Cajun / Acadian / Arcadian

21 July 2025

A Cajun is a member of the community of descendants of French Canadians who colonized the Bayou Teche region of Louisiana after 1755, the dialect spoken by them—a variety of English with strong influence from Louisiana French—or a style of cuisine, a mix of French and African influences, popular among them that includes gumbo, jambalaya, and crawfish as primary features.

Cajun is a variant of the French Acadian, which in turn is from the Greek Ἀρκαδία (Arcadia), a mountainous region of the Peloponnesus in Greece which became a metaphor of an ideal, rustic life, such as that lived in the mythical Golden Age.

We see this metaphorical sense of Arcadia being used in English by the late sixteenth century. Here is an example from Thomas Watson’s poem Eglogve Vpon the Death of the Right Honorable Sir Francis Walsingham (also known as Meliboeus), which Watson produced in two versions, Latin and English. It’s inspired by Virgil’s Eclogue 1. Watson writes in the preface:

A third fault (haply) will bee found, that my pastorall discourse to the vnlearned may seeme obscure: which to preuent, I haue thought good, here to aduertise you, that I figure Englande in Arcadia; Her Maiestie in Diana; Sir Francis Walsingham in Meliboeus, and his Ladie in Dryas; Sir Phillippe Sidney in Astrophill, and his Ladie in Hyale, Master Thomas Walsingham in Tyterus, and my selfe in Corydon.

And early in the poem the character Corydon (Watson himself) opines on the death of Meliboeus (Walsingham):

Let deadly sorrow with a sable wing,
throughout the world go brute this tragedie:
And let Arcadians altogether sing
a woefull song agenst heauns tirannie.
     Alas too soone by Destins fatall knife
     Sweet Meliboeus is depriu'd of life.

The French colony of Acadia, named for the mythical rustic paradise modeled on the Greek Arcadia, was established in the seventeenth century in what are now the Maritime provinces of Canada (Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island). The colony was not a formal colony of France, rather an independent settlement of French colonists that had a politically tenuous existence between the French colony of Quebec and British North America. Acadia was conquered by the British in 1710, and in 1755, the British began the “Great Expulsion” of French colonists from the region. The Acadians were initially scattered along the eastern seaboard of North America with many returning to France, but a substantial number eventually settling in what is now Louisiana.

We see a reference to Acadian refugees in South Carolina being offered transport somewhere else in the Boston Weekly News-Letter of 3 June 1756:

CHARLES-TOWN (in South-Carolina,) May 1.

We hear, that an Offer has been made to the Acadians here, to supply them with Vessels &c. at the Public Charge, for transporting themselves elsewhere, as they have frequently solicited (or rather demanded.)

Aversion to “the wrong kind of” immigrants is nothing new in American history.

And a reference to Acadians arriving in New Orleans can be found in the 12 June 1765 edition of the New-Hampshire Gazette and Historical Chronicle:

It was reported that 400 Acadians were lately arrived at New Orleans, and the West-Floridians began to doubt whether the Spaniards would come to take possession of the said city and island.

France had ceded the colony of Louisiana to Spain in 1763 following its defeat in the Seven Years’ War, but the French colonists there rebelled, and Spain had difficulty in establishing its rule over the city of New Orleans and the surrounding area.

The form Cajun begins to appear in print in the 1860s, during the US Civil War. Ohio’s Delaware Gazette of 12 December 1862 gives this racist and extremely unflattering—to say the least—portrait of Cajuns that also revises the history to place the blame for their expulsion from Canada on their own heads rather than that of the British:

THE LOUISIANA CAJUNS.

A correspondent of the Cincinnati Commercial, who was captured by the rebels in lower Louisiana and confined at Camp Pratt thus describes the singular race of “natives” who inhabit the swamps in the south-western part of that State:

“Camp Pratt was filled with Cajun conscripts. You don’t know what a Cajun is? Of course you don’t, but I will try and tell you. A Cajun is a half-savage creature, of mixed French and Indian blood. They live in swamps, and subsist by fishing and hunting and cultivating a small patch of corn and sweet potatoes.

