Nevada, according to the World Almanac for 1947, prefers to be called the Battle-born State, to recall the fact that it was admitted to the Union on October 31, 1864, while the Civil War was raging, but it is usually called the Sage-brush State or the Silver State,1 with many votes, since the rise of Reno, for the Divorce State. Sage-brush State has been challenged by Wyoming and Silver State by Colorado. Sage State and Sage-hen State have also been heard, the first, like Sage-brush State, in compliment to Artemisia tridentata, which is the State flower, and the second in compliment to Centrocercus urophasianus, in the early days the chief victual of the pioneers. Centrocercus still feeds on Artemisia and acquires thereby a flavor seldom to the taste of a tenderfoot.
New Mexico glories in the plausible appellation of the Sunshine State, but has also been called the Spanish State, the Cactus State, the Land of the Cactus, the Land of the Montezumas, the Land of the Delight Makers, the Land of Heart’s Desire, the Land of Opportunity, and the Land of Enchantment, the last five being the inventions of boosters. Which brings us to North Dakota, the Sioux State, with Flickertail State, Great Central State and Land of the Dakotas lurking in the background. The Sioux Indians roved the wilds that are now North Dakota for many years, and were hostile when the first white settlers appeared. In 1851 they were induced to cede some of their land to the invaders, but it was a long while before they became reconciled to the boons of civilization. Flickertail State comes from the popular name of Citellus richardsonii, a ground squirrel which, according to a local authority cited by Shankle, is found in North Dakota only.
Ohio, the first of the Middle Western States to be admitted to the Union (1803), is the Buckeye State, and has been recorded as such since 1835. It appears under that appellation on the Brother Jonathan list of 1843, and on all other lists that I am aware of. During the first years of the Nineteenth Century it was often called the Yankee State, apparently in allusion to the fact that many of its settlers came from New England, but that designation was abandoned long ago. There was a time when some of its boosters, having Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Benjamin Harrison, McKinley, Taft and Harding in mind, claimed for it the nickname of Mother of Presidents, once borne by Virginia, but that project blew up after the débâche of the Hon. James M. Cox in 1920. Buckeye is derived from the name of a native horse-chestnut (Aesculus glabra), so called, according to Schele de Vere, because of “the resemblance its fruit bears to a deer’s eye.” The term was first used for the tree in 1784 or thereabout, but when and why it came to be applied to the people of Ohio is not known. According to William M. Farrar, a local historian quoted by Shankle,1 it was because of the following incident:
The first court conducted by the settlers of Ohio was located at Marietta in a large wooden fortress known as the Campus Martius. On September 2, 1788, while the judges were marching in a body to this fortification a Colonel Sprout, who led the procession with glittering sword and was a very tall, erect man, six feet, four inches in height, so impressed a group of onlooking Indians that they shouted “Hetuck! Hetuck!,” meaning Big Buckeye. It was that incident, coupled with the abundance of the buckeye tree, which caused Buckeye State to be applied to Ohio.
This tale is far from persuasive, but all the authorities seem to agree that Buckeye for an Ohioan was somehow borrowed from the name of the tree. It goes back to 1823. There is a weekly called the Buckeye at Archibald (population, 1185), another called the Buckeye State at Lisbon, a third called the Buckeye News at Lithopolis, a fourth called Buckeye Lake Topics at New Concord, and a Buckeye Grocer at Springfield.
Oklahoma is the Sooner State, which is borrowed from the term used to designate the early settlers who sneaked across the border before the land of the State was thrown open to white settlement. The proclamation of President Benjamin Harrison opened it as of noon of April 22, 1889. At that time, about 20,000 progenitors and predecessors of the later Okies were gathered along the border, ready to rush in, hoping to find Utopia. Unhappily, many of them discovered, when they came to likely looking tracts, that there were claimants there ahead of them. How these claimants got in was not determined officially, but many of them succeeded in holding their claims. They were called sooners, and in a little while the term began to be applied to all the citizens of the State. The DAE notes that by 1892 it had been extended to any one of “that numerous class of … people who insist upon crossing bridges before they come to them.” The sooner dog, not listed by the DAE, had no relation to the human sooner: he was one who would sooner fight than eat. In England, according to Eric Partridge,1 he was one who “would sooner feed than fight.” With this latter sense in mind, sooner became British naval slang for a shirker. Shankle lists two other nicknames for Oklahoma – the Boomer’s Paradise and the Land of the Red People. The latter is based on the theory that the name of the State is derived from a Choctaw word meaning red men or red people.
