leopards eating people’s faces

11 July 2025

The fictional and satirical Leopards Eating Faces Party was the brainchild of Adrian Bott, who posted this tweet to Twitter on 16 October 2015.

The sentiment, in the midst of the run-up to the 2016 presidential election expressed the frustration of progressives at those who supported Republican candidates whose stated policies ran contrary to the interests of those who supporting them.

The New Yorker published this cartoon by Phil Noth on 29 August 2016, while it does not use the same words, the metaphor of the prey voting for the predator is the same:

The cartoon features sheep looking at a billboard with a picture of a wolf in a business suit and the words “I am going to eat you.” One of the sheep says, “He tells it like it is.”

After a somewhat slow build, this metaphor for voter regret, or buyer’s remorse, went viral on social media. Following the first election of Donald Trump, the subreddit /r/LeopardsAteMyFace launched on 25 March 2017, containing examples of tweets and comments from people who were surprised when the politicians they had voted for fulfilled their campaign promises and did something that negatively affected them. For instance, on 28 May 2025, this tweet from a Trump voter bemoaning a raid by US immigration authorities at his workplace was posted to the subreddit:

Jake Cowan—in Florida State University

Lost a lot of good men today. I like Trump but this isn’t what I voted for. This will absolutely kill the economy in construction. I thought he was going after gang members and criminals with warrants. Not hard working guys.

But the sentiment was not restricted to Republicans and Trump voters. Nor is it even limited to the United States, being applied to those in the United Kingdom who regretted voting for Brexit, for example. In her blog of 29 January 2019, writer Carrie Marshall used leopards eating your face to refer to trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFS):

There’s a well-known gag on Twitter: “I can’t believe leopards are eating my face!” says woman who voted for the “Leopards Eating Your Face Party”.

In the US and increasingly in the UK, self-described “radical feminists” who hate trans people are linking arms with virulently anti-women, anti-abortion, anti-LGBT groups such as the Heritage Foundation, convinced that these leopards will only eat other people’s faces.

These leopards are behind much of the anti-trans legislation US republicans are trying to force through, much of which just so happens to restrict cisgender women’s reproductive rights. 

Marshall’s blog post also included Noth’s cartoon.

And the metaphor moved from the internet to traditional media in 2019, although the initial uses by traditional outlets featured the woes of Republican insiders rather than ordinary voters, a significant difference. Jill Filopovic wrote the following for CNN on 8 May 2019:

That the Trump family throws people under the bus when they become inconvenient is not news. Just ask his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani. Or his former fixer and lawyer, Michael Cohen. Or former administration members Rex Tillerson, H. R. McMaster, and Dina Powell. Or the entire nation of Canada.

The question isn't who Trump has screwed over or fed to the wolves. It's who he hasn't. I'm sorry Winston Wolkoff feels wronged. But it's hard not to hear her complaints sound a little too much like Adrean Bott's viral tweet: "'I never thought leopards would eat MY face,' sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party."

And Michelle Goldberg wrote in the New York Times on 4 December 2020:

Since Trump’s defeat, the MAGA revolution has begun devouring its own. As it does, some conservatives are discovering the downsides of having a president who spreads malicious conspiracy theories, subverts faith in democracy and turns the denial of reality into a loyalty test. As the internet meme goes, people voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party, and now the leopards are turning on them.

While its wording refers to electoral politics, the phrase’s sentiment is not limited to that sphere. Physician Yoo Jung Kim used the phrase in reference to COVID-19 anti-vaxxers in a USA Today op-ed on 12 August 2021:

Recently, Michael Freedy, a 39-year-old Las Vegas casino employee and father of five, caught COVID-19 while on vacation. He texted his fiancé from the hospital, “I should have gotten the damn vaccine.” He later died.

Freedy’ story went viral because his text highlighted the visceral regret felt by patients on their deathbeds, especially now COVID-19 is more preventable in the United States. While many commentators expressed sympathy to his grieving family, some were vicious. A particularly vocal source of COVID-19 schadenfreude can be seen in Reddit communities such as “CovIdi”ts" and “LeopardsAteMyFace.”

