2 Men-of-War Names: Their Meaning and Origin; London, 1897; second ed., 1908.
1 These names were noted during the Eighteenth Century by Francis Grose, author of A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. In a posthumous collection of essays called The Olio; London, 1792 (second ed., 1796), he called them “boastful” and warned that the hazards of war might make them ridiculous. “An unfortunate day,” he said, “may engage the Gazette writers in an awkward combination of words, by being obliged to inform the public that the Victory was beaten off, the Invincible overpowered, the Inflexible forced to yield, and that the Dreadnaught escaped by crowding all the sail she could carry.” Grose favored naming warships after admirals, “who may without much impropriety be spoken of as an old woman” – i.e., as she –, or, anticipating American usage, after the counties of England. “When we hear a sailor say,” he went on, “that the Prince of Wales has been on board Poll Infamous or that the Princess Royal has much injured her bottom, should we not tremble for the health of the royal offspring?” I am indebted here to Mr. Hugh Morrison.
2 I take these from First Snow of the Season, New Yorker, Jan. 17, 1942.
3 I am indebted for all these save the last to Sailor Nicknames for Fighting Ships, U. S. Naval Institute Proceedings, Jan., 1946, p. 83. Grose, in the paper I have lately quoted, gave some examples from the British Navy of his time. The Eolus, he said, was the Alehouse to its crew, the Belliqueux was the Belly Cook, the Agamemnon was the Eggs and Bacon, the Bienfaisant was the Bonny Pheasant, the Boreas was the Bare Arse, and the Castor and Pollux had “a misnomer too gross to repeat.”
1 The Battle of South Mountain, or Boonsboro’, Century, May, 1886, p. 137.
2 Hill was a philosophical fellow, and his reflections on his murderous trade are well worth reading. In the same paper he thus discussed the moral propaganda that makes wars: “The war songs of a people have always been written by non-combatants. The bards who followed the banners of the feudal lords, sang of their exploits, and stimulated them and their retainers to deeds of high emprise wore no armor and carried no swords. So, too, the impassioned orators who roused our ancestors in 1776 with the thrilling cry, ‘Liberty or Death,’ never once put themselves in the way of a death by lead or steel, by musket-ball or bayonet stab. The noisy speakers of 1861, who fired the Northern heart and who fired the Southern heart, never did any other kind of firing. One of the most noted of them frankly admitted that he preferred a horizontal to a vertical death.” After Appomattox, Hill took to the birch. He died in 1889 as president of the Middle Georgia Military and Agricultural College.
1 On the Dedications of American Churches: An Enquiry Into the Naming of Churches in the United States, Some Account of English Dedications, and Suggestions for Future Dedications in the American Church; Cambridge (Mass.), 1891.
1 See also Names of Churches, Current Religious Thought, Nov., 1945, p. 6, and Church Dedications of the Oxford Diocese, by K. E. Kirk; Oxford, 1946.
2 “It was not until 1170 that the Roman Church reserved to herself the right to canonize; and only about 250 years ago that the regulations were laid down for substantially the present Roman procedure.” (pp. 30 and 31.)
3 Judges XXI, 16–23.
4 A store-church is one set up in a vacant store or in the front room of a dwelling house. All it needs to get under way is a brother fired to preach, and a sufficiency of sisters to applaud him and feed him.
5 For the sake of the record, I add that this was in Gilmor street above Lexington, little over three blocks from my house in Hollins street.
6 The use of the names of Catholic churches by athletic teams made up of their younger members produces some startling incongruities in sports-page headlines, e.g., All Saints vs. Corpus Christi and Holy Cross Beats Holy Rosary. Combats between the colleges of the older British universities provide other examples, e.g., Jesus Still Head of River, a headline in the London Daily Telegraph, June 15, 1936. I am indebted here to the late F. H. Tyson. At a village called Sacred Heart in Oklahoma there is a cotton-gin known simply as the Sacred Heart Gin. It is listed in Oklahoma Manufactures, 1940, Publication No. 49 of the Engineering Experiment Station of the Oklahoma Agricultural and Mechanical College, fifth ed., April, 1941, p. 98. I am indebted here to Mr. Winslow Ames.
1 Churchyard is traced by the NED to 1154. In the early days the gentry were buried under the floor of the church itself, and the common people in the consecrated ground surrounding it. Cemetery, which was first used to designate the subterranean Christian graves in the Roman catacombs, came into general use in the Fifteenth Century. Graveyard, an American invention, is traced to 1773, and burial-ground to 1803.
