catfish

7 April 2025

A channel catfish, Ictalurus punctatus

Catfish are a diverse group of fishes of the orders Siluriformes or Nematognathi, so named because many, but not all, of catfish species have distinctive barbels (a type of sensory organ) that resemble a cat’s whiskers. Catfish can be found mainly in fresh and brackish water on six continents. (They don’t inhabit Antarctica.) Most catfish species are bottom feeders. Many catfish species are important food sources, and they can be easy and inexpensive to farm.

The name catfish dates to at least 1612, when John Smith records it in his description of the colony of Virginia:

Of fish we were best acquainted with Sturgeon, Grampus, Porpus, Seales, Stingraies, whose tailes are very dangerous. Brettes, mullets, white Salmonds, Trowts, Soles, Plaice, Herrings, Conyfish, Rockfish, Eeles, Lampreyes, Catfish, Shades, Pearch of 3 sorts, Crabs, Shrimps, Creuises, Oysters, Cocles and Muscles.

But catfish acquired a slang sense in 2010 meaning a person who uses a false online persona to deceive, especially in an online relationship. The slang term comes from the 2010 documentary film Catfish, which follows a man, Nev Schulman, who engages in an online relationship with a woman, Megan. It turns out that Megan does not exist, and her online persona was created by another woman, Angela. In the film, Angela’s husband, Vince, describes his wife as a catfish, because purveyors of live cod supposedly included a catfish in the tank to keep the cod lively and active during shipment. (Accounts of this supposed practice date to 1912.) From a transcript of the film:

The catfish will keep the cod agile. And there are those people who are catfish in life, and they keep you on your toes. They keep you guessing, they keep you thinking, they keep you fresh.

The film was shown at the Sundance film festival in January 2010 and entered into wider distribution by that September. But Urbandictionary.com had a post of the slang sense dated 22 July 2010. (The post is no longer on the site but is documented by the Oxford English Dictionary and Green’s Dictionary of Slang). A post to Urbandictionary.com of 2 September 2010 reads:

catfish

someone who pretends to be someone they are not online to create false identities, particularly to pursue deceptive online romances.

From the 2010 movie Catfish

Many guys have multiple accounts on facebook because they are catfishes

Urbandictionary.com also has entries from the early 2000s that use the term for various types of male pick-up artists, relying on a metaphor of catfish as bottom feeders. If these senses had wider currency, they may have influenced the adoption and spread of the online deceiver sense, although the 2010 film is clearly the primary locus of origin.

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Sources:

Dexxe, Urbandictionary.com, 2 September 2010.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., s.v. catfish, n.

Joost, Henry and Ariel Schulman, dir. Catfish (film), Universal Pictures, 2010. IMDB.com.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989 & additional sense, 2023, catfish, n.; third edition, December 2023, catfish, v., catfishing, n.

Smith, John. A Map of Virginia with a Description of Covntrey, the Commodities, People, Government and Religion. Oxford: Joseph Barnes, 1612, 15. ProQuest: Early English Books Online.

Photo credit: US Army Corps of Engineers, before 2005. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

urban / suburbs / suburbia / burbs

Suburban housing development, Spennymoor, Durham, UK, 2015

5 April 2025

The root of all these words is the Latin noun urbs, meaning city, and specifically the city of Rome. From this noun comes the adjective urbanus. And there is the Latin adjective suburbanus, referring to the environs surrounding a city. In Latin, the word’s development followed the usual path, root then root plus affixes.

But in English, we first see the form suburbs. It first appears in a c. 1350 translation of the Deuteronomy 32:32 in the Midland Prose Psalter:

For our God nis nouȝt as her goddes, and our enemis ben iuges. Her uines is of þe uine of Sode-mens & of þe suburbes of Gomorre. Her grape is grape of gall, & her berye hys bitterest.

(For our God is not as their gods, and our enemies are judges. Her vines are the vine of Sodom & of the suburbs of Gomorrah. Their grapes are the grapes of gall, and their berries are the bitterest.)

The Latin Vulgate of this verse uses suburbanis.

