1129. This week, we talk with Ben Zimmer about the linguistic detective work of antedating words — finding earlier usages than those published in dictionaries. We look at the surprising origins of "Ms.," "scallywag," and the baseball history of "jazz."
1129. This week, we talk with Ben Zimmer about the linguistic detective work of antedating words — finding earlier usages than those published in dictionaries. We look at the surprising origins of "Ms.," "scallywag," and the baseball history of "jazz."
Find Ben on his website: Benzimmer.com
Vietnam Graffiti Project at Texas Tech's Vietnam Center: https://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/graffiti/
The interface for searching the text on the canvas bunk bottoms: https://vva.vietnam.ttu.edu/#graffitiSearch
Ben's post that includes the Daily Orange article where Helen Herman’s claims she coined "supercalifragilisticexpialidocious." March 10, 1931: https://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/wordroutes/tracking-down-the-roots-of-a-super-word/
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[Computer-generated transcript]
Mignon Fogarty: Grammar Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty, and today I am here with Ben Zimmer, linguist, lexicographer, crossword puzzle writer, language columnist for “The Wall Street Journal,” and more. Ben, you do a lot of things. Welcome to the Grammar Girl Podcast.
Ben Zimmer: Thanks. Glad to be back. It's always a pleasure.
Mignon Fogarty: So it turns out one of the many things you're known for is antedating words, finding earlier usages than those published in dictionaries. After I had a show about the word "scallywag" recently, you pointed me to an antedating you'd done on it. And it's a great story.
Ben Zimmer: Yeah, I loved hearing you talk about the word "scallywag." It's a great word. You talked about it to commemorate Talk Like a Pirate Day. Although, as you pointed out, it's not actually a word that comes from pirates; people associate it with that because of movies like “Pirates of the Caribbean.” But we call people scallywags not for that; the history is completely different than you might expect.
You gave some of that history, but as it turns out, I was able to present some interesting work that has been done to find earlier examples. That's what's called antedating. Let's say you look in the Oxford English Dictionary and see, "Oh, this word dates from 1850," and then you can find it earlier—10 years, 20 years, or, you know, sometimes antedatings can be like a hundred years before if you're really lucky in terms of finding something that no one else has found.
And so with the word "scallywag," it was fascinating because the OED had examples going back to the mid-19th century, but there was a fellow who was doing some genealogical research on his family and started poking around in newspaper databases. He was a young guy, but he was trying to figure out family names in newspapers in upstate New York. He was looking for a particular name and found it in newspapers in Batavia, New York, a town that's sort of halfway between Rochester and Buffalo. He found his ancestor's name kind of ignominiously listed among people who had skipped out on their debt.
Mignon Fogarty: Oh, no.
Ben Zimmer: And these people, including his ancestor, were labeled scallywags. And it had an interesting spelling. I think it was like S-K-A-L-L-E-W-A-G. That's the thing with the word "scallywag"; it could be spelled lots of different ways, right? And pronounced slightly differently, and the vowels might change a little bit as well. He was like, "Well, why is my ancestor being called a scallywag?" and checked the Oxford English Dictionary. So these examples were coming from the 1830s, but the OED didn’t pick up the story of the word until about 10 or 20 years later. So he started seeking out experts who could say, "Did I really just find the earliest example of this word about my ancestor?" And it turns out he did. He had actually checked in with a mailing list that I'm active on from the American Dialect Society. There's a listserv, a mailing list, where a lot of us who are really into trying to antedate words hang out and share our discoveries. He kind of realized, "Oh, this is where I should go to ask the experts."
And yeah, I mean, he was absolutely right. A word like "scallywag" might be difficult to find if you're trying to find the earliest example because it has so many spelling variations. You wouldn't even know what to be looking for. How would you know to look for S-K-A-L-L-E-W-A-G-G, for instance? Even if you were trying to do this kind of targeted searching, it would be very difficult. So just fortuitously, he found this early example, and that led to me writing a column about this for the “Boston Globe” at the time. It was this interesting window into the history of upstate New York because there was a guy who claimed to have coined the word. He was of Scottish heritage, which makes sense because the word does seem to have Scottish roots. But he was the one to start calling people scallywags, not just these people running out on their debts, but his political opponents in the different political parties that were there at the time. Sometimes just a single discovery like that can unlock a rich cultural history that was just sort of there, waiting to be discovered in the archives.
