Author: hughrawson

Hugh Rawson has been in involved in the book, magazine, and newspaper businesses all his working life. Among other things, he served as director of Penguin USA’s reference books operation, edited the Bulletin of The Authors Guild, wrote a column about American words and phrases for American Heritage magazine, and assisted William Safire on the last edition of Safire’s Political Dictionary. His book titles include Rawson’s Dictionary of Euphemisms & Other Doubletalk; Wicked Words, which is the opposite of Euphemisms in that it tells you everything you might want to know about so-called “bad” words, and Devious Derivations, a book about folk etymologies. He also is the author of Unwritten Laws: The Unofficial Rules of Life as Handed Down by Murphy and other Sages and he co-authored with Hillier Krieghbaum An Investment in Knowledge, a history-study of a National Science Foundation program for training teachers of science and mathematics. Rawson has collaborated with his wife, Margaret Miner, on four dictionaries of quotations: The Oxford Dictionary of American Quotations, The New International Dictionary of Quotations, A Dictionary of Quotations from the Bible, and A Dictionary of Quotations from Shakespeare. He also writes a blog, focusing mainly on language, for The Huffington Post.

Jazz Is a Four-Letter Word

On By hughrawsonIn the English language10 Comments

by Hugh Rawson

JazzJazz is one of America’s most distinctive contributions to global culture. The origins of the music are fairly well understood. It arose from the songs and field hollers of plantation slaves and evolved over the years under the influence of church hymns, Creole music, the music of brass bands, and traditional Western harmony.  But what about the word jazz? The source of the term is something of a mystery – and it makes a good case study of the difficulties in tracking down word origins.

The first known example of jazz in print comes from 1912, and it involves baseball, not music.  Quoting Ben Henderson, a right-handed pitcher for the Portland Beavers in the Pacific Coast League, the Los Angeles Times of April 2 reported: “I got a new curve this year . . .  I call it the jazz ball because it wobbles and you simply can’t do anything with it.” Continue reading “Jazz Is a Four-Letter Word” →

Food Fights

On By hughrawsonIn the English language7 Comments

by Hugh Rawson

Culinary terms, as noted in my earlier post on Damn Yankees, are commonly employed as insults. The basic idea is to ridicule people from other lands by associating them with what are believed to be their favorite foods.

For example, English speakers have disparaged the French as frogs since at least the seventeenth century, and the Germans as krauts since the nineteenth. The first refers to the French liking for frogs’ legs, the second to the German appetite for sauerkraut. Both insults may be employed  in various ways. Thus, the French also are sometimes said to be  frog-eaters or froggies, to speak Frog, and to come from Frogland or Frogmore. Similarly, the Germans have been called kraut-eaters, kraut-faces, and kraut-heads. And it follows naturally that they talk Kraut and that their national home is Krautland. Continue reading “Food Fights” →

Damn Yankees

On By hughrawsonIn the English language5 Comments

by Hugh Rawson

As the baseball season opens, I am reminded that the last time I visited Paris, I left my Boston Red Sox cap at home, not wanting to look too much like a tourist. Imagine my surprise, then, at seeing more baseball caps than berets along the Seine, most of them New York Yankee caps, and many of them on French heads.  The damned Yankees seemed to be winning everywhere!

As it happens,  the word Yankee is connected intimately with American history. Popularized initially as a term of disparagement for New Englanders, it was applied by Southerners to all Northerners during the Civil War, and finally became attached to Americans generally, as in “The Yanks are coming” and, less happily, “Yankee go home.”

The origin of Yankee has been much debated. Some have claimed that  it comes from the Cherokee eankke, meaning “slave” or “coward”; others that it derives from Yengees or Yenkees, supposed mispronunciations by Native Americans of  English or Anglais. And these are just a few of the guesses that have been made. Continue reading “Damn Yankees” →

Hot (Diggity) Dog

On By hughrawsonIn the English language5 Comments

by Hugh Rawson

Hot dog may well be American’s most distinctive contribution to international cuisine, linguistically as well as actually.  The hot dog’s elevated position dates to at least June 11, 1939, when Britain’s King George VI and Queen Elizabeth visited President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his wife Eleanor at their home in Hyde Park, N.Y. The menu for what was billed as a picnic luncheon that day featured ham, turkey, and “Hot Dogs (if weather permits).”

The weather did permit, and The New York Times reported on its front page the next day:

KING TRIES HOT DOG
AND ASKS FOR MORE

The King ate two hot dogs – “with gusto,” according to historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. (The Queen was more wary. She attacked her hot dog and bun with knife and fork.) Still, FDR could hardly have done better. Continue reading “Hot (Diggity) Dog” →

It’s All OK

On By hughrawsonIn the English language36 Comments

by Hugh Rawson

It seems fitting to start a new blog on language with a look at the greatest contribution of American English to international discourse: the word O.K., also rendered as  OK, o.k., ok, okay, and sometimes even as okeh. In whatever form, this expression of assent,  approval, or correctness is understood nearly everywhere around the globe, from Afghanistan to Japan to Zimbabwe.

O.K. is remarkably versatile.  It can be employed as a noun (“Will you give this memo your O.K.?”), as an adjective (“It’s an O.K. memo.”), as an adverb (“It reads O.K.”), as a verb (“So I will O.K. it for you.”), or as an interjection (“O.K.! Forget about the memo.”). Depending on context, O.K. can denote positive endorsement (“Congress O.K.’d the treaty.”) or mere acceptance of the status quo (“I’m O.K. with that.”). The expression also is remarkably mutable, having evolved into such forms as oke, okey-dokey, okle-dokle, and A-OK (the last popularized in 1961 when American astronaut Alan Shepard reported the safe splashdown of his Mercury capsule in the Atlantic: “Everything’s A-OK – dye marker out.”) Continue reading “It’s All OK” →