Oregon is the Beaver State officially, but has been known as the Sunset State, the Web-foot State and the Hard-case State. Sunset State was once disputed by Arizona, but now seems to be in the public domain. Hard-case State, which is traced by the DAE to 1845, had reference to the large number of evil characters who flocked into the Oregon country in the early days: their descendants are now austere Rotarians and Shriners. Hard case, to designate such a character, is marked an Americanism by the DAE and run back to 1842. Schele de Vere, in his manuscript notes to his “Americanisms,” noted both Old Webfoot and the Land of Red Apples as designations for Oregon c. 1873. Webfoot, for a citizen of the State, is traced by Charles J. Lovell to 1853. The early examples of its use show clearly that it was suggested by the copious rainfalls between the Cascade Range and the Pacific Ocean. At Astoria, the first settlement in the valley of the Columbia, it is 77.2 inches a year, as compared to 42.87 inches at New York City and 33.5 inches at Chicago. Mr. Leo C. Dean of the Salem Capital Press tells me that the State newspapers always make Webfoots, not Webfeet, the plural of Webfoot. To use Webfeet would be as gross a gaucherie as to make meese the plural of moose.
South Dakota, which was joined to North Dakota until 1889, is the Coyote State. In its first days it was known variously as the Blizzard State, the Artesian State, the Sunshine State and the Land of Plenty, but Sunshine State has been taken over by New Mexico, and the others have passed out. In 1898 the Monthly South Dakotan of Mitchell was predicting that Coyote as a designation for a citizen for the State would “probably last,” and this prophecy has been fulfilled. The name comes, of course, from that of the prairie wolf (Canis latrans), borrowed by the Spaniards from a Nahuatl Indian word, coyotl. It has been sound American since the 30s of the last century, though for a long while there seems to have been some uncertainty about its spelling, and such odd forms as cayote, collote, cayeute, chiota, koyott, ciote, cayotah, kiote and kiota are listed by Thornton and the DAE.
Tennessee prefers to be the Volunteer State,1 but since the Scopes trial at Dayton in 1925 it has been called the Monkey State with painful frequency, and will probably be a long time living down that derisive designation. The effort to repeal natural selection by law made the State ridiculous throughout the world, and its civilized minority has suffered severely from its ensuing ill fame. The DAE traces Volunteer State to 1853, but it really goes back to 1847, when Governor Aaron V. Brown issued a call for three regiments to serve in the Mexican War – and 30,000 men responded. At various times Tennessee has also been known as the Big Bend State, the Hog and Hominy State and the Lion’s Den. The last-named was listed by Brother Jonathan in 1843, but its origin is mysterious. Perhaps it arose from the fact that the border ruffians of the early days were sometimes called lions of the West, or simply lions. Hog and Hominy State, of course, refers to the favorite diet of the Tennessee yeomanry – a diet popular throughout the Bible and Bilbo country. Hog and hominy means, colloquially, fatback and any preparation of corn-meal: the term is traced by the DAE to 1792. This combination is deficient in vitamins, and those who feed upon it often suffer from pellagr
a. There was a time when certain patriotic Tennesseans began calling the State the Mother of Southwestern Statesmen, but the nickname did not last, for the Southwest was soon moving beyond the Mississippi, and the researches of historians revealed that all three of the Presidents claimed by the State – Andrew Jackson, James K. Polk and Andrew Johnson – were born outside its boundaries. Another of its nicknames is Big Bend State, which refers to the various big bends in the Tennessee river, especially the one at Chattanooga.