Mignon Fogarty: I love the story. He was sued for calling someone a scallywag, right?
Ben Zimmer: Yeah, there was some sort of defamation case, and I think he had to justify why he was calling people scallywags. That really seems to be ground zero for the use of the word, and then it spread out. Originally, it was just a regionalism, I guess, in upstate New York. By the time of the Civil War, it was taking on other meanings, as you discussed when you talked about it. But before all of that, there was something going on. It's only by kind of digging into digitized databases of newspapers that we are able to find that story that has just been sort of untold all this time.
Mignon Fogarty: And I love that the genealogist with a sharp eye noticed the date difference in the dictionary—not everyone would even notice that and then go hunting for it.
Ben Zimmer: Yeah, exactly.
Mignon Fogarty: That’s wonderful. Well, you've told me that you're most famous for your antedating of the word "Ms."
Ben Zimmer: Right. You know, in the intonating game, there are some of us who've been doing this for a while, and we're always trying to one-up each other. But it's a good-natured competition because often you have to kind of build on other people's discoveries and then take it a little further. "Ms." is one of those examples where I was able to pinpoint the original suggestion for "Ms." as a title that would be used for women regardless of marital status. It was something that, again, if you had checked the OED for a very long time, it would give an example from the 1940s. There was kind of one from the 1930s that was perhaps not quite the same thing. But then, you know, it was talked about even in the 1930s and 1940s as something that had already been suggested. This is the type of thing that's really hard to search for if you're trying to do this antedating.
Mignon Fogarty: Is that because it’s so short?
Ben Zimmer: Yes, that's a big problem. If you're trying to do this kind of targeted searching—which we're able to do thanks to these digitized databases—if you're just searching for something that's just two letters long, like "Ms.," you're going to get lots of noise, let’s say, and not much signal. You're going to get a lot of false positives that you have to weed through. It's very difficult to find what you know you're actually looking for amidst all of the stuff that happens to match on those two letters.
So I started thinking about how one could search for this thing. I had an insight about how would this term would be discussed when it first came up and was first proposed. Surely people would be talking about how it was pronounced because it's this unusual thing. Even in the women's liberation movement and the feminist wave of the late sixties and early seventies, and "Ms." became a popular term of address, that was still being discussed how to pronounce this thing. People would say, "Well, it's ‘mizz.’" So the trick that I found for unlocking the history was to search for ways that people might have been talking about the pronunciation. So I looked not just for M-S. but for that in conjunction with something like M-I-Z or M-I-Z-Z, and I got kind of lucky with that because then that turned up articles that were, in the newspaper databases, going back to the very early 20th century, 1901 in fact. And there were newspapers that were saying, “Yes, the Springfield Republican has suggested that we use this term, but how do we pronounce it? Is it pronounced like ‘mizz’?” And then, so that was the first step. And then it required figuring out the Springfield, Massachusetts, Republican. Their archives were not yet online. At the time that I was doing this, looking around for it, it was still microfilm.
So I actually did try to look in microfilm for a while before giving up. Fortunately, like a year later, I think, the Springfield Republican in Massachusetts did digitize their archive and made it searchable. And so I was finally able to find the original proposal that was made in the pages of the Springfield Republican in 1901. So that one actually took a few years, and again, I was sort of building off of other people's discoveries. So, for instance, Fred Shapiro, he is a law librarian at Yale Law School and also the editor of the Yale Book of Quotations. He was making discoveries too. And so we were kind of feeding off each other, but I was the one to actually find the original. So I can be proud of that as sort of a feather in my cap.
Mignon Fogarty: You know, it's so fabulous that so many things are digitized now and they're online. I was noticing on your, when you’ve posted about these; you have screenshots of the old newspapers and things like that, and they look like they're kind of hard to read sometimes. Like the text isn’t super clear. I mean, is that a challenge sometimes when you're trying to do searches too?