In one thread, users wrote: “It started as a virus and mutated into an IQ test.” “Guy wen from being a moron to a dead moron.” “If you die of Covid because you refused to get the vaccine then I have no sympathy or pity for you.”

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Sources:

Bott, Adrian (@cavalom). X.com (formerly Twitter.com), 16 October 2015.

cwhmoney555. “I Didn’t Think He was Going to Deport Those Immigrants!” Reddit.com, 29 May 2025.

Filipovic, Jill. “If You Work for Trump, Expect to Be ‘Thrown Under Bus.’” CNN Commentary, 8 May 2019. ProQuest: Wire Feed.

Goldberg, Michelle. “The MAGA Revolution Devours Its Own.” New York Times, 4 December 2020.

Kim, Yoo Jung. “Mocking Unvaccinated Is Counterproductive.” USA Today, 12 August 2021, 7A/3–4. ProQuest: Newspapers.

“Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party.” Knowyourmeme.com, accessed 11 June 2025.

Marshall, Carrie. “The ‘Leopards Eating Your Face’ Party.” Bigmouth Strikes Again (blog), 29 January 2019.

Noth, Phil. “He Tells It Like It Is” (cartoon). New Yorker, 29 August 2016, 47.

Image credits:

Tweet: Adrian Bott, 2015. X.com. Fair use of copyrighted tweet to illustrate the topic under discussion.

New Yorker cartoon: Phil Noth, 2016. Fair use of copyrighted image to illustrate the topic under discussion.

Tweet: Jake Cowan, 2025. Reddit. Fair use of copyrighted Reddit post to illustrate the topic under discussion.

love bug

Two conjoined love bugs, Plecia nearctica

9 July 2025

Back when I lived in Texas, each spring I would be subjected to two assaults. The first was by allergies, which I’d experienced before when living in more temperate climes, but which are especially bad in the Texas spring when everything is in bloom. The other was by swarms of Plecia nearctica, commonly known as the love bug. They are so called because they are most commonly seen when copulating, which is pretty much continuously during their short lifespans, appearing as two-headed bugs floating lazily through the air. They are also known as honeymoon flies, fuck bugs, and telephone bugs. This last name is a bit mysterious but is perhaps because, with their black color, they bear a vague resemblance to an old-time telephone.

Love bugs are common in Texas and all along the Gulf Coast of the United States. Originally from Central America, they were first recorded in the United States in 1911 and have been moving northward, now found as far north as North Carolina. They are mostly harmless. They don’t bite and are really only a nuisance because they tend to swarm, blackening car hoods and windshields, although their body chemistry is acidic and can damage the paint on older cars if not cleaned off quickly. The name love bug is also applied to other species that exhibit the same mating behavior, such as the Plecia longiforceps, originally native to the East Asian subtropics but which has been moving northward in recent years due to climate change, and annual swarms are now plaguing Seoul, Korea.

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) has a citation from 1937, but when viewed in context it’s not clear what insect is being referred to, or even if it is an insect at all. The article, about a Nebraska entomologist, that appears in the 25 July 1937 edition of the Lincoln, Nebraska Sunday Journal and Star reads:

There’s a popular song that goes like this: “The love bug will get you if you don’t watch out.”

It is not the love-bug though that is worrying the Nebraska farmer these days. He can put up with love-bugs, kissing-bugs and lady-bird beetles from spring until frost and from sun up until the chores are all done, but there are hundreds of other kinds, large and small, that make him fret at night and cuss during the day.

The first instance of love bug in the piece is clearly a reference to the metaphorical source of erotic infatuation. The second mention of love-bug is likely also metaphorical, and the third may refer to an actual insect, but if so it’s not clear which species.

The Dictionary of American Regional English records uses of love bug referring to Plecia nearctica from 1968 in north-central Florida and southeast Louisiana. The Florida description reads:

Love bugs—black-and-orange insects which mate in late August through September. They are seen coupled in thick swarms for as long as three weeks.

And Louisiana:

Love bug—a little black-and-orange insect about three-eighths of an inch long. They mate at certain times of the year, smearing windshields and covering pedestrians. You never see one separately; they are always coupled.

