“A society of men here called high-binders”

The California Gold Rush made San Francisco a boom town. It attracted Americans from the East Coast, of course, and also people from southern China.

Within a couple of decades, some Americans of northern European backgrounds began to view Chinese immigration as a problem. In particular, they pointed to violent male criminals who trafficked young women and fought men from other organizations.

To label that type of criminal, newspaper editors and government officials reached back several decades.

The Weekly Alta California for 5 Feb 1870 referred to a ring of Chinese immigrants as “a gang of ‘Celestial highbinders’.” In this period “Celestial” was a codeword for Chinese, China being the “Celestial Empire.”

On 2 May 1876, at a California state senate hearing on “The Social, Moral, and Political Effect of Chinese Immigration,” the Sacramento police officer Charles P. O’Neil testified:

On I Street there are from one hundred and fifty to two hundred of what we call “highbinders,” living off the houses of prostitution, and they are mixed up with the gamblers. You might call them hoodlums.

The U.S. Congress formed a Joint Special Committee to Investigate Chinese Immigration, and in the fall of 1876 China trader Thomas H. King testified about “the large force of the six companies’ high-binders, who can always be seen guarding [contract laborers].”

A senator asked: “What do you mean by ‘highbinders’?”

King replied: “I mean men who are employed by these companies here to hound and spy on these Chinese and pursue them if they do not comply with their contract as they see fit to judge it.”

“It is a term to express Chinese persons who act in that capacity?”

“I have often heard the term applied to designate bad men. It is an English term, I believe.”

Later the Rev. Augustus W. Loomis, a Presbyterian missionary, objected to King’s claim:

…he expatiates about the high-binders, hired assassins, kept by the six companies to intimidate the coolies. These are simply assertions without proof. . . . I have heard the papers speak of them. I do not know of any such people.

But even Loomis acknowledged people were using the term.

At those same hearings, San Francisco police officer Michael A. Smith said:

There is also a society of men here called high-binders, or hatchet-men. . . . A great many of them carry a hatchet with the handle cut off; it may be about six inches long, with a handle and a hole cut in it; they have the handle sawed off a little, leaving just enough to keep a good hold.

Since “high-binders” had fallen out of use as a general term for hoodlums, Californians could seize on it to mean Chinese hoodlums in particular. In 1877, O. Gibson’s The Chinese in America stated:

…associations of Chinese villains and cut-throats have been formed for the purpose of protecting the owners of women and girls in their property rights, and of doing any other villainous business that comes to hand.

The San Francisco press know these men by the term of “Highbinders.”

In The Hatchet Men: The Story of the Tong Wars in San Francisco’s Chinatown (1962), Richard H. Dillon wrote:

While giving testimony during the 1870’s in regard to evildoing in Chinatown, Special Officer Delos Woodruff answered a question from the bench by saying, “A lot of highbinders came to the place—”

The judge interrupted him with a gesture of his hand. “What do you mean by ‘highbinders’?” His honor queried.

“Why,” replied Woodruff, “a lot of Chinese hoodlums.”

The judge persisted, “And that’s the term you apply to Chinese hoodlums, is it?”

“That’s what I call them,” responded Woodruff.

The source for this exchange is almost certainly an item in the 19 Mar 1893 (San Francisco) Morning Call, thus a recollection or reconstruction rather than a contemporaneous record. Woodruff resigned from the San Francisco police in 1874 after testifying that he had kicked back $25 per month to a friend of the police chief for his lucrative beat, and then suddenly moved out of state when that man came to trial. Despite that pedigree, other authors cite the exchange from Dillon’s book as establishing the term “highbinders.” But there are less impeachable examples from the 1870s.

“Highbinders” remained in near-constant use for the next several decades, losing its scare-quotes, its hyphen, and its initial capital. Even today, the Merriam-Webster dictionary definition of the word notes the specific link to Chinese criminals. But, as I discussed earlier, it actually came from the opposite coast, and an earlier conflict between natives and immigrants.

(The picture above is a page from Harper’s Weekly in 1886 showing “The Chinese Highbinders in San Francisco” and their “Favorite Weapons.”)

“High-binders” Escape from New York

As I recounted here, the term “High-binder” or “hide-binder” appeared in the New York press in late 1806 and early 1807 after disturbances in the streets around Christmas.

At first it referred to a particular set of anti-Catholic rowdies. Soon it was being slapped on working-class Catholics instead.

