redskin / red man

Washington Redskins football helmet, 2019

31 December 2025

Redskin, a disparaging term for a Native American, is over two and a half centuries old. It is first recorded in a transcript and translation of a speech given by Chief Maringouin, of the Illinois people, on 26 August 1769. It was interpreted by a Frenchman from the Illinois language and transcribed and translated into English by William Johnson:

I shall be pleased to have you come to speak to me yourself if you pity our women and our children; and, if any redskins do you harm, I shall be able to look out for you even at the peril of my life.

The French that redskin is translated from is peaux Rouges, and if the translation into French is accurate, the original Illinois word would probably have been *e•rante•wiroki•ta (person with red skin), but we don’t have a record of the original Illinois words.

The term red man is older, dating to 1740, when it appears in the journal of John Wesley, and the French homme rouge dates to at least 1725. And the English use of the adjective red to refer to Native Americans is older still, dating to an appearance in the journal of Colonel George Chicken on 31 October 1725:

They have heard the Talk of the White people for this many Years and that they have been down to the English Sevl times and heard the talk there and that they desire always to be at peace wth the White people and desire to have their own way and to take revenge of the red people and that it was their Young people that first broak out Warr with the White people.

Like many ethnic slurs, redskin and red man did not start out as derogatory, but they acquired the disparaging connotation over time. Tales that the term redskin refers to the practice of scalping or the use of red dye by native peoples are false.

Until 2020, the Washington, DC National Football League team was known as the Redskins. The name was not originally intended to be disparaging and is part of the long and problematic tradition of using Native Americans as mascots of sports teams. Other examples in this genre include the NFL’s Kansas City Chiefs, and baseball’s Atlanta Braves and Cleveland Indians (which changed its name to the Guardians in 2021), not to mention my own high school teams, which were the Toms River South Indians. But while the Redskins name was never intended to be so, it is nevertheless considered offensive by many Native Americans. Following its dropping of the name, the Washington team was briefly known as simply the Washington Football Team before being dubbed the Commanders in 2022.

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Sources:

Chicken, George. “Journal of Colonel George Chicken’s Mission from Charleston to the Creeks.” In Travels in the American Colonies, Newton D. Mereness, ed. New York: Macmillan, 1916, 169. HathiTrust Digital Library.

Johnson, William. The Papers of Sir William Johnson, v. 7, Albany: University of the State of New York, 1931, 133–38. HathiTrust Digital Library.

Nunberg, Geoffrey, “When Slang Becomes a Slur,” The Atlantic, 23 June 2014.

Oxford English Dictionary Online, September 2009, s.v. redskin, n., red man, n., red, adj. & n. (& adv.).

Photo credit: Joe Glorioso, 2019. Wikimedia Commons. Flickr. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

neither confirm nor deny / Glomar response

USNS Glomar Explorer, undated photo

29 December 2025

When a US government official neither confirms nor denies the existence of a classified program it is called a Glomar response or a Glomar denial. This label has its origins in one of the most fascinating incidents of the US-Soviet Cold War, but the wording neither confirm nor deny is much, much older, dating to at least 1840.

In March 1968, the Soviet K-129 Golf-class ballistic missile submarine sank 1,500 miles off the coast of Hawaii. The wreck was at a depth of 16,000 feet (4,900 meters). Soviet efforts to recover the submarine failed, and the CIA and US Navy subsequently funded the construction of the ship Global Marine Explorer or Glomar Explorer by billionaire Howard Hughes. The cover story was that the ship would be used to mine manganese from the ocean floor. In 1974 the ship managed to lift the hull of the Soviet submarine from the ocean floor, but the submarine broke up in the process, and the Glomar Explorer only recovered a portion of the sub. Allegedly, various cryptographic materials, two nuclear torpedoes, and six corpses were in the recovered portion. The bodies of the Soviet sailors that were recovered were buried at sea with full honors by the US Navy.

The story became public in the pages of the Los Angeles Times in 1975. Subsequent Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests by reporters for documents on the incident were met with the response that the government could neither confirm nor deny the incident took place. Hence the labels Glomar response and Glomar denial became attached to the phrase.