That metaphorical meaning of love bug is much older. But it seems this love bug was originally envisioned as a bacterium rather than an insect. There is this clearly tongue-in-cheek description of pathogen in Georgia’s Macon Telegraph and Messenger of 2 August 1882:

The Love Bug.

San Francisco Post

A California physician who discovered a new disease—love madness—has been experimenting with the persons afflicted therewith, and has produced the “love parasite,” or bacillus microccus. This he cultivated up to the twentieth generation, and with the parasites of that generation he inoculated a number of subjects. The inoculation was invariably successful, symptoms of the disease appearing a very short time after the operation. A bachelor, aged 50 years, on the first day after inoculation, had his whiskers dyed, ordered a suit of new clothes and a set of false teeth, bought a top buggy, a bottle of hair restorer, a diamond ring and a guitar, and began reading Byron’s poems. The inoculation produced symptoms of the same nature in a young lady of 45. She spent $5 at a drug store for cosmetics, sang “Empty is the Cradle,” sent out invitations for a party, and complained that the Chico young men do not go into society. An inoculated youth of 17, employed in a country store, did up a gallon of molasses in a paper bag, but [sic] the cat in the butter tub and threw some fresh butter of the window. Finally he sat in a basket of eggs while looking at the photograph of a pretty girl and was discharged for his carelessness. The Chico doctor is still experimenting, and will soon lay lay the results of his observations before the medical world.

(I can’t find any records for the San Francisco Post.)

And here is one that is a metaphorical insect from the Indianapolis Star of 29 June 1907:

LOVE BUG STINGS AGED MAN FOR FIFTH TIME

Senile Bridegroom Proudly Makes Unique and Surprising Announcement of Coming Marriage to His Friend.

CHICAGO, June 28.—“Charlie, my son, I have been stung by the love bug the fifth time.” This was the announcement made today by Ossian Guthrie, 81 years old, of his marriage next Monday night to Mrs. Elizabeth F. Flower, 71 years old, 122 East Forty-second Place.

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Sources:

Bond, George. “Prof. D. B. Whelan Traps Insects, Studies distribution, and Determines Infestations.” Sunday Journal and Star (Lincoln, Nebraska), 25 July 1937, C-D—Two/1. NewspaperArchive.com.

Dictionary of American Regional English, 2013, s. v. love bug n, honeymoon fly n, fuck bug n, telephone bug n.

“The Love Bug.” Macon Telegraph and Messenger (Georgia), 2 August 1882, 2/5. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“Love Bug Stings Aged Man for Fifth Time.” Indianapolis Star, 19 June 1907, 1/4. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Myung-hee Yi, et al. “Microbiome of Lovebug (Plecia longiforceps) in Seoul, South Korea.” Microbiology Spectrum, 12.7, July 2024, 1–10. DOI: 10.1128/spectrum.03809-23. National Library of Medicine: PubMed Central.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, 2008, s.v. love bug, n.

Rashid, Raphael. “Seoul Wrestles with How to Handing Invasion of ‘Lovebugs.’” Guardian, 30 June 2025.

Photo credit: Unknown photographer, 2005. Wikimedia Commons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Lovebugs.jpg Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

tarheel / rosin heel

“The Turpentine Industry of North Carolina,” W. P. Snyder, 1884

7 July 2025

Tarheel is a nickname for a native of North Carolina. The term is preceded by the older rosin heel. Originally an epithet, its early history is mixed up in the racist attitudes of the antebellum South. But tarheel has been ameliorated and is now used proudly by residents of that state, and its use today is free of any racial connotation.

The tar and rosin in the term is from the use of pine-tree sap in the maritime and naval industries of the early nineteenth century. Workers who harvested the sap in the American South, a mix of poor whites and enslaved Blacks, would often go barefoot, getting the tar/rosin on the soles of their feet. And this industry was a significant contributor to North Carolina’s economy in the antebellum era.