Ben Zimmer: For sure. Yeah. You know, it's really been over the past 20 years or so that this kind of searching has even been possible thanks to this kind of digitization that's happened with newspapers, magazines, books, for instance, Google Books that's only been around for about, you know, 20 years or so. And so it was around that time I first got intrigued about, well, now that we have all of this great new archival, you know, all these records of books and magazines and newspapers and so forth, what can we do with it? And so it was an exciting time for me because you could make all these discoveries that hadn't been found before, but you are kind of dependent on how good those scans are. And anybody who's sort of looked through scanned documents, whether it's newspapers or whatever, you know, it can be variable. So, sometimes it's from a transfer that's been made from microfilm; with Google Books, they're taking photographs of the pages, and so it's pretty high quality. But very often for newspaper databases, it's like whatever got microfilm, whatever quality that was. And then it goes through something called OCR, Optical Character Recognition, where it becomes machine-readable and searchable text that you can actually search online. Sometimes it's good, sometimes not so good. And sometimes the thing that you're looking for, you may be able to pinpoint it to like a maybe a date range. Like, “I know it's here somewhere, but I can't find it with a search.” And then you have to kind of manually go through pages. And, you know, it's still better than going through microfilm, but you still very often will need to think, "It's probably in this period, in this week of this paper; I'm just gonna have to keep looking through all the pages until I find it."
Mignon Fogarty: Because like someone mentioned it somewhere else that they'd read it in the paper or something like that's a lot of work.
Ben Zimmer: Right. Yeah. Sometimes you just find it, boom, it's there within seconds, but other times it takes a lot more work to find something.
Mignon Fogarty: Well, another one you antedated that, you know, I was surprised. So “jazz,” the word “jazz,” like the music, I had no idea it had an origin in baseball.
Ben Zimmer: Yeah. I mean, I can't claim credit for that one, but I've worked with sort of the folks who have made the big discoveries in that. And yeah, “jazz” is a fascinating one because really, I mean, it's such an important word. In fact, the American Dialect Society, when they picked their word of the century for the 20th century, “jazz” was the winner.
Mignon Fogarty: Wow.
Ben Zimmer: And so the early history has always been kind of intriguing and mystifying because it just starts showing up when jazz becomes the rage in the, you know, circa 1916, 1917 is when you start getting like the Original Dixieland Jazz Band and things like that. And Dixieland, I mean, everybody just assumes it comes from New Orleans. And yes, the music has its roots in New Orleans, but as far as we can tell, the word doesn't come from New Orleans. The word only starts getting applied to the music as far as we know when it makes its way up to Chicago, and we have newspaper articles from Chicago in 1915 talking about this new musical form called jazz. And of course, it had different spellings. It could be J-A-Z-Z, J-A-Z, J-A-S-S, J-A-S, and so forth before it sort of got fixed in its spelling.
But what various researchers have pieced together is that just a few years before that, in 1912, this same word was being used on the West Coast in baseball circles. There was a pitcher who pitched in the Pacific League, this is before there were any major league teams out on the West Coast, who had a curveball that moved in a funny way, and they started calling that sort of the jazz curve. And then, after that, we have some records from the Bay Area in San Francisco; there was a team called the San Francisco Seals. And there's all various usages at that point where they're talking about jazz as like vim or vigor or pep, like "give it some of the old jazz." And that seemed to be related to the training camp where the San Francisco Seals practiced, you know, before the season started, and there was a band there, and one of the band members ended up going to Chicago and started playing there. And this guy always claimed that “I'm the one who came up with the word jazz.” And, you know, he may have sort of brought it with him from San Francisco to Chicago, and then this music that was really coming from the South, from New Orleans ends up getting that label. But it really requires this complicated tale of three cities, as I call it: New Orleans, Chicago, and San Francisco for it to all come together as jazz.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. And it was also, it was spelled differently. It was spelled with an S sometimes. I mean, did that make it harder to search for, or did you kind of just know to look for the different spellings? Because that's what you do.
Ben Zimmer: Yeah, no. You have to look for all of the spelling variants. And some people will say, "Oh, it started as J-A-S-S 'cause the Original Dixieland Jazz Band originally spelled it that way and then changed it to ZZ." But it turns out, you know, in 1915 in Chicago, they were already using that J-A-Z-Z spelling, and it appeared in the Chicago Tribune that way. But there, you know, for a while it was just one of several possible ways of spelling it before it became the conventional spelling.
Mignon Fogarty: Interesting. And then, you talked, you know, New Orleans. I think of jazz when I think of New Orleans, and you've written about why it's called The Big Easy.
Ben Zimmer: Yeah, no, that's another fascinating one that we're still making discoveries about.
Mignon Fogarty: Oh.
