silver

Bronze Age (c. 2300 BCE) silver goblet found at Karashamb, Armenia

21 February 2025

Silver is a chemical element with atomic number 47 and the symbol Ag. It is a soft, white, lustrous metal with the highest electrical and thermal conductivity of any metal. It has, of course, been known since antiquity. Besides its use in coinage and in jewelry and other decorative items, it has a wide variety of industrial uses, many coming from its conductivity.

Our present-day word silver is from the Old English seolfor or siolfor, which in turn is from a proto-Germanic root *silubra-. It has cognates in Celtic and Slavic languages, but interestingly, it does not come from a Proto-Indo-European root; it is a wanderwort, borrowed into these Indo-European languages from another source, probably via Bronze Age trade networks. The corresponding Proto-Indo-European root is *arg-, with a meaning of shining or white, which gives us the Latin argentum, and hence the chemical symbol Ag.

Here is an example of silver in the late ninth-century Old English translation of Pope Gregory the Great’s Cura pastoralis (Pastoral Care):

Witodlice ðæt ar, ðonne hit mon slihð, hit bið hludre ðonne ænig oðer ondweorc. Sua bið ðæm þe suiðe gnornað on ðære godcundan suingellan; he bið on middum ðæm ofne gecirred to are. Ðæt tin ðonne, ðonne hit mon mid sumum cræfte gemengð, ond to tine gewyrcð, ðonne bit hit swiðe leaslice on siolufres hiewe. Sua hwa ðonne sua licet on ðære swingellan, he bið ðæm tine gelic inne on ðæm ofne.

(Indeed brass, when one strikes it, is louder than any other material. So it is for one who complains a lot about divine chastisement; in the midst of the furnace he is turned to brass. Tin, then, when it is with a certain art alloyed and worked into pewter, then it is very deceptively in the likeness of silver. So then whoever is like that under chastisement, he is like tin in the furnace.)

So silver is as mysterious as it is beautiful.

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Sources:

Etymological Dictionary of Proto-Germanic Online, 2010, s.v. *silubra-. Brill: Indo-European Etymological Dictionaries Online.

Fulk, R. D, ed. & trans. The Old English Pastoral Care. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 72. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2021, chapter 37, 282–85. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Hatton 20.

Miśkowiec, Pawel. “Name Game: The Naming History of the Chemical Elements—Part 1—From Antiquity till the End of 18th Century.” Foundations of Chemistry. 1 November 2022. DOI: 10.1007/s10698-022-09448-5. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10698-022-09448-5

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. silver, n. & adj.

Sweet, Henry, ed. King Alfred’s West-Saxon Version of Gregory’s Pastoral Care, vol. 1 of 2. Early English Text Society. London: N. Trübner, 1871, chapter 37, 266–69. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Hatton 20. HathiTrust Digital Archive. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.hngdrs&seq=274

Photo credit: Yerevantsi, 2024. History Museum of Armenia, Yerevan. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

kangaroo court / mustang court / mustang

Adolf Reichwein, an educator and economist, on trial before the Nazi Volksgerichtshof (People’s Court), 20 July 1944; he was hanged 20 October 1944

12 February 2024

It is often the case with slang terms that the metaphor underlying the term has been lost. Slang often circulates for decades before being recorded, and in that time why the term came to be can be forgotten. Such is the case with kangaroo court. We have no firm idea why it is associated with the Australian marsupial. A kangaroo court is an unofficial and sham tribunal or an ad hoc group of people who pass judgment on someone who is perceived as having committed some transgression. It carries the connotation of prejudgment and of relying on poor or trumped-up evidence.

What we do know of the term is that is an Americanism, originating in the antebellum South. Its appearance is slightly preceded by the synonymous mustang court. In the case of mustang court, the underlying metaphor is clear, a mustang being a wild or unbroken horse. Mustang is from a blend of two Spanish words meaning stray, mestengo (now mesteño) and mostrenco. English use of mustang is recorded in 1808.

The first recorded use of mustang court, however, is in a debate in the legislature of the Republic of Texas on 20 December 1839:

The Report of the Judiciary Committee, recommending the passage of a bill to repeal certain acts therein named, was read 2nd time, and adopted; and when the act had received its 2nd reading,

[…]

Mr. Jones, of Brazoria, replied, that the committee on the Judiciary had referred to the statute books; and if gentlemen would do so, they would find as not authorizing the President to receive 40,000 volunteers; an act creating the celebrated Auditorial Court—or ‘Mustang Court’, as it had been very properly called; and enough of other resolutions, acts and laws, equally as useless and odious; to convince them of the errors into which they had fallen.

