Spelling bees are rooted in the old America. Their name grew out of a custom of shared work for the common wealth. Their form grew out of a holiday tradition in rural New England. Later, spelling bees were a great fad that swept the English-speaking world (and yielded commercial products such as the knick-knack party favors advertised above).

But the name is curious. A "spelling bee" ought to be in a class with a talking horse or a flying pig. A British writer could find no reasonable explanation for the Americanism spelling bee other than, "there is a confusion between the bees and their hive; that in strictness the performers are the bees, and the name has been transferred from the performers to the performance." [ Pall Mall Gazette, Feb. 29, 1876]

It is as good a guess as any. However, spelling bees were not the original human bees, and the modern orthography knockout bouts do not quite fit the original notion of that word in colonial America.

BEE SEASON

Most Americans before the Civil War lived scattered in woods or spread over the countryside. Social contact took effort. There were few gangs of laborers, yet much hard work was to be done. "Bees" solved both problems.

A family could spend weeks in fall husking the corn it raised that summer. Or all the neighboring farmers could gather at the family s corn-crib and clean the crop with them in a day, while the family fed them and they all socialized with each other. That event was a bee. A few days later that family might join a gathering at the next farm over, or one across the township, for a work-frolic there.

The image is the hive. Your farm becomes a hive of activity; for one day you host the social hub of the community, which swarms you. Ideally, every man, woman, and child in the barn or kitchen has a purpose and knows what to do. A bee is necessarily a test of competence and speed. The goal is to get the work done by sundown. Then the fiddle comes out and the dancing begins. Frolic was another common name for such a work-gathering. Whiskey was a regular feature, and the heavier the work, the heavier the drinking.

This (absent the whiskey) is how my neighbors the Amish still erect a barn. Two centuries ago, in the same place, such an affair might have been called a "raising bee." An English farmer who settled on the Illinois prairie in the early 1820s described such frolics in a book published in England.

[Corn] is gathered in October and November, when they only take off the ears; but as the ears are covered with a large husk, they carry them as they are to the corn-crib, and then all the neighbours collect together to help to husk it, and put it into the corn-crib. This is a high day with the Americans, and is called a Husking Frolic; plenty of whiskey. [John Woods, Two Years Residence in the Settlement on the English Prairie in the Illinois Country, United States"]

He writes that "the Americans seldom do any thing without having one."

Thus, they have husking, reaping, rolling frolics, &c. &c. Among the females, they have picking, sewing, and quilting frolics. Reaping frolics, are parties to reap the whole growth of wheat, &c. in one day. Rolling frolics, are clearing wood-land, when many trees are cut down, and into lengths, to roll them up together, so as to burn them, and to pile up the brushwood and roots on the trees. I think this one is useful, as one man or his family can do but little in moving a large quantity of heavy timber. Picking cotton, sewing, and quilting frolics, are meetings to pick cotton from the seeds, make clothes, or quilt quilts; in the latter, the American women pride themselves. Whiskey is here too in request, and they generally conclude with a dance.

The OLD-TIME SCHOOL SPELLING BEE

The raising-frolic is one strand of the spelling bee s origin. Another is in the schoolhouses of the long New England winters. Winter mud made travel impossible for many and increased the isolation of rural life. But a good, deep snowfall allowed sleighing, and a horse-drawn sleigh could go fast and far. When the snows came, adults planned social visits and entertainments.

And students began to pester their teacher for a spelling match, or a spelling contest. A challenge would be issued to a neighboring school, a date would be set. The visitors arrived. Students had their moment of victory or defeat, the adults socialized, the young people courted, and it all was inarguably for the advancement of education.

In the early 1800s, bee seems not to have been the usual name for it. Perhaps the association with frolics and drinking discouraged the connection. But by the time of the Civil War, school spelling socials and husking frolics both were fading memories in the East. The spelling contests were, however, a feature of Freedman s school in the post-war South, where Northern teachers taught the children of former slaves. 

BEE MANIA

Then from about 1872 to 1876, spelling bees revived as a fad. It started in American cities, where it was noted as the "old-fashioned" country event shifted to a modern footing. And they were called bees. Often the sponsor was a local newspaper or library. Sometimes they were fundraisers for the community poor, which echoed the benefit to all theme.

The spelling bee of the 1870s was an evening of food, music, socializing, and flirting. An Englishman described one as an "orthographic soiree." Admission was a few pennies. Anyone could join as a contestant. At least one event had all the spellers in "masks and other articles of disguise," chosen by the parties themselves.

The English observer in 1875 also compared one to a steeplechase. It seemed half the town was lined up at the start, and the first few rounds were full of hilarious spills. A speller often never got to finish; the crowd would hoot him offstage at the first error, especially if it was a howler.

The words rolled on. Pseudonym cacophony cafe paraphernalia yacht asthma. They weeded out the clowners and self-overraters and those who had signed up after a few drinks. The real match began when none but serious spellers remained. Generally these were the local schoolmasters (who had reputations to protect), literate lawyers, or men who simply prided themselves on spelling. The judges emptied Webster s at them.

Contests could last past midnight. They were competitive: town against town, school against school. If everyone was from the same place, they would pick captains and choose up sides, or pit parents against children. A sort of league formed. Poems were written about the spelling bee. People greeted friends on the street playfully with How do you spell ____? The nation was in the grip of "logomania" ( Pennsylvania School Journal, June 1875), you could lay a bet on Spelling Bee the race-horse (in 1878 as a 4-year-old). And it was all, nominally, educational.

"Here amusement would go hand in hand with improvement," London's "Belgravia" magazine wrote in April 1876, "and the sternest moralist might acquit himself of wasting time. It would also have the desirable effect of bringing the sexes together."

BEE GIRLS

Women's spelling might have been a joke, then, among some hyper-literate men. But observers noted that when it came time to assert their superiority in a spelling match, the men often blanched. Partly because, as "Belgravia" noted, the men "have a general idea that when ladies show any decided eagerness for a contest it is because they are assured of a victory." 

And here was a chance to put certain pompous men, or all of them, in their place, in public. The men might note in their own defense that girls schools crammed long lists of words into the heads of students (in place of learning considered out of their sphere). But it had been noted from the old schoolhouse days that, when open to all, a spelling match drew more girls than boys and generally they were better at it.

