Great Depression

Unemployed men queued in front of a Chicago soup kitchen opened by Al Capone, February 1931

21 April 2025

I am always interested in the question of when various historical events acquire their names. For instance, when did people realize the global economic downturn that started with the Wall Street crash of October 1929 was great. And when did it become The Great Depression, an event with no peer?

The phrase great depression was applied to any number of earlier economic downturns, a simple collocation of terms, not a fixed label or proper noun. And at its start the 1929 downturn was no different. We see the phrase great depression being applied to it a little more than a month after the crash. For instance, there is upbeat (and unfortunately very wrong) analysis in the New York Times of 24 November 1929:

Reports of business heads to the President’s conference, Mr. Barnes said, should dispel the fears that existed that the country was running into a period of great depression. Retail stores reported, he said, the usual employment for this period of the year, mail-order houses were going along in a normal way and the “distribution of automobiles is normal for this period of the year.”

By the middle of 1930, though, it had become obvious that this particular depression was worse than the previous ones had been, and people had started to use the definite article with it, calling it the great depression. From Massachusetts Springfield Union/Springfield Republican of 13 July 1930 (the two papers published a joint edition on Sundays):

The taxes paid in March and June 1930, quarterly payments, were on the business done by American firms and individuals during the calendar year 1929, which takes in the autumn of the great depression.

Full recognition that it was a singular event came by 1931, when capital letters started to be used in the label. What had been simply a period of great depression had become the Great Depression. We can see it in an article in the 15 April 1931 edition of Windsor, Ontario’s Border Cities Star about Pasquale Venuta, who had taught music to bandleander Guy Lombardo and his brothers in London, Ontario:

While signal success attended his efforts in London, that was before the period of the Great Depression.

“There is not much money now,” he said, “to spend for music and this part of the young people’s education is being neglected.”

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Sources:

“Barnes Assures Business Advance.” New York Times, 24 November 1929, 1/3. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

“Heavier Federal Taxes Paid Here Past Fiscal Year.” Springfield Union/Springfield Republican (Massachusetts), 13 July 1930, 1/4. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“Lombardo’s Maestro Here.” Border Cities Star (Windsor, Ontario), 15 April 1931, 11/5. ProQuest Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, 2013, s.v. Great Depression, n.

Photo credit: US government photographer, February 1931. US National Archives NAID 541927. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

awesome / awful

An “awful” Roman Legion

18 April 2025

Words often change their meaning over the years and centuries, and awesome and awful are two good examples. Their current meanings are quite different from when they were originally coined.

When I typed awesome into the search box* on urbandictionary.com, the first definition that popped up, authored by someone who goes by the apt screenname of Spleenvent, is:

Something Americans use to describe everything.

[* = Your results may vary. This is what I got when I searched for the word on 21 March 2025.]

And a few definitions down I found this:

A “sticking plaster” word used by Americans to cover over the huge gaps in their vocabularies. It is one of the three words which make up most American sentances [sic]. 

The American vocabulary consists of just three words: Omygod, awesome and shit.

Both these definitions date to 2006, and presumably both are from Britons. In addition to demonstrating the validity of McKean’s Law, which states that any criticism of another’s language will itself contain at least one error, these definitions are pretty good, if highly informal, descriptions of how the word is often used today. 

This sense is a relatively recent development, although from the perspective of today’s teens it is a thoroughly decrepit and creaky one. The earliest citation the Oxford English Dictionary, defined as “a general term of approval: excellent, fantastic, great,” is from 1979, found in linguist Connie Eble’s collection of University of North Carolina student slang.

Before that, the word existed with a somewhat milder meaning of remarkable or prodigious. This use of awesome dates to at least 1838 in a negative context and to 1916 in a positive one.

In contrast, awesome’s original meaning, which is recorded as early as 1598, is quite literal: something that inspires awe or reverence.

Similarly, awful originally meant causing terror or dread, or frightening, inspiring reverential fear—God could be awful. The word did not simply mean very bad.

Awful is a much older word, dating back to Old English, the language spoken in England before the Norman Conquest of 1066. The following is from the late ninth-century translation of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy into Old English, a translation that is generally attributed to King Alfred the Great:

[Cicero] cyðde on sumre his boca ðæt þa get Romane nama ne come ofer þa muntas þe we hatað Caucaseas, ne þa Sciððeas þe on oðre healfe þara munta bugiað furðum þære burge naman ne þæs folces ne geheordon, ac þa he com ærest to Parððum and wæs þær swiðe niew. Ac he wes þeah þærymbutan manegum folce swiðe egefull.