The earliest use of rosin heel that I’m aware of is from a 5 May 1826 letter to the Natchez, Mississippi Ariel describing an argument between two white men, one well to do and the other poor:

One of the disputants was a short, fat, rich, independent looking fellow, with a large gold watch-key and chain, hanging from his fob, and a gold headed cane dangling in his right hand, and as I have since understood is a rich planter in this neighborhood; he most uncivilly told the other he had no right to an opinion upon the subject of a lighthouse; that he was a rosin heel, and should not offer an opinion upon a subject of national concern. The other who was dressed in plain homespun, with a long ox-whip in his hand, replied by calling the other a gum head, and told him he reckoned he had seen some people with golden purses have very gummy heads; that it was not every man who had a long purse that had a long head.

Note that gum is another name or pine-tree sap.

Also from 1826 is this from Timothy Flint’s account of his travels through the Mississippi Valley:

Such is the general face of the country in West Florida. It possesses in its swamps a considerable quantity of live oak, and masts and spars enough for all the navies of the world. It is capable of furnishing inexhaustible supplies of pitch, tar, &c. The high grass, which grows every where among the pine trees, opens an immense range for cattle. There are some tolerable tracts of land along the rivers; but generally the land is low, swampy, and extremely poor. The people, too, are poor and indolent, devoted to raising cattle, hunting, and drinking whiskey. They are a wild race, with but little order or morals among them; they are generally denominated “Bogues,” and call themselves “rosin heels.” The chief town is Pensacola, which grew rapidly, and received an increase of many inhabitants and handsome houses, until the fatal summer of 1822, when it suffered so severely from yellow fever, since which it has declined. It has a fine harbour, and the government has made it a naval depot, which will probably raise it once more.

Rosin heel seems to have been applied only to poor whites. Tarheel, however, was applied to both whites and Blacks. The difference may have to do with the fact that rosin is lighter than tar. Use of tarheel to refer to Blacks was probably influenced by the phrase, current at the time, like tar on a n——r’s heel. Here is an example of the phrase from Indiana’s Fort Wayne Sentinel of 16 September 1848. The article, in the dialectal voice of one Hetty Jones, undoubtedly fictional and perhaps Black, uses the phrase in reference to Martin Van Buren. During his earlier term as president, Van Buren, a Democrat, compromised his anti-slavery principles in order to get elected. In 1848 he was running on the abolitionist Free Soil Party ticket:

He talked as nice and soft as a Congressman about the dear people, and comperises  of the constitution, and scrub treasury, & all them things—he stuck up to the South then like the tar to a n[——]er’s heel—woul n’t even let a woolly headed cuss go free in the District of Columbia—nor he wouldn’t let a dockiment of the abolitioners go in the mail bags.

The earliest published use of tarheel that I’m aware of, however, is in reference to poor whites. From a letter, dated 6 October 1846, published it the Emancipator, it is not specific to North Carolina:

There are at this moment at least as many poor whites in the slave states as there are slaves, who are hardly less miserable than the slaves themselves. They have no weight in society, grow up in ignorance, are not permitted to vote and are tolerated as an evil, of which the slaveholder would gladly be rid. They are never spoken of without some contemptuous epithet. “Red shanks,” “Tar heels,” &c., are the names by which they are commonly known. The slaveholders look with infinite contempt upon these poor men—a feeling which they cherish for poor men every where.

But there is this mention of the name Pompey Tarheel in Philadelphia’s Neal’s Saturday Gazette and Lady’s Literary Museum of 22 January 1848:

Mrs. Farthingale was the other day overlooking a lazy son of Guinea in her employ, as he was sweeping down the sanded floor of the kitchen, and remarking the queer figures the dark one drew with his broom, observed:

"Well Caesar, you can draw, pretty well, can't you?"

"Yah, yes, gorramighty Missus, I can draw fust rate; last Saturday I took a policy for Pompey Tarheel, and I drawed fifty dollars."

Mrs. F. drew herself up into one of her highly dignified attitudes, and—left the kitchen.

