1140. This week, we look at the difference between the modern phrase "hamster wheel" and the older "rat race," and why the former gained popularity. We also look at the similar concept of the hedonic treadmill. Then, we look at the many names for Santa Claus, including the Dutch "Sinter Klaas" and the German "Christkindlein."
1140. This week, we look at the difference between the modern phrase "hamster wheel" and the older "rat race," and why the former gained popularity. We also look at the similar concept of the hedonic treadmill. Then, we look at the many names for Santa Claus, including the Dutch "Sinter Klaas" and the German "Christkindlein."
The Santa Claus segment originally appeared on The Conversation and was written by Valerie Fridland, a professor of linguistics at the University of Nevada in Reno and the author of "Like Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English." You can find her at valeriefridland.com.
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Grammar Girl here. I’m Mignon Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language. Today, we're going to look at the hamster wheel versus the rat race, and then we'll look at where Santa Claus got his many names.
by Mignon Fogarty
Last week, Kevin called in from the Big Island of Hawaii to tell us about "hamster alert" — a familect his dad would say any time someone in the family did something stupid or silly, as in "the hamster rides the wheel all day long going nowhere." And Kevin said he's noticed more pop culture references to the term "hamster wheel" in the last couple of years.
So first, the real physical wheel that real hamsters run on started being a thing people got for pet hamsters in the 1940s. The first citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is from a Los Angeles Times advertisement for hamster wheels in 1949, but it's a small classified ad with no picture, so I think it's fair to assume the retailer expected potential customers to know what a hamster wheel was at that point. The ad wasn't introducing a new concept, so hamster wheels existed pre-1949.
And for a long time, people only used the phrase for these real wheels, but sometime in the early 2000s, it took on the metaphorical meaning of running and getting nowhere in life or at work, and that's when you can see a sharp and consistent rise of the phrase in books that have been scanned by the Google Books project. So Kevin isn't imagining it, although the increase goes back more than a few years.
For example, Lynda Field's 2003 self-help book “Be Yourself: How to Relax and Take Control of Your Life” included this line:
"The demands of the material world can keep us rushing about — doing this and that, playing one role and then another — until one day we can find ourselves on a hamster's wheel, going round and round in circles and unable to get off."
And in 2007, publishers grabbed the concept for the title of a business book: “The Hamster Revolution: How to Manage Your Email Before It Manages You”
Then, in 2010 Dean Starkman, who at the time ran the business section for the Columbia Journalism Review, wrote an important cover story called "The Hamster Wheel," where he bemoaned the state of journalism: fewer reporters writing more stories, but fluffy stories that didn't matter — like the Wall Street Journal assigning seven reporters to live blog the opening ceremony of the Olympics.
He said, "Journalists will tell you that where once newsroom incentives rewarded more deeply reported stories, now incentives skew toward work that can be turned around quickly and generate a bump in Web traffic," and he said, "The Hamster Wheel isn’t speed; it’s motion for motion’s sake. The Hamster Wheel is volume without thought. … It is copy produced to meet arbitrary productivity metrics."
Starkman's piece got a lot of attention, which I imagine put the phrase "hamster wheel" into the minds of a lot of journalists, which then also contributed to its continued growth.
Interestingly, the increase in people using the phrase "hamster wheel" paralleled the growth in another phrase from 2000 to about 2010: "the hedonic treadmill." Although psychologists Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell actually coined the term back in 1971, it saw a major surge in popularity during the 2000s. And people sometimes even refer to the hedonic treadmill as the hamster wheel of happiness.
The hedonic treadmill describes how people usually revert to a base level of happiness soon after something makes them extra happy or sad. So you might be super happy if you win the lottery or get a big promotion at work, but pretty quickly, you go back to your baseline, and you're no happier than you were before. And the same thing happens for bad events that temporarily make you unhappy.
But then in 2010, the phrase "hedonic treadmill" plateaued, while "hamster wheel" kept rising, at least in scanned books. Maybe as a result of Starkman's cover story or maybe just because people found "hamster wheel" more relatable or useful. Or maybe it's just that it's easy to find stock photos of hamster wheels?
Finally, we can look at a similar older phrase: "rat race." Starkman's Columbia Journalism Review piece actually quoted a Wall Street Journal editor who said, "Everyone's running around like rats."
According to the OED, "rat race" first appeared in the U.S. in 1937 to describe a fiercely competitive race or contest, especially related to work. It seemed to resonate with people who thought — Yes, this is how work sucks. I'm like a rat fighting all the other rats to get ahead — and the phrase also rose sharply and consistently. Here's an example from a 1954 book by P.G. Wodehouse and Guy Bolton: "‘Is anything the matter with you?’ ‘Just the rat-race. I don't quite know why I've been doing it.’"
"Hamster wheel" didn't replace "rat race." They've grown at about the same rate. But where "hamster wheel" gives a sense of meaninglessness — of just doing the same boring thing over and over every day — "rat race" gives a sense of fighting your way to the top against coworkers or competitors.
Visually, the hamster wheel wins though. On four stock photo sites, a search for "hamster wheel" returned more photos than a search for "rat race," sometimes dramatically more. And the "rat race" photo results all actually included some pictures of hamster wheels.
So thanks for sharing your familect, Kevin, and for setting me on this little search through language history, which didn't feel like being part of a rat race or being on a hamster wheel at all.