The learned men had never been taught to spell. The pattern was what made the spelling bees such fun: schoolmasters versed in etymologies sailed through polysyllables out of Greek and Latin. But they went to pieces over "the little Saxon terms, which are derived from nothing and consequently afford no clue." The housewife could spell those.

Before it ran its course, the spelling bee craze also spawned the musical bee in which the company assembled to compete at singing or playing music at sight, the rhyming bee and like activities.

BEE-BONNETS

And it sparked a backlash, which awakened new interest in that old pipe-dream, fonetik spelling in English. The backlash was inevitable. As the bees swarmed they left a growing list of literate soreheads who had been stung hooted off stage in front of the whole town for spelling duellist with one -l- or judgment with an -e-.

Some years ago a dreadful game, called the "Spelling Bee," became very popular of winter evenings; and educated people were put to shame because they could not remember what silent letter stands at the head of certain words--"mnemonics," for example, or "pneumatic." It was hoped that this pastime would reconcile the popular mind to the official orthography; but it left a rankling grievance which is now blazing in the bosoms of professors. ["The Speaker," Dec. 21, 1895]

Such men were ripe for reaping by the zealots of phonetic spelling. In 1877, the author of "Simplification of English Spelling" (George Harley) wrote:

The ephemeral Spelling Bee unwittingly did a service (for which we cannot be too grateful) in successfully pointing out to reflecting minds very many inconsistencies; aye, it might even be said, many palpable absurdities in English orthography, while it had at the same time the advantage of conclusively proving that it is not necessarily the best educated persons who are the most proficient spellers.

Other phonetic cranks (such as Isaac Pitman, caricatured below in Punch in 1879) also pointed to the spelling bee mania as having awakened awareness of the problem they would fix. 

They were tireless, confident souls, and, fortunately for the rest of us, they could make nothing of the opportunity. English orthography remains a navigable maze, and a spelling bee is still educational fun. Fonetik English would be orthographic apicide.

We have an A-list, checklist, blacklist, backlist, waitlist, wish-list, existentialist (kidding), bucket-list, playlist, shopping list, enemies list, mailing list yo-ho-ho, the listing life for us.

And they become figures in our speech. We use shopping list in a general way for any set of things sought that must be paid for.

Why, out of all of these, does laundry list puff up into the big, broad sense of "a large, bewildering list of disparate items"? Any of them might be that.

In the early 20th century laundry lists were a fact of hotel travel. The better hotels all would clean your clothes for you in-house. For the well-heeled traveler, such care mattered a great deal; this was not lost on the hotel managers, who boasted of their meticulous laundry departments.

In that competitive atmosphere, each strove to be "full-service." Which meant, theoretically, they would clean anything dropped down the chute.

Laundry lists were pre-printed forms, ordered from suppliers along with the hotel letterhead and other standard documents.

There never was an incentive to remove an item from a laundry list. The last person in America to wear that particular article, if there was one, might be your next guest. The very appearance of obscure terms on the list would impress on every guest the notion of "full-service."

By the late 1920s (after a decade of fashion revolution) people began to remark in print on the old-fashioned garment words on hotel laundry lists, such as "bloomers" and "corselets" and detachable cuffs.

It began in New York. Soon newspaper reporters anywhere looking for something to do could pick up a laundry list from a hotel and write a column spotting the anachronisms on it.

The hotels defended. Old-fashioned did not mean obsolete. In 1933 the Cleveland Press quoted the laundry master at the Statler, "who said a corset appeared in the laundry two weeks ago 'stays and all' " though he noted that it "so disrupted his staff that he had to figure out a way to wash it himself." 

By 1950s the laundry-list was a cliche. "Most laundry lists appear to have been composed at about the turn of the century, and their purity has not been tampered with since," the Atlanta Journal concluded in 1957. "Not only does nobody seem to send some of the listed articles to the laundry, they aren't even MADE anymore."

And by the end of that year "laundry list" was appearing in print in the broad sense of "long list of bewildering things." Prominently so, by Jacob Bronowski, the great scientific humanist. He used it to describe what had been found in the ancient Minoan tablets of Crete, written in a script which recently had been translated after tantalizing scholars for generations.

In England in an address to the annual conference of the Library Association in September, Bronowski admitted the material had turned out to be "very disappointing," mundane lists of palace slaves and property.

Yet here, Bronowski reminded them, we saw the first spark of all our written language. The ancient "laundry-list" was "exactly the sort of list that men could not (and still cannot) carry in their heads." That is why it had to be written down at all. It is the sort of mental matter that forced writing on the human mind. It is the work we invented writing to do.

The humble laundry list, Minoan or modern, the humanist told the librarians, "is as important, and in the end as powerful, an advance on the spoken word as the symbolism of algebra is an advance on the verbal mathematics of the Middle Ages."

barbecue

The first to hit English. Originally a native (probably Haitian) word for the grill structure used for cooking meat. Because a fresh-killed animal is larger than most families can consume in one sitting, barbecue parties were common from the very beginning. The 1732 diary of Judge Benjamin Lynde is where we have the earliest evidence in English of barbecue meaning an outdoor feast:

[August] 31st: Came home this afternoon; and Coz. S. Brown from a barbacue at Browne's farm with my sons Wm and Benjamin, coming home in the evening, his coachman was thrown off the coach box, and Coz. S. Browne leapt out, but over him, and his coachman hurt. [Diary of Benjamin Lynde, 1732, published 1880]

picnic

The origin of this term is in a satirical poem from 17th century France about a man named Pique-Nique (translates something like "Insult Starter" though that is far from exact. The nique would be kind of like Shakespeare's biting the thumb at someone.) The actual poem was soon forgotten, but the dining style described within it, in which all the guests shared expenses for their luxurious meal, became a standing fashion in France. By 1748 in the letters of the Earl of Chesterfield, he remarks on his son's attending a picnic:

I like the description of your PIC-NIC; where I take it for granted, that your cards are only to break the formality of a circle, and your SYMPOSION intended more to promote conversation than drinking. Such an AMICABLE COLLISION, as Lord Shaftesbury very prettily calls it, rubs off and smooths those rough corners which mere nature has given to the smoothest of us. [Philip Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield, LETTER LV, October 29, 1748.]