This wasn’t the suburbs as we know them today, a ring of residential land surrounding a city. Rather the Latin and fourteenth-century translation of Deuteronomy use the word to mean the agricultural lands surrounding a city.

A few decades later, we seen suburbs used to refer to residential areas outside of a city, but these are not the affluent homesteads which we’re familiar with today. Rather these are shanty towns and low areas populated by the poor and the criminal. Here’s a passage from Chaucer’s Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue, c. 1387, where the Canon’s Yeoman describes where he and his con-man boss reside:

“Ther-of no fors, good Yeman,” quod oure Hoost;
“Syn of the konnyng of thy lord thow woost,
Telle how he dooth, I pray thee hertely,
Syn that he is so crafty and so sly.
Where dwelle ye, if it to telle be?”
“In the suburbes of a toun,” quod he,
“Lurkynge in hernes and in lanes blynde,
Whereas thise robbours and thise theves by kynde
Holden hir pryvee fereful residence,
As they that dar nat shewen hir presence;
So faren we, if I shal seye the sothe.”

(“That does not matter, good Yeoman,” said our host.
“Since you know the cunning of your lord,
Tell how he does, I ask you heartily,
Since he is so crafty and so sly.
Where do you dwell, if it can be told?”

“In the suburbs of a town,” he said,
“Lurking in corners and blind lanes,
Where these robbers and these thieves by nature
Hold their private, fearful residence,
As those who dare not show their presence;
So we conduct ourselves, if I shall tell the truth.”)

The disreputable nature of suburbs would continue into the seventeenth century. It is only in the eighteenth do such regions start to be rehabilitated.

Urban doesn’t make its English appearance until over two hundred years later, in Alexander Garden’s 1619 verse life of William Elphinstone, bishop of Aberdeen (1431–1514):

And suche viuacitie of spreit,
Was he indew'd withall.
That nothing laicking feem’d
That needs concerne, or can
Be fitting for ane priuat, or
A publick placed man.
Vrban and tunishe turns,
Or for the land's effairs,
Or what soeu'r besyd, his wit
Him fit for all declairs.

Note that Garden is associating the city with things that are fashionable (tunishe or tonish), a connotation that continues to this day.

There are further variations on the words. We get the faux-Latin suburbia in the late nineteenth century. Here is an example from a theater review that appears in the London newspaper the Era on 9 October 1870:

A new farce by Mr. Conway Edwardes, entitled Board and Residences, commenced the entertainments. It is a light and bustling affair enough. Miss Matilda Mildew, a spinster of middle age, keeps a boarding-house in Tranquil-terrace, Suburbia.

And the American slangish clipping the burbs is in place by 1977. From an article on urban farming in the Washington Post of 11 December of that year:

Regardless, for most homesteaders, there must be another source of income, and that requires, in the vast majority of cases, close proximity to an urban environment. Some, like General Motors heir Stewart Mott, for several years a chicken-farmer on his Manhattan rooftop, have found ways of adding a rural flavor to an essentially urban existence. Others are buying the American dream of a house in the burbs and two cars in the garage—and then adding a new dimension.

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Sources:

Bülbring, Karl D., ed. The Earliest Complete English Prose Psalter, part 1. Early English Text Society. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1891, 188. London, British Library, MS Additional 17376. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Cook, Adrienne. “The Urban: Farmstead.” Washington Post, 11 December 1977, Magazine 25/2. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Garden, Alexander. The Lyf, Doings, and Deathe of The Right Reuerend and Worthy Prelat, William Elphinstoun (1619). In A Theatre of Scottish Worthies. Glasgow: R. Anderson, 1878, 71. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Middle English Dictionary, 8 February 2025, s.v. suburban, n., suburb(e, n.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2002, s.v. ‘burb, n.; June 2012, s.v. suburban, n. & adj., suburb, n., suburbia, n.; June 2011, s.v. urban, adj. & n.

“Town Edition.” Era (London), 9 October 1870, 13/1. Gale Primary Sources: British Library Newspapers.