([Cicero] said in one of his books that at the time the name of the Romans had not yet come over the mountains that we call the Caucasus, nor had the Scythians who live on the other side of the mountains even heard of the name of the city or the people, but then it came first to Parthia and was very new there. But it was nevertheless very awful to many folk thereabouts.)

For awful in this passage, we can read fearsome or frightening.

But today, awful simply means bad. The OED has a May 1781 citation found in a letter by Methodist evangelist Joanna Turner to her husband that the dictionary classifies in this newer sense, presumably because it is describing the weather. But it is actually an example of the older sense of inspiring fear; the weather is inspiring fear in her:

I hope you were carried home safe! I felt for you all the afternoon you left me; besides pangs of the tenderest affection at parting! The awful weather was a great affliction; thinking how you were exposed.

Instead, the modern sense of awful meaning very bad dates to the beginning of the nineteenth century. The earliest citation of this sense in the Oxford English Dictionary is by Thomas Green Fessenden (1771-1837), a journalist, satirical poet, and early American political pundit. (Fessenden also wrote extensively about farming and gardening. Go figure.) In 1809, he penned a sentiment that is very familiar to us today:

I fear our great, and far-famed nation,
Is in an awful situation;
That dame Columbia, free and brave,
Has one foot fairly in her grave;
Yes, she is gasping for her breath,
While certain journeymen of death,
At Washington have been at work,
To send her packing in a jerk,
And her unburied corpse expose
To glut the maws of Gallick crows!

Evidently the meaning of words changes faster than the nature of political commentary.

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Sources:

Fessenden, Thomas G. [Peter Pepper-Box, pseud.] Pills, Poetical, Political, and Philosophical. Philadelphia, 1809, 2. Gale Primary Sources: Sabin Americana.

Godden, Malcolm and Susan Irvine, eds. The Old English Boethius, vol. 1 of 2. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009,  Chapter 18. 1:280.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2019, s.v. awesome, adj., adv., & intj., awful, adj. & adv.

Turner, Joanna. Letter to her husband Thomas (May 1781). In Mary Wells. Triumph of Faith Over the World, the Flesh, and the Devil. Bristol: T. Mills, 1787, 174. Gale Primary Sources: Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Urbandictionary.com, s.v. awesome. Accessed 21 March 2025.

Image credit: Barosaurus Lentus, 2009. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

sheriff / reeve

Perry Owens, sheriff of Apache County Arizona, c. 1886

16 April 2025

A sheriff is a government official whose duties vary depending on the jurisdiction. In England, Wales, and Northern Ireland, sheriff is a ceremonial office. In Scotland, a sheriff is a judge. Elsewhere, sheriffs are typically bailiffs, enforcing judicial orders, managing prisoners, and sometimes they operate police forces and have law enforcement powers. In the United States, a sheriff is typically the chief law enforcement officer for a county, an elected official who enforces court orders, operates jails, and enforces the law in areas that do not have separate police departments.

The word sheriff comes from the Old English scirgerefa (shire-reeve). A gerefa, or reeve in Present-Day spelling, was the chief official who administrated justice and collected taxes in a region. The word often appears with a modifier to denote the area of responsibility as in portgerefa (portreeve) or burhgerefa (borough-reeve). Thus a scirgerefa was the reeve in charge of a shire (county).

Reeve is still used as title for a mayor in some Canadian municipalities.

An Old English gerefa or later reeve could also be a person charged with administering a landowner’s estate or portion thereof. This particular sense is probably most familiar to people via Chaucer’s The Reeve’s Tale in The Canterbury Tales.

The Germanic root of gerefa is uncertain, but it probably relates to numbers and ordering.

An example of the Old English gerefa can be found in the Peterborough Chronicle for the year 787. The Old English Chronicle, which exists in multiple versions, was probably started during the reign of Alfred the Great (r. 871–99), so this entry was written about a century after the events and is postdated. The Peterborough manuscript was copied c. 1121 from one of the earlier manuscripts:

Her nam Breohtric cining Offan dohter Eadburge. & on his dagum comon ærest .iii. scipu Norðmanna of Hereðalande, & þa se gerefa þærto rad, & he wolde drifan to ðes cininges tune þy he nyste hwæt hi wæron, & hine man ofsloh þa; ðæt wæron þe erestan scipu deniscra manna þe Angelcynnes land gesohton.

(Here Beorhtric married (literally “took”) King Offa’s daughter Eadburh. And in his days there came for the first time three ships of Northmen from Hordaland, and then the reeve rode there, and he wanted to drive them to the king’s town, because he did not know who they were, and they slew the man. These were the first ships of the Danish men that sought out the land of the English.)