cookout

Barbecue and picnic satisfied the linguistic outdoor eating needs through the 19th century, but in the 20th century came the cookout. This was presumably for those who intended to cook something outdoors under conditions which wouldn't qualify for the expected rules of barbecue. The first instance I've located comes up in a youth clubhouse context, as do most of the early uses (often Girl Scouts):

The L.W. club held their regular meeting Wednesday afternoon at 3:30 o'clock. It was voted that the club should have a social hour every week at a member's house. [...] The club will probably have a cook-out every Saturday morning. ["L.W. Club to Meet Once Every Week," The Junior Journal (Beaumont Daily Journal), March 28, 1924.]

tail-gate

Once car-culture took off postwar, you of course brought your car to the cookout. The word tail-gating (originally tail-gate picnicking) is used in reference to the open tail-gate of a parked car as a setting for a party or picnic.

Have you ever thought of a tail gate picnic?

During these late summer weekends when bench-type tables in wayside picnic sites are full to overflowing, take heart! In your station wagon tail-gate, you have a ready-made, built-in picnic buffet table, away from sand and insects, and as free and mobile as the family and their friends. [Virginia Baird, "Tail-Gate Picnicking Takes Over," The State Journal (Lansing, Mich.), August 14, 1958.]

But wait there's more! Some other foods traditionally cooked outdoors can include:

chowder - traditionally made just off the beach for seaside picnics.

kettle of fish - Scottish picnic tradition to boil a pot of these.

clambake - more specific about what has to be served.

Now, one of the things that Rocket 88 has going on in it, is the use of electric guitar. I started thinking, maybe guitar is the key to a song being rock? I recall Courtney Love once saying as much in an interview, not that she s a historian. At first it seems like a good rule even Little Richard has guitars in his backing band but Daft Punk Get Lucky is absolutely not rock, despite a guitar (and despite being a sex song) so there s obviously something else in the music defining it.

Already here it started to seem like we might have a situation that happens a lot with the food entries: where the word gets applied to something that then evolves into a form very unlike its old self. If you presented someone with the original version of ketchup, they d be mad that you gave them fermented fish juice instead of what they requested. Maybe, I thought, rock has the same thing happening. 

From listening to Little Steven s Underground Garage, I have learned that Bo Diddley singing Bo Diddley was the first nationally televised rock song. Had you told me that it was the first rock song ever, I d believe it: that one sounds like what came after. The sequence all makes sense if Bo Diddley was what founded rock; the Rocket 88 style doesn t. But notice in that Bo Diddley clip: Ed Sullivan actually calls it rhythm and roll, rhythm and color, rhythm and blues and then Dr. Jive calls it folk blues. Doesn t say rock and roll anywhere. It might be that rock and roll was too risqu to say on mid-50s TV, especially if Sullivan was on thin enough ice just playing it; but also might be that that genuinely isn t the genre they believed it was, even if it s retroactively been classed that way. 

So I turned to my mom, who was a little young for first wave rock but at least was alive during the time. She lived in Hermosa Beach and her culture was surf culture, so the first record she remembers trying to buy was Jan and Dean s Surf City, but she wasn t able to get it despite numerous attempts because it was always sold out. She often laughs at the music from the teen-oriented movies of the time because it was weird jazz stuff written by old men, and it didn t sound anything like what the teens really listened to. Please refer to this example of old man jazz rock from the movie Beach Party (which sounds more like the Rocket 88 than it does like Dick Dale.*) Somehow this music style never becomes called surf rock during the time when it s popular, even though it seems to be one of the earliest rock subgenres. (1963 was the year when all the well known surf songs came out, though the style was apparently around before that.) She recalled a little about 50s rock as understood by a child/preteen in a beach town that had about every ethnicity except Black; but ultimately she admitted she, too, was baffled to explain what the rock genre has going on which unifies Beach Boys, Nirvana, Bella Morte, Question Mark and the Mysterians, AC/DC and Elvis under the same label. In opera, Monteverdi, Mozart and Puccini are all very different music, but the performance method of sung drama with classical rather than folk instruments keeps them under one label, plus it took over a hundred years between each of those examples for the music to change so much. Rock is mutating at jet-age speed.

To deduce a definition, clearly I would have to figure this out like a dictionarian, where the word is all we care about, not the thing. If someone s calling Sal Mineo rock and roll then that s how it gets used no matter what purists say.

The word rock and roll becomes much more common beginning in 1955. That is the year Rock Around the Clock was featured in the movie Blackboard Jungle, and the genre went mainstream. Bo Diddley s Ed Sullivan performance (which again, wasn t actually called rock) happened the same year. 

Douglas Harper pointed out that when a word goes commercial like this, it doesn t evolve naturally anymore: it gets steered by marketing and applied to whatever makes money with that term. So, after a little more digging around and listening to a lot of random music from the 50s that has been (usually retroactively) called rock, my conclusion is this:

The actual rock and roll is that jazzy stuff, but the genre didn t last very long. When it went commercial, the music companies started to pitch, under the label of rock and roll, whatever music they thought superficially resembled it. Apparently DJ Alan Moondog Freed was part of this; he had a radio show from the early 1950s where he played records by Black artists (scandalous at the time) but he felt the term R&B had too much racial stigma, and so on his show he began to term any music he played rock and roll whether it actually met the genre requirements or not.

It indicates the real rock and roll genre died almost as soon as people started to talk about it. The term rockabilly was already necessary by 1956 to differentiate that from the other rock. Most of the rock music we know now probably is of delta blues lineage, rather than the jazzy R&B that started it all. The jazzy type was killed for good with the British Invasion and its decided music hall influence. (And you know it jumped the shark once Bollywood got it.)

Some pre-1955 rockers who were actually performing what was called rock and roll in their own time are Erline Newsome and The Treniers. There were also many others who are named in concert advertisements but don t appear to have left any recordings of what they did. 