In subsequent newspaper items, we can see the term spread outside of New York, though still tied to that place of origin. The 28 Apr 1813 Tickler of Philadelphia described the neighborhood of “Gotham, (New York,)” as: “Here the sailor, the ropemaker, the cookey boys and hide-binders resort to enjoy the jollifications…”

By the 1830s, “high-binder” had become the standard form, and the word was one of many labels for criminals:

• “among the thieves and high-binders of the world” (Philadelphia Daily Chronicle, 19 Apr 1832)
• “a posse of high-binders” (Newburyport Herald, 4 Aug 1835)
• “a gang of high-binders, so called” (New-York Daily Express, 6 Jul 1837)
• “the most desperate high-binders that ever graced a drunken revel upon the ‘Five Points’” (Hudson River Chronicle of Ossining, 27 Mar 1838)
• “a set of ‘high-binders’” (Baltimore Sun, 16 Sept 1839)

Most newspaper editors were still setting the word off in some way to acknowledge it could be unfamiliar to readers.

In 1839, one newspaper near the Mason-Dixon Line used the term to headline an article about gamblers, both black and white (Baltimore Sun, 31 October). Another claimed that New York’s political “ultras” were adopting that label among others to seem even more scruffy and democratic (Alexandria Gazette, 5 November).

Over the following decade, Americans began using the word for corrupt politicians, not just street-level criminals. Among the rising literati, both Edgar Allan Poe and James Kirke Paulding revived the form “hide-binder” to show they were in the know. But the label was losing its power and starting to sound stale.

TOMORROW: High-binders head west.

(The picture above is George Catlin’s 1827 view of the Five Points neighborhood, now at the Met.)

The First High-Binders

I’ve been reading about San Francisco before the big earthquake of 1906, and one word that comes up a lot is “highbinder.”

Merriam-Webster defines that as “a professional killer operating in the Chinese quarter of an American city,” or alternatively “a corrupt politician.”

There were plenty of corrupt politicians in Gilded-Age San Francisco, but in the newspapers of the time and in histories since the term “highbinder” definitely meant a thug of Chinese extraction.

I wondered what the etymology of that term was. What were those men binding, and how high? Was is something to do with queues, or Chinese dress?

It turned out the answer lies in the early 1800s, and it has nothing to do with Chinese-American culture at all.

The term surfaced in New York City at the end of 1806. The Evening-Post of 26 December reported on a riot the evening before this way:

There has for some time existed in this city, in and about George and Charlotte-Streets, a desperate association of lawless and unprincipled vagabonds, calling themselves High-binders, and which, during the last winter, produced several riots, making the demolition of houses of ill-fame the ostensible object of their disorderly practices.

The Weekly Inspector of 27 December stated:

On Christmas Eve, a party of banditti, amounting, it is stated, to forty or fifty members of an association, calling themselves High-binders, assembled in front of St. Peter’s Church, in Barclay-street, expecting that the Catholic ritual would be performed with a degree of pomp and splendor, which has usually been omitted in this city. These ceremonies, however, not taking place, the High-binders manifested great displeasure, but were at length prevailed on to disperse.

I should clarify that these original High-binders wanted to jeer at and disrupt a high Catholic ceremony inside St. Peter’s Church (shown above), not to participate. They were a Protestant, probably nativist gang.

The High-binders’ actions on Christmas Eve provoked counterattacks by Irishmen the next day. Those fights escalated until a town watchmen was killed. Although the police arrested only Irishmen at first, the Republican Watch-Tower of 6 Jan 1807 (misdated 1806 by its printer) said, “It is shrewdly suspected that the murderer will yet be found among the ruffians denominated high binders.”

The Bowery Boys site tells the story of the Christmas Riot of 1806 here.

On 24 Jan 1807, the American Citizen, another New York paper, reported on the trials arising from that violence. Its editors did their best to sort out the sides. They also stated that the correct term was “hide-binders,” for men working in the leather trade.

Within just a few months the May 1807 Weekly Inspector published this item at the end of a column:

An American bull.—An American, speaking of the turbulent conduct of the “hide-binders,” observed that these low Irishmen were so used to being hung, that they could not live without it.

Just five months before the High-binders had burst onto the New York scene by besieging a Catholic church and then brawling with its Irish defenders. Now the term had become a pejorative label slapped onto “low Irishmen” since apparently only they could be thugs.

COMING UP: Spreading out of New York.

The Rise of the “Oxford Comma“

A weekend Twitter conversation with editor Harold Underdown and picture book creator Debbie Ridpath Ohi set me digging for the origin of the phrase Oxford comma.”

That’s the currently popular term for the comma before “and” or “or” in a series of three or more, as in “Tom, Dick, or Harry.” The more established term is “serial comma.” Some people are trained to use that comma, others not to.

Punctuation in the eighteenth century was haphazard to the point of being hazardous. In contrast, the Victorians were prescriptivists, and the spread of print culture meant there was a lot to prescribe.