The earliest record of kangaroo court that I can locate is in the New Orleans Times-Picayune of 24 August 1841:

DON’T COMPREHEND.—The Concordia Intelligencers says “several loafers were lynched in Natchez last week upon various charges instituted by the Kangaroo court. The times grow warm; we can see another storm coming, not unlike that which prevailed in the days of the Murrel excitement. In Natchez, as in New Orleans, they are driving away all of the free negroes.” What is a Kangaroo court, neighbor?

The question at the end demonstrates that the term was not yet widely understood and that the slang term was unfamiliar to a general, Louisiana audience in 1841. While this specific use is to an unlawful tribunal that lynches Blacks, the term did not seem to, and today does not, carry a racist connotation. The issue of the Concordia Intelligencer, another Louisiana newspaper, that is referenced is not digitized, so there is at least one somewhat earlier usage to be found in a paper copy in a library somewhere.

In 1850, the writer Samuel A. Hammett, using the pseudonym Philip Paxton, penned the following description of such a tribunal, using both mustang court and kangaroo court. The tribunal that Hammett describes is a mock trial, convened by lawyers as a joke, but general usage of the term was for real, albeit unofficial and unlawful, courts:

One of the principal amusements of the bar during these sessions of the court, is to assemble in some sufficiently capacious room, and after indulging in all the boyish games that occur to them, to institute mock proceedings against some one of their number, for some ridiculous, imaginary offence.

One of these “circuit evenings” is very green in my memory—and I do not ever remember to have laughed so long or so heartily before or since, as I did then, at seeing the wisest and most intelligent men in the country entering with perfectly childish enjoyment and abandon, into childish jokes and childish games.

The scene was a log hut, containing one room and some dozen beds, upon which, lying, sitting, or in an intermediate posture, were at least thirty members of the courts.

After playing “Simon,” “What is my Thought Like?” and a dozen similar games, one of the company arose and announced in a most funereal tone that a member of the bar had—he deeply and sincerely regretted to state—been guilty of a most aggravated offence against decency, and the dignity of his profession, and he therefore moved that a Judge be appointed and the case regularly inquired into.

By an unanimous vote, Judge G.—the fattest and funniest of the assembly—was elected to the bench, and the “Mestang” or “Kangaroo Court” regularly organized.

Mustang court fell out of use toward the end of the nineteenth century, but use of kangaroo court remains strong.

While the origin of kangaroo court must be labeled as “unknown,” researcher Barry Popik has discovered an intriguing possibility, that while by no means definite, might define the locus of how the term originated. Vicksburg, Mississippi in the 1820s–30s had a notorious red-light district known as the Kangaroo, so named after the district’s most famous brothel. (Why the brothel was named Kangaroo I don’t know, but perhaps it is because it was, in that era, an exotic animal or more crudely an association of brothels with bouncing.) In 1835, following a disturbance in the Kangaroo during Fourth of July celebrations, an ad hoc group of citizens attempted to dislodge the gamblers and sex workers from the district, resulting one of the citizens dead and the hanging of five gamblers for his murder. The incident was widely reported on in newspapers throughout the United States. While there is no evidence of anyone calling the posse that raided the district a kangaroo court, the district’s name, its location, and the date of the incident correspond to a potential origin for the term.

And as is often the case with slang terms whose origin is obscure, various speculations about the origin of kangaroo court have been promoted as fact. Some claim that the term was brought to the United States by Australians working the California gold fields in 1849–55, but as can be seen from the evidence the term existed before the discovery of gold there and the early uses are not from California. Another speculation is that a kangaroo court bounces the defendant from courtroom to jail, much like a kangaroo hops. This is an amusing idea but is almost certainly a post-hoc rationalization.

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Sources:

Buchanan, Thomas C. Black Life on the Mississippi. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: U of North Carolina Press, 2004, 36. HeinOnline: Slavery in America and the World: History, Culture & Law. Partial view available at Google Books.

“Don’t Comprehend.” Times-Picayune (New Orleans), 24 August 1841, 2/5. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“Fourth Congress····First Session” (20 December 1839). Austin City Gazette (Texas), 25 March 1840, 1/2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“Lynch Law—Five Gamblers Hung Without Trial” (27 July 1835). Albany Journal (New York), 28 July 1835, 2/5. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Morris, Christopher. Becoming Southern: The Evolution of a Way of Life, Warren County and Vicksburg, Mississippi, 1770-1860. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995, 121–22.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2024, s.v. kangaroo court, n., mustang court, n.