[…]

Nova Scotia was settled by the French, and by them called Acadia. When the territory passed to the dominion of England, many of the people refused to live under British rule, and emigrated to Louisiana. They settled along the Mississippi, but were driven back further and further by the advancing tide of civilization into the swamps, where the lived like savages and bred like rabbits. They were called ’Cadians by the better settlers, and looked upon in something of the same light as the sandhillers and dirt-eaters of the Carolinas—poor white trash. The rebel authorities do not expect much service from them, but distribute them about to fill up old regiments.

Unfortunately, the popular conception of Cajuns today is not all that different from this 1862 newspaper account. They do traditionally dwell in bayou country, which is rural and economically depressed, but economic circumstances and a long history of exclusion and oppression are to blame for their status, not any inherent characteristics of the people.

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Sources:

“Advices by Wednesday’s Mail (5 June 1765). New-Hampshire Gazette and Historical Chronicle (Portsmouth), 12 July 1765, 2/1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Dictionary of American Regional English Online, 2013, s.v. Cajun, n.1.

“The Louisiana Cajuns.” Delaware Gazette (Ohio), 12 December 1862, 1/6. NewspaperArchive.com.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2025, s.v. Cajun, n. & adj.; December 2011, s.v. Acadian, n. & adj.; second edition, 1989, s.v. Arcadian, adj.1 & n.

“Postscript.” Boston Weekly News-Letter (Massachusetts), 3 June 1756, 1/1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers. [The pages are not numbered; this is the first page of the postscript, not of the newsletter itself. There is further confusion in that two versions of the postscript were published, one dated Thursday, 3 June and the other Thursday [sic], 4 June. The third was a Thursday and the date the newsletter itself was published. So this postscript apparently was published after the regular publication, on the same or the next day.]

Watson, Thomas. An Eglogve Vpon the Death of the Right Honorable Sir Francis Walsingham (Meliboeus). London: Robert Robinson, 1590, sig. A2v and B2r. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Photo credit: Hypersite, 2010. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

confabulation / confab / fable

Roman bust (1st–4th-century C.E.) thought to represent Aesop

18 July 2025

Confabulation is a neat study of how a word can acquire an additional sense. It was borrowed into English in the fifteenth century from the Latin confabulatio, meaning a conversation or discussion. The word appears in Anglo-Latin by the late ninth century

English-language use, in the same sense, is in place by c. 1450 when it appears in a translation of Thomas à Kempis’s De imitatione Christi (The Imitation of Christ):

But þou, graciose & merciful lorde, þat wolt not þat þi workes shulde perisshe, to shewe þe richesses of þi godenes into þe vessels of mercy, ouere al propre merite vouche saf to comforte þi seruaunt aboue al mannes mesure; for þi consolacions are not as mannes talkinges or confabulacions. What haue I done, lorde, þat þou shuldist yeue me eny  heuenly consolacion?

(But you, gracious & merciful lord, so that your works should not perish, to mete out the richness of your goodness into the vessels of mercy, over all proper merit grant to comfort your servant above all man’s measure; for your consolations are not a man’s discussions or confabulations. What have I done, lord, that you should give me any heavenly consolation?)

Kempis’s original Latin is confabulationes.

The verb to confabulate, meaning to converse, appears by the beginning of the seventeenth century when it is in included in Robert Cawdry’s 1604 Table Alphabeticall, widely considered to be the first monolingual English dictionary (although it really is better categorized as a glossary of hard words). Cawdry defines the verb as “to talk together.”

The word is clipped to confab by the beginning of the eighteenth century.

