912. We look at who the Teddy is in "teddy bears" and reveal why the Brothers Grimm, from fairytales, were also massively important in linguistics.
912. We look at who the Teddy is in "teddy bears" and reveal why the Brothers Grimm, from fairytales, were also massively important in linguistics.
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Sources for the Teddy Bear segment
Clay, M. “The History of the Teddy Bear.” "Teddy Bear & Friends website." 2009. http://web.archive.org/web/20110723184018/http://www.teddybearandfriends.com/archive/articles/history.html (accessed January 23, 2023).
Porterfield, W.R. “Here’s Where All Those Teddy Bears Came From,” "The Milwaukee Journal." Friday, May 21, 1971.
Sorel, N. "Word People." American Heritage Press: New York. 1970. p. 281.
“teddy bear.” "Merriam-Webster online dictionary." http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/teddy%20bear (accessed January 23, 2023).
“teddy bear.” "Oxford English Dictionary online edition." https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/198513 (subscription required, accessed January 23, 2023).
“Teddy Bears.” "America’s Story from America’s Library website." Library of Congress.
http://www.americaslibrary.gov/aa/roosevelt/aa_roosevelt_bears_2.html
(accessed January 23, 2023).
Grammar Girl here. I’m Mignon Fogarty and you can think of me as your friendly guide to the English language. We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff.
This week, I’ve been recording a new LinkedIn Learning course, and my voice is kind of thrashed, so I’m going to give you two fun old segments from 2014, heavy on the history. First you’ll hear about the origin of Teddy Bears, and whether to capitalize the name. And then you’ll hear about what the Brothers Grimm of fairytales have to do with linguistics. I love both these segments.
We’ll also have a new familect story at the end, and I have to thank the many of you who told me that the phrases in last week’s familect story, “horse hockey” “bull pucky” and so on, were commonly used by Col. Potter in the TV show M*A*S*H. Apparently, he liked “bull cookies,” “bull twinkies,” “bull snot,” “buffalo bagels,” “monkey muffins,” “horse feathers,” “mule fritters,” and “pony pucks.” You can find lists of even more online.
Teddy bears got their name from a story about Theodore Roosevelt and a failed bear-hunting trip. See the 1902 "Washington Post" cartoon that started a teddy bear craze.
Have you ever wondered how teddy bears got their name?
The story goes that in 1902, the US president, Teddy Roosevelt, went to the South to settle a border dispute between Mississippi and Louisiana, and while he was there, he went on a bear hunt.
The hunting wasn’t going so well, and the organizers wanted the president to be happy, so they captured a bear for him and tied it up. When Roosevelt arrived, they presented him with the poor trussed up bear, suggesting that he shoot it. Roosevelt thought this was quite unsporting and refused.
Here the story gets murky. I’ve read accounts that Roosevelt demanded the bear be freed, and I’ve also read accounts that Roosevelt suggested that someone else shoot the bear and put it out of its misery. Either way, the story of Roosevelt refusing to shoot the bear got out, and the Pulitzer-Prize-winning cartoonist Clifford Kennedy Berryman drew a cartoon for "The Washington Post" depicting an aloof and merciful Teddy refusing to shoot a cute, frightened little bear. As a double play, the illustration was titled “Drawing the Line in Mississippi,” referring to both Roosevelt being in town because of the border dispute and to his drawing a moral line at not shooting a helpless, captive bear.
Berryman’s cartoon was syndicated around the country and people loved it. That positive reception inspired the Michtoms, Russian immigrants who lived in Brooklyn, to make a stuffed bear cub they called “Teddy’s bear” and to put it in their store window. Their first bear was so popular that they created the Ideal Novelty and Toy Company to make more.
Around the same time, a company in Germany called Steiff also began manufacturing stuffed bears, very likely without any knowledge of the Roosevelt-inspired production that was taking place in the US, and in 1903 a New York toy buyer bought 3,000 of the German bears to bring to the US.
Now two companies were selling Teddy bears, and the toys became something of a craze. A 1906 citation from the "Oxford English Dictionary" shows a line from "American Stationer" that reads “Probably no novelty of recent years has been so popular as the Teddy Bears.”
