throuple

Hand-tinted postcard, c. 1910

28 July 2025

Throuple is a good example of a word that has been coined multiple times, by multiple people, over the years. A blend of three + couple, it can refer to any grouping of three, but more commonly it is used to describe a polyamorous relationship involving three people, a ménage à trois, although that latter term can also refer to a single sexual encounter involving three people. Throuple always refers to a longer-term relationship that extends beyond just sex.

The earliest use of throuple that I have found is from 11 July 1994 on a Unitarian Universalist email list. That might seem an odd source for a sexually charged term, but in context it is less surprising. The topic was the difficulty of raising children in a nuclear family model:

As a result, I am find myself becoming increasingly interested in the notion of polyamorous relationships for the sake of our own sanity as parents attempting to raise children, as well as for the sanity of two children being raised by stressed-out parents of the so-called “normal nuclear family” structure.

I also tend to view the issue of sex in a polyamorous relationship as being somewhat irrelevant when it comes to the children in the situation. Most of the time I would imagine that sex would not even be much of an issue at all (except for the gossip mongers and busy-bodies for whom such a situation would provide fuel enough to have people thinking that such a relationship would consist of non-stop sexual encounters). These are among the same sorts of jealousy-based streotyping [sic] and perverted imaginings which undoubtedly hinder most any non-traditional couple (or in this case throuple or more).

This appearance of the word seems to be an outlier, as I can find no other uses of this sense until 2012, although I think it’s safe to assume that the word was relatively widespread in oral use. After all, it’s a natural blend, and throuples have existed since time immemorial. (The Oxford English Dictionary dates English use of ménage à trois to 1862.)

I also found a use of throuple in the general sense of a group of three on the Usenet group alt.tv.red-dwarf from 11 December 1997:

There’s so much great stuff on Daytime telly, thesedays. The really usefull show’s great, so’s supermarket sweep, and of course teletubbies, and schools programs are great too! Then there’s something on BBC2 at about one. I recently had a throuple of days of school, and I quite enjoyed myself (except i had a disgusting cold, which ruins things.)

Like the polyamorous sense, this general use has also undoubtedly been in oral use for ages.

The next instance of the polyamorous sense that I have found is in Allison Nichols’s 2008 novel Contents Under Pressure, describing a relationship between three queer people, Kenneth, Barbie, and Mango. Kenneth and Mango are men, and Barbie is either a drag queen or a transwoman; the novel does not clarify. It is hardly a positive depiction of such a relationship in any case:

She killed Mango for the only motive older than money—love. Seems she, Mango, and Kenneth were a throuple. A couple plus one. Kenneith and Mango had started dating right after the show had moved to Lucky. But once Barbie arrived in Provincetown, Kenneth became drawn to her as if they were made for each other. Mango was none too pleased at sharing Kenneth’s affection, but over time, the three came to tolerate, if not embrace, one another.

The polyamorous sense of throuple starts appearing commonly in print publications in 2012. There is this use in reference to the television series The Big C (2010–13) in the New York Daily News of 12 May 2012:

IN THE BROADWAY musical “Shrek,” Brian d’Arcy James played an ogre who was green. On “The Big C” Sunday night (Showtime, 9:30 p.m.), his racy guest-star role has him getting blue. He plays Tim, a married psychotherapist who, along with his wife, Giselle (Tammy Blanchard), initiates a sexy three-way tryst with Sean (series regular John Benjamin Hickey). Says James, 43, who lives on the upper West Side with his wife and daughter, “I never thought I'd be making out—on the set or off—with John Benjamin Hickey.” No matter. That's exactly what he does in the series, which looks at life and death in a darkly comic way. “Tim is wide open to defining who he is sexually,” says James. “The setup is that Tammy's and my character consider a relationship with Sean. We're calling it a throuple.” (“Threelationship” also works.)

A few months later, on 30 July 2012, the New York Post had this about New York magazine’s upcoming “sex” issue:

New York’s double issue is devoted to “Sex: the multiplicity of Desire.” Predictably there’s an element of Ivy League-flavored reportage, with a sex party hostess who “finds the terminology ‘sex party’ reductive and degrading.” There’s a piece on a three-man “throuple” that produces gay porn, but whose “home life seems positively wholesome,” with remarkably little interpersonal tension. Not much insight is gleaned, however, into how the participants manage to pull this off, no pun intended.

