anaconda

A green anaconda (Eunectes murinus)

2 June 2025

The anacondas are a group of semiaquatic constrictor snakes native to South America. While the name can be applied to any of the species in the genus Eunectes, it is commonly used to specifically refer to the green anaconda, Eunectes murinus, the largest snake in the world by weight. (The reticulated python of Southeast Asia is longer.)

The name anaconda, however, is not of South American origin. Its origin is not known for certain, but it probably comes from the Sinhalese heṇakandayā (lightning/whip snake), and the name was first applied to a snake of Sri Lanka. Many sources point to Yule and Burnell hesitantly suggesting in their 1886 Hobson-Jobson that the name comes from the Tamil designation anaikondra, meaning “killed an elephant,” but they knew of no instances of the Tamil term being applied to a snake. The 1903 second edition of Hobson-Jobson, edited by William Crooke, includes the Sinhalese origin and says that one is “more plausible.”

The name anaconda first appears as a Latin coinage in John Ray’s 1693 Synopsis methodica animalium quadrupedum et serpentini Generis:

Serpens Indicus Bubalinus, ANACANDAIA Zeylonensibus, id est Bubalorum aliorumque jumentorum membra conterens.

(Indian Buffalo Snake, ANACANDAIA Zeylonensibus, that is crushing the limbs of buffalos and other animals)

Ray relied upon an earlier description of what was probably a reticulated python by German physician and naturalist Andreas Cleyer (1634–c. 1698), who had traveled widely in Asia. Ray’s Latin description of the snake, taken from Cleyer, was translated by Charles Owen in 1742, which is the earliest appearance of the name in English:

The Anacandia, a Ceylonick Serpent of monstrous Corpulence, being in longitude about 25 Foot. D. Cleyerus, who accounts for this gigantick Serpent, says, he saw one of them open’d, in whose Belly was found a whole Stag, with all his integral Parts: In another they found a wild Goat; and in a third, a Porcupine arm’d with all its Darts and Prickles. Serpents of this nature have often fallen in our way, by which we may imagine, that there is a vast spread of them over the Earth. Mr. Ray from Cleyrus gives this account of the Monster——Tho’ the Throat seems narrow, yet ’tis very extensible, and the Facts have been confirm’d by Experience. When the Prey is catch’d he wraps himself about it, takes it by the Nose, sucks the Blood, and soon reduces it to a Hodge-Podge; after he has broken the Bones in pieces, that emits a Sound like a Gun, ibid. And in doing all this he spends two days.

Anaconda moved from scientific nomenclature into the popular imagination with a lurid and fictional account of a snake, again probably intended to describe a reticulated python, eating a tiger written by an R. Edwin that appeared in the Edinburgh Weekly Magazine on 17 August 1768. It is clearly fiction, because not only is the description of how the snake eats fanciful, but tigers have never been native to Sri Lanka. The title of Edwin’s piece reads:

Description of the ANACONDA, a monstrous species of Serpent; in a letter from and English Gentleman, many years resident in the Island of Ceylon, in the East-Indies.

The account reads, in part:

The Ceylonese seemed to know the creature well; they call it Anacondo, and talked of eating its flesh when they caught it, as they had no small hopes of this; for, they say, when one of these creatures chuses a tree for its dwelling, he seldom quits it of a long time.

[…]

There are a great plenty of tygers, you must know, in this country; of these, of a monstrous size, not lower than a common heifer, as he went along, came at length under our serpent’s tree. In a moment we heard a dreadful rustling in the tree, and, swift as thought, the serpent dropt upon him, seized him across the back, a little below the shoulders, with his horrible mouth, and taking in a piece of the back bigger than a man’s head. The creature roared with agony, and, to our unspeakable terror, was running with his enemy towards us; his course, however, was soon stopped; for the nimble adversary winding his body three or four times around the body of his prey, girt him so violently, that he fell down in agony. The moment the serpent had fixed his folds, he let go the back of the creature, and raising and twining around his head, opened his horrid mouth to its full extent, and seized the whole face of the tyger in it, biting and grinding him in a most horrid manner, and at once choking him and tearing him to pieces.