Several scholars have taken the name Pompey Tarheel to be a reference to an enslaved person—naming enslaved Blacks after classical figures was common, as seen by the name Caesar here. But I think it may be the name of a racehorse, given the use of the word policy, which can refer to a promissory note made when making a wager. It's not uncommon for slang terms to make early appearances in print in the names of racehorses; edited publications might eschew slang terms in general, but they would print the names of horses in race results.

Then there is a use of Fred Douglass Tarheel in the Indiana Herald of 24 November 1852:

“Well, we are glad the election is over, if we did “come out a little horn.” Democrats will now discover that there are some decent people among the Whigs, and vice versa. A Whig lady can now lend her Democratic neighbor her coffee-mill, and in turn, borrow an egg to put in her pan-cakes. Andrew Jackson Croutcutter will now be allowed to play with Henry Clay Snakefeeder's pet hog; and Fred Douglass Tarheel will se-saw with John Quitman Screwdriver, and take the South side of the fence. All will go just as if one person were as good as another!

Again, the association here of tarheel with Douglass more likely arises out of his politics than because of his race. The proper names mentioned are fictional stand-ins for members of the two political parties, named after prominent members of them: Andrew Jackson and John Quitman were Democrats; Henry Clay and Frederick Douglass were Whigs. Of course, tarheel here could carry both a racial and a political connotation.

But the earliest use of tarheel to refer specifically to a North Carolinian is in reference to a Black man. It appears in California’s San Andreas Independent of 6 February 1858:

“Dont yah call dis er’n a Down-easter,” said Scip, “yah mis’ble dirt-eatin Norf C’lina tar-heel,” and with this he grew bellicose and pitched into Pomp, knocking his nose into something like a mashed potato putting Paddy’s seal on both his eyes, scattering half a pound of wool over the ground, and winding up an argument more creditable to the valor than the discretion of the chivalrous Pompey.

The question here, however, is to what degree was the epithet applied because of the man’s race as opposed to where he was from. So the association of tarheel with Blackness is a muddied one. The word could be applied to Blacks as well as whites, tar is often associated with Blackness, and the contexts that used tarheel to refer to a Black person were clearly racist. But it’s not clear that the term itself had a primary meaning of, or even a strong connotation of, race.

Tarheel becomes even more strongly, and even exclusively, associated with North Carolina during the Civil War, when soldiers in regiments from other Southern states used it to refer to North Carolina regiments. The North Carolinian soldiers took the epithet in stride and proudly claimed it for their own. Thus the process of amelioration began, and today it is not only used proudly, but it lacks any racist association that it might have once had.

Discuss this post

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Sources:

I am indebted to Bonnie Taylor-Blake and Bruce Baker, who pioneered the scholarship of this term in recent years. Most of the citations in this entry were discovered by them.

Baker, Bruce E. “Why North Carolinians Are Tar Heels.” Southern Cultures, 21.4, Winter 2015, 81–94. DOI: 10.1353/scu.2015.0041. Project Muse. An open-access version without the source notes is available here. 

Bayley, A. L. “To the Workingmen of Essex” (6 October 1846). Emancipator (Boston), 21 October 1846, 1/3. Gale Primary Sources: Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers.

“Carrying the War into Africa.” San Andreas Independent (California), 6 February 1858, 3/1. NewspaperArchive.com.

Dictionary of American Regional English Online, 2013, s.v. tarheel, n.

“Evening Lectures of Hetty Jones.” Fort Wayne Sentinal (Indiana), 16 September 1848, 1/5. NewspaperArchive.com.

Flint, Timothy. Recollections of the Last Ten Years. Boston: Cummings, Hilliard, 1826, 318–19. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

A Funny Man.” Indiana Herald (Huntington), 24 November 1852, 2/3. Newspapers.com.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, accessed 8 June 2025, s.v. tarheel, n., tarheel, adj., rosin heel, adj.

Letter (5 May 1826). Ariel (Natchez, Mississippi), 12 May 1826, 6/1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

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

Taylor-Blake, Bonnie. “Tar heels [1846].” ADS-L, 11 April 2009.

———. “Unusual Use of ‘Tarheel’ (1848, 1852).” ADS-L, 21 September 2013.