The New York magazine piece about the gay throuple is in the 6 August 2012 issue, which had sex as the issue’s theme:

And here lies a second explanation for Benny’s—and, by extension, CockyBoys’—microfame. Adrian explains that he is driving upstate to the house that he shares with Benny, who is now puppyishly tugging on Adrian’s hand, and Jason, who is the CEO of CockyBoys. The three men have been together for just over four years—a “throuple,” Benny calls it, putting air quotes around the dumb word. Their throuplehood is more or less a permanent domestic arrangement. The three men work together, raise dogs together, sleep together, miss one another, collect art together, travel together, bring each other glasses of water, and, in general, exemplify a modern, adult relationship.

Except that there are three of them.

One can often date the widespread use of a sex-related term to its use by sex-advice columnist Dan Savage, and he uses throuple in the 9 January 2013 column, Savage Love. In it he references the New York magazine piece, makes the point that heterosexuals form throuples too, and opines more favorably on such arrangements:

Some gay people think throuples are odd, some think they’re unremarkable, and some think they’re sensible. And some gay people—some dumb ones—think gay throuples are bad PR at a time when gay couples are fighting for the right to marry. But our fight is for equal rights, not double standards, and no one argues that straight marriage should be banned because of all the straight throuples, quadles, quintles, sextetles, etc. out there.

[…]

Throupledom presents unique challenges: Major life decisions require buy-in from three people; two can gang up against one during arguments; the partners who were coupled before the third came along may treat the third as a junior partner, not an equal partner, etc. But throupledom presents unique benefits, too: another set of hands to help around the house, another income to pay down the mortgage, another smiling face to sit on, etc. And it’s not like coupledom is a surefire recipe for success. Half of all marriages—those traditional “one man, one woman, for life” marriages—end in divorce. Yet discussions of throupledom all seem to begin with the assumption that coupledom is a self-evidently more stable arrangement. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. I’d like to see some research comparing throuples to couples before I accept that premise.

Use of throuple in print becomes much more common after this.

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Sources:

Dziemianowicz, Joe. “D’Arcy James Scores a ‘Big C’ Triple Play.” Daily News (New York), 12 May 2012, 4B. ProQuest Newspapers.

McLure, David. “Children and Family Structure.” UUS-L (listserv), 11 July 1994. Google Groups.

Nichol, Allison. Contents Under Pressure. Walker, Louisiana: Intaglio, 2008, 176. Archive.org.

Ouroborous**. Usenet: alt.tv.red-dwarf, 11 December 1997. Google Groups.

Oxford English Dictionary Online, September 2001, s.v. ménage à trois, n.

Savage, Dan. “Gay Panic Attack.” Savage Love, 9 January 2013.

“Skin Magazines.” New York Post, 30 July 2012, 26/3-4. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Young, Molly. “He & He & He: Benny Morecock Is in a ‘Throuple’ with Two Partners. Their Family Business Is a Gay-Porn Company in Long Island City. The Cleavers They’re not—and Yet Their Home Life Seems Positively Wholesome.” New York (magazine), 6 August 2012. ProQuest Magazines. [Morecock is Benny’s nom de porn, not his actual surname.]

Photo credit: unknown photograph, c. 1910. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

akimbo

Superman with arms akimbo

25 July 2025

To stand akimbo is to have one’s hands on one’s hips with the elbows turned outward. The word dates to the fifteenth century, but its origin is unknown. There are, however, a number of competing hypotheses.

Let's start with what we know for sure. The word began as a prepositional phrase, on or in kenebowe. The preposition was subsequently reduced to a. These prepositions can lose their final -n when unstressed, becoming a. That much of the word’s origin is certain. The earliest known use of the term is from the fifteenth century poem The Tale of Beryn:

The hoost made an hidouse cry, in gesolreut be haut,
And set his hond in kenebowe ; he lakkid nevir a faute

(The host made a hideous cry, a shrill howl,
And set his hand akimbo; he never was critical of a fault)

(The phrase in gesolreut be haut is a musical reference, literally meaning a G note above middle C; here it is being used figuratively to mean a shout or howl.)

That explains the a- prefix, but the -kimbo root is more difficult. There are three explanations that have some degree of plausibility, although all three should be treated with skepticism.

The first is that it is a compound of the Anglo-Norman cane (flagon, pitcher) + bow, meaning a hoop or ring. In other words, when standing akimbo one’s arms resemble a jug handle.

The second is that it is from an Old Norse phrase í keng boginn (bent like a bow). Unfortunately, this phrase is unattested and doesn’t actually appear in any extant writing from the period.

The third is that it is a compound of the Middle English keen + bow, alluding to the sharply bent elbows.

While the term started out as on/in kenebowe in the fifteenth century, by the middle of the seventeenth century the on/in had been reduced to a, and the n had shifted to m. The a began to be hyphenated by the early eighteenth century, a-kimbo, and by the early nineteenth, it was simply akimbo.