In popular English usage, anaconda came to be applied to any large, constricting snake. For instance, there is this example of overwrought prose from Benjamin Disraeli’s first novel, Vivian Grey, published in 1826:

“Calm myself! Oh! it is madness; very, very madness! ’tis the madness of the fascinated bird; ’tis the madness of the murderer who is voluntarily broken on the wheel; ’tis the madness of the fawn, that gazes with adoration on the lurid glare of the anaconda’s eye; ’tis  the madness of a woman who flies to the arms of her—Fate;” and here she sprang like a tigress round Vivian’s neck, her long light hair bursting from its bands, and clustering down her shoulders.

The name was first applied to the South American snake by French naturalist Francois-Marie Daudin in 1802, writing about the le boa anacondo in the fifth volume of his natural history of reptiles. And English application of the name to the South American reptile is found in the 1836 Penny Cyclopedia:

Boa Scytale and Boa murina of Linnæus, Boa aquatica of Prince Maximilian. This species referred to by Linnæus under two specific names, according to Cuvier, is the Boa aquatica of Prince Maximilian and the Anaconda according to the same authority. Mr. Bennett observes in “The Tower Menagerie” that the name of Anaconda, like that of Boa Constrictor, has been popularly applied to all the larger and more powerful snakes. He adds that the word appears to be of Ceylonese origin, and applies it to the Python Tigris.

Brownish, with a double series of roundish black blotches all down the back. The lateral spots annular and ocellated, the disks being white, surrounded by blackish rings. Inhabits South America. The trivial name Murina was given to it from its being said to lie in wait for mice, and Seba has given a representation of it about to dart upon an American mouse, which he says is its usual food.

Over time the name anaconda became increasingly associated with the South American species and ceased to be used for the Asian snakes.

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Sources:

American Heritage Dictionary, fifth edition, 2022, s.v. anaconda, n. https://www.ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=anaconda

Bennett, Edward Turner. The Tower Menagerie. London: Robert Jennings, 1829, 237. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Daudin, Francois-Marie. Histoire Naturelle, Génerale et Particulière des Reptiles, vol. 5. Paris: F. Dufart, 1802, 161–67. Archive.org.

Disraeli, Benjamin. Vivian Grey, vol. 2 of 5. London: Henry Colburn, 1826, 73. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Edwin, R. “Description of the ANACONDA.” The Weekly Magazine, or, Edinburgh Amusement, 18 August 1768, 201–06 at 201 and 203–04. ProQuest: Historical Periodicals.

Owen, Charles. An Essay Towards a Natural History of Serpents. London: John Gray, 1742, 114. Gale Primary Sources: Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

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

Penny Cyclopedia, vol. 5 of 27, London: Charles Knight, 1836, s.v. boa, 26–27. HathiTrust Digital Library.

Ray, John. Synopsis methodica animalium quadrupedum et serpentini Generis. London: S. Smith and B. Walford, 1693, 332. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Yule, Henry and A. C. Burnell. Hobson-Jobson: The Definitive Glossary of British India (1886). Kate Teltscher, ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013, 62–64.

Yule, Henry and A. C. Burnell. Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases. London: John Murray, 1886, s.v. anaconda, n., 17. Archive.org.

Yule, Henry and A. C. Burnell. Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, second edition. William Crooke, ed. London: John Murray, 1903, s.v. anaconda, n., 24–25. Archive.org.

Photo credit: MKAMPIS, 2012. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

pay through the nose

30 May 2025

To pay through the nose is to pay too much for something, to be overcharged. The metaphor underlying the idiom is unknown, although there are some guesses that are supported by tenuous evidence.

What we do know is that the earliest known record of the phrase is from 1662. It appears in a Giovanni Torriano’s The Second Alphabet, a dictionary of Italian phrases. It appears three times in the book as English equivalents—not translations—of Italian phrases. The first of these is:

Andar alla gatta per il lardo, i.e. pagar salato per che che sia, to go to the cat for bacon, viz. to pay sawce for any thing whatsoever, to pay through the nose, to get a P— from a whore.