Around the turn of the twentieth century Horace Hart (1840-1916), controller of the Oxford University Press, issued a set of guidelines for that organization’s type compositors and proof readers. His examples show he expected to see the serial comma, but he never pointed it out or prescribed it.

Around the same time, the polymath Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) wrote to F. Howard Collins (1857-1910) about why the serial comma mattered, stating:

whether to write “black, white, and green,” with the comma after white, or to leave out the comma and write “black, white and green”—I very positively decide in favour of the first. To me the comma is of value as marking out the component elements of a thought, and where any set of components of a thought are of equal value, they should be punctuated in printing and in speech equally: Evidently therefore in this case, inasmuch as when enumerating these colours black, white, and green, the white is just as much to be emphasized as the other two, it needs the pause after it just as much as the black does.

Collins quoted Spencer in a footnote of his 1905 book Author and Printer: A Guide for Authors, Editors, Printers, Correctors of the Press, Compositors, and Typists. Collins wrote that book in part because he felt Hart’s guide didn’t have enough practical advice for authors.

The Inland Printer magazine, published in Chicago, quoted Collins’s footnote in a review of recent references for compositors. By the end of 1905, therefore, Spencer’s argument for serial commas was spreading on both sides of the Atlantic. For decades the serial comma has been a standard put forward by The Chicago Manual of Style, the main style guide of the American book publishing industry.

However, some areas of publishing resisted that rule. One was daily newspaper journalism in the US. A serial comma might be little more than a flyspeck, but if we total up all such commas in a week of newspapers, eliminating it might save a significant amount of ink, paper, and time. For decades, therefore, The Associated Press Stylebook has prescribed not using the serial comma unless it was necessary to avoid confusion.

Americans in different fields can thus train themselves either to use the serial comma or not to, in the firm belief that they’re following the most authoritative writing guide. It’s all a matter of which sort of writing they’ve undertaken.

Meanwhile, after World War 2 Britain went through a great punctuation contraction. I’ve written about this before. Double-quote marks became single-quote marks. Periods disappeared from many abbreviations. Newspapers stopped setting off titles with italics or quote marks. And the serial comma was shooed away.

Except at Oxford University Press. As at the University of Chicago Press, scholarly editors continued to see value in the clarity of the serial comma. Posthumously expanded editions of Horace Hart’s rules made that mark of punctuation a standard even as much of British publishing disagreed.

Because the serial comma had become a hallmark of the Oxford University Press, Peter Sutcliffe dubbed it the “Oxford comma” in his 1978 history of the publisher. He credited Collins with establishing the rule, but his own book established a new term for the mark.

“Oxford comma” is thus a retronym, a term coined for something that was once so standard it didn’t need a special designation (e.g., analog watch, prose novel). At one point all British publishers put commas into series of three or more. Now that most don’t, that comma is notable enough to need a name, and “Oxford comma” has a touch of class. It’s quite possible that “serial comma” is also a retronym, forced by journalism developing a different standard.

Harold and I agreed that “Oxford comma” seems like a parvenu synonym for what we’d learned as the “serial comma.” Indeed, Google Books Ngram confirms that authors used “serial comma” and “series comma” starting around 1920. For a long time the terms appeared at about the same rate, but “serial comma” took off in the late 1970s.

Not until this century did “Oxford comma” spread, perhaps pushed by international internet debate. In the Google Books Ngram database (which stops in 2008), “Oxford comma” has overtaken “series comma” and cut into the dominance of “serial comma.” It has not, however, returned to being standard punctuation in Britain.

More on Woodman and Woodsman

My examination of the shifting prevalence of “woodman” and “woodsman” and what that implies for how people speak of L. Frank Baum’s character the Tin Woodman brought this comment:

You don't seem to address the difference in the two professions, Woodman vs. Woodsman, though I'm not sure how well you could specify that in the search. But the word usage rates are clearly dependent on such, IMHO.

A woodman chopped and/or delivered firewood (like the Iceman or Milkman or Postman. A "Woodsman" is a forest ranger, naturalist, etc., that specializes in knowing about "the woods" and the failure to realize this difference in professions is what galls some of us - not the slight change to the spelling. Nick Chopper is a lumberjack not a forest ranger.

When did such a distinction arise, and how established is it?

Dr. Samuel Johnson’s 1755 dictionary didn’t include the word “woodsman” at all. And his definition for “woodman,” with citations from his beloved Shakespeare, said nothing about chopping or delivering wood.

Instead, for Johnson a “woodman” was someone who hunted for sport in the woods.

Let’s jump ahead to Noah Webster’s dictionary in 1828. Once again, there was no entry for “woodsman.” And according to Webster, a “woodman” was:

1. A forest officer, appointed to take care of the kings wood.
2. A sportsman; a hunter.

It would be good to check an American dictionary from the 1860s when Baum was a boy, because that would be the best reflection of usage when he was learning the language. But I couldn’t find one on the web.