———. “Who Put the ‘Tar’ in ‘Tar Heels’?: Antebellum Uses of the Epithet and Its Application to North Carolinians.” So They Say (blog), 29 April 2022.

“Whims and Oddities.” Neal’s Saturday Gazette and Lady’s Literary Museum (Philadelphia), 22 January 1848, 4/9. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Image Credit: W. P. Snyder, 1884. Harper’s Weekly, 17 May 1884, 312. HathiTrust Digital Archive. Public domain image.

fiscal / procurator-fiscal

4 July 2025

One of my favorite TV shows is Shetland, a police procedural set, obviously, on the Shetland Islands. One of the words that keeps popping up is fiscal. The detectives talk of referring matters to the “fiscal” or someone has to fly to Aberdeen to meet with the “fiscal office.” At first I thought it was just a reference to monetary matters—after all investigations cost money and a high-profile murder case is going to need a lot of that—but it soon became clear that the context the word was used had to do with the prosecution of crimes and matters relating to what in the United States would be handled by a coroner’s office. I had stumbled on a common word that means something quite different in the jargon of the Scottish legal system; fiscal is shorthand for procurator-fiscal, the title given to a prosecutor in Scotland.

Fiscal comes to us from Romance languages and ultimately from Latin. Fiscus is the Latin word for the state treasury, and fiscalis is an adjective relating to matters concerning the public purse. A fiscus is literally a basket, originally a woven container for storing money which subsequently developed a figurative sense relating to the treasury or monetary matters. This monetary sense is present in classical Latin, and it can be found in Anglo-Latin from the early eighth century. The later borrowing into English was also influenced by Norman French. In English-language use, fiscal appears by the late sixteenth century. Here it is in the 1570 edition of John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments:

Also, seing they [i.e., prelates] may bee alienated, they may be prescribed, especiallye (the kynges thus consenting who co[n]firmed the same so long a time) which excludeth all ryght both fiscall and ecclesiasticall.

This monetary sense is the one that is most prevalent in English around the world today.

Procurator also has its origins in Latin, but it is an older borrowing into English than fiscal. It comes to English from Latin via Anglo-Norman. In Latin a procurator is a manager or overseer of an estate, and during the Roman empire the word was also used to mean a tax-collector. In Anglo-Norman, the word referred to an agent or attorney who acted on behalf of another or a manager of an estate or a religious house or abbey, and the word is recorded at the beginning of the thirteenth century. That’s the sense that made it into English in the early fourteenth century. There is this description of Mary Magdalene from the c. 1300 Early South English Legendary and describes her as Christ’s procurator, the keeper of his household:

Marie þe Maudeleyne : ore swete louerd hire schrof,
Swete Iesu crist out of hir e : seue deuelene he drof.
Ore louerd makede hire is procuratour : his leof and is hostesse;
heo louede him with gret honour : in pays and in destresse.

(Mary Magdalene, our dear lord confessed her. Dear Jesus Christ drove seven devils out of her. Our lord made her his procurator, his beloved and his hostess; she loved him with great devotion, in peace and in distress.)

By the end of the fourteenth century, procurator had acquired an additional sense of an attorney or advocate, an extension of the agent sense. We see this sense in Chaucer’s Friar’s Tale:

May I nat axe a libel, sire somonour,
And answere there by my procuratour
To swich thyng as men wole opposen me?

(May I not ask for a written copy of the charge, sir summoner,
And answer through my procurator
To such thing as men will accuse me?)

And in Scotland procurator combined with fiscal, and a procurator-fiscal was a prosecutor of crimes and served as a coroner. Originally, the procurator-fiscals were responsible for collecting fines, but the duties expanded over time. Scottish use of procurator, meaning prosecutor, can be found by the start of the fifteenth century. Procurator-fiscal in that sense appears by the middle of the sixteenth century. And by the late seventeenth century, procurator-fiscal was being clipped to just fiscal, which brings me full circle back to the TV series Shetland.

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Sources:

Anglo-Norman Dictionary, AND2 Phase 4, 2017, s.v. projuratour, n. https://anglo-norman.net/entry/procuratour

Chaucer, Geoffrey. “The Friar’s Tale” (c. 1395). The Canterbury Tales, 3.1595–97. Harvard’s Geoffrey Chaucer Website.