Next, I have a piece by Valerie Fridland about why we have so many names for the guy who comes down the chimney.
by Valerie Fridland
Everyone has heard of Santa Claus, that chubby, white-bearded, red-suited guy who delivers Christmas presents via a reindeer-powered sleigh.
But have you never wondered how he became a man of so many names? From St. Nick to Santa to Kris Kringle, it’s a marvel that Rudolph isn’t completely confused about whom exactly he is working for.
So, as a linguist who studies the social and historical paths that deliver the words we use, the season’s festive lights and boughs of holly inspired a deep dive into Santa’s past to uncover what name we should really be using for the man in red.
It might feel like he has been around as long as the North Pole, but the Santa Claus name so frequently mentioned by Americans to refer to old Saint Nicholas come Christmas Eve is a surprisingly recent moniker.
The first written citation for “Santa Claus” doesn't appear in the U.S. until the late 18th century, where it was alluded to in a mention of a religious event in the New York Gazette: “Last Monday the Anniversary of St. Nicholas, otherwise called St. A Claus, was celebrated at Protestant-Hall.”
The fact that the first citation appeared in New York is not unusual, given New York’s history until 1664 as a Dutch colony and the ongoing presence of Dutch settlers in that area. This Dutch background is key because Santa Claus is in fact a borrowing into English of the Dutch name Sinter Klaas, which sometimes dialectally appeared as Sante Klaas. [S-A-N-T-E K-L-A-A-S]
Still, before the 1830s, the substitution of Santa Claus for St. Nick wasn't in frequent use. In fact, prior to vastly increasing in general popularity toward the latter half of the 1800s, its use earlier that century was often to invoke Dutch heritage and culture, as in the satirical writings of Washington Irving.
For instance, a New York-based satirical magazine of the era had this to say in 1808: “The noted St. Nicholas, vulgarly called Santa claus − of all the saints in the kalendar the most venerated by true hollanders, and their unsophisticated descendants.”
But, by the 1820s, a children’s book introduced Sante Claus in a sleigh pulled by reindeer, suggesting that his modern reputation was established by then. His iconic attire, though, didn’t become his standard uniform until a Coca-Cola advertisement depicted him in red-suited splendor more than a century later in 1930. Before then, Santa’s outfits had spanned the range from green and yellow to even patriotic stars and stripes.
The popular term for Santa prior to this period was Saint Nicholas, a name known from the religious observance of the Feast Day of St. Nicholas on Dec. 6. The Dutch name, Sinter Klaas, is actually a derivative of the name Saint Nicholas.
Historically speaking, the namesake of Saint Nicholas was the highly charitable bishop of a Roman town called Myra during the fourth century. He had become the patron saint of children and was known as a man of great generosity. His background made him an easy candidate for later becoming associated with Christmas, even though he originally was celebrated on an entirely different day and for a different reason.
Whether going by St. Nick or Santa Claus, the man’s enormous celebrity as the grantor of tangible wishes also turned out to be another legacy of the Dutch, for it was their tradition to give small gifts or sweets on St. Nicholas Day. And so, this Dutch tradition inspired the American mythologizing of a man with a sack of presents on his back to be delivered to children throughout the land.
Another name for Santa Claus that grew in popularity in the 1800s was the name Kris Kringle. While Santa Claus was Dutch, Kris Kringle came by way of the Germans who first settled in Pennsylvania and then spread out, particularly in the late 1800s.
The name Kris Kringle, though, was unrelated to Saint Nicholas. Instead, it came from the German word Christkindlein, meaning “Christ child,” referring to the baby in the manger. So, unlike St. Nicholas, Kris Kringle is more directly related to the Christian celebration of Christ’s birth.
Over time, however, the feast of St. Nicholas, also celebrated by German immigrants, became increasingly merged with the celebration of Christmas in the U.S. Given that the German influx into the United States was much greater than the Dutch during the 1800s, it is not surprising that the German name competed with the Dutch term during much of that period before Americans eventually decided to settle mainly on Santa Claus.
In the end, whether it’s St. Nick, Santa or Kris Kringle who rides his sleigh into the holidays, the history of how he got his name is one that illustrates a wonderful melding of languages and cultures – a reminder of how differences can merge into a rich and varied part of a culture, celebrated by many.
That segment originally appeared on The Conversation and was written by Valerie Fridland, a professor of linguistics at the University of Nevada in Reno and the author of "Like Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English." You can find her at valeriefridland.com.
Finally, I have a familect story from Mimi:
"This is Mimi. When my oldest child was in kindergarten, all the parents signed up to bring snacks by the letter of the week. So, whatever the letter was, you make a snack that started with that letter. So I signed up for T, and I was trying to make turtles, you know, with the caramel and the chocolate and the pecans. Well, some of them came out great, and others didn't come out that great. So I told the kids, who were 5 and 3 and 1, we'll eat the unattractive turtles, and we did. Well, months and months went by and one day my three-year-old in the kitchen said, 'Do you have any unattractive turtles?' I had no idea, had completely forgotten. What is this child saying? Do I have any unattractive turtles? Well, they're in their thirties now, and when they visit, anytime I'm baking they ask me if they could have the unattractive turtles, and now I know what they mean."
Thank you so much, Mimi! I hope you get to have unattractive turtles with your kids again very soon.
If you want to share the story of your familect, a special word or phrase you use with your family, or a friendilect, leave a message on the voicemail line at 83-321-4-GIRL or record a message on Speakpipe, where you can listen to the message and rerecord it if you want before you send it. It's really easy, and you'll find the information for both those options in the show notes.
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