So let’s jump again to the 1903 edition of Chambers’s Twentieth Century Dictionary of the English Language, published close to the time of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, albeit in Britain. It included a subentry for the word “woodsman”—but defined that word simply as a synonym for “woodman.” As for “woodman,” for the first time we see the word defined as Baum used it—but alongside the older definitions: “a man who cuts down trees : a forest officer : a huntsman.”

Finally, the 1913 edition of Webster’s had separate but overlapping entries for the two words. A “woodsman” was “A woodman; especially, one who lives in the forest.” A “woodman” had a more detailed definition, including all of the earlier meanings plus a new one:

1. A forest officer appointed to take care of the king's woods; a forester. [Eng.]
2. A sportsman; a hunter.
3. One who cuts down trees; a woodcutter.
4. One who dwells in the woods or forest; a bushman.

Today’s Merriam-Webster website shows how the popularity of the two terms has flipped: the entry for “woodman” points to “woodsman.” As for the definition of the latter term, the site says: “a person who frequents or works in the woods / especially one skilled in woodcraft.”

The Oxford Dictionaries site likewise has overlapping definitions. Woodman: “A person working in woodland, especially a forester or woodcutter.” Woodsman: “A person living or working in woodland, especially a forester, hunter, or woodcutter.”

The Collins Dictionary site offers the added complication of different entries for American and British usage, but the definitions still overlap. Woodman:

1. a person who looks after and fells trees used for timber
2. another word for woodsman
3. obsolete: a hunter who is knowledgeable about woods and the animals living in them

Woodsman:

1. a person who lives or works in the woods, as a hunter, woodcutter, etc.
2. a person at home in the woods or skilled in woodcraft

Thus, there never appears to have been a widespread understanding that the two words have distinct and different meanings, with “woodman” meaning a woodchopper and “woodsman” meaning a forester. What’s more, the way Baum used the word—to mean someone who made his living chopping down trees—came late to the standard dictionaries of English.

The Shift from Woodman to Woodsman

One of the attractions at OzCon earlier this month was a showing of James Ortiz’s The Woodsman, produced in New York in 2015. It was a striking piece of theater stylishly adapted from L. Frank Baum’s story of the Tin Woodman.

Another attraction was a preview of R. F. Wohl’s performance as Baum. He was workshopping a new one-person show with an audience of knowledgable Oz fans. Afterwards I heard an attendee note that Baum consistently referred to his tin creation as a “Woodman,” not a “Woodsman”—though many people (not just James Ortiz’s play) now use the longer word.

That prompted some musing that perhaps one form had become more popular than the other, so I turned to the Google Books Ngram Viewer. I asked it to graph out the popularity of “woodman,” “woodsman,” and “woodchopper” from 1800 to 2000. I restricted the query to lowercase only, eliminating “Woodman” as a proper name (and almost all mentions of the Tin Woodman as well).

Here’s the result:

As you can see, “woodman” was the more popular word when Baum grew up and when he published The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1900. “Woodsman” rose suddenly in popularity starting in 1880 and around 1910 surpassed the shorter form. Both forms have been declining in print use since 1940 as we’ve moved away from a wood-based economy.

In addition to affecting how people speak of the Tin Woodman, that shift in everyday language has also affected how we quote the George Pope Morris poem that begins, “Woodman, spare that tree!”

An Update to Parrotfish for This Historical Moment

Ellen Wittlinger’s article in The Horn Book about updating her novel Parrotfish (published in 2007) is testimony to changes in society and in language.

Wittlinger’s novel is considered the first modern young adult novel with a transgender protagonist. In writing it, she consulted with Toby, a twentysomething friend of one of her children who was female-to-male transgender. That was only ten years ago, but the first edition’s language was already out of date.

Wittlinger writes:

In the ALAN Review interview, and often in the original edition of the book, I used the word transgendered. This usage is no longer correct. If you say, for example, that paper has “yellowed,” something has happened to the paper to make it yellow. But “yellow paper” has always been yellow, just as transgender people have always been who they are — nothing has acted upon them to make them transgender. As the GLAAD Reference Guide points out, “You would not say that Elton John is ‘gayed’ or Ellen DeGeneres is ‘lesbianed,’ therefore you would not say Chaz Bono is ‘transgendered.’” Scratch the “-ed” ending.

But the word that bothered me — and critics — most was tranny. A decade ago, Toby felt it was a word that transgender people would use amongst themselves or to refer to themselves, and that’s how I used it in the book. But the word has evolved to be defamatory. GLAAD’s entry says, “Please note that while some transgender people may use ‘tranny’ to describe themselves, others find it profoundly offensive.”