But starting at the beginning of the twentieth century the word, both noun and verb, would begin to acquire a sense meaning a false narrative or to create such a false narrative. This sense, influenced by the word fable, got its start in the field of psychiatry as a term for how amnesia patients would compensate for their memory loss by filling in the gaps with imaginary memories. A 1907 translation of E. Mendel’s Text-Book of Psychiatry (originally in German) has this:

Others, on the contrary, fill up the time where this defect [i.e., amnesia] of memory occurs, with all sorts of events which never took place, they confabulate without their confabulation reaching the phantastic heights of paramnesias.

Here the noun and verb are actually being used in the original sense of conversing or creating utterances, but the context is that of creating a false narrative. But within a couple of decades, the words had acquired the new sense. From a book review in March 1925 issue of the Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry:

From this point, the authors pass naturally to the consideration of important mental symptoms and syndromes as deviations from the normal psychologic processes. In this section are treated disturbances of sleep, of speech, of the emotions, of movement and of memory, including a satisfactory explanation of amnesia. Illusions and hallucinations, apprehensiveness, confusion, confabulation and romancing are taken up in turn, and their interrelationships discussed.

For its part fable, meaning a fictitious narrative, is borrowed from Anglo-Norman French. It appears in English in the late fourteenth century. Geoffrey Chaucer uses it in his Physician’s Tale:

This false juge, that highte Apius,
(So was his name, for this is no fable,
But knowen for historial thyng notable;
The sentence of it sooth is, out of doute),
This false juge gooth now faste aboute
To hasten his delit al that he may.

(This false judge, who is called Apius,
[Such was his name, for this is no fable,
But known to be a notable historical fact;
The substance of it is true, beyond doubt],
This false judge goes now fast about
To hasten his delight as much as he can.)

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Sources:

Anglo-Norman Dictionary, AND2 Phase 2, 2006–08, fable1, n.

Cawdry, Robert. A Table Alphabeticall. London: I. Roberts for Edmund Weaver, 1604. ProQuest: Early English Books Online.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. “The Physician’s Tale” (c. 1387). The Canterbury Tales, lines 6.154–59. Harvard’s Geoffrey Chaucer Website.

Ingram, John K. ed. The Earliest English Translation of the First Three Books of the De Imitatione Christi (c. 1450). Early English Text Society, Extra Series 58. London: Kegan Paul, Trench Trübner, 1893, 3.57, 134. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Kempis, Thomas. De imitatione Christi. Paris: 1889, 3.52, 252. HathiTrust Digital Library.

Latham, Ronald E., David R. Howlett, and Richard K. Ashdowne. Dictionary of Medieval Sources from British Sources. Oxford: British Academy: 2013, s.v. confabulatio, n. Brepolis: Database of Latin Dictionaries.

Lewis, Charlton T. and Charles Short. A Latin Dictionary. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1879, s.v. confabulatio, n. Brepolis: Database of Latin Dictionaries.

Mendel E. Text-Book of Psychiatry. William C. Krauss, trans. Philadelphia: F. A. Davis, 1907, 45. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Middle English Dictionary, 4 March 2025, s.v. confabulation, n., fable, n.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. confabulation, n., confabulate, v., confab, n., confab, v., fable, n., fable, v.

“Pratique Semilogique des Maladies Mentales” (book review). Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry, 13.3, March 1925, 419. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons. Public domain work as a mechanical reproduction of a public domain work.

vet / veteran / veterinarian

16 July 2025

Vet has three distinct meanings. It can be a verb meaning to examine thoroughly, especially of a person slated for a position of responsibility; it can be a noun meaning a doctor who treats animals; and it can be a noun meaning an experienced person, especially a soldier or a former soldier.

The soldier sense of vet is a clipping of veteran, an Early Modern (or perhaps very late medieval) borrowing from classical Latin veteranus, meaning experienced, mature, and especially applied to soldiers. An early use of veteran is in Stephen Hawes 1504 Example of Vertu, where it refers to a knight who has killed a dragon:

Than came dame fayth that lady gloryous
Welcome she sayd with wordes amyable
I am ryght glad ye ar so vyctoryous
Of that foule dragon so abhomynable
She sayd that I was euermore stable
In her in dede eke worde and thought
Or elles my labour had ben to nought

Than spake the lady fayre dame charyte
Welcome vertue the noble veteran
Sythens that ye alway haue loued me
From the fyrst season that ye began
Bothe in your youth & syth ye were man
Ye haue had me in humble reuerence
And haue ben ruled by my preemynence

The clipping of veteran to vet was in place by the mid nineteenth century.