From this it is clear that the phrase was already in fairly widespread use when the book was published, but as far as I know, no one has found an earlier example. That is all we can say with certainty about the phrase’s origin.

It may be that the underlying metaphor is a very simple one: passing anything through one’s nose is rather unpleasant, as anyone who has laughed while drinking something can attest.

As for other possible explanations, there are a couple other words and phrases that may be related. In his excellent website Wordhistories.net, Pascal Tréguer hypothesizes that it may be related to a slightly older phrase, to bore one’s nose or to bore one through the nose. The phrase means to cheat or swindle someone, and the underlying metaphor seems to be lead someone by the nose or their nosering. The phrase appears in a 1577(?) play, Misogonus:

For trwly if he had come in his doublet ands house
he would haue made everie one your mastshipp to scorne
that old churle I am sure would haue borde you throughe nose
this trusse in all partes were so fouly torne

A second possibility is that it is related to another seventeenth-century slang term, rhino, meaning money, and the associated rhinocerical, meaning wealthy. Rhino in Greek, of course, means nose. The slang term appears in Thomas Shadwell’s 1688 play The Squire of Alsatia. In the following exchange, a conman and his confederate, Cheatly and Shamwell, are about to execute a scam on Belfond, the eldest son of wealthy man:

Cheat[ly]. My sprightly Son of Timber and of Acres: My noble Heir I salute thee: The Cole is coming, and shall be brought in this morning.

Belf.[ond] Sen. Cole? Why ’tis Summer, I need no firing now. Besides I intend to burn Billets.

Cheat. My lusty Rustick, learn and be instructed. Cole is in the language of the Witty, Money. The Ready, the Rhino; thou shalt be Rhinocerical, my Lad, thou shalt.

Belf. Sen. Admirable I swear! Cole! Ready! Rhino! Rhinocerical! Lord, how long may a man live in ignorance in the Country?

Sham[well]. Ay: But what Asses you’l make of the Country Gentlemen when you go amongst them. ’Tis a Providence you are faln into so good hands.

Belf. Sen. ’Tis a mercy indeed. How much Cole, Ready, and Rhino shall I have?

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, however, guesses that rhino may be a clipping of sovereign, in which case it has nothing to do with noses or paying through them.

One explanation for the phrase that we can conclusively dismiss is the popular notion that it dates to the eighth and ninth centuries when Viking raiders would cut off the noses of those who refused to pay them tribute. There is no evidence for such a practice, and if the phrase dated to the eighth century, we would have some record of it existing in the intervening centuries.

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Sources:

Bariona, Laurentius. Misogonus (1577?), 2.1. In R. Warwick Bond, ed. Early Plays from the Italian. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911, 194.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, accessed 26 April 2025, s.v. rhino, n.1.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2003, s.v. nose, n.; June 2010, rhino, n.1, rhinocerical, adj.

Shadwell, Thomas. The Squire of Alsatia. London: James Knapton, 1688, 3–4. ProQuest: Early English Books Online.

Torriano, Giovanni. The Second Alphabet Consisting of Proverbial Phrases. London: A. Warren, 1662, s.v. gatta, 71. ProQuest: Early English Books Online.

Tréguer, Pascal. “A Hypothesis as to the Origin of ‘Pay Through the Nose.’” Wordhistories.net, 26 November 2016.

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

deep state

The Warren Commission, which investigated the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, 1963, and which generated many conspiracy theories about the “deep state.” From left to right: former CIA Director Allen Dulles, Representative Hale Boggs, Senator John Cooper, Chief Justice Earl Warren, Senator Richard Russell, Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations John McCloy, and Representative Gerald Ford.

28 May 2025

A deep state is an entrenched, shadowy cabal of government bureaucrats and military officers who manipulate and control government policy to resist reform and measures that would reduce their power. In some political systems the deep state is a reality; in others it is more a paranoid conspiracy theory. The phrase is a calque, or loan-translation, of the Turkish derin devlet.

The earliest use of the English calque that I’m aware of is cited by the Oxford English Dictionary, from the 9 May 1997 issue of the periodical Turkish Probe:

Remnants of this extralegal paramilitary organization have been instrumental in the mafiozation trend in parts of the “deep state” as the national security emphasis shifted away from anti-communism and the Russian threat.