In this age of digital publishing, it’s relatively easy to make such changes in electronic books and new printings. The existing paper copies of Parrotfish will, of course, remain the same. Wittlinger also states that 2007 remains the novel’s “historical moment” even with the terminology changes.

She also expects further change in this area of language. When GLAAD issued the ninth edition of its Media Reference Guide in 2014, it stated it had been publishing that reference for “over 15 years.” At 66 pages, with a lot of white space in the design, it’s not a hefty text. Nonetheless, at the pace it’s been revised so far, that ninth edition will need replacement in 2016.

Given how sensitive we are these days about language and other signifiers, I wonder how soon there may be complaints about print copies of Parrotfish being not just of its historical moment, but insensitive. It took only three days after Wittlinger’s essay appeared for a pseudonymous commenter to take issue with its spelling of “cis-gender”—a very new word that’s appeared in three different forms (“cisgender,” “cis-gender,” and “cis gender”) in news stories this month.

Dummy Type

Book designers, especially those packaging books that haven’t been written yet, often use “dummy type” to show how words will look on the page. Back when I was in publishing, American designers tended to use English text, but British designers used a passage that began:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Nam hendrerit nisi sed sollicitudin pellentesque. Nunc posuere purus rhoncus pulvinar aliquam. Ut aliquet tristique nisl vitae volutpat. Nulla aliquet porttitor venenatis.

I remember my first department head saying how when she’d started in the business she’d always been impressed by design samples from Britain because they looked so classy.

But it turns out that this isn’t real Latin—it’s a jumble of Latin-like words and phrases reminiscent of Cicero and established in the 1600s. The London Review of Books just published a Cambridge graduate student’s translation of the whole paragraph, designed to recreate the feeling of reading the original as if it were meaningful. It begins:

Rrow itself, let it be sorrow; let him love it; let him pursue it, ishing for its acquisitiendum. Because he will ab hold, uniess but through concer, and also of those who resist. Now a pure snore disturbeded sum dust. He ejjnoyes, in order that somewon, also with a severe one, unless of life. May a cusstums offficer somewon nothing of a poison-filled.

Equally enjoyable, the British scholar who produced that prose is named Jaspreet Singh Boparai, showing how bad Latin and bad English both became worldwide languages.

The Slippery History of Gobbledygook

In his column on language for the American Scholar last year, Ralph Keyes described how Maury Maverick coined the word “gobbeldygook”:

While heading a government office in the mid-1940s, the former Texas congressman grew weary of the inflated verbiage he confronted daily among the many bureaucrats who had flocked to Washington during World War II. What to call their windy rhetoric?

As Maverick later recalled in a New York Times article, it reminded him of “the old bearded turkey gobbler back in Texas who was always gobbledygobbling and strutting with ludicrous pomposity. At the end of his gobble there was a sort of gook.” Maverick had his word.

In a memo he advised staff members to “stay off the gobbledygook language,” which he defined as “talk or writing which is long, pompous, vague, involved, usually with Latinized words.” The Texan’s coinage quickly wended its way into the national vocabulary, where it has remained ever since.

(Maverick’s origin story may have been a bit disingenuous. In his time gobbledygoo was slang for fellatio.)

But Maverick and his “gobbeldygook” were necessary enough to make the papers in 1944. Michael Quinion’s similar World Wide Words report on the term is here.

The Anti-Marriage Activists

For the last few years I’ve used the term “anti-marriage” for people trying to limit marriage only to couples they approve of. They claim they’re in favor of marriage, even trying to protect it. But if you’re trying to limit or restrict a behavior, you’re against that behavior.

After all, people who want to restrict access to abortion are anti-abortion. People who want to limit access to guns are anti-gun. People who want to minimize pollution, or crime, or musical comedies are anti-pollution, anti-crime, and anti-musical comedy, respectively.

But I didn’t foresee a politician fulfilling that definition by proposing to do away with marriage laws entirely. That’s what state representative Mike Turner has proposed to do in Oklahoma.

As Think Progress noted, this mirrors one of the “massive resistance” tactics in the Jim Crow states, shutting down public schools for all students rather than integrating them. Of course, those segregationists insisted they were trying to protect education.

George F. Will Senses I’s, as in “OIP Derangement Syndrome”

Back in June 2009, George F. Will criticized President Barack Obama for being “inordinately fond of the first-person singular pronoun.” At Language Log, linguist Mark Liberman tested Will’s judgment:

I took the transcript of Obama's first press conference (from 2/9/2009), and found that he used 'I' 163 times in 7,775 total words, for a rate of 2.10%. He also used 'me' 8 times and 'my' 35 times, for a total first-person singular pronoun count of 206 in 7,775 words, or a rate of 2.65%.