Texas, as everyone knows, is the Lone Star State. This was the device on the flag of the Texas Republic (1836–45), and it remains the device on the State flag and seal today. Attempts have been made at various times to substitute Banner State, Jumbo State, Blizzard State and Beef State, but in vain. An important part of Texas is the Panhandle, which runs up between Oklahoma and New Mexico in the northwest. West Virginia has another such panhandle, projecting in a thin strip between Pennsylvania and Ohio, and has been called the Panhandle State because of it. Idaho has yet another. The term, which was apparently suggested by the handle of a frying-pan, is traced by the DAE to 1861, and was applied to the Texas Panhandle so long ago as 1873. At the time of the Texas Centennial Exposition of 1936, the Hon. William C. McCraw, then attorney-general of Texas and soon afterward an unsuccessful candidate for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination, launched a campaign to put down “the insidious use of the terms panhandle and panhandling for beggars and the act of begging.” For a while this holy war got some attention in the newspapers, but it then subsided, and panhandler is still in wide use. Its origin was thus described by the Chicago Tribune at the time:
The expression grew up among hoboes, or casual laborers, to describe their plight after they had spent all their wages and found themselves jobless and broke in a city. They call street begging panhandling because it is descriptive of the mendicant who sits on the sidewalk holding out his hand or a cup.1
Utah calls itself the Beehive State, and sports on its seal “a conical beehive with a swarm of bees round it, emblematical of the industry of the people,” 2 but the designation Mormon State is far more popular, and seems likely to stick. The State, which did not enter the Union until 1896, delayed by the long battle over the polygamy issue, has also been called the Deseret State, the Salt Lake State, the Land of the Mormons and the Land of the Saints. Deseret is borrowed from a word in the Book of Mormon 3 signifying a honeybee and appearing in a passage describing the wanderings of the prophet Jared and his brother and their families in search of the Promised Land. Reaching the valley of Nimrod, they pastured their flocks, turned loose edible fowl, stocked the streams with fish, liberated swarms of bees, and planted “seeds of every kind.” The cantonment in which Brigham Young quartered his nineteen wives and fifty-seven children was commonly called the Beehive by infidels. In 1922 the World Almanac listed Desert State as a nickname for Utah, but this was probably only a typographical error. Washington is both the Evergreen State and the Chinook State, with the latter apparently the more in use. Chinook is the name of a local tribe of Indians, once numerous at the mouth of the Columbia river. They gave their name to a trade language that was in common use along the coast for more than a century, and is still spoken by a few old-timers.1 It provided a number of words for American English, e.g., skookum, siwash, potlatch, and maybe also cayuse and hooch. The DAE traces Evergreen State to 1909. It refers, of course, to the State’s immense stretches of conifer forest.
West Virginia, as I have noted, is one of the five contending Switzerlands of America, but it is now more generally known as the Mountain State or the Panhandle State, the former because a large part of its area is in the Allegheny chain, and the second because of the panhandle which juts up between Pennsylvania and Ohio and is in places less than ten miles wide, though it includes the metropolitan area of Wheeling, the largest in the State, and Moundsville, the seat of the State Penitentiary. The people of the State often speak of it proudly as West by God Virginia. Wisconsin is the Badger State, and its people are Badgers. The latter appellation seems to have arisen, like Sucker for Illinoisan and Puke for Missourian, at the Galena, Ill., lead mines in the 20s of the last century. These mines were near the place where Illinois, Iowa and Wisconsin meet, and many Wisconsin pioneers were occasionally employed in them. There were no houses for them, and they commonly lived in caves in the hillsides, resembling badger burrows. Hence they were called Badgers, and the nickname stuck when they returned home. Charles Fenno Hoffman, traveling in Michigan Territory in 1834, recorded that he there encountered “a keen-eyed, leather-belted Badger from the mines of Ouisconsin.” But Schele de Vere, in 1872, said that Badger State arose from the prevalence of the Badger (Taxidea taxus) in the wilds of the State. Badger is not an Americanism, but was brought from England, and is first recorded in America in 1654. Finally, there is Wyoming, the Equality or Suffrage State, so called because its Territorial Legislature made the first grant of the suffrage to women voters. This was in 1869.
1 Word Study, Oct., 1941, pp. 6 and 7.
1 Unhappily, the introduction of the dial telephone brought the telephone engineers a fresh headache. Thus Louis Azrael in the Baltimore News-Post, Feb. 22, 1946, p. 25: “When the Towson area gets dial phones something will have to be done about the name of the Towson exchange or the University exchange. Why? Because when you dial TO you are also dialing UN.” This was because not only two but three letters were grouped in each compartment, e.g., TUV and MNO.