But the earliest use in print of either label that I can find is in the 1998 Code of Federal Regulations (CFR), which reads:

In addition, this exemption shall be invoked when the following situations are apparent:

(a) The fact of the existence or non-existence of a record would itself reveal classified information. In that situation, naval activities shall neither confirm nor deny the existence or non-existence of the record being requested. A “refusal to neither confirm nor deny” response must be used consistently, not only when a record exists, but also when a record does not exist. Otherwise, the pattern of using a “no record” response when a record does not exist, and a “refusal to neither confirm nor deny” when a record does exist will itself disclose national security information. That kind of response is referred to as a “Glomar” denial.

The phrasing Glomar response can be found in 2003 version of the CFR:

Glomar Response. In the instance where a [Department of the Navy] activity receives a request for records whose existence or nonexistence is itself classifiable, the DON activity shall refuse to confirm or deny the existence or non-existence of the records. This response is only effective as long as it is given consistently. If it were to be known that an agency gave a “Glomar” response only when records do exist and gave a “no records” response otherwise, then the purpose of this approach would be defeated.

But the phrase neither confirm nor deny predates the Cold War by over a century. It’s a standard journalistic phrase used for all sorts of denials, by the government and by others. The earliest example I have found is from Philadelphia’s  National Gazette and Literary Register of 1 May 1828 in which the editor of the paper, referred to in the third person, invokes the phrase in response to his knowledge of possible corruption on the part of President John Quincy Adams and Senator Daniel Webster:

He therefore, individually, neither confirms nor denies any of the particular allegations and conjectures in the present case; and he will not undertake to reason with persons that consider silence as assent, when sinister appeals are made from quarters to which no deference is due.

Various popular and journalistic accounts of the Glomar incident credit the CIA FOIA office for inventing the neither confirm nor deny phrase, but this not the case. The CIA simply used a standard journalistic catchphrase; it is only the labels Glomar response and Glomar denial that stem from the Cold War incident, and these first appear in print decades after the incident.

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Sources:

32 CFR § 701.11. US Government Printing Office, 1 July 2003.

32 CFR § 701.22. US Government Printing Office, 1 July 1998.

National Gazette and Literary Register (Philadelphia), 1 May 1828, 2/2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Photo credit: US Government photo, unknown date. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

breaking bad

26 December 2025

The popular US television show Breaking Bad (2008–13) is about a high-school chemistry teacher in Albuquerque who, after being diagnosed with lung cancer and with the assistance of an ex-student turned failed drug dealer, begins to cook and sell crystal meth. While the show has been popular with both audiences and critics, the title has baffled many. What does breaking bad mean? Where does the phrase come from?

The answers to these questions are not surprising but digging the answer out of reference books is somewhat difficult, because for most of its life to break bad was not a catchphrase, but simply a normal verb phrase, consisting of a verb coupled with a variety of adjectives. One could break bad, but one could also break good, or break lucky, or break better, etc. It wasn’t until the 1960s that to break bad developed into a fixed phrase, with a sense of to become angry or belligerent, in Black slang. And in the series, White's turn to criminality and violence indicates that the title stems from this Black slang usage.

The use of break in various contexts of something emerging or becoming apparent dates to the seventeenth century. Today we often speak of breaking news, and this phrasing dates to Thomas Middleton’s c. 1615 play The Witch which contains the line “What news breakes there?”

The use of break in cricket to mean a ball that changes its trajectory dates to the late nineteenth century. We have this example from a 6 October 1884 article describing an interview with famed cricketer W. G. Grace:

He says that a fast bowler can “break” both ways, but admits this cannot be done with precision.

And it appears in American baseball slang by the end of the century when it is used by The Chicago Daily News on 8 October 1899:

Katoll is spoken of as the possessor of a sizzling curve that comes up with a phenomenal burst of speed and breaks lightning fast.

And break wrong starts being used in a more general sense by baseballers not long after. From the Detroit Free Press of 9 June 1901:

The unexpectedly poor showing of the Tigers in the series with the eastern teams on the home grounds should not make the followers of the team lose faith in their favorites. The team was laboring under many disadvantages and everything seemed to break wrong for them.

And this the following week in the Rockford, Illinois Morning Star of 15 June 1901:

But for eight innings everything seemed to break wrong for the locals.