There evolved many subgenres of rock: folk rock (1964), pop rock (1965), psychedelic rock (1966), punk rock (1971), southern rock (1971), hard rock and soft rock (both 1967), Christian rock (1972), glam rock (1972), gothic rock (1977), alternative rock (1979), and J-rock (2003.) Despite its large variety, rock now is effectively a dead genre the only major bands still doing it are the same ones who were doing it in the 90s. 

In the end I had to write up the rock and roll entry like the ketchup entry: give a big story explaining it instead of trying to define it, because too many things have been the word. The ultimate rock might be Yoko Kanno s honkadori of the old time blues, from Cowboy Bebop, with its rock and blues vibes even as it uses for its theme a jazz tune. 

* I used Misirlou Twist because it s Dick Dale s most famous song, but it s actually a bad example because it is an adaptation of a Greek folk tune (the title means Egyptian girl. ) The oldest recording is here. I was surprised a few months ago to stumble upon the information that, despite his WASPy stage name, Dick Dale s family was Lebanese, and he knowingly used traditional Middle Eastern music in his take on surf rock. Which might be the reason surf rock sounds like it does: reports are that Dick Dale was the first of the genre.

Now, I may be famously a fan of fortune telling, but I don t think all methods of performing it are equal, and moreover I conceive that supernatural/spiritual practices are supposed to stay in their own lane and not get used outside of deliberate acts of fortune telling. Consequently, one fortune telling method that I especially detest is word magic. This is where bad etymology and absence of historical knowledge converge, and it is used to inspire fear and hatred by convincing people that they (sometimes it s a named they like the liberals or the aliens or Greta Thunberg ) are using these secret meanings to do something unpleasant to you (yes YOU) this act being very often mind control or curses. When you find this in the wild, you might notice it can be treated as more than mere fortune telling by it proponents, often rising to the rank of pseduo-science. 

Very often, when introducing people to the idea, the one the scammers start with is Government is govern plus ment, meaning they want to control your mind! Since when is ment a word? Doesn t matter. I wrote its own post about the level of stupid this one has behind it, but the trick is nevertheless well demonstrated here. 

To perform this simple art, just pick any word, divide up the syllables, and seize upon anything that sounds like a negative word. If the word has only one syllable, you have to use homophones. Sometimes you can t use sounds and have to resort to mucking with the spelling, like showing how, if you flip the word or add or subtract letters, it shows the true meaning when it becomes another (spooky) word. This is key. Most of all, more than anything, you want to make sure the real meaning becomes something spooky; this inspires fear and makes people stop thinking rationally. Doesn t matter that the same logic ought to likewise determine the spooky is word s real meaning is something harmless; an aim for spookiness is the destination. Sometimes if you re really struggling, you can just declare a random word offensive and give it a wholly made up backstory for why.

Once you have your spooky elements picked out, build a story around why they gain from using that word to oppress people. Sometimes it might be obvious from the spooky word. 

Now you can actually finish there if you want. It ll make you sound smart just for claiming to have cracked a secret code in the language, and if you make up stories about powerful people using them you can get internet maddos to panic, and probably even misbehave if you wish it so. These people might even start giving you money if you promise to show them more great secrets you ve uncovered. 

The other thing you can do, is use some kind of text and start demonstrating what it really means through these hidden words. This is especially popular to do with something like the Bible, which is especially stupid since it wasn t written in English and there s about 90 different English translations that will yield various truths ; but again, be spooky enough and no one will notice. 

Let s make up some examples! Let s start with the lyrics of the song Happy Birthday and demonstrate how it s really a horrifying chant meant to lead to your demise.

Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you,

Happy birthday dear ___, happy birthday to you!

Happy, with the mere change of only one letter, becomes Harpy. Harpies were ancient Greek monsters who kidnapped people and stole from them. We now see that these wicked forces are being invoked against anyone who hears this song. Now, let s examine this word birthday. When you pronounce it, it almost sounds like Earth Day. That might initially invoke notions of helping nature and environmental friendliness, but you d be wrong, because when you look closer, you realize that the EARTH is where they bury dead bodies. What a wish to make against a person! And then, after all that, they make these wishes to You. Well what s wrong with that? Plenty! You see, a Ewe is a sheep. Sheep are notoriously stupid and easily led animals, which is why we say that an ignorant person is a sheep. So now the real message of the song becomes perfectly clear: the harpies will snatch you and take you to the grave where you ll be slaughtered like an animal. Good thing you know who your real enemies are now that you ve heard this lesson: beware of those who sing such treacherous wishes at you each year!

Now I would consider tales of secret codes and magic words to not be etymonline material, except that we actually get people emailing us to demand we correct the etymologies to match these true meanings. Refusal to do so is seen as complacency with or even participation in whatever conspiracy theory they re into (because they think someone controls the words. ) 

Much of the idea that these are true meanings assumes that there was some kind of wordmaker who chose these words to exist, in their modern forms and standard pronunciations, and also that English is the only language in the world. A claim like WORDS are dangerous because they re a SWORD if you move a letter around doesn t hold up well with the spellings used in Middle English (the form of English used from around 1100 to 1500) which might be swurt and worde or some other spellings that had to do with regional pronunciation (spelling wasn t standardized until more recently, another issue with the idea that word scrambling reveals anything substantial about what it s supposed to mean though the crackpots might insist that that s why it was standardized by the nefarious THEM to be imbedded with the sigils THEY wanted.) Also these claims fail as any universal truth once you choose a different language like say, Uzbek, where sword (qilich) and word (so z) don t appear similar anymore. 

Ah, but of course, Etymonline just used a whole WALL OF EVIL TEXT to control everyone and distract from the real thing that s happening: Ety, sounds like Eddie. And Mon, that s like in Monster. And Line, showing they want to keep you in line. That s right, Etymonline is where Eddie Munster will control your every move. Food for thought, ewe people!

Some genuinely sinister words that have misfortune baked into their etymologies include chopstick, dismal, widdershins, dys-, hazy, schlemazel, Davy Jones, and thirteen.

It can be a positive quality, involving civility, diplomacy, and discretion. It does not necessarily imply coddling of those who would be better spanked.

And it has nothing to do with children.

Kid as "child" is the old Scandinavian word for a young goat, in use in the viking-accented part of England. It came to mean also a young person by 1700 (especially in kidnap). So did lamb, colt, and later pup, but that young child meaning of kid wasn't prevalent in the mid-19th century, when handle with kid gloves hoves into view.