2 Cemetery Names Give State Distinction, Jackson News, March 5, 1939, p. 24. I am indebted here to Miss Anabel Power, of the State Department of Public Welfare. Jackson, and for other help to Mr. Carl Kastrup, of Rockford, Ill.
3 Quilt Names in the Ozarks, American Speech, Feb., pp. 33–36.
4 The Romance of the Patchwork Quilt in America; Caldwell, Idaho, 1935.
1 “What is known as the crazy-quilt,” say Randolph and Miss Spradley, “is simply a wild jumble of small patches, apparently put together without any particular design.” The DAE traces the term to 1886 and marks it an Americanism. It is probably much older.
2 Ch. CXXXIX. The Doctor was written between 1834 and 1847.
3 What’s in a Name?, Country Gentleman, Feb., 1937, p. 97.
4 The Borden Company’s Elsie was the first cow to be a radio crooner and the first to travel by air. She was not, in fact, one cow, but “a troupe of well-bred Jerseys,” with headquarters at East Shodack, N. Y. Her story was told in the Borden Company’s annual report for 1946, pp. 26–27.
5 O Tempora, O Nomina!, American Speech, July, pp. 529–60.
1 I am indebted here to Mr. Marshall Cassidy, executive secretary of the Jockey Club.
2 Care of the Dog; Chicago, 1940; second ed., 1943, p. 19. Captain Judy is also editor of the Dog World.
3 Rover Gives Way to Butch as Dog’s Tag, Sept. 18.
4 I am indebted here to Mr. Frank E. Bechman, of Battle Creek, Mich.
1 I am indebted here to Miss Alice Rosenthal, editor of the Dog News.
2 American Newspaper Titles, American Speech, Feb., 1937, pp. 10–18.
1 Saturday Review of Literature, Aug. 8, 1942, p. 16.
2 Mr. Valentine said that there was an almost complete bibliography in Ephemeral Bibelots, by Winthrop Faxon; Boston, 1903.
3 In a dispatch from Washington printed by newspapers of the North American Newspapers Alliance, Aug. 19.
4 For the names of American colleges see American College Names, by Harold B. Allen, Words, March, 1937, pp. 70–72; April, pp. 86–88, and May, pp. 110–112. For the nicknames of football elevens see American Speech, April, 1937, pp. 158–59.
1 I am indebted here to Mr. C. W. Y. Currie, of the New York Central. He tells me that it made a record of 112.5 miles an hour, west of Batavia, N. Y., so long ago as May 10, 1893, drawn by the famous locomotive, 999. Its first trip in streamlined, stainless-steel equipment was made on Dec. 7, 1941.
2 New York, 1937, p. 410. Dr. Shankle’s work is one of the best reference books ever published, and deserves to be in every library. It is heavily documented, and shows few omissions. I am indebted to it for much of what follows. For permission to quote it I owe thanks both to him and to his publisher, the H. W. Wilson Company.
1 e.g., M. Schele de Vere, p. 620, and Shankle, p. 129.
2 Albany Microscope, March 27. The same article also referred to gunflints made of horn, and buttons made of basswood. In 1826 Timothy Flint, in his Recollections of Ten Years Passed in the Valley of the Mississippi, added straw baskets and “pit-coal indigo,” apparently an anticipation of the synthetic indigo suggested by Adolf Baeyer in 1880. In 1833 S. A. Hammett, in A Stray Yankee in Texas, added wooden hams, and in 1838 a Western paper quoted by the Baltimore Commercial added cast-iron axes. I am indebted here to Thornton.
2 See Supplement I, p. 211.
3 p. 441. I am indebted here to Dr. Joseph M. Carrière.
1 p. 658.
2 This book is not to be confused with the magazine Brother Jonathan.
3 Written in 1873 or thereabout. These notes are now in the possession of Dr. Atcheson L. Hench, of the University of Virginia.
4 I am indebted here to Mr. Bradford F. Swan, of the Providence Journal.
5 I take this from the DAE.
1 By Gerald W. Johnson, Frank R. Kent, H. L. Mencken and Hamilton Owens: New York, 1937, p. 389.
1 Proclaimed on Dec. 6, 1922, after a struggle with England that had gone on off and on since 1171. Under the new constitution of Dec. 29, 1937 the name was changed to Eire.