Shortly after this, various forms of break good/right/lucky start appearing. Such examples of the verb to break paired with various adjectives can be found right up to the present day. But the use of break bad as a fixed phrase isn’t recorded until the 1960s, when it starts appearing in African-American slang with the sense of to become aggressive or angry. Claude Brown’s 1965 novel Manchild in the Promised Land has:

Down home, when they went to town, all the n[——]rs would just break bad, so it seemed. Everybody just seemed to let out all their hostility on everybody else.

The earlier uses of break bad are primarily in the sense of things taking an unfortunate turn, of bad luck, with criminality, anger, and violence becoming attached to the phrase when it becomes a fixed locution in Black slang.

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Sources:

Brown, Claude. Manchild in the Promised Land. New York: Macmillan, 1965, 302. Archive.org.

Dickson, Paul. The Dickson Baseball Dictionary, third edition. New York: W. W. Norton, 2009, s.v. break, break ball, 134.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, accessed 22 November 2025, s.v. break, v.2.

“Kiernan’s Krew Beaten in Tenth.” Morning Star (Rockford, Illinois), 15 June 1901, 4/3. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“An Interview with Dr. W. G. Grace.” Huddersfield Daily Chronicle (West Yorkshire), 6 October 1884, 4/2. Gale Primary Sources: British Library Newspapers.

Middleton, Thomas. The Witch. London: J. Nichol, 5.3, 106. Gale Primary Sources: Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO). The play existed only in manuscript form for over 150 years before it was published in 1778. The manuscript is Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Malone 12.

Oxford English Dictionary Online, March 2024, s.v. break, v.

“Whirl of the Sporting World.” Detroit Free Press (Michigan), 9 June 1901, 10. ProQuest Newspapers.

Image credit: Sony Pictures Television/AMC, 2011. Fair use of a low-resolution copy of a copyrighted work to illustrate the topic under discussion.

keener

24 December 2025

Having been born and raised in the United States, I was unaware of the slang noun keener until I came to the University of Toronto. Keener (keen + -er) is Canadianism used to denote enthusiastic and over-eager students and is mildly derogatory. One hears instructors uttering phrases like “I assigned extra reading, knowing that only the keeners would actually do it.” And instructors are ambivalent about the keeners. On the one hand, their enthusiasm is appreciated, but on the other that same enthusiasm can become tiresome. The joy of having a bright, motivated student who strives to get an A wears off after the seventh frantic email on the night before an essay is due.

This Canadian slang term dates to at least 1973, when it appears in a 21 July article in the Winnipeg Free Press about a playground where children are given tools and encouraged to build their own treehouses and play forts:

The hammers and saws and other tools are kept locked up in a portable shack at the park until the two playground supervisors arrive in the morning, but they usually find a number of keeners already working on various projects using tools brought from home.

There is an older, better attested slang sense of keener meaning a sharp, alert individual, one who drives a hard bargain. This is an Americanism that dates to at least 1839. Citations of this sense in slang dictionaries tend to stop around the turn of the twentieth century, but given that keener is formed from the adjective keen and the common suffix -er, there is no reason to think that people stopped using it, and the term was undoubtedly independently recoined on many occasions. The current Canadian usage may be a continuation and specialization of this older sense, or it may be an independent coinage.

The slang term is unrelated to the word meaning one who sings a lament for the dead. English use of that keener dates to the eighteenth century and is from the verb to keen, caoin- in Irish, meaning to wail or lament

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Sources:

Canadian Oxford Dictionary, second edition, 2004, s.v. keener, n. Oxford Reference Premium Collection.

Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Prinicples (DCHP-2), October 2016, s.v. keener, n.

FitzRandolph, Katie. “Girl’s Wish Comes True in W. K. Adventure Spot,” Winnipeg Free Press (Manitoba), 21 July 1973, 3/4. NewspaperArchive.com.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, accessed 19 November 2025, s.v. keener, n.

Oxford English Dictionary Online, 1901, s.v. keener, n.1, keen, adj. and adv.; 1933, s.v. keener, n.2.

Photo credit: Steve Hillebrand/US Fish & Wildlife Service, before 2013. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

bald-faced / boldfaced / barefaced

22 December 2025

Is a lie bald-faced, bold-faced, or barefaced?