The animal doctor sense of vet is a clipping of veterinarian and veterinary. These words are also Early Modern borrowings from the classical Latin veterinarius, which was used as an adjective related to livestock and as a noun to a person who treated sick animals. We see the Latin words in Thomas Cooper’s 1578 Thesaurus linguæ, hinting that they were starting to appear in English usage:

Veterinàrius, veterenarij, m.g. Col. He that letteth horses or mules to hyre: a muletter: an horsecourser: an hackney man. Veterinárius. Col. An horseleach, or ferrour.

Veterinârius, Adiect. vt Veterinaria medicina. Col. The craft or science of an horseleache.

But we see veterinarian fully anglicized, with an English ending, in Thomas Browne’s 1646 Pseudodoxia epidemica:

The gall of an horse was accounted poyson, and therefore at the sacrifices of horses in Rome, it was unlawfull for the Flamen but to touch it; but with more difficulty, or hardly at all is that reconcilable which is delivered by our Countreyman, and received veterinarian, whose words in his master-piece, and Chapter of diseases from the gall, are somewhat too strict, and scarce admit a Reconciliation.

Veterinarian is the term used in North America, but in Britain one will also see veterinary used as a noun, a clipping of veterinary surgeon.

The clipping vet in this sense dates to at least the mid nineteenth century. (The OED marks this clipping as “chiefly British,” which is incorrect and inexplicable. It’s extremely common in North America, with the abbreviated form being perhaps more common even than the full veterinarian.)

The verb to vet was initially used to mean subjecting an animal to an examination by a veterinarian. We see this sense in Annie Thomas’s 1891 novel The Roll of Honor, where it is used in reference to a racehorse before a competition:

Have you seen Culverfield? The beast is going about saying that Beau is shaky in his fore legs. I shall have him vetted before the races, or they will hang back and won't plunge on him.

But it quickly acquired a more general sense of subjecting a person to examination prior to approval, and this sense carries with it a connotation of being treated with less than the respect one normally accords fellow humans, as one might a piece of livestock. We see this sense in B. M. Croker’s 1898 Peggy of the Bartons, in which the titular character, newly married to a soldier and stationed in India, is to be subjected to examination and approval by the other wives in the regiment:

The married people in this regiment are a desperately slow set, very different to the Blunderbores; they never entertain, or ask you to put your legs under their mahogany; but we will make a new departure. You will be having them round to “vet” you—at least, Mother Vallancy, I don't know about Mrs. Hesketh and Mrs. Timmins, as I never left a pasteboard on either of them. Life is too short and too pleasant to bother about calling on stupid, dowdy frumps.

Today, the verb to vet is commonly used in the context of investigation prior to the issuance of a government security clearance or elevation to some position of responsibility.

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Sources:

Browne, Thomas. Pseudodoxia epidemica. London, T. H. for Edward. Dod, 1646, 3.2, 108–109. ProQuest: Early English Books Online.

Cooper, Thomas. Thesaurus linguæ, London: Henry Denham, 1578, s.v. veterinarius, sig. Qqqqqq.1. ProQuest: Early English Books Online.

Croker, B. M. Peggy of the Bartons. New York: R. F. Fenno, 1898, 138. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Hawes, Stephen. Example of Vertu. London: Wynkyn de Worde, 1504, sig. ff.3v. ProQuest: Early English Books Online.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2017, s.v. vet, v., vet, n.2, veterinarian, n. & adj., veterinary, adj. & n., vet, n.1 & adj.2, veteran, n. & adj.