2 The Orange Free State declared its independence on Feb. 23, 1854. It was annexed by England on May 24, 1900, and became the Orange River Colony.
3 There is a Free State Brewery in Baltimore, and also a Free State Roofing Co., a Free State Oil Corporation, a Free State Press, and a chain of Free State grocery-stores.
4 The boundary between Maryland and Pennsylvania, run in 1763–67 by two English surveyors, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon. It was, until the Civil War, the dividing line between the free States and the slave States, and is still generally regarded as marking off the North from the South. The actual division between the two sections, culturally and politically, runs an irregular course through Maryland, crossing below Baltimore. The Northern counties of the State belong either to the Appalachian or to the Pennsylvania cultural spheres.
1 Boston, 1928, p. 155.
2 One of the races run at the Wilmington track is the Diamond State Stakes.
1 I owe this to Shankle.
2 The Southern name for the battle known to Northerners as Antietam. It was fought at Sharpsburg, Md., on Sept. 16 and 17, 1862.
1 Zebulon B. Vance (1830–94) was an opponent of Secession, but when his State left the Union raised a company which became part of the Fourteenth North Carolina Infantry, C.S.A. He was later elected colonel of the Twenty-sixth North Carolina, and commanded it in the Seven Days’ Battles of the Peninsula campaign, June 25-July 1, 1862. While still in the field he was elected Governor of his State. On May 20, 1864, he was imprisoned, but was released on July 5. In 1870 he was elected to the United States Senate. He was refused admission, but was reëlected in 1879, and served in the Senate thereafter until his death.
2 The Graham speech, the theme of which was Agricultural Achievements in North Carolina, was delivered before the Southern Commercial Congress at Muskogee, Okla., April 25, 1915. Graham was then commissioner of agriculture in North Carolina. The speech was reprinted in the Miami (Fla.) Daily News, Nov. 19, 1925, and in American Speech, March, 1926, p. 355 It is from the latter that I take it.
1 The DAE says that this was “moonshine whiskey of a low grade.”
2 Clay-eating is an aberration known to pathologists as chthonophagia or geophagism. It is encountered only in persons of low mentality, and is usually accompanied by theological delusions of an extravagant character.
1 Cf. the German krachen and the American wise-crack and wise-cracker.
2 Letters From the United States, Cuba and Canada, by the Hon. Amelia M. Murray; New York, 1856, p. 324. I am indebted for this to Dr. Joseph M. Carrière.
3 Advertisement of the Journal in the Editor and Publisher, July 15, 1944, p. 25.
1 See Nicknames of the States: a Note on Walt Whitman, by John Howard Birss, American Speech, June, 1932, p. 389.
1 Another and far less probable etymology is given in Alabama: a Guide to the Deep South, in the American Guide Series; New York, 1941, p. 128.
2 There is a weekly Wonder State Herald in Kensett, Ark., population 889.
1 The history of the Bowie-knife has been heavily labored by historians, with no general agreement. The most plausible account of it is in The Bowie Brothers and Their Famous Knife, by Matilda Elanor Bowie Moore, a daughter of Rezin P. Bowie, Frontier Times (Bandera, Texas), Feb., 1942, pp. 199–205. Mrs. Moore was long dead in 1942, but she had prepared a history of the Bowies during her lifetime, and this was sent to the Frontier Times by her granddaughter, Mrs. Bessie Bird Moore Bryant. It showed that the Bowie-knife was invented by Rezin after he had been seriously wounded by a hunting knife with which he had attempted to cut the throat of a wild heifer. The thought occurred to him that this “could have been prevented had there been a guard between the blade and handle of the knife.” He accordingly had the blacksmith of his plantation on Bayou Boeuf, La., make a new one of a broad file, with such a guard affixed. His daughter testified that he intended it to be used as a hunting knife only. But its usefulness for homicide soon attracted public attention, and in a little while it was the weapon of choice of the whole Southwest. The Bowies were descendants of a Scotsman who immigrated to America during the Eighteenth Century, along with two of his brothers. He settled in Natchez, Miss., but his brothers chose Maryland, and there they became the progenitors of a number of distinguished men, including Oden Bowie, Governor of the State from 1868 to 1872. Oden Bowie was a Democrat, and his election marked the final rescue of the State from the abhorred damyankee. I am indebted to Judge Robert T. Neill, of San Angelo, Texas, for the Frontier Times. See also Bowie Knife, by Eston Everett Ericson, American Speech, Feb., 1937, pp. 77–79.
