10 Words Derived From Places In America - 500 Words Ep. 26

It seems we’re always late to the party here at HaggardHawks. Yes, it was July 4 last Monday but, hey—what can you do? 

So. A very belated Happy Independence Day to anyone reading this over in the States, and in honour (or rather honor) of your celebrations, this week on the HH YouTube channel we’re looking at 10 places in the United States that somehow ended up in the dictionary. Dinner jackets. Outdoor symposiums. Endless, mind-numbing political speeches. Frankly, it’s all here.

One little bit of linguistic Americana that didn’t make the final cut this week, however, is hooch.

As a slang term for alcohol—and in particular homemade or rough quality alcohol—the word hooch first appeared in the language in the late nineteenth century. It derives from the name of the Hoochinoo, a tribe of Tlingit Native Americans based on Admiralty Island in the far southeast of Alaska. And as they knew all too well, if there’s one thing guaranteed to keep you warm on a cold southeast Alaskan night, it’s home-brewed alcohol. Apparently. 

The Hoochinoo had long manufactured their own liquor, but when the Klondike Gold Rush brought 100,000 prospectors to the region in mid-1890s, they realised they had the perfect captive audience. Before long, they were making a considerable profit selling their alcoholic beverages to the prospectors hoping to strike it rich in the Yukon—and to the prospectors, the name Hoochinoo, and eventually the reduced form hooch, came to be their byword of choice for potent, homebrewed booze. (Booze, incidentally, is another story for another day…)

As for the Hoochinoo themselves, they took their name from a local Tlingit word, Hutsnuwu, literally meaning “grizzly bear fort”, thought to be either the name of one of the tribe’s settlements on the island, or else a local name for the island itself. All of which makes hooch the perfect geographical accompaniment to your tuxedo, your Denver boots and, of course, absolute bunkum. 

Cocktail

The word cocktail is a bit of an etymological puzzle: originally only used as a nickname for an animal that rears up when irritated, by the late 1700s it had become another word for a horse with a “cocked” or shortened tail. How it then made the leap to alcoholic mixed drinks in the 1800s is, however, a mystery. 

One theory claims it’s to do with the drinks making you feel energised and sprightly, like an energetic horse, while another suggests it’s to do with cocktails being popular at the races. Alternatively, the two meanings could be entirely unrelated—one very plausible explanation is that cocktail might actually an anglicized version of the French coquetier, meaning “egg-cup”, which was perhaps once used to measure out quantities of spirits.

The names of individual cocktails are often just as problematic, and often it’s difficult to track down the histories of individual names. The margarita, for instance, is various credited to Marjorie King, a former Broadway dancer; the singer Peggy (i.e. Margaret) Lee; and Margarita Henkel, the daughter of a former German ambassador to Mexico. Even then, margarita is the Spanish word for “daisy”, and so it might instead take its name from an earlier drink known as the “tequila daisy”.

Equally, no one is quite sure why a sidecar is called a sidecar (although one story claims that it was invented in Paris just after World War I by an American Army captain who could often be seen being driven around the city in a motorcycle sidecar). The highball is another mystery: originally a straightforward mixture of Scotch and soda water, it’s thought that its name it refers to the drinks’ popularity in the bars on early steam locomotives. The train’s coal-powered boiler would be fitted with a pressure gauge with a floating ball inside it, so that when the train was going at its fastest speed, the pressure gauge would be “highballing”.

Some cocktails famously take their names from the places where they were invented. So while a sling is a general American name for any sweetened and flavoured drink made from a spirit base, the Singapore sling was invented in the early 1900s at the famous Raffles Hotel in Singapore. A classic daiquiri cocktail—essentially a mojito without the mint—is named after the village of Daiquirí on the southeast coast of the island; legend has it that the drink was invented by local American mining engineers in the early 1900s when they ran out of gin and had to use the local rum instead. (Mojito, incidentally, is thought to derive from mojo, the Cuban Spanish name of a type of sauce or marinade made with citrus fruit—so a mojito is literally a little mojo.)

But what about a Manhattan? Well, although accounts of the event are debatable, legend has it that the Manhattan cocktail was specially invented for a banquet hosted by Lady Randolf (mother of Winston) Churchill at the trendy Manhattan Club in New York in the late 1800s. The name Manhattan was, however, already in use long before then as the name of a different drink from the modern Manhattan cocktail—so, if the story is true, it was probably the success of Lady Randolf’s banquet that popularised the recipe used today.  

A Manhattan made with Scotch rather than Canadian whisky, incidentally, is a Rob Roy. It was originally invented at New York’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel in 1894 to celebrate the Broadway premiere of an operetta loosely based on the life of the Scottish folk hero Rob Roy.

Other more straightforward etymologies like this one include julep, which was borrowed into English from French as far back as the 1400s to refer to a sweet-tasting or sweetened drink, but has its earliest origins in the Arabic word for rose-water, julab. The mimosa takes its name from the mimosa plant, Acacia dealbata, which produces bright orange-yellow flowers the same colour as mixed champagne and orange juice. 

Piña colada means “strained pineapple” in Spanish, a reference to the drink’s fruity base, and maitai means “good” or “nice” in Tahitian. The pale orange-red colour of a classic Bellini cocktail reportedly reminded its inventor—Giuseppe Cipriani, the founder of Venice’s famous Harry’s Bar—of a similar colour often used in paintings by the Venetian artist Giovanni Bellini.