Lewis, Charlton T. and Charles Short. A Latin Dictionary. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1879, s.v. veteranus, veterinarius.

Thomas, Annie (Annie Hall Cudlip). The Roll of Honor. New York: John W. Lovell, 1891, 130. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Image credit: Mark Buckawicki, 2014. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain photo.

nuclear option

The “Ivy King” US nuclear test, Enewetak Atoll, 1952; at 500 kilotons it was the largest fission bomb ever detonated

14 July 2025

The term nuclear option is used figuratively, especially in politics, to refer to a response that threatens “mutual assured destruction.” It is, as the Oxford English Dictionary defines it, “the most drastic of the possible responses to a situation.” But of course, it does have a more literal original sense. 

It first appears in the early 1960s referring to the choice of a country to develop nuclear weapons. It appears in an article in the March 1962 issue of the American Political Science Review in reference to Britain’s decision to acquire a nuclear arsenal ten years earlier:

Nuclear forces were also thought to increase positive British influence over the United States by undertaking a share in the task of deterrence and demonstrating technological skill. Moreover the strategic nuclear option was a policy for which both the weapons and a doctrine existed.

That same year, it was used to refer to India’s potential for nuclear weapons in the title of a book review, “The Nuclear Option,” in the New Left Review. The review was of Leonard Beaton and John Maddox’s The Spread of Nuclear Weapons. The phrase does not appear in the review itself, only the title, but the following explains what the title refers to

Thus it emerges that India has an extensive nuclear programme designed to give it an option on nuclear weapons in about 1963. Very little is known about this in India, and Mr. Nehru, who is Minister of Atomic Energy as well as Prime Minister, seldom speaks about it: but from the analysis the book provides, it seems probable that India will go ahead and make nuclear weapons if the Chinese “menace” is considered to warrant it.

Beaton and Maddox’s book does not use the phrase either but makes extensive use of option in the context of the decision to acquire nuclear weapons. India demonstrated it had the capability to build a nuclear arsenal in 1974 with its detonation of a “peaceful” nuclear explosion, and it formally took the nuclear option in 1989, establishing an arsenal of the weapons probably by 1994 and openly testing one in 1998.

Literal use of nuclear option would also come to be used to refer the decision to use nuclear weapons in a war and also, less menacingly, in respect to the choice to use nuclear power for the generation of electricity.

The figurative sense of nuclear option was in place by the early 1990s. The earliest use I’m aware of is in 1993 in the context of UK Prime Minister John Major threatening a general election if a rebellious group of backbenchers in his party did not back him on the decision not to join the social aspects of the European Union. As recorded in The Independent on 23 July 1993:

Today John Major binds his own future as Prime Minister to the policy that lies at the heart of his Government’s meaning. He has detonated what one of his close friends called “the nuclear option”: back the social chapter opt-out or I’ll blow the party apart at a general election. Given the question, it seems certain he will win.

This incident and the phrase appeared in the American press in the same context. From the Washington Post, dateline also of 23 July 1993, an article that was syndicated widely in other papers:

To win the support of rebels within his own Conservative Party, Major had to threaten them with what became known as the “nuclear option”—he would resign as prime minister, dissolve Parliament and call a general election if they voted against him Friday. With the Conservatives lagging far behind in the polls, for the rebels to defy Major would have been, in the words of one Tory, “like turkeys voting for Christmas.”

Nuclear option would come to be used in American politics in the twenty-first century, most notably in reference to threats to end the filibuster in the US Senate.

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Sources:

Beaton, Leonard and John Maddox. The Spread of Nuclear Weapons. New York: Praeger, 1962. Archive.org.

Marr, Andrew. “The Haunting Resonance of a Beaten Leader’s Last Show. Independent (London), 23 July 1993, 1/1. Gale Primary Sources: The Independent Historical Archive.

Martin, Laurence W. “The Market for Strategic Ideas in Britain: the ‘Sandys Era.’” American Political Science Review, 56.1, March 1962, 26–41 at 27/2. JSTOR.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, 2003, nuclear option, n.

