While the power of popular perception is important, I put nothing in this book that to my better knowledge wasn’t true, with one exception: the tale of our old friend, the Earl of Sandwich.
The mythology of the earl inventing sandwiches to get through a daylong gambling binge seems to have formed around a single source. It appeared in a travel book on London written by a visiting Frenchman who was repeating something juicy he had heard about one of the king’s ministers. There’s no corroborating evidence that the earl was a gambler of any sort; rather, he was said to be a tireless worker, leading to the conjecture that maybe he loved his sandwiches because they allowed him to work through the night, a claim proposed by his biographer and supported by his descendants (owners of the Earl of Sandwich restaurant chain), which seems only slightly less ridiculous than the Frenchman’s tale.
In either event, what does it matter? It’s just a macguffin.
NOTES
Philadelphia whiskey maker E.G. Booz: His product was memorably packaged in a log-cabin-shaped brown bottle; to bouse as a verb goes back to Middle English.
algorithm . . . Algorismus: The term algorithm developed after algorism (the original English word) got confused with arithmos, the Greek word for number.
scientific pig Latin: The naming system Linnaeus developed, set forth in his Species plantarum (1753) and Systema naturae (1758, tenth edition), includes a generic (genus) name and specific (species).
nearly thirty times what they were worth: The harvest reportedly cost the British government £10,000 for £350 worth of potatoes. “Boycott’s legacy; Making a name for himself: British land agent Captain Charles Boycott was ostracised by the Irish.” Daily Mail (September 27, 2007).
Improving upon Jackson’s idea: Kellogg got his original start in the cereal business producing his own version of Granula, called Granula. Upon Jackson’s apparent threat to sue, Kellogg renamed his product Granola. A former patient at John’s sanitarium named C.W. Post then ripped off Kellogg’s Granola recipe, creating Grape Nuts. Years later, hippies would revive the name of Kellogg’s by-then defunct product for a new take on the cereal genre.
brought back home with them a new word: That, at least, is one theory, based on chronology and geography. To wit: Crapper went into business in 1861; the OED cites “crapping ken” (1846), “crapping case” (1859), and “crapping-castle” (1874) as referring to outhouses and water closets, but crapper is first seen in American slang from the 1920s. The link from Thomas Crapper to the Americanism, if real, is yet to be discovered.
“That will do for a salamander!”: A salamander is a variety of amphibian, but was long the name for a mythological, lizardlike creature that lived in fire and was closely related to the dragon. On Elkanah Tisdale’s original drawing of the gerrymander, notice the silhouette of Governor Gerry under the beast’s wing.
the lexical contributions: The term superman itself is not originally an eponym, but was coined by Friedrich Nietzsche (or, rather, his translators). Still, it’s safe to posit that when someone says “Don’t try to be a superman,” they aren’t talking about the proto-Nazi übermensch but rather the creation of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, a couple of nice Jewish boys from Cleveland.
an amalgam of brain and maniac: The famed supercomputer ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Automatic Calculator), built in 1946, also may have influenced the character’s name.
Bizarro: The word bizarre may come from the language linguists consider the bizarro world, Basque, where the word bizzara means “beard.”
one Scuttled Butt: A scuttlebutt was the deckside equivalent of the water cooler, literally and figuratively. Vernon’s order appears in Michael Quinion’s essay on grog (“World Wide Words: Grog,” World Wide Words, www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-gro4.htm), as well as in Peter D. Jeans, Seafaring Lore and Legend: A Miscellany of Maritime Myth, Superstition, Fable, and Fact (McGraw-Hill Professional, 2004): 101–102.