The meaning of the word expanded too. By the nineteenth century akimbo was being used for the legs as well. And beginning at the end of the eighteenth century, the word was being used more generally to mean askew or disorderly. The word’s use as an adjective is in the last sense, so in 2002 Esquire magazine could write this description of Charlie the Tuna, the mascot of StarKist-brand tuna:

He is still on the can. He is still blue, with mitteny hands and startled, akimbo eyebrows. He is still wearing a pair of Woody Allen-ish eyeglasses and a smart red beret. You remember Charlie: the protohipster with his bebop, his bongos, his Burroughs, and his Baudelaire. Commercial after commercial, Charlie tried to make himself attractive by attaining cultural mastery, only to be told, “Sorry, Charlie: StarKist doesn't want tunas with good taste. StarKist wants tunas that taste good.”

Charlie the Tuna with fins akimbo and “akimbo eyebrows”

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Sources:

Anglo-Norman Dictionary, AND2 Phase 1, 2000–06, s.v. cane1, n.

Furnivall, F. J. and W. G. Stone, eds. The Tale of Beryn. Early English Text Society, extra series 105. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1909, lines 1837–38, 57. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Junod, Tom. “Man at His Best: Bizarre Essay of the Month: The Significance of Charlie the Tuna.” Esquire, September 2002, 80. ProQuest

Middle English Dictionary, 4 March 2025, s.v. kene-boue, n.

Oxford English Dictionary Online, September 2012, s.v. akimbo, adv. and adj.; June 2008, s.v. a, prep.1.

Image credits:

Superman: by Michael Allred, DC Comics, 2018. Wikimedia Commons. Fair use of a low-resolution copy to illustrate the topic under discussion.

Charlie the Tuna: StarKist, Co.. 2020. Wikipedia. Fair use of a low-resolution copy to illustrate the topic under discussion.

zeppelin

Crash of the Hindenburg at Lakehurst, New Jersey, 6 May 1937

23 July 2025

Zeppelin, meaning a dirigible airship, comes, of course, from the name of Ferdinand Adolf Heinrich August Graf von Zeppelin (1838–1917), who designed such airships. Ironically, the word appears in English before it does in German. English use as an adjective referring to such airships dates to 1896, while the German Luftschiff Zeppelin isn’t recorded until 1904.

Ferdinand Zeppelin published the designs for his airship in 1893 and patented them two years later. His first airship took flight in 1900. But there was considerable pre-launch hype. The earliest use of the adjective zeppelin that I’m aware of appears in the Boston Daily Advertiser on 12 February 1896, a reference to the count’s proposed flying machine:

Dr. Helmholtz had already pronounced favorably upon the Zeppelin flying machine some time before the specialist’s death; and even the Kaiser, it is reported, has now begun to take an interest in the device submitted by the Wurtemburg [sic] inventor.

As yet the accounts of the new flying machine are not very explicit. It is stated, however, that the Zeppelin air-ship is a cigar-shaped vessel, which can be steered upward and downward, right and left, forward and backward, under practically every condition presented by the atmosphere within a distance of three and a half miles from the surface of the earth.

The noun zeppelin is in place in the opening years of the next century when it appears in the pages of the Baltimore American on 6 August 1908:

Walter Wellman, who planned recently about going to the North Pole in a dirigible balloon, said last night that he was planning to make the attempt next year. He said his airship, the America, built for polar atmospheric conditions, could easily travel from New York to Buffalo, Detroit, or even Chicago. It is, Mr. Wellman said, the second largest airship ever built. Its 200,000 cubic feet being exceeded only by the Zeppelin.

“But in fuel-carrying capacity and radius of action the America exceeds the Zeppelin,” continued Mr. Wellman.

The Oxford English Dictionary also has a 1908 quotation for the noun zeppelin from H. G. Wells’s novel The War in the Air, but Wells is using it as a proper name for a particular airship, the Graf Zeppelin. (Wells’s airship is fictional; the first real airship named Graf Zeppelin took to the air in 1927.)

Cf. airship, blimp, dirigible.

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Sources:

“An Air Ship.” Boston Daily Advertiser (Massachusetts), 12 February 1896, 4/4. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“By Balloon to the Pole” (5 August 1908). Baltimore American (Maryland), 6 August 1908, 9/4. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary Online, June 2014, s.v. Zeppelin, n.

Wells, H. G. The War in the Air. London: George Bell and Sons, 1908, 235, 258. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Photo credit: Murray Becker / Associated Press, 1937. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain photo.

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.