrogatives, it is often preceded by exclamation “nah”, a vocative such as “man”/”dude” and elision “Imma”.

“Are you studying for Macy's test?”
“Nah, man. Imma raw dog it.”

“I considered purchasing the per diem rental car insurance, but opted instead to raw dog it.”

Rawdog is an excellent example of how a slang term can change in meaning as it is adopted by a wider community and how terms and their senses are often much older than most people think they are.

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Sources:

Friedman, Nancy. “Word of the Week: Rawdog.” Fritinancy (blog), 13 January 2025.

DMX. “Good Girls, Bad Guys” (lyrics). Genius.com, n.d.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., s.v. rawdog, adj., raw dog, v., raw dogg, n.

Urbandictionary.com, s.v. raw dog, accessed 17 January 2025.

Photo credit: Corode, 2013. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

moonstruck

A stained-glass window in the Church of St Thomas the Apostle, Killinghall, North Yorkshire, England, depicted Matthew 4:24 in which Jesus heals the sick

10 February 2025

(Edit 1 March 2025: Reference to the movie Moonstruck added after I finally got around to watching the nearly forty-year-old film)

We all know that people in love sometimes act insane, and that is the concept behind the modern use of the word moonstruck. Someone who is moonstruck is out of their mind with love. For instance, the delightful 1987 Norman Jewison film titled Moonstruck is about precisely that.

But this was not always the word’s meaning; the word originally simply referred to insanity. The idea that the phases of the moon could trigger mental illness is an old one—English use of the word lunatic dates to the late thirteenth century—and that’s where the concept of being moonstruck comes from.

Moonstruck is recorded as early as 1647 in a sermon by John Arrowsmith, in which he expounds on the metaphor of the moon as a symbol of the decadent world—full of spots, representing sin; subject to change; and:

The cause of many diseases, especially of the falling-sicknesse. Scripture speaking of such as were troubled therewith, calls them σεληνιαζομένους Lunaticks or moon-struck, Mat.4.24.

Σεληνιαζομένους (seliniazoménous), found in the original Greek of the gospel, literally means moonlit. The full text of Matthew 4:24, in the 1611 Authorized (King James) Version reads:

And [Jesus’s] fame went throughout all Syria: and they brought unto him all sick people that were taken with divers diseases and torments, and those which were possessed with devils, and those which were lunatick, and those that had the palsy; and he healed them.

The New Revised Standard Version translates the Greek word as “epileptics.”

Moonstruck also appears in John Milton’s 1674 version of Paradise Lost, Book 11, in a vision shown by Michael to Adam of the consequences of his and Eve’s indiscretion with the forbidden fruit:

                                    Immediately a place
Before his eyes appeared, sad, noysom, dark,
A Lazar-house it seemd, wherein were laid
Numbers of all diseas’d, all maladies
Of gastly Spasm, or racking torture, qualmes
Of heart-sick Agonic, all feavorous kinds,
Convulsions, Epilepsies, fierce Catarrhs,
Intestin Stone and Ulcer, Colic pangs,
Daemoniac Phrenzie, moaping Melancholie,
And Moon-struck madness, pining Atrophie,
Marasmus, and wide-wasting Pestilence,
Dropsies, and Asthma’s, and Joint-racking Rheums.

But in the mid-nineteenth century the meaning of moonstruck shifted and acquired an association with love and romance. To the Victorians, to be moonstruck was to be madly in love, combining the idea of madness with a moonlit lovers’ tryst. Charles Dickens used the word in association with love when he describes the title character of his 1850 novel David Copperfield:

The first thing I did, on my own account, when I came back, was to take a night-walk to Norwood, and, like the subject of a venerable riddle of my childhood, to go “round and round the house, without ever touching the house,” thinking about Dora. I believe the theme of this incomprehensible conundrum was the moon. No matter what it was, I, the moon-struck slave of Dora, perambulated round and round the house and garden for two hours, looking through crevices in the palings, getting my chin by dint of violent exertion above the rusty nails on the top, blowing kisses at the lights in the windows, and romantically calling on the night, at intervals, to shield my Dora—I don't exactly know what from, I suppose from fire. Perhaps from mice, to which she had a great objection.