For comparison, I took George W. Bush's first two solo press conferences as president (from 2/22/2001 and 3/29/2001), and found that W used 'I' 239 times in 6,681 total words, for a rate of 3.58% — a rate 72% higher than Obama's rate. President Bush also used 'me' 26 times, 'my' 31 times, and 'myself' 4 times, for a total first-person singular pronoun count of 300 in 6,681 words, or a rate of 4.49% (59% higher than Obama).

But curiously Will had never made the same “inordinately fond” critique of George W. Bush. He was close enough to Bush to slip the candidate an index card revealing a question he’d ask on the air, but evidently didn’t listen closely to how Bush answered questions.

In October 2009, Will expanded his criticism to include First Lady Michelle Obama, evidently trying to respond to takedowns like Liberman’s by offering numbers:

In the 41 sentences of her remarks, Michelle Obama used some form of the personal pronouns "I" or "me" 44 times. Her husband was, comparatively, a shrinking violet, using those pronouns only 26 times in 48 sentences. Still, 70 times in 89 sentences conveyed the message that somehow their fascinating selves were what made, or should have made, Chicago's case compelling.

Liberman again tested the context of Will’s remark:

Barack Obama's Olympic remarks included 26 first-person-singular words out of 1130, for a rate of 2.3%. This is slightly below his typical rate for presidential press conferences, and a bit more than half the rate of the George W. Bush pressers that I measured earlier (2.3/4.49 = 51%, to be precise). . . .

It's true that Michelle's tally was higher — 45 first-person-singular words out of 781, for a rate of 5.76%.

This is almost as much as the 6.4% first-person-singulars registered by Nancy Reagan's statement on Edward Kennedy's death, or the 7.0% achieved by her remarks at the christening of the USS Ronald Reagan in 2001, or the 10.0% notched by her discussion of the assassination attempt on her husband.

We’ll recall that Will was close enough to Ronald Reagan to help coach him for a Presidential debate and then go on TV as a “journalist” to declare that Reagan had won performed well. But Nancy Reagan’s use of pronouns didn’t get under his skin the way Michelle Obama’s does.

In May 2012, Will regurgitated his idea once more, saying on television:

If you struck from Barack Obama’s vocabulary the first-person singular pronoun, he would fall silent, which would be a mercy to us and a service to him, actually.

Once again, Liberman shared actual evidence from the radio addresses of the last five Presidents, starting with Reagan. Once again, Barack Obama scored lowest on the use of the “first-person singular pronoun.” Fed up with such claims, Liberman declared Will’s statement to be a lie.

Will’s thought process is clear. He has such a visceral reaction to hearing this President that he has to justify that feeling to himself in a socially acceptable way. He therefore complains that President Obama (and his wife) are too focused on themselves. In fact, Will’s problem is obviously that he doesn’t like to hear people like them speaking from a position of authority and respect, regardless of what pronouns they use.

This “Dude” Was a Dud

I’ve been looking into the origin of the word “dude,” which originally meant a dandy or a fop. It exploded into public consciousness in early 1883, though researchers have found two uses in the late 1870s.

Mary Mapes Dodge, editor of St. Nicholas Magazine, muddied the waters a little in 1890 when she wrote in an article about curious words:

The word dude began to mingle in the speech of the people of this country about the year 1873, but did not make its appearance in print until 1876, when it boldly met the public gaze in the February number of “Putnam’s Magazine.” The origin of the word has been a question ever since it asserted itself in every-day speech, and its claim to represent a human nonentity in raiment befitting either fool or fashion-plate has never yet received the stamp of authority.

In fact, Putnam’s Magazine wasn’t being published in 1876. The issue at issue was dated February 1870. Furthermore, that magazine didn’t include the word “dude”; it included the word “dud,” with the direct opposite meaning.

That issue of Putnam’s included part of a novel titled Eirene: or, A Woman’s Right, by Mary Clemmer. In it someone asks a young man what he thinks of a young lady, and he replies:

“Think! I think she is dressed like a dud. Can’t say how she would look in the costume of the present century.”

Maximilian Schele De Vere quoted that passage (without exacting accuracy) in his Americanisms: The English of the New World (1871) under the entry “Dud.” Context shows it was a form of the old word “dowd,” as in “dowdy.” It meant a woman unfashionably dressed and not a man too fashionably dressed.

After “dude” burst on the scene in 1883, however, etymologists went looking for its origin. Some found De Vere’s entry and cited it in an argument that “dude” had grown out of “dud.” For discussion of a more convincing theory, see this posting at Boston 1775.

“Add a Manicule in the Margin,” Tom Said Pointedly.