Of the three, barefaced is the oldest by about half a century. The underlying metaphor is that of being beardless, that is open and undisguised. But from its earliest use barefaced has also been linked to being shameless. It appears as early as 1533, when Thomas More used it in reference to the heresy that transubstantiation meant that the eucharist had the form as well as the essence of flesh:

Doth any man that receyueth the blessed sacrament, thynke (as ye Iewes thought) that the flesshe of Chryste that he receyueth, is in forme of fleshe, cut out in gobbettes as shepys fleshe is sold in the shamells, and not in forme of brede? If mayster masker were now bare faced hym selfe, he were wonderfull shamelesse yf he coulde endure to loke any man in the face for shame.

Bald-faced also dates to the sixteenth century, but only in the sense of a white-faced cow or horse. We see “bald faced buckes” in a 1596 work by John Harington. The metaphorical use to mean undisguised or shameless comes over a century later, the mid eighteenth century, when it appears in William Villiers’s 1761 Letter to Miss F—d:

I will, however, let you into a Secret, to prevent you wondering at this renouncing Faculty in your Family: It is a Family Failing: Your U—e in Jamaica has renounced you all. He left England to avoid such Connections; and where he is, denies being any Ways related to the O—d B—y Sollicitor, or to your Kinsman Dr. Chalk-liker; and though they all know his bald-faced Affinity, yet his present Station puts him one Remove above being told so.

The third, boldfaced also dates to the late sixteenth century, appearing in William Rainolds’s 1583 defense of the Catholic translation of the New Testament published in Rheims:

This is his accusation of vs (good reader) vttered as thou seest in such terrible vvordes, as if some counterfaite Aiax Mastigophorus, or Hercules Furens, or some tragical Tereus or Thyestes, after the eating of their ovvne children, vvere raging vpon a scaffold. Here thou hast, The creation of the vvorld, Vnaccustomed and monstrous noueltie, Prophane corruptions, and outragius boldnes, Neuer heretikes at any time did the like violence and iniurie to the sacred testament of Christ Iesus, The vvord of God mocked and contemned, Madnes and desperatnes of the Papistes. and so forth, as if we were giltie of (or himself as boldfaced as he is, durst obiect vnto vs) any one of those wicked, Prophane, Heretical, & Turkish corruptio[n]s, of which we haue proued him & his brethre[n] to haue co[m]mitted many. 

But if you are trying to convey shamelessness or impudence, as in bald-/bare-/bold-faced lie, which should you use? Both Merriam-Webster and Bryan Garner state that bald-faced lie, written with a hyphen, is the more common form in edited prose nowadays. And this conclusion is supported by the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), the News on the Web (NOW) Corpus, and Google nGrams.

Bold-faced frequently appears in unedited prose, albeit still not as frequently as bald-faced, but you should probably avoid using it unless you’re writing about fonts and typefaces.

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Sources:

Davies, Mark. Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), accessed 18 November 2025. https://www.english-corpora.org/coca/

———. NOW Corpus (News on the Web), accessed 18 November 2025.

Garner, Bryan A. Garner’s Modern American Usage, third edition. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009, s.v. bald-faced; barefaced; boldface(d).

Harington, John. An Apologie. R.Field, 1596, sig. O1v. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO)

Merriam-Webster. “Is that Lie ‘Bald-faced’ or ‘Bold-faced’? And What about ‘Barefaced’?” Merriam-Webster.com, 15 July 2025.

More, Thomas. The Answere to the Fyrst Parte of the Poysened Booke, Which a Nameless Heretyke Hath Named the Souper of the Lorde. London: W. Rastell, 1533, chap. 7, sig. r7v–r8r. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Oxford English Dictionary Online, 1885, barefaced, adj.; 1887, s.v. bold-faced, adj.; 1933, bald-faced, adj.

Rainolds, William. A Refutation of Sundry Reprehensions, Cauils, and False Sleightes. Paris: For Richard Verstegan(?), 1583, 445. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Villiers, William. A Letter to Miss F—d. London: 1761, 16. Gale Primary Sources: Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Image credit: Giorgio Scapinelli, 2016. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.