2 Apartment-House Names, American Speech, Oct., 1945, pp. 165–77.
1 In Venice, Calif., there is (or was) a Finklestein Arms and a Burkeshire Arms. The New Yorker (March 9, 1946, p. 18) reports a Venus Arms, and American Speech (Feb., 1946, p. 75) a Magdalene Arms, both in Brooklyn.
1 When the custom of attaching House to the name of a hotel arose in the United States I do not know: the DAE does not mention it. Neither does the NED or its Supplement mention the use of House in the name of an office-building in England.
2 The discomforts it produces in England were once set forth as follows by William Carr in the London Telegraph: “On a dark night one may walk up one side of a long street in a new district looking for Rosynook with an electric torch, only to find it on the other side. Alternatively, darting from one side of the road to the other with danger to life and limb, one may walk up a garden path, newly planted with privet cuttings, to find ‘The Elms’ painted over the front door when it would have been more easily seen on the front gate. Numbers should be made compulsory.”
3 Naming the Bungalow, American Speech, March, 1927, p. 269.
1 No Namee, New Yorker, Aug. 26, 1944, pp. 55–57.
2 This device is frequently used for other purposes. Mr. B. P. Brodinsky, of Washington, tells me that the dramatic club at the University of Delaware used to be called the Citamard (dramatic), that a city-wide celebration in Omaha is called the Aksarben (Nebraska), that a patent medicine is called Serutan (nature’s), and that a Jewish club in Cincinnati is the Learsi (Israel). General Felix Agnus, for many years publisher of the Baltimore American, called his home in the Green Spring Valley near Baltimore Nacirema.
3 I am indebted here to Mr. W. R. Smith, of Rockledge, Fla.
4 I take all these save the first four from Cabin Names From Colorado, by Joseph Jones, American Speech, Oct., 1936, pp. 276–78.
5 Early Inns in the Philadelphia Region, American Speech, Dec., 1937, p. 318.
6 Rendezvous im König von Preussen, by Karl T. Marx, American-German Review, Feb., 1946, p. 28: “Das Gasthaus heisst King of Prussia, ja selbst die Ortschaft heisst noch so.”
1 Cross Keys was a village near Baltimore, now absorbed by the city. From time immemorial it has been mainly inhabited by colored folk.
2 It was summarized in The Names of Texas Eateries, Baltimore Evening Sun, editorial page, Feb. 8, 1940.
3 Probably pronounced kaif. See AL4, p. 347.
4 Private communication, Dec. 14, 1944.
1 The Railroads at Bay, Jan., p. 8
9.
1 List of Standard, Private and Tourist Cars; No. 34; Chicago, Oct. 1, 1943.
2 Supplement No. 1 to List of Cars No. 34; Chicago, Dec. 15, 1944.
1 I am indebted for the foregoing to Mr. George A. Kelly, vice-president of the Pullman Company.
2 Pullman Ode, New Yorker, March 27, 1937, p. 69.
3 These were names of boats on the Morris Canal. I take them from Among the Nail-Makers, Harper’s Magazine, July, 1860, p. 149.
4 I am indebted here to Mr. Robert W. Horton, director of the commission’s division of information.
1 There was an El Reno Victory, named, not after the Nevada divorce mill, but after El Reno, Okla.
2 The private lines, before and after the war, have usually given their ships synthetic serial names, often unlovely, e.g., Deloreans, Delargentino and Delbrazil. Cf. the names of the old Cunarders, ending in -ania, and those of the White Star ships, ending in -ic.
1 The first was defined to include ships carrying 40 guns or more, and the second to include those carrying from 20 to 39.
2 I am indebted here to Lieut. Leonard C. Hall, USNR, of the aviation and ship section of the Navy’s office of information.
3 Most of them are more commonly known by their numbers.
4 In the last two cases it is provided that “logical and euphonious words” may be substituted.
1 Born in 1854, he died in 1921. He rose to the rank of admiral. In 1917 he and all the other members of his family living in England changed their surname to Mountbatten, and he was created Marquess of Milford Haven.
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