Kid then, in reference to persons, usually had recent, slangy, specialized senses: "young criminal" or "young prizefighter."

The use of kid generically for "a young child" is not common in print until about the turn of the 20th century, about the same time the mass mind starts to coin related phrases: Kid brother 1890; kid sister 1892. Kid stuff 1913. If you want to pin rough dates on the child-senses of kid, take those of the diminutive kiddy or kiddie: at first "a young goat;" by 1780 as "a flash thief," from 1889 as "a little child."

Handle with kid gloves was set in its figurative sense by the mid-1830s. Then, the rod was not spared. There was a verb every child knew, birch, to flog, from the noun birch in the sense bunch of birch twigs used for flogging. A schoolboy wouldn't have been the first object to come to mind in the 1830s when picturing what ought to be handled with soft hands and minimal violence.

Or any decade before, back to at least Horace. As for the verb kid "tease playfully," it also emerges in that window of years. Early it had a sharper sense, of luring a victim into a deception, and probably it sprang from the "young thief" sense of kid, shifting in the 20th century toward "treat as an innocent child."

KID GLOVES

Kid gloves mean gloves made of the skin of a young goat, a kid. Kydskynnes are a commodity of trade in England by 1469. The soft, thin skin or fell of kids was used especially in making gloves, slippers, and boots. The exact phrase kid glove "a glove made of kid-skin leather" is attested by the 1670s.

Over time the manufacture of them was perfected in France and Italy, and by the late 1700s imported kid gloves, were part of a British or American woman's fashionable wardrobe.

Below, a Broadway wit discovers that "pipson" would be an amusing word to rhyme on, and so he goes a-courting, in verse, the "elegant Miss Pipson. The result is old-fashioned newspaper humor, a string of groaners done up in feminine-rhymed fifteen-syllable lines.

Et cetera.

Kid gloves were tight-fitting but notoriously delicate and getting them on and off one's hand was a learned skill. Gloves had their own rules of etiquette in polite society.

What can be learned can be mastered. Donning and doffing a kid glove offered opportunities to exhibit one's skill at it. Miss Pipson's way of slipping her pretty hand into the snow-white glove is itself a facet of her allure. 

MEN S WEAR

When kid gloves also became a standard item of upper-class men s dress, the word shifted. It was a peacock era, and by the 1820s the most stylish men were wearing a masculine version of the glove, which their elders would consider effeminate. But the gloves suited the costume, and kid gloves, especially spotless white ones, became part of the clich outfit of the aristocrat. The etiquette of them reached to the highest authority among the beau set.

Which popular fashion, and clothing marketers, soon popularized. By 1838 a theater-goer notes "more young men with white kid gloves, scented pocket handkerchiefs, and hair on the upper lip."

When a noun becomes a pure adjective it attains a rite of passage; kid-glove acquired its adjectival sense of "dainty, elegant" by the 1830s.

A cross-country race was the delight of daring horse-riders, an ultimate equestrian thrill. The better the horses, the sharper the riders, the better the race. There is a region in Buckinghamshire, usually now spelled Aylesbury, with the Chiltern Hills on one end and Milton Keynes at the other and a perfect steeplechase ground between them.

Let a rider of the day explain it to you:

The trick was to keep the dull and unskilled among the gentry out of the way so the resolute riders of whatever class and their cattle (slangy, horses ) could charge the course. Polite, and dismissive.

It was commonly paired with silk-stocking in such passages, and followed by gentry or aristocrat. Kid-gloved "characterized by wearing kid gloves" (hence "aristocratic") is in print by 1836.

Here, in 1838, an actor is praised for his skill, on stage, in handling the kid gloves like a man unfamiliar with them. The audience knows what it is looking at, and laughs.

The comedy is The Love Chase, by James Sheridan Knowles, then in vogue, playing at the National Theater, "corner of Leonard and Church streets, ten doors from Broadway." The characters have the old-style names, names like "Sir William Findlove." The actor is James S. Browne, who also played the part in the South and West later. He was British, fresh to American audiences that year.

Meanwhile, in the same theater columns, an actress is criticized for keeping hers on (perhaps with a touch of vanity) in a scene where they had been better left off.

In the popular literary mind, then, by the 1830s kid gloves came (with silk stockings) to symbolize the fastidiousness, concern for appearances, and artful delicacy of the gentry, especially the male part of it, and those who set their standards by them.

But they also were the mark of that dread thing, the dandy.

Kid-gloves for men also always seem to figure in descriptions of the French equivalent, the exquisite. Conservative voices were shocked, or wrote as if they were, by the look of the young men on the fashionable streets of London or Philadelphia. 

Kid gloves and other such clich s of affectation were ripe for mockery, and both countries were full of it in the 1830s. Americans (and the British) had a taste for humor pieces written as a U.S. yokel s letters to the folks back on the farm explaining in homely terms life in high society or politics in Washington, D.C.

This, by Jonathan Slick had run earlier in the N.Y. Express. Jonathan, fresh from the sticks of Connecticut, is mingling with the elite of New York, at a "swarry."

Jonathan Slick is a little less sharp-tongued than "Sam Slick" or "Major Jack Downing," but writes in interesting detail about the dress and decoration at the soiree. The newspaper columns later were gathered and published as a book, "High Life in New York."

The author of all of them, behind the pseudonym, was Ann Sophia Stephens (1810 1886), above, who was a busy writer and editor in that decade. Some credit her with inventing dime novels.

Across the ocean, kid gloves came to symbolize especially the high-bred uselessness that anti-aristocrats saw in England s gentry during the era when the Reform Act of 1832 broke the old power-order. 

In an 1856 play such a character describes himself in despair:

[Mrs. Sidney F. Bateman, "Self: An Original Comedy"] 

As far off as Australia, an allusion to kid gloves could be understood as indicating the sort of gentry the country didn t need. 

The sharpest distillation of the insult in the 1830s was folded into the pithy dismissal of a dead king, himself an intimate of the beaux and dandies of his day, quoted in American papers but credited to the English press:

"George the Fourth was not a gentleman in any sense of the word, except that he was born to wear white kid gloves and do nothing."