And on 26 September 1997 the phrase appears in the New York Times in an article about a Turkish lawyer who was sentenced to prison for making a speech in support of Kurdish separatism:

The coincidence of these three decisions caused much comment in political circles and the press, where the existence of a “deep state,” a set of obscure forces that seem to function beyond the reach of law, has become a major topic of discussion over the last year.

In the years that follow, deep state was applied in the context of countries other than Turkey, especially authoritarian regimes in the Middle East.

The earliest use of deep state in reference to the United States that I’m aware of is in Peter Dale Scott’s 2007 book The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America:

But there is another problem affecting the United States: our supposed open society is in fact partly driven by deeper forces many of us do not clearly see, especially in matters of foreign policy. This weakness of civil society at the federal level allows policy to be dictated by special interests. This is particularly true of foreign policy, more and more of which is driven by covert bureaucracies in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Pentagon, uncontrolled by the checks and balances of the public state. In this book I designate as the “deep state” (a term borrowed from Turkish analysts) that part of the state driven by top-down policy making, often by small cabals.

Scott, a noted Canadian diplomat, poet, and academic, uses the term in the context of a serious political analysis, arguing that entrenched special interests can thwart popular, democratic agendas, an argument that one can hardly dispute. But once the CIA and intelligence agencies are invoked, one can see how the argument was taken up conspiracy theorists and politicians who would use conspiracy theories to create popular appeals.

And by 2016, deep state was in use in an American context with just such a conspiracy-minded context. A piece in the 8–9 October issue of the Financial Times about film director Oliver Stone uses the phrase without explanation in just such a context:

If [Oliver] Stone resembles any American artist of this generation, it is Don DeLillo, “chief shaman of the paranoid school of American fiction,” as the NYRB once had him. Both men paint a country that was nearing its 200th year of innocence when the Kennedy assassination acquainted a simple people with the darker edges of life. Ever since, their work implies, the idea of America has been sullied by enemies within: the deep state, rampant markets, God-like technology.

A few months later, on 22 January 2017, two days after Donald Trump’s first inauguration as US president, London’s Sunday Times ran a piece in which another Stone, this time Trump consigliere Roger Stone, casts the newly inaugurated president as the enemy of the American “deep state”:

After a recent brush with illness, [Roger] Stone says he is convinced CIA operatives and parts of the intelligence establishment are out to get him—and by extension, Trump. He claims his doctor told him that he was poisoned with a radioactive substance such as polonium.

Stone believes that “the deep state” (American intelligence) is threatened by Trump, fearing the big changes he could force through.

So at least in the American context, deep state is what grammarian Bryan Garner calls a “skunked” term. What was once a useful term in political analysis has become a phrase that cannot be uttered by serious people without explanation and disclaimers because of its association with conspiracy theories and the corrupt politicians who use it to manipulate the public.

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Sources:

Ganesh, Janan. “I Was Always Concerned About Lies.” Financial Times (London), 8–9 October 2016, 3/4–5. Gale Primary Sources: Financial Times Historical Archive.

Harnden, Toby. “The Donald Did It My Way.” Sunday Times (London), 22 January 2017, 16/6. Gale Primary Sources: Sunday Times Historical Archive.

Kinzer, Stephen. “Blind Turk Is Going to Jail to Find Freedom, He Says.” New York Times, 26 September 1997, A6. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2023, s.v. deep state, n.

Scott, Peter Dale. The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007, xvi. JSTOR.

Photo Credit: Warren K. Leffler, 1963. Library of Congress. Public domain photo.

tweak

A radio operator tweaking the oscillator of a transceiver

26 May 2025

Tweak is both a verb and a noun with a base meaning of pinch, twist, or pull. From this, it has developed a number of other senses. The word, in the form twick, can be traced back to Old English. (The Oxford English Dictionary says this is only “perhaps,” but to my mind it is as certain as anything in this business.) We see this form in Bald’s Leechbook, a mid tenth-century medical text:

Wiþ ormætum hungre þonne scealt þu sona þæs mannes tilian: bind his ytmestan limo mid byndellum, teoh him þa loccas & wringe þa earan & þone wangbeard twiccige.

