Typical digs at the Wynn Hotel in Las Vegas, 2013. A hotel room with bed, couch, chairs, television, and other furnishings with a view of the Las Vegas strip out the window.
5 August 2022
One’s digs are one’s home, abode, or lodging. On its face, why digs should carry this sense is opaque, but when one looks at the history of the word, how it came to be becomes clear. But digs is also a word with a fraught lexicographic history. It is testament to the need to actually check citations to see if they are accurate. One should not assume that just because a detailed citation is given, with date, volume number, and pages, that it is correct. Casual word lovers can generally rely on citations without checking them, but if you’re doing serious research aimed at publication somewhere, then one should always double check.
Digs is a clipping of diggings, and that word originally referred to a mine or quarry. Over time, however, the meaning of diggings broadened to include the locality around a mine or quarry, and eventually to mean a region or locale divorced from any idea of delving into the earth. Then diggings reversed course and specialized to refer to a home or abode, and it was eventually clipped to just digs.
Diggings in the sense of a mine or quarry and the area around one dates to the sixteenth century. We see it in poet and antiquary John Leland’s account of his travels about Britain, written sometime before 1552 and published in 1710:
On the South side of Welleden a litle without it, hard by the highe Way, ys a goodly quarre of Stone, wher appere great Diggyns.
And this remained the sense of the noun diggings for several centuries. In nineteenth-century American speech, however, it began to change. The meaning of the word broadened to refer to any region or locality. We can see this shift in a single work, Alphonso Wetmore’s 1837 Gazetteer of the State of Missouri. In that work, Wetmore uses diggings several times to refer to mines. For example, there is this line:
These diggings of mine à Lamotte are supposed to have been the earliest discovery of lead in Missouri.
But toward the end of his work, Wetmore includes a narrative that uses diggings to refer to a campsite used by fur trappers, not miners:
I told Jonas the varmint [i.e., a bear] would revisit us before morning; and he sat down with his darning-needle and an old pair of blue stockings, while I barbecued a few slices of old blackee for a late supper, or a very early breakfast. Our guns were close about the “diggings.”
And there is a 24 June 1841 letter from North Carolinian J.S. Knight that uses diggins to refer to a locale in Georgia:
You request me to give you an epitome of the times about here which if I did correctly I should certainly send you a blank sheet of paper—There is no times in these diggins.
Charles Dickens uses the word in his 1843 novel Martin Chuzzlewit. Dickens had completed a trip to America in 1842, and the novel contains a number of Americanisms that he picked up there. In the passage in question, Chuzzlewit is on board a train in the United States and talking to a group of Americans:
“Queen Victoria won’t shake in her royal shoes at all, when she hears to-morrow named,” observed the stranger. “No.”
“Not that I am aware of. Why should she?”
“She won’t be taken with a cold chill, when she realizes what is being done in these diggings,” said the stranger. “No.”
“No,” said Martin. “I think I could take my oath of that.”
Here we have the first problem in the lexicographic history. Many secondary sources, including the Oxford English Dictionary (in an old entry that dates to the nineteenth century), place Dickens’s use of diggings under the sense of home or abode. But it is clear from the context that the word is still being used in its more general sense of region or locale.
But that is far from the most egregious error. If you look online, almost every source, including the OED, will point to a first citation of diggings in the sense of lodgings as being in J.C. Neal’s 1838 Charcoal Sketches. The only problem is the quoted lines do not appear anywhere in Neal’s work. In this case, lexicographers over the course of the last century (including me in an earlier version of this entry) have fallen down on the job and failed to actually check the citation. The error seems to have started with M. Schele De Vere’s 1872 Americanisms, which cites the line, giving volume and page number. Virtually every other source since then has cited De Vere or one of the other subsequent secondary sources without looking to see if it is real. But De Vere obviously mixed up his sources. What source he meant to refer to is unknown, but it was not Neal’s book. That’s forgivable—we all make errors—but the fact that no one subsequently bothered to check his source is not.