“Old Grog”: Grogram, from French gros grain, is a coarse fabric out of which were made cloaks and coats, often themselves called “grograms” by synecdoche. Vernon’s ever-present grogram earned him the nickname Old Grog.
adopted, with vigor: Though often credited with the invention of the guillotine, Joseph-Ignace only proposed the device; its roots are centuries older. The version used in Revolutionary France was designed by Dr. Antoine Louis (who would die by one) and built by German harpsichord maker Tobias Schmidt. It quickly took on innumerable nicknames, among them the Louisette, the Louison, the widow, the national razor, the Capetian necktie, Guillotin’s daughter, Mlle. Guillotin, and, of course, the guillotine. Supposedly, the Guillotin family lobbied to change the name of the device and, that failing, changed their own.
“bar-room and brothel”: A grandson and great-grandson of presidents, Charles Francis Adams Jr. described Hooker’s headquarters as “a place where no self-respecting man liked to go, and no decent woman could go . . . a combination of bar-room and brothel.” Hugh Rawson, “Why Do We Say That?” American Heritage (Feb./March 2006): 16.
Hooker ordered that prostitutes: According to Thomas Power Lowry, The Story the Soldiers Wouldn’t Tell (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1994): 64, “To aid the military police by localizing the problem, Hooker herded many of the prostitutes into the Murder Bay (future Federal Triangle) area.”
regional slang term: Three antebellum citations have so far been found for hooker, two of which independently ascribe its origin to Corlear’s Hook, a bawdy part of New York filled with sailors and brothels. Some think the word evolved from an earlier sense of hooker as a pickpocket, or the idea of a prostitute trying to “hook” a client. Likely, it was some combination of these elements, and the use of hooker formed a double or triple entendre— one of the entendres being Fighting Joe.
Patrick Hooligan: In 1898, tales of “Hooligan” gangs began appearing in London newspapers. A variation on the more familiar Houlihan, hooligan almost certainly derives from someone’s name, but whose is in dispute. The main evidence for Patrick comes from Clarence Rook’s The Hooligan Nights (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1899), which recounts his story as told by patrons of the Lamb and Flag, a pub Hooligan frequented.
it kind of sounded African: A variety of African connections have been suggested, including a link to the Swahili word jumbe, or chief, and a possible connection to the West African bogeyman Mumbo Jumbo. According to the writer Jan Bondeson, the London Zoo superintendent who named Jumbo also later named an African gorilla Mumbo. The Feejee Mermaid and Other Essays in Natural and Unnatural History. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999): 99.
“The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze”: Composed in 1867, with words by Gaston Lyle and music by George Leybourne. From Howard Loxton, The Golden Age of the Circus, (New York: Smithmark Publishers, 1997): 68:
He flew through the air, with the greatest of ease
This daring young man on the flying trapeze;
His movements so graceful, all girls he could please
And my love he purloined away.
poor Jules died at thirty-one: The year of Léotard’s birth, and his age at death, are in dispute. While many sources agree that he was born August 1, 1838, the years 1842 and 1839 have also been suggested. He died in 1870.
So which Lynch was it?: Charles was long considered the real Lynch, then the pendulum swung to William and has only in the last couple of years swung back to Charles. Much about the William thesis is easy to dismiss, since it rests on documents published long after the term entered the language (an 1811 account of Lynch’s confession to South Carolina diarist Andrew Ellicott, an 1836 article in the Southern Literary Messenger, and a May 1859 article in Harper’s magazine). Christopher Waldrep has provided essential research bolstering the Charles thesis, and was the source for much of this entry. See Christopher Waldrep, The Many Faces of Judge Lynch: Extralegal Violence and Punishment in America (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), and Lynching in America: A History in Documents (New Yor
k: New York University Press, 2006).
a hoax perpetrated by Edgar Allan Poe: Poe loved hoaxes, especially those he managed to get published in the newspaper. In 1844, he persuaded the New York Sun to publish an entirely false account of a European who had managed to cross the Atlantic in three days in a hot-air balloon.
The Milliner’s Trade: The term milliner derives from those famed pliers of fancy wares (originally not just hats) of Milan.
the Southwark hatters who manufactured it: Other versions of the story say the name derives from the hatter John Bowler, and that it wasn’t William who ordered the hat but a relation, Edward Coke.