(For intense hunger, then you must soon treat the man, bind the ends of his limbs with bandages, pull from him the locks & wring the ears & twick the whiskers.)

Twick has been in use in various dialects through to the present day.

The form tweak appears at the beginning of the seventeenth century. We see it in a translation of Pliny’s Natural History:

These Spiders hunt also after the yong Lizards: first they enfold and wrap the head within their web: then, they catch hold and tweake both their lips together, and so bite and pinch them. A worthy sight and spectacle to behold, fit for a king, even from the stately Amphitheatres, when such a combat chanceth.

The translator, Philemon Holland, was known for using colloquial English in his translations of classical texts, so it seems likely that he was using a variant of the older twick. Holland's use of tweake here translates the Latin apprehendentes.

By the early eighteenth century, tweak had developed a figurative sense meaning to trouble, arouse, or spark. Nathan Bailey’s 1721 Universal Etymological English Dictionary records this sense:

A TWEAG, A TWEAK, [of Twaken, Teut.] Perplexity, Trouble.
To TWEAG  To TWEAK, [Twacken, Du. To pinch] to put into a fret.

And by the end of the nineteenth century in American speech tweak had also come to mean to bother, afflict, tease, make fun of. From Thomas Jerome’s 1895 novel Ku-Klux Klan No. 40:

“Oh, no; I did not mean to say that you should refrain from a prosecution for any reason,” answered Tinklepaugh. “I only thought to tease the Captain a little.”

And yet Tinklepaugh was tortured with a vague apprehension that an indictment of innocent persons for the murder of Old Stingy Jap might lead to the detection of the guilty slayers.

“Well I must confess that it does kinder stick a pin in my gizzard to tweak me about that little skirmish at the court-house,” answered Cross-eyed Telf; “but I’ll bet you next time I meet the Sheriff I’ll have my spurs on, and he won’t be allowed to snatch a bloodless victory, either.”

In the early twentieth century, cricketers started using tweak to refer to imparting spin on a ball. And a bowler who delivered tweaked balls was a tweaker. From the Times of London, 18 July 1935:

The score was 13 when Sims, a tweaker with possibilities, came on in place of Bowes, and Langridge was tried at the other end.

And in the latter half of the century, tweak was being used to mean to make small adjustments to something. From Omaha’s Sunday World-Herald Magazine of 20 April 1958 in an article about missile engineers:

“Otto,” somebody yelled, and out came Otto who marched up to the V-2, opened a small trap door, tweaked a gadget inside with a screwdriver, and the countdown proceeded. The V-2 worked like a charm.

This particular sense of tweak was especially common among automobile mechanics and could be found on both sides of the Atlantic. From London’s Sunday Telegraph of 14 July 1963:

After driving it for hundreds of miles I find its impressive record in rallies and races easy to understand. It is not a “hot rod” as you and I know the term, but a four-door, five-seat family saloon costing only £767—including tax—which has had its engine “tweaked” sufficiently at the factory to give a power-output of 78½ brake horse-power compared with 59½ in the ordinary £688 model.

And by the 1980s, tweak had become a slang term among drug, especially methamphetamine, users, also known as tweakers. The earliest drug-related use that I’m aware of is found in Ralph De Sola’s 1982 Crime Dictionary:

Tweak: (motorcycle-gang slang) inject heroin

Despite this early citation, use of tweak in relation to heroin is relatively rare.

(The OED has a 1981 citation of tweeked out, but the context has nothing to do with drugs, instead referring to the emotional state of a woman who had been raped.)

And we see tweak used in relation to methamphetamine by 1985. From Jennifer Blowdryer’s Modern English of that year:

TWEAK (v): When everybody is on speed, they are tweakin’ out on speed. One day turns into a week.

When we were living in the vats in San Francisco, everybody was always tweakin’, Animal was freakin’ out, me and Crystal had to get outta there. We took all these wires they were playin’ with, and made bracelets, and decided it would be anti-tweak, and we all took the fun bus, and we went to China Beach, and we had a big Barb que and everyone got drunk when they usually took speed and it was neat, it was  big anti-tweak campaign.