It's not uncommon for a secondary source here and there to fail in this way and plump for an incorrect citation, but usually others will check and get it right. More common is for metadata, especially dates, to be wrong and falsely propagated (I’ve also made the mistake, from time to time, of relying upon bad metadata myself), but for a non-existent quotation to persist unchallenged for over a century is rare.
Nor is this the last such error in the lexicographic history of diggings. Mathews’s 1951 Dictionary of Americanisms cites W. Gilmore Simms’s 1834 novel Guy Rivers as the first citation under the sense of region or locality. But the word does not appear in that book until the 1859 revised edition. (Consulting a later edition but citing the earlier one is also a common route for error to creep in.)
Finally, we get diggings being used to refer to the home of a widowed mother and her teenaged daughter in a letter published in the May 1845 issue of Cincinnati Miscellany:
She then returned into the house and set her rifle down. Her daughter by this time had got up and struck a light, assuring her mother, (for as old Tim Watkins the narrator said, “the gals did’nt [sic] call their Mothers Ma in those days,”) there was some strange animal about the ‘diggins’ for she heard it “fussing” around whilst her mother was out.
And it can also be found in Samuel Adams Hammett’s 1858 Piney Woods Tavern, where the word is used to refer to accommodations onboard a ship:
It’s a sartin sign of foul weather when a ship’s under bare poles, and you may be sure of it when you see them pesky little critters, Mother Carey’s chickens, a flyin’ around the starn, and when the steward can’t set the table, and you kin hear the crockery a smashin’ in the cubberd; buy when you find all the women folks a leavin’ their own diggins, and gittin’ into the main cabin fer consolation, you may know that the very old boy’s to pay.
And by the end of the nineteenth century, we see diggings, in the sense of abode or place of accommodation, being clipped to digs. Here we see a British use of digs referring to a traveling theatrical company’s lodging that appeared in a letter to London’s The Stage on 11 May 1893:
Anyone reading some of the letters published lately would imagine that the writers evidently look upon touring as a sort of pleasure trip. I would remind a few of them (who have not been on the road long enough to give a general opinion) that “being in the know” regarding the best “digs” can only be obtained by experience. When they have really done the provincial towns for a few years, and had time to find out for themselves, then let them speak.
There you have it. And of course, feel free to follow up on and check my citations for accuracy.
Sources:
De Vere, M. Schele. Americanisms: The English of the New World. New York: Charles Scribner, 1872, 171. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Dickens, Charles. The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit. London: Chapman and Hall, 1844, 260. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Eliason, Norman E. Tarheel Talk. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina Press, 1956, 268.
Goranson, Stephan. “Re: [ADS-L] Digs: mystery citation?” ADS-L, 14 July 2022.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2022, s.v. digs, n.1, diggings, n.
Hammett, Samuel Adams. Piney Woods Tavern; or, Sam Slick in Texas. Philadelphia: T.B. Peterson and Brothers, 1858, 112. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Knight, J.S. Letter to James Evans, 24 June 1841. James Evans Papers, 1826–1927, 248, Series 1, Folder 3 1840–42, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Special Collections Library, U of North Carolina.
Leland, John. The Itinerary of John Leland, vol 1 (before 1552). Oxford: 1710, 9. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).
Mathews, Mitford M. A Dictionary of Americanisms. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1951, s.v. digging, n.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. digging, n., dig, n.1.
Quinion, Michael. “Digs.” Worldwidewords.org, 28 August 2004.
Redding, G. “Correspondence: Another Bear Adventure” (May 1845). Cincinnati Miscellany, vol. 1. Cincinnati: Caleb Clark, 1845, 241. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Sheidlower, Jesse. “Re: [ADS-L] Digs: mystery citation?” ADS-L, 14 July 2022.
Simms, W. Gilmore. Guy Rivers, a Tale of Georgia, vol. 1 of 2. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1834. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
———. Guy Rivers, a Tale of Georgia, new and revised edition. New York: Redfield, 1859, 70. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Weir, Charles. “Letters to the Editor.” The Stage (London), 11 May 1893, 16. ProQuest.
Wetmore, Alphonso. Gazetteer of the State of Missouri. St. Louis: C. Keemle, 1837, 109, 317. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Photo credit: William Warby, 2013. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.