Glasgow magistrate

Earlier this week, this popped up on HaggardHawks:

In 19th century Scottish slang, herrings were nicknamed GLASGOW MAGISTRATES.

— HaggardHawks Words (@HaggardHawks) September 3, 2015

And, as so often happens with this kind of thing, there’s a brilliant—if a fairly sketchy—story behind it. Unlike a lot of slang expressions, the Glasgow magistrate has found its way into the OED, who have traced it back to 1833. But the OED also cites a 1950 issue of The Scots Magazine, which offers this tentative explanation of how the phrase came about:

Herring were cured there by Walter Gibson, a merchant of Glasgow and Provost of that city in 1688, and it is perhaps because of Provost Gibson that salt herring acquired their nickname of “Glasgow Magistrates.”

Walter Gibson indeed helped to found Glasgow’s lucrative herring industry in the late 1600s, and he did become provost (chief magistrate) of Glasgow in 1688. But is he really the origin of the term? And is the establishment of a herring-curing factory really the best story I could tell you? No. No it’s not.

The problem is that if Gibson were the original Glasgow magistrate, we’d have to accept a century-and-a-half gap between his appointment as provost in 1688 and the earliest record of the phrase in print in 1833. That’s not impossible of course (slang expressions are used relatively rarely in print, after all) but it nevertheless casts doubt over the Walter Gibson theory—and it becomes a lot more doubtful given the other explanation on offer. 

In the revised edition of his Dictionary of Phrase and Fable in 1894, Ebenezer Cobham Brewer included the Glasgow magistrate (alongside the Yarmouth capon and the Billingsgate pheasant) as a nickname for a salted herring. He also offered this brief yet brilliant account as an etymological explanation:

When George IV visited Glasgow, some wag placed a salt herring on the iron guard of the carriage of a well-known magistrate, who formed one of the deputation to receive him.

Where or how Brewer came across this story isn’t clear, but he goes on to explain:

I remember a similar joke played on a magistrate because he said, during a time of great scarcity, he wondered why the poor did not eat salt herrings, which he himself found very appetising.

So is this tale of a local Glaswegian scallywag secreting a herring onto a processional carriage true? 

Well, by name-checking George IV, Brewer is certainly proposing a date that seems to fit with the evidence: George took to the throne in 1820 and reigned for the next ten years, so written evidence dating from around 1833 is perfectly reasonable. There is, however, a problem: King George only visited Scotland once in his ten-year reign—and he never set foot in Glasgow.

In 1822, George IV became the first Hanoverian monarch—as well as the first reigning monarch in nearly 200 years—to visit Scotland when he stayed in Edinburgh for three weeks in mid August. During that time, the king attended all sorts of predictably glamorous pageants and processions (all stage-managed by Sir Walter Scott, no less) and gamely managed to make a complete fool of himself by opting to wear bright pink stockings under a criminally undersized kilt. At no point, however, did he travel across to Glasgow. 

So does this blow Brewer’s fishy theory out of the water? Perhaps not. It’s thought that some 300,000 Scottish people—one in seven of the entire population at the time—turned out to see the various events put on for the royal visit in Edinburgh in 1822, and a large proportion of those had made the 40-mile trip from Glasgow, reportedly leaving the city all but deserted. 

So could it be that Brewer’s Glaswegian prankster was in fact among the crowds in Edinburgh, rather than his home city? It’s not only plausible, but it’s a much better story... 

Grandmother

When it came to being amazed, those Victorians really knew how to respond:

“This beats my grandmother!” was a 19th century expression of surprise or amazement.

— HaggardHawks Words (@HaggardHawks) June 5, 2015

If ever an old fashioned phrase needed bringing back into circulation, it was this one. But where does a saying as bizarre as this one come from?

The earliest record we have of this beats my grandmother! dates back to 1833, when it first appeared in a comic poem included in an American elocutionary reader, The United States Speaker. The poem, “Logic”, outlines a light-hearted back-and-forth conversation between a young schoolboy—“an Eton stripling”—who has just returned from boarding school, and his uncle, Sir Peter, whom he is visiting:

“Well, Tom, the road; what saw you worth discerning?