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Sources:

Bailey, Nathan. An Universal Etymological English Dictionary. London: E. Bell, et al. 1721. Gale Primary Sources: Eighteenth Century Collections Online.

Blowdryer, Jennifer (Jennifer Waters). Modern English: A Trendy Slang Dictionary. Berkeley: Last Gasp, 1985, 81. Archive.org.

Cockayne, Oswald, ed. Leechdoms, Wortcunning and Starcraft of Early England, vol. 2. London: Longman, et al., 1865, 2.16, 196. Archive.org.

“Cricket: Gentlemen v. Players.” Times (London), 18 July 1935, 6/1. Gale Primary Sources: Times Digital Archive.

De Sola, Ralph. Crime Dictionary. New York: Facts On File, 1982, 155. Archive.org.

Edwards, Courtenay. “Plenty of Spirit in Cortina G.T.” Sunday Telegraph (London), 14 July 1963, 20/2. Gale Primary Sources: Telegraph Historical Archive.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, accessed 24 April 2025, s.v. tweak, n.2, tweak, v.2, tweaked, adj., tweaker, n.2, tweaking, adj., tweaky, adj.

Jerome, Thomas J. Ku-Klux Klan No. 40 A Novel. Raleigh, North Carolina: Edwards & Broughton, 1895, 205. Google Books.

Lutz, William W. “Typical of Missilemen Is . . . ‘Mr. Redstone.’” Sunday World-Herald Magazine (Omaha), 20 April 1958, 22-G/3. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Middle English Dictionary, 4 March 2025, s.v. twikken, v.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2022, s.v. tweak, v., tweak, n.1, tweaker, n.; June 2019, s.v. twick, v.

Pliny the Elder. The Historie of the World. Philemon Holland, trans. London: Impensis G.B., 1601, vol. 1, book 11, chap. 24, 324. ProQuest: Early English Books Online.

Photo credit: Giorgio Brida, 2009. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

fascism / fascist

Mussolini and Hitler, 19 June 1940

23 May 2025

By strict definition, Fascism is an autocratic and ultranationalist political ideology, characterized by centralized authority focused on a dictatorial leader and militarism, use of force to suppress opposition, national or racial supremacy, and regimentation of society and the economy that subordinates the individual to the collective. It is most closely associated with Mussolini’s Partito Nazionale Fascista (National Fascist Party) in Italy and Hitler’s Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Worker’s (Nazi) Party). But Vladimir Putin’s Russia also fits this strict definition, as do Donald Trump’s aspirations in the United States. Beyond this strict definition, fascism and fascist are often used more broadly to refer to authoritarianism in general.

The term arose in Italy following World War I as a label for various ultranationalist groups vying for power, and Mussolini formed his Partito Nazionale Fascista in 1921. It comes from the Latin fasces, a symbol of power and authority in the Roman Empire consisting of a sheaf of rods bound around an ax. Fasces appears in the 1538 Latin-English Dictionary of Syr Thomas Eliot Knyght:

Fascis, is a burdeyn or knytche of wodde, or any other thyng. Also Fascis sagittarum is taken for a sheffe of arrowes.

Fasces, roddes bounden togyther, and an axe in the myddell, whiche were borne before the chiefe offycers of Rome, in declarynge their authoritie, whereof some had syxe, and some mo.

And it appears in English prose by 1591, but in italics, marking it as foreign word. In Henry Savile’s translation of Tacitus str is used in the English translation of a marginal note in Greek elaborating on <i>Consulare autority</i> (<i>Consulare imperium</i>)

To haue 12. fasces alwaies and in euery place borne before him, and to sit betweene the present Consuls in a chaire of estate.

And in Philemon Holland’s 1609 translation of Ammianus Marcellinus fasces appears to be fully anglicized:

Severo: who being Legatus Proconsulis in Africke, when one of his old acquaintance met with him going in state with his Fasces and Lictors before, and embraced him familiarly, without due respect of his high place, caused him to be scourged, sub elogio [praeconis] LEGATƲM P. R. homo plebeius temerè amplecti noli, i. Take heed another time how you, a commoner, seeme rudely to embrace a Lieutenant of the people of Rome.