And we can also see scirgerefa or sheriff in the Peterborough Chronicle, this time for the year 963, when it records King Edgar granting the town of Oundle to St. Peter’s Monastery in Peterborough:

And Ic gife þone tun þe man cleopeð Undela mid eall þet þærto lið, þet is þet man cleopeð Eahtehundred & market & toll, swa freolice þet ne king ne biscop ne eorl ne sc[i]rreue ne haue þær nane hæse, ne nan man buton se abbot ane & þam þe he þærto sæt.

(And I give the town that people call Oundle with all that pertains thereto, that is what people call the Eight Hundreds, and market, and toll, freely, so that no king nor bishop nor earl nor sheriff shall have no authority there, nor any person except the abbot alone, and those he appoints thereto.)

A hundred was a territorial division of one hundred hides, each hide being an area that could support one household, that is up to about 120 acres (49 hectares) of arable land.

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Sources:

Irvine, Susan. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a Colloborative Edition, vol.7, MS E. Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2004, 41 and 57. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 636, fols. 25r–v and 37r. JSTOR.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2009, s.v. reeve, n.1; December 2006, s.v. portreeve, n.; second edition, 1989, s.v. grieve, n., gerefa, n., sheriff, n., borough-reeve, n.

Photo credit: Unknown photographer, c. 1886. Arizona Historical Society. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

gizmo

Example of a gizmo; a P-38 can opener, issued with US military canned rations from 1942 to the 1980s.

14 April 2025

Gizmo is a generic, slang name for an object. If you want to refer to something and don’t have a name for it at hand, it is a gizmo. The term is of unknown origin, but very probably is a nonsense coinage. It arises in US Marine Corps slang in the lead up to World War II.

The earliest use of the term that I’m aware of is as a pseudonym for a correspondent in the Marine Corps magazine Leatherneck. It is spelled Gismo in the August 1938 issue and Gizmo in October 1938.

And the earliest use in the sense of an object without a name is again from Leatherneck, this time from the May 1939 issue:

Butch Nyden has returned to us from Shanghai, where he found out that Gin Rickey’s aint [sic] them two wheel gismos you ride in out there.

Gizmo had made its way into US Army slang two years later, when Henry Levy, a reporter for the Los Angeles Citizen-News who had been drafted into the Army, wrote of his experiences for the paper on 8 May 1941:

Oddest of all words is “gizmo,” pronounced “gizz-mow.” This is an all-purpose word, always utilized as a noun. A “gizmo” means everything and anything. An example, a soldier asks another lend him his bayonet. “Lend me your gizmo,” he says. Or, “Boy, what a gizmo,” referring to a beautiful new car streaking by.

And by August 1942, civilians were using the word. From North Carolina’s Charlotte Observer of 24 August 1942:

The Waltonbike is here.

For want of a better name, we christen the vehicle thusly—but to many it may still be a hickey, bejadel, thingamaijig or gizmo—but to its designer it’s the answer to tire and gasoline rationing.

Stacy Walton, well-known Jacksonville citizen who operates his father’s store five miles from town, during his spare time has rigged up his vehicle out of parts of a man’s and woman’s bicycle, a water pump motor, and a friction drive pulley that rests against the rear tire, and, which actually works.

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Sources:

Gismo. “Company D, First Battalion.” Leatherneck, 21.8, August 1938, 54/2. Archive.org.

Gizmo. “‘Dog’ Company Dope.” Leatherneck, 21.10, October 1938, 28/2. Archive.org.

Goranson, Stephen. “‘Gizmo’ 1938, ~August and October.” ADS-L, 19 April 2017.

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

Levy, Henry J. “Private Henry Finds Army Like Sideshow.” Citizen-News (Los Angeles), 8 May 1941, 10. Newspapers.com.

Looey. “Motor Transport.” Leatherneck, 22.5, May 1939, 35/2. Archive.org.

“New Bicycle Makes Debut” (23 August 1942). Charlotte Observer (North Carolina), 24 August 1942, 3/2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. gizmo, n.

Good Friday

Jesus in Golgotha, Theophanes the Cretan, c. 1550

11 April 2025

Good Friday is the day when Christians commemorate the crucifixion and death of Jesus Christ, which leads many people to ask, “what’s so good about it?” That’s a fair question, and the answer is that good has been used to designate a number of religious holidays. In Old and Middle English, the adjective god (good) could mean pious, devout, morally perfect, so the good in Good Friday is a linguistic relic meaning holy, in other words, Holy Friday.