Image credit: Trevor Littlewood, 2015. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

yard

A typical suburban, American front yard, c. 1983

4 April 2025

In Present-Day English, yard has several meanings, but the two dominant ones are an open area near a house or other building and a unit of linear measure. But while spelled and pronounced the same, these are two separate words, descending from different Old English roots.

The first, the open area near a building, comes from the Old English geard, meaning a home, dwelling place, or enclosure. And it is from this enclosure sense that the present-day meaning comes down to us. We see this sense in the poem Beowulf, in a passage in which an old man mourns the death of his son:

Gesyhð sorhcearig    on his sune bure
winsele westne,    windge reste,
reot[g]e berofene;    ridend swefað,
hæleð in hoðman;    nis þær hearpan sweg,
gomen in geardum,    swylce ðær iu wæron.

(He will look sadly at his son’s chamber, the desolate wine-hall, the windswept rest, mournful, empty; the riders sleep, heroes in the grave; there is no harp song, no entertainments in the yard, such as there once was.)

And we see it used in the sense of home, rather figuratively to refer to heaven, in the poem Guthlac A:

Swa soð-fæstra    sawla motun
in ecne geard    up gestigan
rodera rice,    þa þe ræfnað her
wordum ond weorcum    wuldor-cyninges
lare longsume,    on hyra lifes tid
earniað on eorðan    ecan lifes,
hames in heahþu.

(So may the souls of the righteous ascend to the eternal yard, the kingdom of heaven; those who perform here in words and deeds the longtime teaching of the king of glory in their lifetimes on earth earn eternal life, homes on high.)

The unit of measurement, on the other hand, comes from the Old English gyrd, meaning a tree branch, rod, or staff. We see this rod sense in the Old English translation of Exodus 8:16:

Drihten cwæð to Moyse: Cweð to Aarone: Ahefe þine gyrde & sleah on eorðan, þæt gnættas gewurðon ofer eal Egypta land.

(The Lord said to Moses: Say to Aaron, “raise your yard & strike the earth, so that gnats settle over all the land of Egypt.)

And gyrd as the unit of measurement can be seen in a charter that outlines the rents due at Hurstbourne Priors, Hampshire:

Her synd gewriten þa gerihta þæ ða ceorlas sculan don to Hyssebyrnan. Ærest æt hilcan hiwisce feorwerti penega to herfestes emnihte […] & XVI. gyrda gauoltininga eac.

(Here are written the dues the peasants must render at Hurstbourne. First, from each hide fourteen pence at the autumnal equinox […] & also 16 yards of fencing.)

This Old English yard was not equivalent to our present-day measurement, being around sixteen feet long—the modern measure known as a rod is sixteen and a half feet. So a more accurate present-day translation of the above would read “16 rods of fencing.” The yard was reduced and standardized at three feet in the fourteenth century.

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Sources:

Crawford, S. J., ed. The Old English Version of the Heptateuch. Early English Text Society, O. S. 160. London: Oxford UP, 1922, Exodus 8:16, 232. Archive.org.

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

Fulk, R. D. Robert E. Bjork, and John D. Niles. Klaeber’s Beowulf, fourth edition. Toronto: Toronto UP, 2008, lines 2455–59, 84.

Guthlac A. In Mary Clayton, ed. Old English Poems of Christ and His Saints. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 27. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2013, lines 790–96a, 142.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. yard, n.1, yard, n.2.

“Services and Dues Rendered at Hurstbourne Priors, Hampshire.” In A. J. Robertson, ed. Anglo-Saxon Charters, second edition. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1959, 206.

Image credit: Bart Everson, c. 1983. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

weapon of mass destruction / WMD /conventional weapon

2 April 2025

Most people became aware of the terms weapon of mass destruction and WMD during the run up to the first Gulf War in 1990–91. And they again entered the public consciousness during the second war with Iraq which started twelve years later. Both times Saddam Hussein had been thought to have developed nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, an assessment that was only correct the first time. But the term is much older than widespread public awareness of it.