Roberts, Adam. “The Nuclear Option.” New Left Review, Winter 1962, 124–25 at 125. ProQuest: Scholarly Journals.

Robinson, Eugene. “Major Survives Vote of Confidence; Europe Pact Approved” (23 July 1963) Washington Post, 24 July 1963, A12/2–3. ProQuest: Newspapers.

Image credit: US Department of Energy, 1952. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain photo.

concentration camp

Gate at the Auschwitz concentration camp

31 January 2025

(Updated 13 July 2025 with the citations from the Hansard database and the Guardian)

One might, with some justification, think that the term concentration camp, like the term genocide, came out of Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazis during World War II, but that is not the case. The term is almost half a century older, coming out of another war, the Cuban War of Independence (1895–98).

Concentration camp is an anglophone term to describe the camps in which the Spanish government of Cuba resettled what they called reconcentrados, a word that was also borrowed into English at the time. The earliest example of concentration camp that I have found is in a report from a US consul to Cuba that was reported in Michigan’s Copper Country Evening News on 24 May 1897:

A consular report from Cuba tells of a new order of concentration. The effect of it will be to add greatly to the horrors of the situation. The suffering will be increased, and the deaths will be more numerous. The order, so far as the consul knows, applies to about one-third of the province of Santa Clara. This is the region of sugar estates.

Obliged to form camps.

Under the original order of concentration the agricultural population was obliged to form camps at the centrals, or grinding plants, of such estates as maintained a Spanish garrison. This permitted the farming population to gather in bodies of from 500 to 1,000. By this distribution in small bodies the reconcentrados were able to find some subsistence. The smaller concentration has been attended with less hardship than the larger. The new order just made by the Spanish authorities abolishes the concentration camps on the sugar estates. It directs that only [sic] points of concentration in the district shall be the cities having municipal organizations. In this district there are but three “municipals,” as they are called.

Must Move to Three Towns.

To these three points the entire farming population will now be driven. The report from the consul says:

“There are twenty-five estates on which the camps of reconcentrados had been established. The camps averaged 500 persons. Now these persons, 12,500 in all, must move to the three towns. In the camps on the estates they had built shanties, which must be abandoned. That, however, is not the worst feature. They had planted gardens and were about to realize food crops. All must be left behind, and the 12,500 must be added to the three large camps, where the people are starving. The situation is becoming worse every day, and this new order is going to aggravate it.

Another early use is in the Louisville Courier Journal of 17 July 1897. Weyler was the Spanish governor-general of Cuba General Valeriano Weyler y Nicolau:

“In the beginning of the concentration,” this American writes, “the people driven into the towns were occasionally allowed to go to the country on passes and search for food to bring back to the camp. Having such passes, they sometimes escaped the notice of the scouting parties. Now, however, the Spanish columns have received orders from Weyler to shoot any one, whether furnished with a pass or not, wherever found outside of the concentration camp. I will give an example of the operation of this new order, to show how it works. The little town of Mata is situated near the railroad. It had in time of peace about 100 inhabitants and four stores. Under concentration 3,500 reconcentrados have been collected there.”

While the Spanish did have terms for the people who were interned in such camps, concentrados and reconcentrados, they did not have a special term for the camps themselves. The term campo de concentración did not appear until 1918.

The Cuban War of Independence ended in 1898 with the intervention of the United States on the Cuban side, a theater in the global Spanish-American War, which also netted the United States the Philippines as a colony. But concentration camps would again appear in another colonial war, the Boer War in South Africa (1899–1902), when the British interned many Dutch Boer settlers and Indigenous peoples in such camps. There is this use of both concentration camp and camps of concentration in the transcript of British parliamentary debate on 17 June 1901 from the Hansard database:

MR. JOHN ELLIS
(Nottinghamshire, Rusheliffe)

I beg to ask the Secretary of State for War whether he can now inform the House as to the number and situation of the camps of concentration formed in Cape Colony, and how many men, women, and children are confined therein, and what have been the figures of mortality therein.