I found newspaper ads from 1907 advertising “Teddy Roosevelt Bears” and for a series of spin-out books called “The Roosevelt Bears,” which featured Teddy G (a good bear) and Teddy B (a bad bear). Two bears with the same names were presented to the Bronx Zoo. There was a rush of teddy bear songs such as “The Teddy Bear March and Two Step,” and manufacturers made all kinds of teddy bear products including tea sets, cages for stuffed bears, paper dolls, scarf pins, and so on.
Back then, "teddy" was capitalized because it was the president’s nickname, but sometime over the years, it became acceptable to write "teddy bear" lowercase, and that’s how Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary and the "Oxford English Dictionary" list it today.
The next time you see a teddy bear, remember Theodore Roosevelt and his failed hunting trip.
—
When I talk about the Grimm brothers, you probably think of "Grimm’s Fairy Tales "such as "Snow White," "Rapunzel," "Rumpelstiltskin," "Sleeping Beauty," and "Cinderella"; or maybe you think of the TV show "Grimm." (As a complete aside, I recently read the original Cinderella, and it’s a lot darker than the Disney version.)
The brothers’ names were Wilhelm and Jacob. Together, they collected and published folklore stories in the 1800s, but they were also interested in dictionaries—they worked on a German language dictionary for many years—and they were interested in linguistics. Jacob, in particular, published "The History of the German Language" and "German Grammar," and he is the namesake of Grimm’s Law, which he first explained in that grammar book, "German Grammar."
Grimm’s Law describes how consonant sounds changed in a systematic way between very early languages called Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Germanic. Proto-Indo-European is the precursor to languages including Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, German, French, English, Gaelic, Hindi, Dutch, Russian, Pashto, and more. The list goes on and on, and Grimm, building on the work of Rasmus Rask, was the first person to describe the predictable pattern of changes you could see in certain consonant sounds as Proto-Indo-European became Proto-Germanic.
For example, Grimm realized that the p-sound in Proto-Indo-European tended to become an f-sound in Proto-Germanic. Grimm’s Law explains why we have the related words "fatherly" and "paternal," "fish" and "Pisces," and "fire" and "pyro." It describes a lot of other sound changes too. The phenomenon Grimm described is also known as the first consonant shift, and it was a monumental discovery in early linguistics.
So the next time you watch "Snow White" with your kids or watch the TV show "Grimm," remember that "Grimm’s Fairy Tales "may be what made the Grimm name famous in popular culture, but Jacob Grimm was also one of the giants of early linguistics.
Grimm’s Law is actually pretty complicated linguistics. Below is a YouTube video that helped me understand it better. Neal Whitman also helped me make sense of Grimm's Law and come up with simple examples. He also pointed me to a second helpful video, which you can see on the website at QuickAndDirtyTips.com.
Finally, I have a familect story from Kirsten.
"Hi, Grammar Girl. This is Kiersten from Vashon Island in Washington. I wanted to share a word my family used during the pandemic. I ended up with four chickens, and four quickly turned to 34. One of the charming things about chickens is when they see something that is potentially threatening, they make a specific clucking sound. I've always called it the ‘danger cluck.’ So it didn't take long before ‘danger cluck’ started getting used in regular language with my kids. Both of my boys are teenagers. When they're doing something scary—skiing or snowboarding—they will rank it by number of danger clucks: That's a five star danger cluck. Anyway, I thought it was cute."
I loved this because we’ve been thinking about getting chickens, but wow, 34 chickens is a lot. They sound like so much fun though. Danger cluck. Thanks for the call.
I’m Mignon Fogarty. That’s all. Thanks for listening.
Sources for the Teddy Bear segment. The following was not included in the audio but is included here for reference.
Clay, M. “The History of the Teddy Bear.” "Teddy Bear & Friends website." 2009. http://web.archive.org/web/20110723184018/http://www.teddybearandfriends.com/archive/articles/history.html (accessed January 23, 2023).
Porterfield, W.R. “Here’s Where All Those Teddy Bears Came From,” "The Milwaukee Journal." Friday, May 21, 1971.
Sorel, N. "Word People." American Heritage Press: New York. 1970. p. 281.
“teddy bear.” "Merriam-Webster online dictionary." http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/teddy%20bear (accessed January 23, 2023).
“teddy bear.” "Oxford English Dictionary online edition." https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/198513 (subscription required, accessed January 23, 2023).
“Teddy Bears.” "America’s Story from America’s Library website." Library of Congress. http://www.americaslibrary.gov/aa/roosevelt/aa_roosevelt_bears_2.html (accessed January 23, 2023).