right stuff

The Mercury Seven astronauts with a US Air Force F-106B jet aircraft. From left to right: Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, John Glenn, Gus Grissom, Wally Schirra, Alan Shepard, and Deke Slayton

6 June 2025

Today the phrase the right stuff is inextricably linked to test pilots and astronauts, thanks to Tom Wolfe’s 1979 book The Right Stuff and the 1983 Hollywood movie made from it about the early years of the U.S. space program. The right stuff is that ineffable quality that makes one right for a particular job, a combination of skill, determination, audacity, and intelligence, along with properly tempered ambition. But Wolfe was not the first to use the phrase in this sense; far from it.

The phrase can be found as far back as 1748 in the sense of an alcoholic drink, but the application to human qualities is first found in Samuel Foote’s 1778 play A Trip to Calais, where the right stuff is used to refer to the qualities that make a young man a hard-partying man-about-town, and given the earlier sense, implies that the men may not be drunk enough:

Yes, yes, they look of that cut; not of the right stuff, as the French say, to make bucks desprits on.

A century later, James Fenimore Cooper uses the phrase in the sense familiar to us today in a biographical sketch of Edward Preble which appeared in Graham’s American Monthly Magazine in May 1845. Preble was the naval officer who commanded the blockade of and assault on Tripoli during the First Barbary War, an operation perhaps best known from the reference to the “shores of Tripoli” in the Marines’ Hymn. Cooper writes about a boyhood incident where, during a boating party, Preble threw stones at a boat containing his father, General Jedediah Preble:

Many anecdotes are related of the boyhood of young Preble, all tending to prove his courage, determination and high temper. On one occasion, his father was about to go on an excursion to the neighboring islands, with a party of gentlemen, and the boy was denied a place in the boat, on account of his tender years. In order to get rid of his importunities, his father gave Edward a task, which it was thought could not possibly be completed in time, with promise that he should go, did he get through with it. The boy succeeded, and, to his father’s surprise, appeared on the shore, claiming the promised place in the boat. This was still denied him, under the pretext that there was not room. Finding the party about to shove off without him, young Preble, then about ten years of age, commenced hostilities by making an attack with stones picked up on the wharf, peppering the party pretty effectually before his laughing father directed a capitulation. It seems the old general decided that the boy had the “right stuff” in him, and overlooked the gross impropriety of the assault, on account of its justice and spirit.

While the anecdote is too perfect to be true, a hagiographic illustration of the boyhood of a future naval hero, Cooper is using the phrase in exactly the same sense that Wolfe would over a century later.

Other writers have used the phrase over the years prior to Tom Wolfe, most notably Virginia Woolf, who wrote in The Voyage Out in 1915:

He told me all about his life, and his struggles, and how fearfully hard it had been. D’you know, he was boy in a grocer’s shop and took parcels to people’s houses in a basket? That interested me awfully, because I always say it doesn’t matter how you’re born if you’ve got the right stuff in you.

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Sources:

Cooper, James Fenimore. “Sketches of Naval Men. Edward Preble.” Graham’s Magazine, 27.5, May 1845, 205–15 at 206. Archive.org.

Foote, Samuel. A Trip to Calais. London: T. Sherlock for T. Cadell, 1778, 25. Archive.org. (The OED gives a 1775 date for this play, which I believe is in error. Foote published a prose piece of the same title that year.)

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2010, s.v. right, adj. & int.

Woolf, Virginia. The Voyage Out. London: Duckworth, 1915, 224. Archive.org.

Photo credit: NASA, 1961. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

D-Day / H-Hour / J-Day

American troops landing at Omaha Beach, Normandy, 6 June 1944

4 June 2025

D-Day is probably best known as a name for 6 June 1944, when Allied troops landed on the coast of German-occupied France during World War II. It was the largest seaborne invasion in history, with over 150,000 American, British, and Canadian troops landing in Normandy, including 23,000 airborne paratroopers, and involving almost 7,000 ships, boats, and landing craft. But it turns out that the term has an older, more general meaning, and it is also something of a redundancy.

The term comes out of the American military and is used in the planning for any operation, the Normandy invasion being only the most famous example. The D simply stands for day, so literally, D-Day is day-day. The term is used in coordinating the timing of a military operation. D+0 ("D plus zero"), or D-Day, is the start of the operation. D+1 ("D plus one") is the next day, D+2 is the day after that, etc. Similarly, D-1 ("D minus one") is the day before the operation and used to designate the timing of preparations. H and H-Hour are used in a similar fashion. The advantage of this system is that if the date of the operation is advanced or delayed, the plans don’t need to be revised. In fact, the Normandy landings were originally scheduled for 5 June 1944, but bad weather delayed the operation by one day.

D-Day and H-Hour were not invented in World War II; instead they date to World War I. And before D-Day was coined, the term J-Day was used to signify the beginning of an operation. The J is from the French jour (day), and the American military practice of planning the timing of an operation in this fashion was adopted from the French, with whose army the WWI American Expeditionary Forces often had to coordinate operations. The use of the letter J to signify the day of an attack appears in a French operations order from October 1917:

Les coups de mains sont de plus en plus nécessaires à mesure que le jour J—le jour de l'attaque—se rapproche.

(The sudden attacks in force become more and more necessary as the day J—the day of the attack—approaches.)

The earliest American use of J-Day and H-Hour that I have found is in an operations plan of the U.S. 16th Infantry Regiment, part of the 1st Division, from 21 February 1918:

Artillery: From J minus 5 day to J day—Cutting gaps in the enemy’s wire at points other than that of the real objective, namely, Salient LAHAYVILLE and Salient 2520.

[…]

Box Barrage—A box barrage of 45 minutes duration will be held at H hour as shown on the sketch. At H plus 25 the box barrage will close down to the enemy’s first four lines which will be heavily shelled till close of operation.

D-Day enters U.S. Army nomenclature later that year. The earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is from the First Army, American Expeditionary Force in Field Order No. 8, issued on 7 September 1918:

The First Army will attack at H-Hour on D-Day with the object of forcing the evacuation of St. Mihiel salient.

An alternative suggested origin for J-Day is that it stands for jump-off day. The phrase jump off was used by the AEF in World War I, but it is more likely that the French practice was adopted by the less-experienced American forces and then later anglicized to D-Day. The use of J-Day in English was limited to official operations plans and orders—or at least I’ve found no examples of it in less-official sources. If it were from jump-off day, then one would expect to see it in wider use.

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Sources:

Headquarters, 16th Infantry. “Plan for Raid on Richecourt Salient.” 21 February 1918. World War Records First Division A.E.F. Regular, vol. 10. First Division Museum.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. D-Day, n., H-Hour, n.

D'un poste e commendement (P.C. du 21e C.A.) Bataille de l’Ailette (23 octobre–2 novembre 1917). Paris: E. Flammarion, 1918, 61. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Reitan, Peter. “‘H-Hour’ and ‘J-Day’, 21 Feb 1918.” ADS-L, 4 May 2025.

Photo credit: Herman V. Wall, 1944. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

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.