I read a couple of interesting extracts from Keith Houston’s new book on typography, Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks, including an article on the history of the “manicule”: the pointing hand drawing readers’ attention to a particular line or passage.

Created by medieval scribes, that symbol was reproduced by early printers. The presence of the pointing hand in many early sets of lead type justifies Houston’s decision to treat it as a form of standard punctuation. Web-browser programmers adapted or reinvented it for designating hyperlinks as one moves a computer cursor over that part of the screen.

But what’s the standard term for the pointing hand? Houston uses the Latinate word “manicule,” which carries an air of antiquity. However, Michael Quinion reports in World Wide Words:

The history of manicule in English is a bit of a mystery. It isn’t recorded in the recent review of the letter M in the Oxford English Dictionary, nor is it in any other dictionary I’ve been able to consult. And I’ve found no example in print before 1996. However, William Sherman wrote in a detailed study of the sign in 2005 that he had been told it had become the standard term among scholars who study ancient manuscripts. I wonder if his informant actually had manicula in mind, either the Latin word or the identical Italian one; this has certainly been used in English-language works on manuscripts. Alteration of the final letter to turn it into an English equivalent seems to have happened very recently.

William H. Sherman’s essay was titled “Toward a History of the Manicule” (PDF download), and it became part of his 2009 book Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England. Sherman noted a host of terms for the symbol:

I have now found 15 other names for what I prefer to follow the manuscript specialists in calling the manicule: hand, pointing hand, hand director, pointer, digit, fist, mutton fist, bishop’s fist, index, indicationum, indicator, indicule, maniple, and pilcrow. The last three terms are outright mistakes: indicule and maniple are mishearings, misrememberings, or conflations of similar words.

(Houston’s book also has a long discussion of the pilcrow, which is this: ¶.)

The official, and long-established, English term for the pointing hand is “index.” However, we use that word for other things in designing books today, so perhaps we should adopt “manicule” and pretend it’s much older than what the evidence points to.

This Is Your First Time?

In the New York Times’s review of the New Yiddish Rep’s production of Waiting for Godot, I noticed that the Boy is being played by nine-year-old Nicholas Jenkins.

I know New York is a cosmopolitan melting-pot, but it still struck me that a lad named Nicholas Jenkins had probably not grown up hearing Yiddish.

In fact, the theater company has shared a video of “Nicholas Jenkins’ First Yiddish Lesson.”

And it turns out Nicholas and I have something in common. At an early age we both played a Flying Monkey in The Wizard of Oz.

It’s All Dutch to Me

One of the most interesting mini-comics I picked up at the Massachusetts Independent Comics Expo this weekend was Daniel Pucca’s My Dutch Foreskin, published through the A28 Press cooperative.

This story starts with the author on his first day at a new school—in the Netherlands. As an American kid, he struggles to make himself understood, even with a dictionary.

The action then jumps ahead a couple of years to the day when Daniel and his Dutch friends are sent home with a note to parents saying there will soon be health exams. That letter contains a Dutch word our hero doesn’t know. He looks it up, and finds that it’s the equivalent of an English word that he doesn’t know, either. Another pile of books later, and Daniel learns what a “foreskin” is.

Given that theme of communication barriers, Pucca made a fine choice to have his characters’ Dutch dialogue printed in Dutch. But printed below those bright red letters are English translations in a pale blue (not visible in the image above). The comic comes with a translucent plastic red film in a tulip-shaped holder. Place that over the Dutch word balloons, and the red lettering fades while the blue lettering becomes darker and easily legible.

One can also puzzle out the English just by careful observation, preserving the tulip-shaped translator in pristine form. Either way, Pucca has found a nifty visual way to recreate his childhood experience with language barriers. My Dutch Foreskin must have cost a bundle to print and assemble, but it’s a fine mini at a good price.

A Shirt Is a Terrible Thing to Waist

Yesterday I quoted L. Frank Baum’s description in The Patchwork Girl of Oz of a Munchkin boy wearing “a blue ruffled waist.” When I first read that book, I must have glossed over the phrase because:

• John R. Neill’s pictures show Ojo wearing a white shirt with a ruff around his neck.
• I had no idea what a “ruffled waist” might be.

This year, thanks to Google Books, I solved that mystery for myself. In 1897, the American Home Magazine published this picture of a ruffled waist.

Elsewhere in the magazine are examples of a shirt waist, blouse waist, silk waist, Norfolk waist, tucked waist, full waist, draped waist, and military waist.

The magazine also used “waist” to mean a person’s midriff or its circumference, as we still use the term (and once in a metaphor for how “the Chesapeake, like a great arm, reaches up and entwines itself about the waist of Maryland”). But obviously turn-of-that-century readers understood that the word could mean a garment of the sort we’d call a shirt.