English isn’t the only language to use a word meaning good in this way. There is the Middle Dutch goede vridach, dating to at least 1240, and the Middle Low German got vridach, dating to the same period. In Anglo-Norman, the dialect of French spoken in post-Conquest England, the day was called Bon Venderdy, attested to c. 1312, and in fourteenth century Anglo-Latin it was bonus dies Veneris. (Jewish holy days are called yom tov, a Yiddish alteration of the Hebrew yom (day) + tob (good), but use of good in English to refer to Jewish holy days appears later and is a translation of the Yiddish/Hebrew rather than an extension of the Christian use of the word.)

But the earliest English use of good to refer to a period of religious observance is older than these other languages, found in the Penitential of Ecgbert, Archbishop of York. Ecgbert was an eighth century cleric, but the work is almost certainly falsely ascribed to him and written sometime later. It’s found in the manuscript Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 190, which was copied in the mid eleventh century. This penitential uses goden tide (good time) to refer a generic period of penance, not specifically as a name for Lent:

Ðeos tid cymð ymbe twelf-monað; þ[æt] ælc man sceal his scrift gesprecan; & be his seciftes leafan on his fæsten fon; & Gode & his scrifte his gyltas andettan; þa ðe he geþohte; oððe man-slihte; oððe on morðre; oððe on unriht-hæmede; oððe on ænigum þara þinga þe man wið God agyltan mæg. Ðonne hafa þu rihtne geleafan to Gode & to þysse godan tide; & georne beo betende þær þu wite þ[æt] þu geworht hæbbe.

(The time comes, after a year, when every man should speak to his confessor, and, with the his confessor’s permission, begin his fast, and confess to God and to his confessor his sins which he has purposed, whether manslaughter, or murder, or fornication, or by any of those things by which we might sin against God. Have therefore righteous faith in God, and in this good time; & you will quickly repair the harm that you have done.)

The corpus of Old English texts has no use of god to refer specifically to the day of the crucifixion. Instead, that day was referred to as langa frigadæg (Long Friday), probably a reference to the fasting and long religious services held on the day. The following appears as a rubric for the West Saxon Gospel of John 18–19, the chapters that covers the arrest, trial, torture, and crucifixion of Christ. The rubrics, or section headings, in this edition refer to the days on which the section should be read:

Ðes passio gebyrað on langa-frige-dæg

This passion is appropriate for Long Friday

The name Good Friday appears in the version of the life of Saint Brendan found in the South English Legendary, a collection of saints’ lives that dates to before 1325 and uses maundy refer to all the rites and ceremonies of Holy Thursday:

Þis procuratour heom cam aȝein : and welcomede heom a-non,
Ant custe seint brendanes fet : and þe Monekes echon;
And sette heom sethþe to þe soper : for þe day it wolde so,
And sethþe he wuchs hore fet alle : þe maunde for-to do.
huy heolden þare heore maunde— : and þare heo gounnen bi-leue
A-gode friday al þe longue day : for-to an ester eue.

(This procurator came to them again, and welcomed them at once, and kissed the feet of Saint Brendan and every one of the monks; and afterward set them to the supper, for the day would have it so, and afterward he washed all their feet, to perform maundy. They held all their maundy there, and there they remained Good Friday, all the long day, because it was Easter eve.)

(A procurator is an official of a monastery, the monk in charge of the finances and worldly affairs.)

So Good Friday is “holy Friday,” and we’ve been calling it that since the fourteenth century, although the use of good to refer to holy days in general is even older.

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Sources:

Anglo-Norman Dictionary, AND2 Phase 1, 2006, s.v. bon, adj.

Dictionary of Old English: A to Le, 2024, s.v. god, adj.

Horstmann, Carl. The Early South-English Legendary. Early English Text Society O.S. 87. London: N. Trübner, 1887, lines 361–66, 229. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud 108. Middle English Compendium.

Middle English Dictionary, 4 March 2025, s.v. fri-dai, n.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2014, s.v. Good Friday, n., good, adj., n., adv., & int., good tide, n.; June 2016, s.v. Long Friday, n.

Thorpe, Benjamin, ed. Ancient Laws and Institutes of England, vol. 2 of 2. London: Commissioners of the Public Records, 1840, 224. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

———. Ða Halgan Godspel on Englisc: The Anglo-Saxon Version of the Holy Gospels. London: J. G. F. and J. Rivington, 1842, John 18–19 (rubric), 227. Archive.org.

Image credit: Theophanes the Cretan, c. 1550, Stavronikita Monastery, Mt. Athos, Greece. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.