Shortly afterwards, Matthew Arnold, in his 1852 Tristram and Isuelt, uses the word in the same sense:

All red with blood the whirling river flows,
The wide plain rings, the daz’d air throbs with blows.
Upon us are the chivalry of Rome—
Their spears are down, their steeds are bath’d in foam.
“Up, Tristram, up,” men cry, “thou moonstruck knight!
What foul fiend rides thee? On into the fight!”
—Above the din her voice is in my ears—
I see her form glide through the crossing spears.—
Iseult! . . . .

The older sense of plain madness and lunacy quickly dropped away and moonstruck came to mean dazed by love.

There are some other senses of moonstruck based on various superstitions about the effects of moonlight. Some believed that sleeping in moonlight could cause blindness, and those afflicted with this supposed moon-blindness were sometimes called moonstruck. Nineteenth-century sailors believed that the tropical moon would spoil fish, and said fish were said to be moonstruck. Of course, it was the tropical heat, and not the moonlight, that caused the fish to spoil, but superstition seldom has any truck with common sense. And various and sundry other afflictions were attributed to being struck by moonlight. Most of these are seldom found today, but you may run across them if you read enough nineteenth century literature.

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Sources:

Arnold, Matthew. “Tristram and Iseult.” In Empedocles on Etna and Other Poems. London: B. Fellowes, 1852, 120–21. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Arrowsmith, John. A Great Wonder in Heaven. London: R. L. for Samuel Man, 1647, 19. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

The Bible, Authorized King James Version. Oxford World Classics. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997, Matthew 4:24.

Dickens, Charles. David Copperfield, London: Chapman & Hall, 1850, chapter 33, 374–75. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Milton, John. Paradise Lost. London: S. Simmons, 1974, Book 11, lines 477–88, 299–300. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2002, s.v. moonstruck, adj.

The New Oxford Annotated Bible, augmented third edition (NRSV). Oxford: Oxford UP: 2007, Matthew 4:24.

Photo credit: Storye book, 2016. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

selenium

“Selene,” Albert Aublet, 1880, oil on canvas

7 February 2025

Selenium is a chemical element with atomic number 34 and the symbol Se. It can appear as a red powder; a vitreous, black solid; or a gray metallic solid. It is rarely found in nature in a pure form, found usually in metal sulfide ores where it takes the place of sulfur. It is a chalcogen, a group that includes oxygen, sulfur, and tellurium. Selenium is toxic, although trace amounts are necessary for life as we know it. It has a variety of uses in industry, including production of glass, brass alloys, batteries, solar cells, and photoconductors.

Selenium was discovered by Jöns Jacob Berzelius and Johan Gottlieb Gahn in 1817. Berzelius named the element after Selene, the Greek goddess of the moon, paralleling the naming of tellurium, which was named after the earth. When burned, selenium gives off an odor reminiscent of horseradish, a similar odor to that exuded by tellurium, leading the chemist to initially think he was dealing with a tellurium compound. Subsequent work convinced him that his initial assessment was incorrect. Berzelius announced the discovery in a series of letters sent to chemists throughout Europe, which were subsequently published in various scientific journals. Here is an extract of one of those letters, dated 27 January 1818:

Da das reine Tellurium diesen Geruch nicht verbreitet, weder im metallischen noch im oxydirten Zustande, so vermuthe ich, dass die Tellurerze etwas von diesem Stoffe enthalten möchten. Diese Vermuthung gab mir Veranlassung den neuen Stoff Selenium, vom griechischen Namen des Mondes, zu nennen. Die Vermuthung mag sich nun bestätigen oder nicht, so kann er doch diesen Namen behalten, weil er doch einen Namen braucht.

(Since pure tellurium does not give off this smell, either in the metallic or oxidized state, I suspect that the tellurium ores may contain some of this substance. This suspicion led me to name the new substance selenium, from the Greek name for the moon. Whether or not this suspicion is confirmed, it can still keep this name because it needs a name.)

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Sources:

Berzelius, Jöns Jacob. “Ein neues mineralisches Alkali und ein neues Metall” (27 January 1818). Journal für Chemie und Physik, 21, 1817, 44–48 at 47–48. HathiTrust Digital Archive. (Berzelius’s letter is dated 1818, while the volume of the journal is dated 1817; presumably the 1817 volume was published late.)

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. selenium, n.

Image credit: Albert Aublet, 1880; photo by Sotheby’s, New York, 2007. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image as a mechanical reproduction of a public domain work.