Foxe, John. The First Volume of the Ecclesiasticall History Contayning the Actes and Monumentes of Thynges Passed in Euery Kynges tyme in this Realme. London: John Daye, 1570, 456/2. ProQuest: Early English Books Online. Transcription available at: The Acts and Monuments Online.

Horstmann, Carl, ed. The Early South English Legendary (c. 1300). Early English Text Society O.S. 87. London: N. Trübner, 1887, lines 137–40, 466. Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse.

Latham, Ronald E., David R. Howlett, and Richard K. Ashdowne, eds. Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013, s.v. fiscalis, fiscus, procurator. Brepols: Database of Latin Dictionaries.

Lewis, Charlton T. and Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary, 1879, s. v. fiscalis, fiscus, procurator. Brepols: Database of Latin Dictionaries.

Middle English Dictionary, 4 March 2025, s.v. procuratour, n.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2007, s. v. procurator, n.1; procurator-fiscal, n.; second edition, 1989, s. v. fiscal, adj. and n.

Image credit: Shetland Times, 3 October 2024. Fair use of a low-resolution copy of the image to illustrate the topic under discussion.

star-spangled / spangle

2 July 2025

Fort McHenry, Baltimore, Maryland

We all know that Francis Scott Key wrote the Star-Spangled Banner in 1814 after watching the British bombardment of Fort McHenry in Baltimore harbor:

O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

But most of us don’t know what a spangle is or that Key wasn’t the first to refer to the U.S. flag as the star-spangled banner. Key wasn’t even the first poet to write an ode to the flag that was set to the tune of Anacreon in Heaven, which is better known today as the melody of the U.S. national anthem.

A spangle is a shiny piece of metal used to decorate fabric—similar to a sequin. The origin is a bit muddied, with a precursor in Old English, but with the modern meaning heavily influenced by a borrowing from Middle Dutch.

In Old English, a spang is a clasp or fastener. The word appears in the Old English biblical poem Genesis in a passage about Satan preparing to travel to Earth to tempt Adam and Eve:

Angan hine þa gyrwan    Godes andsaca,
fus on frætwum    —hæfde fæcne hyge—
hæleð-helm on heafod asette    and þone full hearde geband,
spenn mid spangum.

(Then God’s adversary began to prepare himself, eager in his adornments—he had deceitful intentions—he set a helmet of invisibility on his head and fastened it very firmly, bound with clasps.)

By the beginning of the fifteenth century, we see that spang had lost the meaning of a clasp and acquired that of a small, metal ornament. This shift in meaning is probably from a borrowing of the Middle Dutch spang, which had the ornament sense in addition to that of a clasp. And in the fifteenth century we start seeing the form spangle. Here is an example from a 6 June 1462 inventory of items, made by John Paston, that had belonged to Sir John Falstolf (1380–1459, the real-life namesake of Shakespeare’s fictional character):

Item, a litell cheyne of gold wyth a perle hangyng therby and ij spangell[es] of gold.

(The Paston family papers are a treasure trove of linguistic and historical information about daily, albeit aristocratic, life in the fifteenth century.)

And we see the verb to spangle, meaning to decorate with the same, by 1548, when it appears in Edward Hall’s description of Henry VIII’s New Year’s festivities 1510–11:

In came the kyng with fiue other, appareled in coates, the one halfe of russet satyn, spangeld with spangels of fine gold, the other halfe riche clothe of gold, on their heddes cappes of russet satin, embroudered with workes of fine gold bullio[n].

The adjective spangled is in place by 1555, when it appears in a description of the clothing of the people of Panchaia, an island said to be in the Indian Ocean (exactly where Panchaia was is uncertain; it may be fictional, or perhaps it is Socotra or Bahrain):

Their garmentes by the reason of the finesse of the wolle of their shiepe specially aboue other, are verye softe and gentle clothe. Bothe menne and women vse ther, to sette oute them selues with Iuelles of golde, as cheines, braselettes, eareringes, tablettes, owches, ringes, Annuletes, buttons, broches, and shoes embraudred, and spangled with golde, of diuers colours.