And when it became popular in the late 1800s to introduce liqueurs into cocktail recipes, the older more basic recipes that omitted them—and in particular this classic mix of whiskey and bitters—became known as “old fashioned” cocktails. Hence an old fashioned is a straightforward mix of Bourbon or rye whiskey, Angostura bitters, sugar.

Cheers!

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. 

Limerick

Look up the origin of the word limerick and there’s a good chance you’ll be pointed in the direction of the the English poet Edward Lear. Best known for writing The Owl and The Pussycat, in 1846 Lear published an aptly titled Book of Nonsense:

There was an Old Man who said, “Hush!
I perceive a young bird in this bush!”
When they said—“Is it small?”
He replied—“Not at all!
It is four times as big as the bush!”

Lear’s book contained more than 100 five-line poems just like this one, each of which relayed the consistently bizarre activities of a consistently bizarre parade of people, including “an Old Man of New York” (“who murdered himself with a fork”), “a Young Lady of Ryde” (“whose shoe-strings were seldom untied”), and “an Old Person of Ischia” (“whose conduct grew friskier and friskier”). The collection proved hugely popular, and soon Lear’s quirky five-line poems—with their jaunty rhythm and memorable AABBA rhyme scheme—soon became known as “Learic” verses.

King Lear

Over time the fairly clumsy word Learic drifted ever closer to one of its more easily pronounceable soundalikes—namely Limerick, a city and county in south-western Ireland—and eventually, this was this name that stuck. It’s a neat, if slightly flawed little story. The flaw being that it’s complete rubbish. 

For one thing, Lear didn’t invent the AABBA style of verse. That honour goes to the Italian Dominican friar and scholar Thomas Aquinas, who wrote this in the mid-thirteenth century:

Sit vitiorum meorum evacuatio
Concupiscentae et libidinis exterminatio,
Caritatis et patientiae,
Humilitatis et obedientiae,
Omniumque virtutum augmentatio.

Regrettably, Sit vitiorum meorum evacuatio is not the Latin for “There once was a girl from Nantucket”, as Aquinas’s poem was actually a prayer:

Let it be for the elimination for my sins,

For the expulsion of the desire and lust,

For the increase of charity and patience,

Humility and obedience,

As well as all virtue.

Aquinas didn’t call his poem a limerick of course—but then again, neither did Lear. Another problem with the “Learic” explanation is that, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word limerick didn’t appear in print until 1896, eight years after Lear’s death, when the author and artist Aubrey Beardsley wrote a letter to a friend to say that he had been trying “to amuse myself by writing limericks on my troubles”.

The limerick Beardsley came up with, inspired by a painting of St Rose of Lima, is far, FAR too indecent to reprint here. After all, there might be children reading this. But if you’re in the mood to be scandalized, you can read the original (alongside Beardsley’s accompanying illustration) here. Seriously—you have been warned...

But self-defiling Peruvian saints aside (you really want to know what that limerick says now, don’t you?) Beardsley tellingly used the word limerick in his letter without any accompanying explanation or context, suggesting the word was already well known by the time he came to use it. Could Learic have transformed into limerick in such a short period of time? It’s unlikely.

Sir James Murray: OED CEO

So where did the name come from? Well, according to Sir James Murray—founding editor of the OED, no less—the word actually derives from an old drinking song, once popular among troops in the British army, that apparently required all those taking part to make up their own verse, one person after another. Each verse was an improvised five-line poem, following an AABBA rhyme scheme, and was typically witty, nonsensical, satirical, or indecent in nature. And in between all of these spur-of-the-moment verses, the entire group would join together for the chorus, “Will you come up to Limerick?”. 

The game was probably based on an even earlier Irish jig called Will You Come Down To Limerick?, or Kitty Come Down To Limerick, which is still performed—albeit without the indecent lyrics—today. 

Poppycock

Something smells a bit iffy about poppycock.

People have been using it to mean “nonsense” or “useless blather” since the early 1800s, when it first began to appear in the colloquial English of the northeast United States. But how did it get there in the first place? 

According to several online sources—including the Merriam-Webster Dictionary—poppycock is a corruption of the Dutch word pappekak, a compound of pap, meaning “soft, chewed up food”, and kak, meaning, well, “cack”. Put together, pappekak, as the Oxford English Dictionary so eloquently explains, means something along the lines of “excrement as soft as porridge”. And on that basis it’s easy to see how the word came to describe something of little value.

Might be worth considering a rebrand...

But as the OED also points out, “no such word appears to be attested in Dutch”. That is to say, pappekak is a linguistic conjecture, a word only presumed to exist by keen etymologists clutching for possible origins of poppycock. So if porridgey poop isn’t quite right (which it isn’t in more ways than one, certainly), then what is?

Bizarrely, a more plausible explanation is that poppycock comes from the Dutch poppekak, meaning “doll excrement”. As odd as that might sound, poppekak is actually a genuine Dutch word attested in an old idiomatic phrase—zo fijn als gemalen poppekak, or “as fine as powdered doll’s excrement”—once used to describe someone showing what the OED calls “excessive religious zeal.”

So we can only presume that Dutch immigrants arriving in America in the early 1800s brought this peculiar expression with them. There, poppekak eventually morphed into poppycock and, perhaps through association with the pulpit-thumping preachers of the time, ultimately came to mean “empty prattle”, “claptrap”, and “nonsense”.