Paxton, Philip [Samuel A Hammett]. “Term-Time in the Backwoods, and a Mestang Court.” Spirit of the Times, 27 July 1850, 269/2. ProQuest Magazine. Later published as a chapter in A Stray Yankee in Texas. New York: Redfield, 1853, 205. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Popik, Barry. “Kangaroo Court.” The Big Apple (blog), 4 August 2006.

Tréguer, Pascal. “’Kangaroo Court’ and Synonyms: Meanings and Early Occurrences.” Wordhistories.net, 3 July 2023.

Photo credit: Unknown photographer, 20 July 1944. Wikimedia Commons. Bundesarchive Bild 151-11-29. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Germany license.

occupy

Protestors in the Occupy Wall Street movement, 30 September 2011

17 February 2025

[18 February: updated note on vault.]

Occupy is a verb with many shades of meaning, but these senses fall into two broad categories. One sense is that of keeping busy or being engaged, as in occupying one’s time; the other is to seize, to take possession of, as in occupying territory. English borrowed the verb from the Anglo-Norman French occupier or occuper, with a primary meaning of to seize or to hold, especially to hold an office. But the keep busy sense was also in use in the Anglo-Norman and in the Latin occupare, from which the French verb comes.

The first recorded English use of the verb is in the sense of to keep busy, to be engaged. It is from a translation of an English statute, 9 Edward II, Articuli Cleri, originally written in Latin and passed in 1316. The Middle English translation is from some time before 1325:

For þe procrastinacion of þe askinde, he ne sal noȝt for iugen him þat is occupied.

(For not responding to the complaint, those who are occupied shall not be judged.)

[This brief snippet is in both the OED and the MED. It is a Middle English translation of the law, which was originally in Latin. I cannot locate a copy of the source for the Middle English, so my translation is based on the larger context found in the Latin text. It is saying that, like archbishops and barons, clerks who are employed (occupied) in the Exchequer or in the king’s service are immune from prosecution for carrying out their inherent duties.]

By the end of the fourteenth century, the second meaning of occupy, to take possession of, to hold, is recorded in English use. People could occupy an office or title, a dwelling, or someone else’s land—often by force. This last has a rather unsavory connotation; the use of force to take someone’s land is generally not looked upon favorably. We recall the Nazi occupation of Europe during World War II, and during the recent war in Iraq, American politicians and generals took great pains to stress that the United States was not “occupying” Iraq. More recently, the Occupy movement, which started in 2011 to protest economic inequality and other social injustices, took its name from this sense of the word.

We see this second sense in Chaucer’s The Monk’s Tale, in a passage that retells the biblical verses of Daniel 5:24–31, in which Daniel interprets the writing on the wall:

“This hand was sent from God that on the wal
Wroot Mane, techel, phares, truste me;
Thy regne is doon; thou weyest noght at al.
Dyvyded is thy regne, and it shal be
To Medes and to Perses yeven,” quod he.
And thilke same nyght this kyng was slawe,
And Darius occupieth his degree,
Thogh he therto hadde neither right ne lawe.

(“This hand that on the wall wrote ‘Mane, techel, pares’ was sent by God, trust me. Your reign is done, you are of no account at all. Your kingdom is divided, and it shall be given to Medes and Persians,” he said. And that same night the king was slain, and Darius occupies his throne, though he had neither right nor law to do so.)

There is at least one subsense, however, that has faded from use. Starting the late fourteenth century, to occupy meant to have sexual intercourse. From an anonymous, fourteenth-century translation of Ranulf Higden’s Polychronicon:

Men of Lacedemonia provide for a batelle ageyne men of Micena, which fatigate and wery thro the compleyntes of theire wifes beenge at home, made a decre and ordinaunce that thei scholde occupye mony men, thenkenge the nowmbre of men to be encreasede by that.

(The men of Lacedaemonia preparing for war against the men of Mycenae, who fatigued and wearied from the complaints of their wives at home, made a decree and ordinance that they should occupy many men, thinking that this would increase the number of men.)

John Trevisa’s c. 1387 translation uses the word take, rather than occupy. Higden’s original Latin has uti (to use).

This use of occupy was usually not used to describe marital relations, but rather fornication, often in the context of prostitutes and concubines. John Florio’s 1598 Italian–English dictionary, A Worlde of Wordes, has this entry:

Fottisterii, baudie or vauting houses ... Also occupyers or baudie fellowes.

(A vauting/vaulting house is a brothel. The verb to vault is late sixteenth-century slang meaning to engage in sexual intercourse. It probably comes from the idea of leaping onto or mounting one’s partner, but it may also be wordplay on the Latin fornix, literally meaning an arch but which was also slang for a brothel, after prostitutes who plied their trade in underground, arched spaces, and which gives us fornicate and fornication.)