Thus, Baum described Ojo wearing a blue ruffled shirt, perhaps with vertical ruffles like this lady. And Neill chose instead to draw Ojo with a ruff around his neck and a plainly sewn, if floppy, white shirt.

Baum used “waist” in similar ways in his other fantasy novels. In Sky Island he described the boy Button-Bright this way: “He wore a blouse waist, a short jacket, and knickerbockers.” And in The Scarecrow of Oz, Button-Bright looks like this: “He was dressed in a brown velvet jacket and knickerbockers, with brown stockings, buckled shoes and a blue shirt-waist that had frills down its front.”

Baum always portrayed Button-Bright as an upper-class, fairly precious (though indestructible) little American boy. His mother or governess (he had both) therefore dressed him in loose, frilly shirts. Or, as his contemporaries would say, waists.

Editing Dahl

From Stephen Roxburgh’s recollections of editing Roald Dahl’s The Witches thirty years ago, just published in Publishers Weekly:

On May 16, I sent Roald our American copyeditor’s queries, three closely typed pages of minutiae, most of it involving using American English rather than British English. Roald wrote, “I don’t approve of some of your Americanisms. This is an English book with an English flavour and so it should remain.” Here are a few examples:

“elevator vs. lift: I agree elevator for ‘lift’ because most American children simply won’t know what ‘lift’ means.

“candy vs. sweets: I do not agree ‘candy’ for ‘sweet.’ Your children will know what sweets are and anyway it’s important for the witch to say “Sveet-shop.” So no candy or candy-shops, please.

“tuna fish vs. fish-paste: I won’t have ‘tuna fish’ for “fish-paste.’ Please keep this Anglicism. It’s a curiosity even over here.”

I’m pleased that even though Dahl began with a broad statement about “Americanisms,” he made his actual choices based on how well the text would communicate to young American readers.

Also notable in this article is that Dahl originally thought The Witches needed a more conventional ending, as forecast in its original beginning: “I myself escaped twice from the clutches of witches before I was eight years old, and for that I have to thank my grandmother.”

Sorting Out Genres and Modes

J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books are overstuffed (sometimes literally). Fellow fantasist Bruce Coville credited her, especially at the start of the series, with putting more neat stuff into every chapter than anyone else. But the books also hit all the buttons for several storytelling genres at once.

There’s the genre of the British school story, itself a subsection of coming-of-age narratives. There’s the mystery genre, as Ken Jennings noted. In some books there’s the sports-book genre, where conflicts get worked out on the playing field. And of course there’s the chosen-one-battles-against-evil genre, which many people mistake for all fantasy.

In fact, I don’t think fantasy is a genre at all. It’s what I call a mode. Genres are defined by the plots readers expect: detective solves puzzling crime, couple gets together, gang pulls off heist (or not), soldiers carry out mission, chosen one defeats evil, and so on.

In contrast, modes are defined by their settings and what is possible in those fictional worlds. The major modes I see are:

• contemporary realistic—stories set in the world that readers recognize as like their own.
• historic, and thus constrained to some extent by past events.
• fantastic, breaking the currently known laws and limits of physics. This mode could be defined through science (science fiction) or magic (fantasy). 
• heightened, in which coincidences, emotions, and stakes are turned up a couple of notches above the realistic. When played for laughs, this produces farce. When played seriously, it’s melodrama.   

Genre stories can be told within each of those modes. Thus, there are mysteries set in a fantasy world, romances told in the historical mode, sports stories with extraterrestrials, crime novels either farcical and melodramatic, and so on.

Timberline and Sprayberry

Six years ago I marveled at the Dickensian names of two young actors in 28 Weeks Later.

Today I’m celebrating the Pynchonian names of two younger actors:

Cooper Timberline and Dylan Sprayberry

They play the young Clark Kent at different ages in Man of Steel. Both are acting in other projects.

For nostalgia’s sake, here are pointers to Marc Tyler Nobleman’s interviews with the actors who played young Clark Kent back in 1978.

What’s Happened to Damian Now?

Damian Wayne lives on in the Batman: Li’l Gotham digital-first comics by Dustin Nguyen and Derek Fridolfs, along with Nightwing’s blue stripe, Oracle, and Cass Cain.

Damian’s even featured on a very cute variant cover of the first print collection, drawn by Chris Burnham.

But really, this isn’t Damian. In the latest Li’l Gotham download he says things like, “Welp, I’ve got nuthin’. Who’s up for fixing me a sandwich? Peanut butter and banana, my favorite.”

The Damian Wayne developed over the past few years in the main comics could be that demanding, but he’d express himself with hauteur instead of whiny slang. And he’d never admit to failure.