Kid gloves also meant extravagance. Even when cheaper versions (rumor was that the skins for them were supplied by Paris rat-catchers) became available to average people in the late 1800s, kid gloves had a reputation for costliness.

A magazine joke from 1894 has a wealthy young Texan accused of extravagance for buying his wife a $250 diamond ring. He retorts, "Why, man alive, I'll save $500 on kid gloves" (which she couldn t wear with a diamond ring).

Mark Twain, in Innocents Abroad has an anecdote of an American in Gibraltar trying to impress a shopgirl with his savvy at kid gloves and making a fool of himself in the process.

Outside afterward, his friends pounce, mimicking her words.

TO HANDLE WITH

To handle with kid gloves is to handle in the manner of an aristocrat. With some or all of the above comprehended in that. Here is a view of a British political star in 1834:

You can see the image in place but not the exact phrase. Lord Durham himself is being handled kid-glovedly here: clear views as far as he can see and so forth. The lord, John George Lambton (below), known as "Radical Jack," was a wealthy liberal and prominent Whig of the era. He had led in the movement which resulted in the Reform Act, but his ego and temper hobbled his career. 

By 1839, in America, you have the expression coming into focus: "... they will handle him in kid gloves, nothing harsher" is written of a certain Swartwout, who has got himself in hot water for defalcation. A U.S. House committee is investigating him, staying at the posh hotels, and the writer here smells politics under it all: 

Andrew Jackson came to the presidency furious at his predecessors and determined to clean house and fill federal offices with his own loyal backers. The federal government was ridiculously small by modern standards. The most lucrative post under presidential control was Collector of the Port of New York.

The office of the collector also was the main source of the U.S. government s income (from tariffs, and most overseas trade came through New York port). Jackson jettisoned the long-time port collector, a scrupulously honest official, and installed Samuel Swartwout, his personal choice, a frontier crony and former Aaron Burr co-conspirator. Swartwout went to Europe in 1839 at the end of his term, and soon a discrepancy was discovered in the port accounts of more than $1.2 million.

Jackson is out of office by now, his vice-president Martin Van Buren is in the White House, and the writer above suspects the opposition party is going to try to use the scandal to undermine Van Buren (who in fact had vigorously opposed Swartwout s appointment in private and told Jackson he was a crook). He doesn t call the opposition the Whigs, but uses the old dismissive feds, as though they were no more than the defunct Federalists.

It was a stunning scandal; the House investigation exposed widespread embezzlement of federal funds. Swartwout wasn't the only one, but he was the face of it:

Later in 1839, with the banks crashing for the second time in two years, the financiers were hit with a major inside swindle perpetrated by the clerk of the Schuylkill Bank in Philadelphia. The scandal closed the bank and the financiers closed ranks and responded by focusing attention on the alleged embezzler, not the system that allowed him.

Here the Whigs reaction to that case is contrasted to the Swartwout defalcation. White kid gloves again are invoked. 

In the U.S., through the 19th century, the kid-gloved aristocrat image had more bite than it did in England. England had an aristocracy, still widely respected and felt as part of the national constitution. America never did. A kid-gloved aristocrat in the U.S. suggested not only fastidious uselessness but something open to downright contempt as fundamentally un-American.

Here is the Winston-Salem (N.C.) People's Press, on July 4, 1856, exhorting the opposition faithful to support a son of the soil from Guilford in the upcoming race for governor, against the Democratic incumbent: The fact is, Mr. Bragg knows that he is a perfectly used-up man, and the people know it too ; and we know that Guilford's noble and talented son, is just the man to handle white kid glove gentlemen, who go about defaming and slandering the honest sons of the soil.  

But Thomas Bragg won. He was a lawyer from a middle-class family, and elder brother of CSA's Gen. Braxton Bragg, formerly of Fort Bragg fame.

In the 1830s, in the U.S., the kid-gloved aristocrat stigma seemed to adhere most often to Martin Van Buren himself (below). 

Jackson s VP and successor was a modern politician out of time. Van Buren was the first president from the generation that never heard a shot fired or freedom debated during the American Revolution. He was a wealthy, savvy New Yorker and a skilled political manipulator.

The White kid glove label haunted his campaign in 1836 against a divided opposition led by Sen. William Henry Harrison of Ohio. Here a Democratic leader in New England tries to align the local party behind Van Buren and meets opposition from "Workey." 

A clergyman s son (Unitarian) named George Bancroft was heavily involved in Democratic politics that year. He was a true son of New England, educated at Harvard and the finest European universities, and two years earlier had begun to publish his massive History of the United States.

He was making a name for himself as a public intellectual. A populist, idealist, and probably well to the left of Van Buren, Bancroft argued for empowerment of the whole American people rather than just the elite.

And was dismissed as a white kid gloves aristocrat.

Meanwhile descriptions of Harrison, though nothing like those of the bloviated Tippecanoe and Tyler Too 1840 sequel election, emphasize the Ohioan's (soi-disant) down-hominess, his military record, and his want of white kid gloves.

... a thing which he is not fit for, and if he were fit for it he can t afford it. The common-man boast, and the implied insult, must have stung. Van Buren s friends took pains to refute the notion that the candidate always wore kid gloves.

[bear handed, sic]

One of the great uses of the handle with kid gloves image is in the writings of the robust Christian fundamentalist C.H. Spurgeon. In 1856 he carefully reviews a book of new hymns and finds them patently deistic, yet in line with the times. He deplores all this in a much-quoted passage

"As long as the fight is thought to be concerning a man, or a book, the issue is doubtful, but let it be for God and for His truth, and the battle is the Lord's. The time is come for sterner men than the willows of the stream can afford; we shall soon have to handle truth, not with kid gloves, but with gauntlets the gauntlets of holy courage and integrity."

[Spurgeon, from his tomb]

As American politics harden and crumble in the 1850s, handle with kid gloves begins to feel still more ominous. When it is invoked in political or national life, It becomes something you vow to not do, that only a fool would do.