How’s all at college Tom: what is’t you’re learning?”

“Learning?—Oh, logic, logic; not the shallow rules

Of Lockes and Bacons, antiquated fools!

But wits’ and wranglers’ logic; for d’ye see

I’ll prove as clear as A, B, C,

That an eel-pie’s a pigeon; to deny it

Is to say that black’s not black;”—“Come, let’s try it?”

“Well, sir; an eel-pie is a pie of fish:” “Agreed.”

“Fish-pie may be a jack-pie:”—“Well, well, proceed.”

“A jack-pie is a John-pie—and ’tis done!

For every John-pie must be a pie-John!”

“Bravo! bravo!” Sir Peter cries,—“Logic for ever! 

This beats my grandmother, and she was clever!”

Tom’s grandmother-beating argument is that the eels in an eel-pie are fish, as are the jacks (an old nickname for a young pike) in a “jack-pie”. Jack is a pet form of John, and “John-pie” when reversed gives “pie-John”— hence, “pigeon”. Ipso facto. Quod erat demonstrandum. Logic forever, indeed.

The poem is unfortunately anonymous, which makes it hard to pin down the precise origin of this beats my grandmother. Its appearance here in an American textbook makes it tempting to presume it’s an American invention, but the reference to Eton College confuses things, as does the fact that the entire “pigeon”/“pie-John” argument is apparently considerably older than this poem might suggest: a reference to it here, for instance, from a book published in London in 1821, suggests that it was already fairly well known even by then.

But regardless of its American or British ancestry, one question remains—why on earth does it beat my grandmother? 

Well, oddly enough, this beats my grandmother! was just one in a long line of bizarre eighteenth-nineteenth century slang expressions that emphatically alluded to the speaker’s grandmother. So all my eye and my grandmother! meant “don’t talk rubbish”. So is your grandmother! was the Victorian equivalent of that schoolyard favourite, “I know you are, but what am I?” And to shoot your grandmother meant to find out a juicy bit of gossip, only to discover that everybody else already knows it. (Shameless plug: there’s more on this here.) 

Some of these expressions even made the leap from everyday colloquial English into hard-copy literature. Dickens, for instance, used the emphasizing expression not even to your grandmother in Our Mutual Friend (1865). Anthony Trollope dismissively used your grandmother! in his novel Phineas Redux (1873), as did Mark Twain in his short story How I Edited An Agricultural Paper Once (1870). And chances are you’ll have heard someone warn not to teach your grandmother to suck eggs—which Henry Fielding used in Tom Jones as far back as 1749.

As well as being the only one of these phrases to still be in use today, this egg-sucking grandma is also the oldest—and as such provides the best clue to the origin of this entire clutch of expressions. It’s earliest record dates all the way back to 1707, but before then, seventeenth-century speakers were telling each other not to teach their grandmothers “to sup sour milk”, “to make milk-kail” (a type of cabbage soup), and even “to grope a goose” (meaning to poke a goose’s rear end to see if it’s ready to lay an egg—which is likely the origin of the egg-sucking grandma).

Some geese: boy, has grandmother got a surprise for you...

The implication of all of these sayings was the same—don’t try to tell an informed, experienced person how to do something they already know how to do. Tellingly, a similar meaning is implied by another expression, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, which has been found in a list of proverbs dating back to 1636 but is probably much, much older: a book on animal husbandry written in 1534, for instance, advises that “it is harde to make an olde dogge to stoupe [i.e. be compliant]”. The same book also explains the best technique for greasing sheep. Truly, it’s an indispensable read.

The implications in the old dog new tricks and grandma to suck eggs might be different, but there’s only a slight semantic sidestep from “old dog” to “old person”, and hence to “grandmother”—so it’s likely that the one inspired the other, and, eventually, its plethora of later variations. 

And if that doesn’t beat your grandmother, I don’t know what will.

Gotham

Yesterday, we tweeted this:

The first city known to be nicknamed GOTHAM was Newcastle upon Tyne in 1804. http://t.co/oLcpVgYaIF

— HaggardHawks Words (@HaggardHawks) June 2, 2015

It’s a surprising one. To most people, Gotham is just another nickname for New York, and in that guise it’s by far and away best known as Batman’s stomping ground. 