Ben Zimmer: Today, it's great how sometimes these are kind of ongoing stories and, like, sometimes what I'm doing in my columns is just trying to capture the research for something like that. As it's going, you know, as people are trying to piece it together. And so, the Big Easy is one of those as the sort of label for New Orleans that people were like, it was very hard to tell exactly how far back it went. And so, there was one researcher named Barry Popik, who's done a lot of research on a lot of these terms, is one of the sort of foremost people for figuring these things out. Because he, once he gets on a particular word or phrase, whether it's Big Apple for New York or Big Easy for New Orleans, he'll just sort of keep digging and seeing what he can find. And so, Barry Popik had found out that there was a name of a dance hall across the river in Gretna, Louisiana, that was called the Big Easy as early as 1910.
But I mentioned another one of these researchers, Fred Shapiro, who is the editor of the Yale Book of Quotations. And he is, he's always looking to see, well, what new resources are out there that we can look at? And he brought something to our attention that there's a digital library called JSTOR, and that they added this collection of American prison newspapers. And so, yeah, these are newspapers that were published in prisons for inmates. And this was this whole kind of trove of material that really had never been looked at before in any serious way. And if you look in that database that's now available on JSTOR to search through, you can find one particular newspaper from the Louisiana State Penitentiary. That penitentiary was sort of known as Angola, and so their newspaper edited by inmates there was called “The Angolite.” And so it turns out, if you look up Big Easy, you will find these references going back to 1957 about the Big Easy, where they're talking about, oh, they wanna get out so that they can go to the Big Easy, meaning New Orleans.
And so, that was way earlier than anyone had found previously for that phrase referring to New Orleans. It would eventually get sort of more famous. You might remember, in the 1980s, like there was a movie called “The Big Easy” in 1986 with Dennis Quaid and Ellen Barkin. And so, things like that it sort of got more national attention, but that's a case where it's like, yeah, I mean, you know, just thanks to this sort of prison newspaper database, we were able to sort of fill out this history about, you know, how it first got used, and otherwise we wouldn't have known because it wasn't showing up in just sort of more, you know, mainstream sources, newspapers, and so forth.
Mignon Fogarty: No, I was actually just reminded this morning that you can get free access to a hundred articles at JSTOR by just creating an account. Do you know if you can get to the databases with that kind of account?
Ben Zimmer: Yeah. And in fact, if I'm not mistaken, I think JSTOR has made this particular database sort of open access for everyone. So I think you don't even need a subscription at all.
Mignon Fogarty: That's great.
Ben Zimmer: To look at that. So, yeah, it's worth checking out.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. Oh my gosh. There are all these hidden databases full of fascinating information that people like you know about.
Ben Zimmer: Yeah, sometimes it's just a matter of where you look. Because you know, it could just be something like newspapers.com. That's a database that people are familiar with. It is a subscription service, but it has a vast variety of newspapers from American history and also some other countries. And sometimes that's like one-stop shopping. It's like, is it a newspapers.com? Oh, there it is. Other times you have to go further afield and find it in these various other archives and databases.
Mignon Fogarty: Well, the last one we'll talk about in the main segment, you also have said that you are a connoisseur of long words and the story of supercalifragilisticexpialidocious is really fun and interesting too.
Ben Zimmer: Yeah, that is definitely a great one. So yeah, I've always been interested in, you know, the words that people consider the longest. And so, whether it's antidisestablishmentarianism or supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. And typically it's, people talk about them just as a long word and people know the super word, I won't keep saying it, from Mary Poppins. And, you know, that was 1964 and everybody sort of learned it from there. And the songwriters for that film and other sort of Disney musicals were the Sherman Brothers, Robert and Richard Sherman. And so I had seen when Robert Sherman passed away, this was back in 2012, that in the obituary, they often said he and his brother came up with this word. They invented this word. But then I looked in the Oxford English Dictionary just to be like, oh, that's interesting. What does the Oxford English Dictionary have? And they said, yes. It's, you know, it appears in Mary Poppins. But there were these earlier songs from the 1940s, from 1949, and 1951. And the titles had slightly different versions of that word. So it was supercalifagilisticexpialidogious, spelled slightly differently, but close.