Fasces continue to be used in iconography to this day to symbolize power and authority. For instance, fasces decorate the walls on either side of the rostrum in the US House of Representatives.

But modern use of fasces to represent power were taken to another level in twentieth-century Italy. The term Fascist, usually capitalized, appeared shortly after the end of World War I as a label for various ultranationalist political groups. By 1919, this label was appearing in English-language newspapers in articles about Italian politics. From London’s the Observer of 19 October 1919:

Among the parties we have the Moderates, the Clericals, the Liberals-Radicals, the Republicans, the Socialists, the Nationalists, and the “Fascists”—a group, this, of political opportunists which, beyond expressing ultra-patriotic doctrines, seems to have no more definite policy than that of attaining to power.

And we see Fascism in a book review for Sisley Huddleston’s Europe in Zigzags in the 8 December 1920 Providence Journal:

In his characteristically successful fashion he has so blended his material as to answer many questions about reparations, security, dictatorship and democracy, about Fascism and the youth movement.

[…]

With his memories of Italy are recalled interesting facts connected with the most noted authors and poets. Fascism, Mussolini and his relations with the church, the policy of Pope Pius CI, and the relations between France and Italy.

Mussolini would formally create his political party the following year.

But fascist and fascism, usually lower case, would soon come to be used more generally to refer to authoritarianism writ large. Poet Dylan Thomas used fascism in this general sense, not in direct reference to Italian Fascists or German Nazis, in a July 1939 letter:

But the result of a consciously-made intelligentsia may be to narrow, not to widen, the, if you’ll excuse me, individual outlook, and instead of a lonely man—and writing, again, is the result, as somebody said, of certain favourable bad conditions—working in face of an invisible opposition, (the crude opposition, of family, finance, etc. that says “writing is a waste of time” & “why don’t you do something worth-while” has always, surely, had to be disregarded) there may be just a group of condoling, sympathy-patting, “I was always bullied at school,” “So was I,” “Down with the philistines,” “They don’t understand a poet,” mutually acknowledging, ism and isting, uniformed grumblers making a communal opposition to a society in which, individually, they feel alone and unimportant. I’m selfish enough not to feel worried very much about the writer in his miserable artistic loneliness, whether it’s in Wales or Paris or London; I don’t see why it should be miserable anyway. I think that to fight, for instance, the fascism of bad ideas by uniforming & regimenting good ones will be found, eventually, to be bad tactics.

This general use would become much more common once Germany and Italy were defeated in World War II, but with the passing of the generation that fought that war, the stricter, more narrow sense is unfortunately becoming more relevant to present-day politics once again.

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Sources:

Elyot, Thomas. The Dictionary of Syr Thomas Eliot Knyght. London: Thomas Berthelet, 1538, sig. H.3. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

“The Italian Elections” (11 October 1919). Observer (London), 19 October 1919, 14/2. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Marcellinus, Ammianus. “Annotations and Conjectures Upon the 14. Booke of Ammianus Marcellinus.” The Roman Historie. Philemon Holland, trans. London: Adam Islip, 1609, sig.a.ii.v. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. fasces, n.; third edition, June 2014, s.v. fascism, n., fascist, n. & adj.

“Sisley Huddleston Looks at Europe” (book review). Providence Journal (Rhode Island), 8 December 1920, 28/1–2. Readex America’s Historical Newspapers.

Tacitus. The Ende of Nero and Beginning of Galba. Fower Bookes of the Histories of Cornelius Tacitus. Henry Savile, trans. Oxford: Joseph Barnes and R. Robinson for Richard Wright, 1591, 171, Annotations 79. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Thomas, Dylan. Letter to W. T. Davies, July, 1939. Dylan Thomas: The Collected Letters. Paul Ferris, ed. London: Paladin, 1987, 388–89. Archive.org.

Photo credit: Unknown photographer, 1940. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain photo.