The term weapon of mass destruction dates to at least 27 December 1937, when it was used by William Cosmo Gordon Lang, the archbishop of Canterbury in a speech. He uttered the phrase in the context of the bombing of cities in Spain and China by fascist air forces. Lang was using the term not in the sense of nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons, but rather conventional weapons that were used indiscriminately against civilians:

Who can think without horror of what another widespread war would mean, waged as it would be with all the new weapons of mass destruction? Yet how fruitless seem to be all efforts to secure a really settled peace.

The abbreviation WMD dates to at least 1985, when it appears in a master’s thesis on the Outer Space Treaty of 1966. Again, the definition here is an expansive one:

Taking into account the circumstances under which the Space Treaty was concluded, it would be difficult to view Article IV a derogation of the common interest principle. Aside from Article IV(2) which totally demilitarize [sic] the moon and other celestial bodies, the ban under Article IV (1) on the “weapon of mass destruction” (WMD) is noteworthy. The concept of WMD is not a static one. It not only embraces weapons of this kind which had existed before the conclusion of the Space Treaty, such as chemical and biological weapons; but also encompasses weapons of mass destruction to be developed in future. In judging whether a particular weapon is WMD, it is the effect and destructiveness caused by this weapon that should count, not the question of whether a weapon is conventional or non-conventional. Moreover, the means by which mass destruction can be caused is only secondary. The direct killing is equal to killing by destroying crops, by flooding large living areas, or by any other kind of modification of our natural environment.

Article IV of that 1966 treaty reads:

States Parties to the Treaty undertake not to place in orbit around the Earth any objects carrying nuclear weapons or any other kinds of weapons of mass destruction, install such weapons on celestial bodies, or station weapons in outer space in any other manner.

The Moon and other celestial bodies shall be used by all States Parties to the Treaty exclusively for peaceful purposes. The establishment of military bases, installations and fortifications, the testing of any type of weapons and the conduct of military manœuvres on celestial bodies shall be forbidden. The use of military personnel for scientific research or for any other peaceful purposes shall not be prohibited. The use of any equipment or facility necessary for peaceful exploration of the Moon and other celestial bodies shall also not be prohibited.

The counterparts to WMD are conventional weapons. That retronym, used in contrast to nuclear weapons, appears, as one might expect, shortly after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There is this from Illinois’s Centralia Evening Sentinel of 16 October 1945:

The general’s [i.e., Lt. Gen. Curtis LeMay’s] plain speaking is welcome at a time when the whole country has been understandably confused about the whole subject of atomic power. There has been a tendency to assume that there was no possible defense against the bomb, and that aircraft and other conventional weapons have been ruled out.

And there is this from Ohio’s Cincinnati Post of 4 July 1946, shortly after the first atomic tests on Bikini Atoll in the Pacific:

There is no tendency on the part of anybody here to question that the plutonium bomb is a vastly more dangerous weapon in the hands of any enemy than any conventional weapon ever conceived.

A note on usage. When I was working arms control issues in the Pentagon in the early 1990s, we actively tried to discourage use of the terms weapons of mass destruction and WMD. Our thinking was that nuclear weapons were orders of magnitude more destructive than even biological or chemical weapons, and that putting them in the same category was committing an analytical error and would lead to poor policy outcomes. We were not successful in quashing use of the terms.

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Sources:

Heath, S. Burton. “Bikini Atomic Bomb Blast Pleases Navy.” Cincinnati Post (Ohio), 4 July 1946, 16/4–5. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Huang, Jiefang. The Common Interest Principle in Space Law (LL.M thesis). Institute of Air and Space Law, McGill University, June 1985, 196–97. ProQuest Dissertations.

“In the Arm Chair.” Centralia Evening Sentinel (Illinois), 16 October 1945, 8/1. NewspaperArchive.com.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, 2005, s.v. weapon of mass destruction, n., WMD, n.

“Primate Appeals to the Individual in His Home.” Scotsman (Edinburgh), 27 December 1937, 15/3. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies (1966). United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs.