Alexander Pope’s Dunciad: The Dunciad, first published in 1728, was an epic parody in which Pope eviscerated many of his fellow authors of the day, whom he fashioned “dunces” living in the kingdom of Dulnes. By that time a dunce meant a general blockhead, though according to the Oxford English Dictionary Pope was also using the term with the special sense of one who has been made stupider by learning.
sark: Sark is cognate with the second half of berserk, Icelandic for bear-shirt, the dressing preference of some particularly bloodthirsty Viking warriors. Cutty Sark became the name of a nineteenth-century clipper ship that in turn inspired a brand of whisky.
slave signed the document “Dr. Leopold, Knight of Sacher-Masoch”: Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs. Trans. Jean McNeil, in Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty & Venus in Furs (New York: Zone Books, 1991): 278–279.
trance states: Mesmer was hypnotizing people without knowing it and “curing” them via hypnotic suggestion. He was no charlatan; he wanted badly to be investigated, believing he had made great scientific breakthroughs. Since the Mesmer commission, faith healing has been shown to be effective, while energy flow and magnet wearing (both with long histories pre-Mesmer) are back in vogue.
ironically for the monarch: Destined to die on Guillotin’s machine along with the king was his wife, Marie Antoinette (a client of Mesmer’s), as well as the chemist Antoine Lavoisier, a member of the commission.
the obvious reading of Genesis 38: Modern biblical scholarship tends to say Onan’s crime was his failure to fulfill the obligation of levirate marriage, an ancient Hebrew custom that required a man to marry his brother’s wife if the brother died without a male heir.
call them all—Pandars!: Obviously, not quite prescient enough. The term pander changed again post-Shakespeare. As a verb, pander went from meaning to act as a go-between for sex to a figurative use, associated especially with politicians. That verb then produced a noun, panderer, with a different meaning from the original noun pander. Today the meaning of pander as “to pimp” exists only as a relic in U.S. legal code.
paparazzi has entered the world lexicon: In Japan, mothers who photograph their children’s every move are called mammarazzi, a term making inroads in English as well.
statue of a warrior: The statue is thought to represent Menelaus (cuckolded husband of Helen of Troy) carrying the body of Patroclus (Achilles’ boon companion and boy toy).
a really silly fifties hairstyle: The coiffure, in a slightly different form, was first worn by La Pompadour and copied by men as well as women. The style had several variations but always involved sweeping the hair up off the face, and sometimes even fixing it to a wire frame.
Procrustes: In Greek, Prokroustes literally means “the stretcher.” The serial killer’s real name, according to Apollodorus (the first known to write about him), was Damastes, though others have suggested the name Polypemon.
lacking the death penalty: Norway had not had a civilian execution since 1876, but capital punishment was still on the books for the military, where it remained until 1979.
when Nellie had a spell under the weather it was the one thing she could eat: Another story has it that the opera diva was on a diet and one day her thin dry toast arrived overdone, horrifying Escoffier, but Nellie wound up liking it that way. Melba, Dame’d in 1918, was born Helen Porter Mitchell; her stage name derives from her hometown of Melbourne, Australia.
Lemuel Benedict: His story, which he told the New Yorker in 1942, could well be a tall tale. There are many contenders to the plate. The original server of the dish may have been Delmonico’s (with the name eggs à la Benedick), or perhaps a French provincial dish called oeufs bénédictine is the source of the recipe. Then again, maybe Delmonico’s and French peasant cooks are a bunch of copycats.
(but no anchovies): Some say a salad with anchovies came first, whipped up by Cesare’s brother Alex. However, others attribute the dish to chef Giacomo Junia of Chicago, who is said to have created it around 1903 and named it after Julius Caesar.
the crime of “moderatism”: In a political sense, that is.
de Sade, by the way, was really fat: And short. But to be fair, it was only late in life that he “had eaten himself into a considerable, even a grotesque, obesity,” as de Sade biographer Neil Schaeffer wrote in the Guardian in 2001.