Hang on—has someone done a superhero called Hawkman yet? They have? Curses. There really is nothing new under the Sun. But we digress. 

So—Batman. New York. Newcastle. Gotham City. How did all that happen?

Well, this particular story starts not with a bungled robbery in an inner-city alleyway, but way back in Tudor England. Sometime around the mid-fifteenth century, the name Gotham began to be used as a byword for any unsophisticated, backwater town or village, whose populace were all proverbially foolish, bumpkin-like characters. 

The earliest record we have of that comes from one of the Wakefield Mysteries, a series of thirty-two religious plays first performed in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, sometime in the mid-1400s. We know from the only surviving script of these plays (housed here) that one of them contained the line, “foles all sam, Sagh I never none so fare, Bot the foles of Gotham”—cut through all the late Middle English spelling and jumbled syntax, and you’ll have something along the lines of, “they’re all fools, I never saw a fool so fair [game] as the fools of Gotham.”

This allusion became so widespread in Tudor English that in 1540 an entire book of comic anecdotes about the ironically-named “Wise Men of Gotham” was published, including one story about a Gothamist who rode his horse while wearing a huge sack of grain on his back so that the horse didn’t have to carry all the weight, and another about a gang who decided to punish an eel that had eaten all the fish in a pond by trying to drown it. The joke even inspired a sixteenth-century folk rhyme, which described the hapless misadventures of three wannabe seamen from Gotham:

Three wise men of Gotham,

Went to sea in a bowl.

Had the bowl been stronger,

My song had been longer.

It’s unclear whether or not this proverbially foolish “Gotham” was based on an actual place. It’s been suggested that the real-life village of Gotham in Nottinghamshire may well have been where these Tudor writers had in mind, but connections have also been drawn to a long-lost “Gotham Hall” in Essex, the proximity of which to the capital could have made its rustic inhabitants a prime target for jokes among the more urbane Londoners nearby (although if that’s the case, it’s doubtful that the earliest written record of Gotham would appear 200 miles north in Wakefield). 

But whatever or wherever the original Gotham might have been, over time use of its name started to change—and that’s where Newcastle comes in.

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Gotham began to be used as a nickname for any place whose inhabitants were seen as less sophisticated or less cultured than those of larger, more cosmopolitan cities. In this context, it was probably applied to a number of different places across England, among them—entirely unfairly, of course—Newcastle upon Tyne. But as those Tudor folktales and rhymes steadily dropped out of fashion, the name Gotham began to lose all its negative connotations so that by the time the nineteenth century came into view, it was merely being used as a byword for any large town or city, regardless of the sophistication of the people who lived there. And in that context, it remained particularly associated with Newcastle. 

The earliest record of that that we have—which provides the earliest reference to any large city being labelled “Gotham”—comes from a local Newcastle ballad called Kiver Awa’ (“a command used in drilling”, according to the English Dialect Dictionary) written in November 1804, and first published in a collection of Rhymes of Northern Bards in 1812:

The “Gotham of the Tyne” mentioned here was Newcastle, and the first few lines of this, the last verse of Kiver Awa’, prove that by the time the poem was written Gotham was nothing more than a local name for the city—and clearly one used with considerable pride. 

So where does New York come into the mix? Well, English emigrants are presumed to have taken Gotham, their old nickname for a large city, across to America in the early 1800s and there began using it in reference to New York. It first appeared in print in the United States in an instalment of Washington Irving’s satirical magazine Salmagundi in November 1807, which made reference to “the chronicles of the renowned and antient [sic] city of Gotham”. 

For Irving’s article to have made sense to its readers, we can presume that the nickname Gotham was already fairly well established in New York by the time he came to use it in 1807. But given that Kiver Awa’ still predates Irving’s essay by three years—and given the lengthy history that the name Gotham had back in England—we can safely say that the first city we know of being called “Gotham City” was Newcastle upon Tyne, not New York.

So the dark night rises—just over the Tyne Bridge.