1 I am indebted for this to Dr. Joseph M. Carrière.
2 Dorado is Spanish for golden, or gilt.
3 Eureka is Greek for “I have found it.” The NED says that it should be spelled heureka. It is the legendary exclamation of Archimedes (c. 287–212 B.C.) on his discovery of a way to determine, by specific gravity, the amount of base metal in a golden crown of King Hiero II of Syracuse (c. 308–216 B.C.). He made the discovery in a public bathhouse, and was so excited by it that he ran home naked. Eureka State is traced by Charles J. Lovell to 1857; the DAE overlooks it.
1 A Book of Nicknames, by John Goff; Louisville, 1892, p. 13, quoted by Shankle.
2 There is a weekly called the Sucker State at Mahomet, Ill., population 729.
3 A Winter in the Far West; London, 1835, I, p. 207n. This book was also published in New York during the same year as A Winter in the West.
1 June, p. 133.
2 A reference to Genesis XLII, 2: “And he said, Behold, I have heard that there is corn in Egypt; get you down thither, and buy for us from thence; that we may live, and not die.”
3 The following is from The Field, the Dungeon and the Escape, by Albert D. Richardson; Hartford, Conn., 1865, p. 186: “ ‘Egypt to the rescue!’ is the motto upon the banner of a new Illinois regiment. Southwestern Illinois, known as Egypt, is turning out men for the Mississippi campaign with surprising liberality.”
1 The Word Hoosier, Indiana Magazine of History, Vol. VII, 1911, p. 62.
2 Dunn was born in 1855 and died in 1924. He was secretary of the Indiana Historical Society from 1886 until his death. He was on the staff of the State library from 1889 to 1893, on that of the Indianapolis Sentinel from 1893 to 1904, and city comptroller of Indianapolis from 1904 to 1906 and again from 1914 to 1916. He was the author of the volume on Indiana in the American Commonwealth Series, of a History of Indianapolis published in 1910, and of a book called Indiana and Indianans, published in 1919.
3 The Word Hoosier, Indiana Historical Society Publications, Vol. IV, No. 2; Indianapolis, 1907, p. 4.
4 Bound in Shallows; New York, 1897, p. 142. I take this reference from the DAE.
5 No printed copy of the Journal of Jan. 1, 1833 is known to exist, but Dunn had access to a copy of the poem in
the possession of the poet’s daughter, Mrs. Sarah Wrigley, and on it the date was noted. It is probable that Finley made the copy after the poem was published, and changed the spelling of his title. The DAE traces Hoosheroon to 1834, by which time it had come to signify an adult as well as a child.
1 i.e., on the frontier.
2 Traced by the DAE to 1834, but probably older.
3 Defined by the DAE as “an appellation used by or about boasting frontiersmen and boatmen in the West.” James K. Paulding, in his Westward Ho!; New York, 1832, Vol. I, p. 83, hinted that it embodied the idea that the boatmen were amphibious, and could proceed overland as well as afloat. The DAE’s earliest example is dated June 12, 1812, but Thornton shows that the term had occurred in Washington Irving’s Knickerbocker’s History of New York, 1809. Thornton presents many examples from the 20s and 30s. The term was often reinforced with additions, e.g., and a little of the snapping turtle, part earthquake and a little steamboat, etc. It was an important constituent of the Tall Talk of the frontier, for which see AL4, pp. 136 and 137.
4 I take this from Dunn’s 1907 paper, p. 11.
5 The term is not noted by either the DAE or Thornton.
1 London, 1856, p. 338.
2 In his 1907 paper, p. 12.
3 John Jacob Lehmanowsky, who had served as an officer under Napoleon, and came to Indiana after Waterloo. His descendants survive in Indiana to this day.
1 A rather more probable eponym was the Rev. Harry Hoosier, a Negro Methodist evangelist who ravaged the frontier in the 1800 era. Born a slave in North Carolina, he died in Philadelphia in 1810. He was a famous alarmer of sinners and was much esteemed by his white contemporaries, Francis Asbury (1745–1816), Thomas Coke (1747–1814) and Richard Whatcoat (1736–1806). Says A. B. Hyde, in The Story of Methodism, 1894, p. 409: “If these eminent men were sick the congregations were glad if only Harry were there, and Asbury owned that they preferred Harry to him.” I am indebted here to Mr. J. A. Rogers.
2 Letters From the United States, Cuba, and Canada; London, 1856, p. 324.
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