This sexual sense of occupy is a more specific application of the more general sense of taking possession of, often with the implication of the use of force or rape. This English usage may have been influenced by the classical Latin occupare amplexu, meaning to seize with an embrace. This sexual sense of occupy survived as slang into the nineteenth century.

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Sources:

9 Edward II, Articuli Cleri (1316). In Statutes of the Realm, vol. 1. London: Dawsons, 1963, 172. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Anglo-Norman Dictionary, 2013–17, s.v. occupier1, v.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. “The Monk’s Prologue and Tale.” The Canterbury Tales, lines 7.2231–38. Harvard’s Geoffrey Chaucer Website.

Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, 2013, s.v. occupare, v. Brepols: Database of Latin Dictionaries.

Florio John. A Worlde of Wordes. London: Arnold Hatfield for Edward Blount, 1598, 137/1. Hathitrust Digital Archive.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., s.v. vaulting house, n., vault, v.

Higden, Ranulf. Polychronicon, vol. 3. Anonymous translator. Joseph Rawson Lumby, ed. London: Longman, et al., 1871, 47. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Lewis, Charlton T. and Charles Short. A Latin Dictionary (1879). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933, s.v. fornix, n. Brepols: Database of Latin Dictionaries.

Middle English Dictionary, 13 January 2025, s.v. occupien, v.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2004, s.v. occupy, v.; second edition, 1989, s.v. vaulting, n.2.

Photo credit: David Shankbone, 2011. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

doge

Kabosu, a Shiba Inu dog, dressed as a doge of Venice

16 February 2025

Doge, pronounced / doʊ(d)ʒ /, is a variant of dog that became an internet meme and then a US government entity. It is an internet subculture in-joke that in 2025 became an official US government term, a shift that reflects upon the maturity of those appointed to high office by Donald Trump.

The word appears to have begun life on the web video series Homestar Runner, a puppet show whose two main characters are the titular Homestar and his villain/comedic straight man Strong Bad. Doge appears in this exchange in a video uploaded on 25 June 2005:

Strong Bad: Ah, I'm almost done with these third-quarter projection analysis spreadsheets and still no sign of . . .

Homestar: What is up, my dog?

Strong Bad: Arrgh! I am not your dog!

Homestar: Wandelman, you quack me up. Quack me up! That’s why you’re my D-O-G-E.

Strong bad: Your doge?! What are you talking about? I’m Strong Bad! Randleman works in regional shipping management resources.

Homestar: Ha, ha, ha. Good one, Wandleman. I mean good one, my dog! So are you going to beach-themed westaurant tonight? It’s ladies night. Music, dancing. They’ve got fake palm trees.

Internet memes using doge are commonly associated with pictures of Shiba Inu dogs, especially one named Kabosu. On 13 February 2010, Atsuko Sato posted some photos of Kabosu to his personal blog, and on 28 October 2010, someone reposted one of the photos, seen above, to the /r/Ads subreddit with the title “LMBO LOOK @ THIS FUKKEN DOGE.” The post received numerous upvotes on Reddit and was widely circulated.

Two years later, memes with the word doge associated with pictures of various dogs began appearing on Tumblr, Reddit, and 4chan. And by 2013, photos of various Shiba Inus, especially photos of Kabosu, started to dominate such posts. And in December 2013 a cryptocurrency with the name Dogecoin was launched. The logo of Dogecoin featured an image of Kabosu. Kabosu passed away at age eighteen on 24 May 2024, but the memes live on.

The shift to government use began on 19 August 2024 when Elon Musk announced on X.com that he would be willing to serve in a second Trump administration. His tweet was accompanied by an AI-generated image of Musk standing at a lectern labeled “D.O.G.E. Department of Government Efficiency.” On 20 January 2025, newly inaugurated President Donald Trump made DOGE official when he signed an executive order creating a Department of Government Efficiency (official name: “United States DOGE Service”) with Musk at its head. The organization is not an actual department, which would require an act of Congress, but actually a rebranding and redirection of the United States Digital Service, a part of the Executive Office of the President. The US Digital Service had been established by President Barack Obama in 2014 to improve the quality of federal government websites.

Under Musk, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency has engaged in a number of acts to gain access to federal computer systems, especially those related to personnel and payments. They have gained access to classified information without the appropriate clearances, and in some cases have released classified information to the public. The legality of some of these acts is questionable, while others clearly violate federal law. Whether Musk and DOGE will be allowed to escape consequences for their illegal actions remains to be seen.