And we see star-spangled by 1600 in poetic lines attributed to Thomas Dekker in Robert Allott’s collection of poetry titled Englands Parnassus:

Great Delian Priest, we to adore thy name,
Haue burnt fat thighes of Bulls in hallowed flame,
vvhose sauour wrapt in smoake and clowdes of fire
To thy starre-spangled Pallace did aspire.

Star-spangled became a rather common adjective referring to the night sky and other heavenly things. And the term was applied to the American flag as early as 1805 when it appears in a patriotic song set to the tune of Anacreon in Heaven, the same tune that Key’s poem would be set to and which is familiar to us today as the US national anthem. The song was printed in Baltimore’s American and Commercial Daily Advertiser on 14 December 1805. According to that paper, it had been sung at a 30 November 1805 dinner at McLaughlin’s Tavern in Georgetown (now part of Washington, DC) in honor of naval captains Stephen Decatur and Charles Stewart, heroes of the First Barbary War (1801–05). The third verse of that song reads:

In the conflict resistless, each toil they endur’d
Till their foes shrunk dismay’d from the war’s desolation;
And pale beam’d the Crescent, it’s splendour obscur’d
By the light of the star-spangled flag of our nation,
Where each flaming star gleam’d a meteor of war,
And the turban’d heads bow’d to the terrible glare,
Then mixt with the olive the laurel shall wave,
And form a bright wreath for the brow of the brave.

Note that Key was a resident of Georgetown at this time and may have attended the dinner. He also called Baltimore home and would have been familiar with that city’s newspapers. The lyrics, especially the chorus, marked in italics in the paper, bear a similarity to the lines that Key would later write.

That 1805 song used the phrase star-spangled flag, but star-spangled banner is applied to the American flag as early as 1808, in an Ode to Independence, also set to the tune of Anacreon in Heaven. The poem was published in another Baltimore paper, the Whig, on 27 June 1808. The second verse of the ode reads:

Inspired by the genius, our fathers unfurl’d
    Her star-spangled banner, and own’d her dominion;
Bade their cannon indignant proclaim to the world
    Their oath to be freemen in act and opinion.
        While her eagle on high,
        Flashing fire from his eye,
Saw the olive disdain’d—and his thunders let fly.

Key would write his version, originally titled The Defence of Fort M’Henry, six years later.

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Sources:

Thanks to Kenneth Liss for pointing out the 1805 quotation to me.

Allott, Robert. Englands Parnassus: or the Choysest Flowers of Our Moderne Poets.” London: For N. Ling, C. Burby, and T. Hayes, 1600, 373. ProQuest: Early English Books Online.

The Fardle of Facions Conteining the Aunciente Maners, Customes, and Lawes, of the Peoples Enhabiting the Two Partes of the Earth, Called Affrike and Asia. London: John Kingston and Henry Sutton, 1555, sig. H2v–H3r. ProQuest: Early English Books Online.

“Genesis.” In Old Testament Narratives. Daniel Anlezark, ed. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 7. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2011, 33–34, lines 442–45.

Hall, Edward. The Vnion of the Two Nobel and Illustre Famelies of Lancastre [and] Yorke. London: Richard Grafton, 1548, fol. 16r. ProQuest: Early English Books Online.

“Inventory and indenture: Draft 1462, 6 June.” Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century, Part 1. Norman Davis, ed. Early English Text Society S.S. 20. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004, 1:108. Archive.org.

“McLaughlin’s Tavern.” American and Commercial Daily Advertiser (Baltimore, Maryland), 14 December 1805, 3/2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Middle English Dictionary, 4 March 2025, s.v. spang, n., spangled, adj.

“An Ode to Independence.” Whig (Baltimore), 27 June 1808, 3/2.  Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2016, s.v. star-spangled, adj., star-spangled banner, n.; second edition, 1989, s.v. spangled, adj., spangle, v., spangle, n.1, spang, n.1.

Photo credit: David Wilton, 2024. Licensable under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.