Right. And so, I wanted to know the story, you know, after I read that, that Robert Sherman had passed away. I was able to get in touch with his brother, his songwriting partner, Richard Sherman, who has also since passed away. But I was able to talk to him and get the story and he said, “Well, yeah, we didn't invent that word out of nowhere. We actually knew it from when we were in summer camp as kids, in the Catskills or whatever. And this is a word that just got used around the campfire as like, here's, you know, this funny word.” But it turns out that where it came from became important in a lawsuit because the songwriters from those earlier songs ended up suing Disney and saying, we came up with it. You know, that's our word. You can't just use it. And they took Disney to court. Disney ended up winning because they kind of bought the story that this was something that had just been percolating around campfires and so forth for quite a while. And that nobody really owned it. And so, you couldn't sue Disney and say, that's our word.
And so, I learned about this whole legal history back when Mary Poppins came out and Disney got sued. But the lawsuit said that there was some record of this word being used at Syracuse University in the 1930s. But then nobody actually said, “This is the article where it appeared.” And I said, well, here's something I can find. And so, I spent some time trying to figure out like, was it in an undergraduate humor magazine or whatever. But then, I saw that in that court case when Mary Poppins came out, there were experts from Merriam-Webster who were consulted. So I asked my colleagues at Merriam-Webster, “Hey, you have all of these slips of paper that have been, you know, these citation slips that you’ve collected over the years. Could you just look in your files and see what you can find?” And it turns out buried in their voluminous files was this article from Syracuse University, “The Daily Orange,” their student newspaper, from 1931. And it was by a young woman named Helen Herman.
Mignon Fogarty: And she sounds like a hoot!
Ben Zimmer: Yeah. No, again, you sort of learn about these characters when you dig them up, you know, from the archives like that. And, yeah, she seems like she's a lot of fun and she wrote this very funny piece about this word that she wanted everyone to use. And she claimed to have invented it, but, you know, I don't think she invented it either. Again, I think there was sort of a penchant for long words that you sort of could make up in the late 19th, early 20th century, and it was popular to share these words. So I don't think we can pinpoint exactly who was the one person. I don't think it was Helen Herman necessarily. But you know, that was this kind of very circuitous route to eventually, you know, find this early usage, which can now be enshrined as the earliest known example of the word.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, I'll put a link to her column in the show notes because it really is a lot of fun. Her bragging claim that she invented this word and where it came from and what it means and everything. You know, one thing that I've been thinking about as you've been talking is, like all, we have all these instances where the word is slightly different. It's spelled slightly differently here or used a little differently there. How do lexicographers decide when usage is a separate word, or like a variant spelling of the same word?
Ben Zimmer: That's a great question, and it's... Dictionaries try to capture language as it's kind of bubbling up, but then also how it gets kind of fixed and conventionalized, and that has to do with both spelling and pronunciation may be variable for a while. And we've talked about some examples like that, whether it's jazz or scallywag. I noticed I was looking, like, you know, the OED entry has S-C-A-L-L-Y-W-A-G, and they haven't updated it yet, and they haven't included all that new research that I was talking about. And so how did they decide that was the primary spelling? Like if I was to spell it, I would probably do it S-C-A-L-A-W-A-G. So, even now, you know, there can be competing versions of the same word, and that's especially true for slang terms and, you know, other terms that kind of bubble up from colloquial usage long before they're written down. So by the time they're written down, yeah, there could be, you know, people being like, oh, I'm gonna spell it this way, I'm gonna spell it that way.
Or like, words that are like “onomatopoeia,” those are famously hard to track because there again, it's representing a sound, and there could be lots of different ways to represent that sound, but as long as it's all kind of clustered around the same semantic basis, semantic foundation, then you can say, yes, these are all variations of the same word. And we'll put it all in one entry in the dictionary, but we may have to give you a whole bunch of different variants in order for you to say, okay, this is a version of this other thing. And sometimes it's regional, and there can be other reasons why you get all these different versions of the same word.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. Thanks. Well, this is so fun, and we're gonna, in the bonus segment, we're gonna talk about the other amazing sources that Ben uses that you, I guarantee you will not guess. And we're gonna talk about “hella” and words coined by Bill Murray. It's gonna be great. So if you're a Grammarpalooza supporter, look for that in your feed or in your text messages. Ben, thank you so much for being here and telling us these amazing stories. Where can people find you?
Ben Zimmer: Well, you can find me on the socials, on, you know, Blue Sky and Facebook and benzimmer.com as well. And you can also find crosswords by me these days. If you look at Slate, where I'm a regular, or other crossword outlets, you might find my byline as well.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. I've been enjoying your crossword puzzles lately. Maybe a little too much. Well, thank you again for being here. For everyone else, that's all. Thanks for listening.