THE SECRETARY OF STATE FOR WAR
(Mr. BRODRICK, Surrey, Guildford)

The places where the camps have been formed are:—Kimberley, Orange River Camp (near Hopetown), Vryburg, Warrenton, and Boer Exile Camp at Port Elizabeth. Lord Kitchener has promised me some figures by telegraph as to the numbers and mortality,

MR. C. P. SCOTT
(Lancashire, Leigh)

I beg to ask the Secretary of State for War whether he will state the numbers of white persons now or recently in the concentration camps in Natal and the Transvaal, Orange River, and Cape Colonies respectively; also the dietary for adults and for children in force in these several districts. I beg also to ask the right hon. Gentleman whether he can state what regulations are now in force in the various concentration camps in South Africa as to the detention of the women and children confined in them; and whether he will consider the desirability of permitting at least those women and children who have no male person with them in the camps, and who have friends or relatives in Cape Colony willing to receive them, to leave the camps and go to these friends.

Scott, in addition to being a Liberal MP, was the longtime editor of the Manchester Guardian. The following day, 18 June 1901, the Guardian reported on the debate under the headline, “The ‘Concentration’ Camps in South Africa.” Other English-language newspapers reporting on the debate and on the Boer War also started using concentration camp from this date.

And like the Spanish campo de concentración, the Afrikaans konsentrasiekamp was coined as a historical term in 1921.

In contrast, the German Konzentrationslager didn’t make an appearance until 1920, referring to hypothetical camps, and 1933, referring to real ones. The Spanish, Afrikaans, and German terms are calques of the English one.

There is a more innocuous sense of concentration camp that also dates to the Spanish-American War, that is with the meaning of a military assembly location. There is this from the Boston Daily Advertiser with a dateline of 10 May 1898:

Washington, May 10.—Maj.-Gen. Sewell has been assigned to command the concentration camp near Falls Church, Va. This is taken as an indication that the general has concluded to accept his military command, risking his tenure in office as a senator thereby.

(The OED has similar quotation from 12 May, but that one is incorrectly dated. Both the dictionary and NewspaperArchive.com’s metadata give the date as 1897, but it is actually from a year later.)

This military sense of concentration camp would also get some use in the British military. From the Friend of India of 7 September 1899:

The Government of India have sanctioned the Imperial Service troops taking part in the coming winter’s manœuvres, and it is settled that the Mysore Cavalry will join the concentration camp near Bangalore.

Of course, unfavorable press about the camps in South Africa, and of course the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust, pretty much ended this military sense of the phrase.

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Sources:

“The ‘Concentration’ Camps in South Africa.” Manchester Guardian, 18 June 1901, 5/1. ProQuest Historical Newspaper.

“Has Sewell Accepted?” Boston Daily Advertiser (Massachusetts), 11 May 1898, 1/5. Gale Primary Sources: Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2015, s.v. concentration camp, n., concentrado, n.; June 2009, s.v. reconcentrado, n.

“Telegram from Lee.” Copper Country Evening News (Calumet Michigan), 24 May 1897, 1/2. Library of Congress: Chronicling America.

“Troops Ordered to Cuba.” Elkhart Weekly Truth (Indiana), 12 May 1898, 4/6. NewspaperArchive.com. (Note the database’s metadata incorrectly gives the date as 1897, an error which the OED repeats.)

U.K. Parliament, House of Commons. “South Africa—Sir David Barbour’s Report,” 17 June 1901. Hansard.

“Weyler’s Victims.” Louisville Courier Journal, 17 July 1897, 9/5. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

“Winter Military Manœuvres” (5 September). Friend of India, 7 September 1899, 12/3. Gale Primary Sources: Nineteenth Century UK Periodicals.

Photo credit: Xiquinhosilva, 2010. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.