Shrapnel: The meaning of the word extended from the shell to the projectiles it sent forth, and in that sense endured after the shell itself became obsolete technology. In Aussie and Kiwi military slang, shrapnel took on a further figurative meaning, of small bills or change.
burnsides; at some point the word did a flip-flop: The switch was probably influenced by “side-hair” and “side-whiskers,” compound terms sideburns eventually replaced. Also popular in the U.S. was the word dundrearies, after the character Lord Dundreary in Our American Cousin, the play Lincoln attended the night he was shot.
a Renaissance man’s Renaissance man: In the credit-where-credit-is-due department, I lifted this from Stephen Jay Gould’s “a Renaissance man of the Renaissance itself,” which is found in an excellent article on Fracastoro and syphilis Gould wrote for Natural History (Oct. 2000), and which is the source of most of my information on the subject.
blame it all on the French: Syphilis was widely called “the Spanish disease,” but Fracastoro, for political reasons, hated the French and supported the Spanish, and so wanted to clear the latter’s name and besmirch the former’s.
stealing nectar and ambrosia: Alternate myths have it that Tantalus’s crime was serving the gods human flesh at a banquet, or that he merely told his fellow mortals what the gossip was around the gods’ dinner table.
“Money don’t stink”: What he actually said (reputedly) was Pecunia non olet, which became a standard Latin proverb.
“Jeep!”: The original military vehicles were designated General Purpose, and so jeep may just be a clipped form of the initials GP. Still, the popularity of Popeye, the identical spelling, and the fact that four-wheeled jeeps are magical and resourceful creatures themselves all indicate at the very least that Eugene exerted a Hooker-like influence on the name’s popularity. (A similar argument can also be made with Wimpy/wimp, the connection between which is not universally accepted.)
blimp: The origin of the word blimp is unknown. The oft-cited etymology crediting it eponymously to Colonel Blimp is definitively apocryphal, the term having predated the cartoon character (who looks suspiciously like Count von Zeppelin).
dummkopf: Despite its flammability, hydrogen gives better lift than helium and was cheaper; in fact, it was the main gas used in airships before 1921.
montgolfier in French: Montgolfier was also once a word in English. Similar English-language fossils found in this essay are roentgen rays and judas in its peephole sense.
Sprudelbad: The most common term in German is Whirlpool, derived from English.
bemelmans, which means “foreigner who makes fun of natives”: I was shocked when I came across travel writer Tom Miller’s book The Panama Hat Trail and learned this about my grandfather. Miller quotes a Quito bookseller as saying that to carry El Burro Por Dentro would be suicidal, even forty years after its publication. To my relief, Miller also reported that certain people, intellectuals mostly, appreciated the book, claiming it spurred change and chalking the negative reception up to knee-jerk nationalism.
a couple of Englishmen and a kid who wrecked his father’s wheels: The brougham was a four-wheel closed carriage, named after Scottish politician Henry Peter Brougham; the hansom a two-wheel closed carriage with the driver sitting at the back, designed by British architect Joseph Aloysius Hansom; and the phaeton a four-wheeled open carriage, named for the son of the sun god who ill-advisedly borrowed his father’s chariot.
a macguffin: A macguffin is the gimmick around which a plot revolves but is in itself meaningless. According to Alfred Hitchcock, who coined the term, “In crook stories it is always the necklace and in spy stories it is always the papers.”
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
JOHN BEMELMANS MARCIANO is the author and illustrator of several children’s books, including Madeline and the Cats of Rome, Harold’s Tail, and Delilah, as well as the illustrated biography Bemelmans: The Life and Art of Madeline’s Creator about his grandfather Ludwig Bemelmans. An artist and self-professed word geek, he lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Andromache, daughter, Galatea, and two cats, Maud and Liddy.
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION
A·NON·Y·PON·Y·MOUS
APPENDIX I
APPENDIX II
AFTERWORD
NOTES
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
Anonyponymous Page 9