In Utah Territory the Mormons were battling the elements but growing and establishing themselves as a separate community within the nation. The Protestant majority in America watched in some dismay as Utah knocked at the door of statehood. But certainly that would put actual Mormons in the U.S. Senate and their wives in Washington social circles. In place of kid gloves, this writer recommends tongs.

The coming of the American Civil War tightens the image still further. To not treat the rebels with kid gloves becomes a Northern clich or battle cry in 1862. Hope of a quick victory is gone. The volunteer army to Save the Union will have to be recruited afresh. There is an active "Peace Party" in many states. The rhetoric intensifies, in town meetings and the pro-administration press.

Here a soldier from the ranks of an Illinois cavalry regiment that has just re-enlisted rallies his comrades and the hometown ladies who have just presented them their battle flag.

[From the regimental history published in 1868]

The 8th served the entire war in the Army of the Potomac and helped hunt down Booth after the assassination and stood as honor guard while Lincoln s body lay in state. It was noted for the abolitionist sentiments of its officers.

But also in 1862 the government was urged to strip off the kid gloves when handling dissent politicians ("traitors in our midst") at home. 

And in the speech below, from early in the year, an Indiana senator pegs the entire rebellion and war its cause and the path to victory on slavery. George W. Julian accuses the government of treating slavery with kid gloves. Some Union generals took in runaway slaves as the armies moved south. Lincoln, pre-emancipation and trying to hold the Border States, had countermanded this. 

The speech by Julian (pictured below) was reprinted and noted in the Southern papers. Within two years much of the North caught up with his insight.

Here, later in the war, the Charleston Mercury, arguably the flagship paper of the Secession, mimics the Northern attitude toward Southern complaints of Maj. Gen. Ben Butler, then leading an army in Virginia. 

Butler had been among the Northern officers who had refused to return runaway slaves in 1862, setting off the controversy that inspired Sen. Julian s warning speech.

The negative phrase not to be handled with kid gloves appears in Roget by 1879 as an adjective under "Conditional Antagonism," along with laborious, troublesome, hard to deal with, more easily said than done.

The 1862 Marysville Tribune clip above pairs handling (the rebels) with kid gloves and a rose-water policy. Rose-water, a skin-toner and aromatic, also formed part of the common person s view of aristocratic softness. Through the 1870s kid-gloves and rose-water combined as a mocking aphorism in anti-pacifist speeches and writings, or rebuttals to attempts to mitigate war's suffering.

In both the United States and Britain, the militarists reminded the masses, "you can not make war with kid gloves and rose-water."

That from a British politician s speech, a reference back to the Crimean War. Their leaders spared Odessa, the beautiful city then in Russia, and their troops on the ground suffered for it. Modern empires seem no longer to own such kid gloves.

Ancient peoples coined vocabularies for the intimate, guiding sky long before it mattered to anyone that the ground under them was a planet and moved.

Pole (n.2), via Latin from a Greek word for a pivot, around which the celestial sphere turned. (The tent pole is no relation to it, though they cozy up formally in English.)

Equator equalizer of day and night, when the sun crosses the celestial equator twice yearly in the sky. It is an agent-noun, kin to equate. Tropic, from the Greek verb for "to turn," originally in astronomy, "point at which the sun in the sky turns back after appearing furthest north or south of the celestial equator."

Centuries later, all three words were extended to also mean the corresponding part of the Earth. That happens about the time the Europeans begin to sail all the way around it.

And Arctic, from Greek arktos bear, not the polar bear of the ice floes but the Great Bear of the heavens, the best-known of the handful of asterisms that are always above the horizon, in the far north. We know her back s ridge as the Big Dipper.

The arctic, the walk of the sky where the star-bear paces. Modern English and modern science brought the word to ground and fixed it to the cold places in the north and gave it a capital A.

In the popular mind, all these words seem now to belong to geography. The celestial sphere, with its seasons and portents, hardly concerns us.

Isidore's book is an encyclopedia, organized by topic. But the fiber in it is etymology. Every section large or small begins with the etymology of the topic name, and often does little more than describe the term.

The etymology in Isidore's encyclopedia is an ancient, inherited mess. Words are etymologized from other words by severe wrenching of sound. Words are distilled from phrases, equally improbably, and without systematic explanation.

Thus Isidore's work is cited in modern times as a catalogue of etymological errors. Most of the etymologies in it now are considered uninformed and absurd:

They are called birds (avis) because they do not have set paths (via), but travel by means of pathless (avia) ways. [Barney et al. translation throughout]

Some are more wrong than others. Isidore writes that "Etymology is the origin of words" and the etymology of a given word is "inferred through interpretation." Etymologies, Isidore writes, derive from rational interpretations, or from their origins so far so good, as logic, but then:

or from the contrary, as lutum ("mud") from lavere ("washing," ppl. lutus), since mud is not clean and lucus ("grove"), because, darkened by shade, it is scarcely "lit" (lucere).

That is the damning trait of classical etymology, the absurdity that brought it into disrepute even in Roman times. Simple honest lack of knowledge is no crime; a creative ignorance is a danger.

ANTIPHRASIS

The ancient etymologists could derive words from their opposites, if the two sounded alike. There was a word for this, antiphrasis, "a term to be understood from its opposite," and there are not a few examples in Isidore.

It was an age when science was extinct, when thinking minds did not write close and methodical observation of nature, as Pliny had done. Their eyes were on the Cross, their minds on words. The Church in Rome was predominant but not yet supreme in Western Europe. In Isidore's day they argued endlessly about words and minutiae of meaning. They slaughtered one another over heresies, which are different understandings of the same words. When you lose ability in things, what is left to fight about are words.

Isidore was writing for young men of the Church, some of them semiliterate farmers' sons, and exposing them to the widest possible intellectual understanding of the world (in Spain in 630). Almost nothing in the book is original to Isidore except his clear and sturdy style. Originality and authority seldom go together. Spain's other St. Isidore was an 11th-century farm laborer. Isidore of Seville is not breaking ground. He is a master weaver, working a tapestry out of a diminished world.

Our etymological St. Isidore can withstand our modern inquisition: He was better than his times. As a bishop, he leaned his authority against persecution of Jews. He started schools everywhere he could. He is a champion of the Church but unafraid of pagan authors and he encouraged students to overcome squeamishness about them.