There is another word doge, referring to the highest magistrate of the Republic of Venice from the seventh to eighteenth centuries. This term is unrelated to the internet/US government doge. It is a borrowing from Italian and French, and its root is the Latin dux, leader, the same root that gives us the English duke and the Italian duce.

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Sources:

Chapman, Matt and Mike Chapman. “Biz Cas Fri 1.” Homestar Runner, 24 June 2005. YouTube.com.

Know Your Meme, 30 January 2025, s.v. Doge.

Musk, Elon, @elonmusk. X.com, 19 August 2024.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, November 2010, s.v. doge, n.

Reddit.com, r/Ads, 28 October 2010. “LMBO LOOK @ THIS FUKKEN DOGE.”

Image credit: Dogemuchwow.com, 2019; Original photo by Atsuko Sato, 2010. Fair use of a copyrighted image to illustrate the topic under discussion.

Gulf of Mexico

Detail of 1681 French map of North America and parts of South America

14 February 2025

The Gulf of Mexico is the body of water bordered by the United States to the north, Mexico to the west and south, and Cuba to the east. The English name is a calque of the Spanish Golfo de México, which dates to the sixteenth century. The name follows the typical pattern of European colonial powers naming bodies of water after the colony on the other side: the Irish Sea was named by the English because that was the route to its colony; the Indian Ocean is so named because the ships of colonial powers traversed it on the way to and from India.

The Spanish name appears in English discourse as early as 1598 in a translation of Jan Huygen van Linschoten’s Itinerario, a description of the Dutch spy and merchant’s travels to Goa, including second-hand descriptions of places he never visited himself, such as the Americas:

The Island whereof we haue alreadie spoken [i.e. Cuba], which doth almost inclose the sea that runneth betweene Florida and Iucatan, which sea by some men is called Golfo de Mexico, of others Golfo de Florida, and of some others Cortes: the sea that runneth into this gulfe, entreth betwéene Iucatan and Cuba with a mightie streame, and runneth out againe betweene Florida and Cuba, and hath no other course.

The anonymous translator of that work did not render Golfo de Mexico into English, but that would happen within half a century. The calque appears in William Castell’s 1644 A Short Discoverie of the Coasts and Continent of America. This passage is from a description of Panama:

The Bishoprick of Tlascula is next to Guaxaca more to the North-west, though extended also through the whole continent from sea to sea, no lesse then 100. leagues in length, in bredth to the South-sea but 18. where we read of no Haven of note but to the North-sea, here called the gulfe of Mexico, being full 80 leagues.

Another early English use is found in the 1655 America: or an Exact Description of the West-Indies, in a passage that describes Mexico or the Aztec Empire:

The bounds of this Kingdome at present are thus. On the East it hath a large Arm of the Sea, which they call the Bay of New-Spain, or the Gulf of Mexico.

In January 2025, US President Donald Trump, in a move that is best described as childish, directed the Board of Geographic Names to rename the gulf the Gulf of America. The BGN, which answers to the secretary of the interior, is charged with standardizing toponyms in US government usage. It has no authority over private companies and people, much less non-US entities, although US cartographers and publishers often adopt the BGN nomenclature in their style guides. While the US government and some private publishers will adopt the renaming, the name Gulf of Mexico will undoubtedly continue to be the commonly used nomenclature, as top-down directives regarding language almost invariably fail.

Correction (14 February 2025):

Trump’s executive order technically does not rename the entire gulf. It only renames:

the U.S. Continental Shelf area bounded on the northeast, north, and northwest by the States of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida and extending to the seaward boundary with Mexico and Cuba in the area formerly named as the Gulf of Mexico

What exactly is meant by the “seaward boundary” is unclear, perhaps referring to the United States’s exclusive economic zone (which governs mining and fishing rights), which apply the new name to about half of the Gulf of Mexico. So any US government, or other, maps that label the entire gulf as the Gulf of America would not comport with this order. As usual, the policy is half baked and sloppily formulated.

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Sources:

Castell, William. A Short Discoverie of the Coasts and Continent of America. London: 1644, 45. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Executive Order: Restoring Names that Honor American Greatness, 20 January 2025.

Frum, David. “The ‘Gulf of America’ Is an Admission of Defeat.” Atlantic, 13 February 2025.

Linschoten, Jan Huygen van.  Iohn Hvighen van Linschoten. His Discours of Voyages into ye Easte & West Indies. London: Iohn Wolfe, 1598, 226/2. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

N. N. America: or an Exact Description of the West-Indies. London: Richard Hodgkinsonne for Edeard Dod, 1655, 332. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Image credit: Attributed to Claude Bernau, 1681. Library of Congress. Public domain image.