Image credit: Fastfission, 2006. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

mine / undermine

Illumination of a medieval manuscript depicting the undermining of walls during the Siege of Jerusalem in 1187 C.E.; London, British Library, Yates Thompson MS 12, fol. 40v.

26 March 2025

To undermine something is to destroy it through some surreptitious means, to subvert it, and undermine is one of those words whose etymology is readily apparent by examining its constituent elements, under + mine, originally a reference to the military tactic of digging under the walls of a fortification in order to collapse them.

The verb to mine dates to the early fourteenth century and comes from the Anglo-Norman verb miner, meaning to dig under something, such as a wall, in order to make it collapse. In English it quickly acquired an additional, more general sense of to dig, especially for minerals.

Here we see the verb phrase to mine under in the poem King Richard, which was probably written sometime before 1300 with a manuscript witness from c. 1330. The bulk of the poem appears in the Auchinleck Manuscript but is incomplete there. This portion is from a fragment in a manuscript in the Edinburgh University library:

Wiþ þat þe galeyes com to þe cite
& hadde neyȝe won entre
Þai hadde so mined vnder þe walle
Þat mani a griffoun gan doun falle.

(With that the galleys came to the city
& had nearly won entry
They had so mined under the walls
That many a siege tower began to fall down.)

But the verb to undermine itself is first recorded in its figurative sense in an account of the Passion of Christ in the South English Legendary, a medieval collection of saint’s lives. The manuscript in which it appears was copied prior to 1325 and the particular version was written around 1280:

Þat ȝif þe hosebonde wiste    þe tyme & þe stounde
Whanne þe þeof wolde come    wake he wolde ffor to him ffounde
And nolde him soffry nou3t    his hous to vndermyne.

(If the husband knew the time and the moment when the thief would come, he would wake to find him. And he would not suffer his house to be undermined.)

The literal sense of digging under a fortification is recorded in a pre-1382 Wyclifite translation of the Bible, specifically Jeremiah 51:58:

These thingus seith the Lord God of ostus, The wal of babilon he the heist with vndermynyng shal ben vndermyned, and his heȝe ȝatus shul be brend with fyr.

(These things say the Lord God of hosts: the wall of Babylon, it is the highest, with undermining shall be undermined, and its high gates shall be burned with fire.)

The Vulgate version of this passage uses the verb suffodere, to dig under, to pierce from below. The fact that the figurative sense predates the literal means little. We just don’t have a surviving example of the literal usage that is older—when it comes to dating words from medieval manuscripts, differences of a few decades usually aren’t significant.

In English, the military senses of both undermine and mine existed throughout the medieval period, but in the early seventeenth century the verb to mine ceased being used in the military sense and came to only mean to dig, to excavate.

Modern landmines and sea-mines are also from the same linguistic root. Often, once a tunnel was dug underneath a castle’s walls, explosives, or mines, would be placed in it and detonated, bringing the walls down. The “breach” in the walls of Harfleur that Shakespeare’s Henry V charged “once more into” was created by just such a mine. This sense of mine eventually evolved into any buried or submerged explosive.

Knowing the etymology of this word has one additional advantage. If you’ve ever played the old board game Stratego and wondered what the miner was doing on the battlefield, now you know.

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Sources:

Anglo-Norman Dictionary, 2012, s.v. miner1, v.

The Holy Bible, Containing the Old and New Testaments with the Apocryphal Books, in the Earliest English Versions Made from the Latin Vulgate by John Wychiffe and His Followers, vol. 3 of 4. Josiah Forshall and Frederic Madden, eds. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1901, Jeremiah 51:58, 467. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

King Richard, lines 309–12. Edinburgh University Library MS 218, E fol. 3vb.

Middle English Dictionary, 8 February 2025, s.v. minen, v., underminen, v.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2002, s.v. mine, v.; second edition, 1989, s.v. undermine, v.

The Southern Passion. Beatrice Daw Brown, ed. Early English Text Society, O.S. 169. London: Oxford University Press, 1927, 525–27, 19. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Image credit: London, British Library, Yates Thompson MS 12, fol. 40 v. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.