BLIND SPOTS

Isidore himself knew that Greek he- was regularly Latin se-, in the names of the numbers and elsewhere. That was the sort of observation that, in the late 1700s, would lead to the astonishing discovery of the Indo-European language tree and open the door to deep human time. But for a thousand years, Western minds looked at it without being able to see it. They lacked that observation-and-hypothesis gear. Isidore mentions it merely as an aside.

Sometimes, as in that aside, the etymology information in Isidore seem more memory-aid than anything. He knows his readers are meeting many new concepts and words. Associating them with others is a way to order the mass of information pouring into the reader's head. Isidore also devotes great effort to distinctions in meaning, to homonyms and synonyms.

He seems unconcerned with truth, more with usefulness. He will give a Latin word, with the near-identical Greek word that is its obvious source, then give an improbably just-so etymology for the Latin word. The same word might be etymologically connected differently in the same passage: "... he is called Mars because he fights using men as though Mars were 'male' " (mas, gen. maris)." But a sentence or two later, "He is also called Mars because he is the author of deaths, for death (mors) is named after Mars."

A street (strata) is so called as if "worn away" (terere, ppl. tritus) by the feet of the crowd. [Quote from Lucretius] And it is paved, that is "strewn" (sternere, ppl. stratus) with stones.

Etymology to Isidore and the ancients was a branch of grammar. To use words expertly, one must be aware of their etymologies. Antiphrasis, "a term to be understood from its opposite," is among the "tropes" of grammar, a practiced art, along with metaphor and hyperbole.

Antiphrasis is grouped especially with irony. And, it being an encyclopedia, Isidore explains the difference:

Between irony and antiphrasis there is this difference: that irony expresses what one intends to be understood through the tone of voice alone, ... while antiphrasis signifies the contrary not through the tone of voice, but only through its words, whose source has the opposite meaning.

As an example, he mentions people calling a dwarf "Atlas."

A dwarf can still be an Atlas, but we have better minds now, if we bother to use them.

Incidentally, when all that modern scholarship finally got around to Latin lucus "grove," Isidore, for the wrong reasons, was right.

Lucus a non lucendo

Burns was something of a phenomenon. He was not the first poet to write in Scots dialect but somehow his poems had broader appeal and were read widely even outside of Scotland. In Jane Austen's unfinished Sanditon novel, they talk about him:

But while we are on the subject of Poetry, what think you Miss H. of Burns Lines to his Mary?

Oh! there is Pathos to madden one! If ever there was a Man who felt, it was Burns. Montgomery has all the Fire of Poetry, Wordsworth has the true soul of it Campbell in his pleasures of Hope has touched the extreme of our Sensations Like Angel s visits, few & far between. Can you conceive any thing more subduing, more melting, more fraught with the deep Sublime than that Line? But Burns I confess my sence of his Pre-eminence Miss H. If Scott has a fault, it is the want of Passion. Tender, Elegant, Descriptive but Tame. The Man who cannot do justice to the attributes of Woman is my contempt. Sometimes indeed a flash of feeling seems to irradiate him as in the Lines we were speaking of Oh! Woman in our hours of Ease . But Burns is always on fire. His Soul was the Altar in which lovely Woman sat enshrined, his Spirit truly breathed the immortal Incence which is her Due.

I have read several of Burn s Poems with great delight, said Charlotte as soon as she had time to speak, but I am not poetic enough to separate a Man s Poetry entirely from his Character; & poor Burns s known Irregularities, greatly interrupt my enjoyment of his Lines. I have difficulty, in depending on the Truth of his Feelings as a Lover. I have not faith in the sincerity of the affections of a Man of his Description. He felt & he wrote & he forgot.

Oh! no no exclaimed Sir Edw: in an extasy. He was all ardour & Truth! His Genius & his Susceptibilities might lead him into some Aberrations But who is perfect?"

The named "irregularities" are probably the 12 children he had with four different women, and even the one he married he wasn't married to at the time their kids were born. Anyway, as you see, he had fans; and anyone with fans gets fandom.

It is said that the tradition of Burns Night was invented by nine men in Alloway on July 21, 1801 the fifth anniversary of Burns's death. They called themselves the Burns Club of Greenock (though they met in Alloway, because nothing about early Burns commemoration was particularly organized), and they held a supper in his honor featuring haggis, Scotch, and readings of his poetry. Within a few years the date shifted to January 25th (Burns's birthday rather than death day), likely because celebrating someone's birth feels less morbid than toasting their demise over dinner.

What the Burns Club of Greenock created was a ritual meal with all the structural bones of religious observance. There's liturgy (the Address to a Haggis, the Selkirk Grace). There's communion (the shared whisky, the freshly sacrificed haggis divided among celebrants). There's scripture (Burns's poetry, read as sacred texts). There's even a sermon of sorts (the Immortal Memory speech, which interprets Burns's life and work for the assembled faithful).

If you want to hold a Burns Supper, you need haggis (which is pretty much impossible to get in the US since the organ meats are banned sometimes you can find a vegetarian version), mashed neeps and tatties (turnips and potatoes, though nowadays most restaurant "turnips" seem to be rutabagas), Scotch whisky, and a willingness to recite verse at your dinner table. The traditional format runs like this:

The host welcomes guests. Someone says the Selkirk Grace ("Some hae meat and canna eat..."). The haggis enters, ideally with bagpipes but whatever live music works. Someone performs the Address to a Haggis, stabbing the haggis at the appropriate moment. Everyone eats. Toasts (often in rhyme) follow: the Immortal Memory (a speech about Burns), the Toast to the Lassies (traditionally a humorous speech from a man about women, originally aimed at the servant girls who were the only women allowed at the club events), and nowadays the Reply from the Lassies (a female response). More poetry gets recited (my personal favorite is Sherramuir.) More whisky gets drunk. Eventually everyone sings "Auld Lang Syne" and means it.

You can modify any of this. The point isn't rigid adherence to Victorian-era Burns Club bylaws; the point is gathering people in the dead of winter, feeding them well, and celebrating a poet who wrote about the dignity of ordinary life.

"Etymonline, what are some of the odder sources you've visited in researching?"

Well, Johnny, there's ...