Thomas Jefferson's Mysterious Shag

Here is a mystery that I can't solve, and it's driving me mad.

Shag is an English verb for the world's most popular pastime.

That it is English and not American was a central joke of Austin Powers, and a central flaw in the British marketing of the 1989 American romantic comedy Shag.

So I was astonished to read the first citation in the OED. It's not English, but American. We've lost! Not just any old American, either: the first recorded shag is by Thomas Jefferson.

He had shagged his mother and begotten himself on her body.

That, I think you'll agree, is a pretty weird sentence. But the OED, of course, don't give context. They just have the line and the name of the book. So I ran down to the British Library to get hold of a copy and see what Jefferson was talking about.

I don't know whether it's that Thomas Jefferson isn't important enough, but the British Library have never bothered to buy a copy. It's recent too. Though Jefferson wrote it in 1770, it wasn't published until Princeton University press put it out in 1997.

But it's not there, dammit. It's not on Google Books either. So I'm left with this one enigmatic sentence:

He had shagged his mother and begotten himself on her body.

What the hell does it mean? I've been thinking long and hard about this. Who shagged his mother? It's not Oedipus because he didn't beget himself. I looked up Sin and Death in Paradise Lost, but they don't fit.

Then I came up with an odd idea. Maybe he's talking about Jesus. If you consider Jesus and God the Father to be one, then Jefferson's Shag might make sense. It's more than a trifle blasphemous, but I can't see what else he could have been writing about.

Does anybody have a better suggestion?

Does anybody have access to the original book? Any Princetonians? Anybody with another copyright library round the corner?

If you do then it's:

Thomas Jefferson
Jefferson's Memorandum Books volume II (ed. James Bear and Lucia Stanton)
1997
Princeton University Press
ISBN 0-691-04719-7


And it's the entry for Dec. 27 1770 on page 200.

And it's urgent.


The Inky Fool wonders if he can get his money back.

UPDATE

Thanks to Mark (see comments) I now have a photo of the page in question. The context is that it's all brief notes of court cases in which Jefferson was acting:

Now, I'd like to say that that cleared it up, but really it's caskets within caskets. I still can't work out what the phrase means. It's hard enough to see who's suing who for what and why. The open vestry is mysterious. I assume the pl. is the plaintiff, but I can't be sure.

Ah well.

Thank you to everyone for suggestions.

Mugwump

A mugwump is a derogatory word for somebody in charge, or for somebody who affects to be above petty squabbles and faction. The plodding boss and the pompous peacemaker are both mugwumps.

Mugwump is therefore an eminently useful word. It has a preposterous sound: the ug and the ump get across the idea of plodding stupidity, and context can give it meaning.

The origin of the word is extraordinary and involves the first American Bible.

There was a seventeenth century chap called John Eliot who was a protestant, a puritan and a colonist in America. He wanted to convert the local natives - the Wampanoags - to Christianity and to do so he needed a Bible in their language. He learnt Massachusett, the language of the Wampanoags, and then had to invent a writing system to get it down on paper. The result was Eliot's Massachusett Bible of 1663: the first Bible ever printed in America.

Eliot had the perennial translator's problem of finding words for concepts that don't exist in a language. The Algonquians had no centurions, no captains, no generals and so what was he to do when such fellows cropped up in the Bible? He decided to translate all of them using the Wampanoag word for war leader: mugquomp.

Mugwump then disappeared for a hundred and fifty years. There is neither citation nor quotation until the early nineteenth century when it pops up again as a comical and derisive term for a boss.

So long is the silence, that some say that John Eliot's mugquomp has nothing to do with the nineteenth century mugwump. The OED avers that there is no reason to connect the two.

I might believe the OED, were it not that the first modern mugwump it cites is from Vermont in 1828. Vermont is only just to the North of the Wampanoag homeland. This alone would test coincidence to the limit. The second citation is from Rhode Island in 1832 and Rhode Island is slap bang in the middle of Wampanoag territory. Had mugwump reappeared in California or Dorset, I might credit it as an independent coinage. But geography being what it is I am as certain as certain can be that mugwump is mugquomp, and that the first American Bible produced a fine American insult.

We also know that the Wampanoag population of Martha's Vineyard were still using Eliot's Bible in the mid-eighteenth century. All of which means that the OED seems to be rather too exucontian in its derivations.

So bring on the mugwumpery! Insult your boss and when a petty peacemaker belittles your battle, smack the mugwump in the face.

And with that our tribal hebdomadary comes to end. As John Eliot said just before he died: "Welcome joy!"

An editorial meeting at the Inky Fool offices

P.S. I'm sure there's a Sgt Bilko episode where he bets on a horse called Mugwump, but I can't find it.

American Clothes

I've been staying in the flat of an American friend and found amongst his books an American-English dictionary. It is a slim volume, almost bulimic, and it was first published in 1971.

This antiquity makes it a curious book. It preserves the distinction between the American billion (a thousand million) and the British (a million million): a numerological nomenclature that we abandoned twenty or thirty years ago. I believe that in the City billions have been smaller since the sixties.

Other terms testify to their times. I had no idea what a blackleg was, but imagine that in 1971 it was vital information for the travelling strike-breaker.

Mainly, though, it shows the areas in which our languages have drifted apart. Every third word or so is to do with either cooking or clothes. Barrettes, bathrobes, bellpeppers, bobbie pins, broils, business suits, candy, cheesecloth, clothes pins, collar stays, cookies, corn starch, cream of wheat and so on and so forth are still absent from English English. I knew about three of them, but the rest are a complete surprise. Do Americans really call it a lima bean rather than a broad one? Astonishing. Do swedes really become rutabagas beyond the Atlantic storms?

I suppose it's natural that these words should have drifted. Cooking is more talked about than communicated. It doesn't pop up much in films (movies) and novels in the way that serial killers do. Families have their own names for favourite dishes, so it is natural that a nation should as well.

And all those clothes! It is permanently amusing to an Englishman that American men like to wear their pants, knickers, vests and suspenders on the outside. If I tried that I would be arrested. Again.

What interests me about the clothes is that clothes do appear in novels. People are always being introduced as wearing a derby and jockey shorts, yet American novels have not affected English English. Why? I would guess that it is because clothes are almost never mentioned in films. On screen we can see what somebody has on (trousers and a tweed jacket) and no character needs to speak the words.

It's an old streetwalker of a book: outdated but fun. I never knew that a robin was a different creature in America. However, the book misses my favourite difference. Few legal activities give me more pleasure than hearing an angry American telling me that he's really mad and really pissed, because in English that means that he's drunk and insane.

Ours is prettier

Frankly, My Dear Frankfurter

Once upon a terribly long time ago, there was a tribe called the Franks. They invaded Gaul and Gaul became Franc[k]e.

They oppressed the native Gauls horribly, forcing them to eat garlic and listen to Johnny Hallyday records. Only the Franks were free. Thus they were enfranchised. They were able to speak freely, or frankly, and everybody else was disenfranchised and not able to approve things just by franking them.

How did the Franks get to France? Well, on the way they had to cross the river Main. This was easily done: they found a ford by which to ford it. The place became known as Frank-ford on the Main, or Frankfurt am Main.

Frankfurt is now best known as a financial centre, but also makes lots of low-rent sausages called Frankfurters. By the same token a hamburger comes from Hamburg* and involves no ham (or in the case of McDonalds no detectable meat at all). Also a berliner is a kind of doughnut from Berlin, which made JFK's famous remark - 'I am a Berliner' - a trifle amusing to German audiences (that is, until they elected Chancellor Cabbage).

In France the big export used to be incense, which therefore became known as frankincense, and at least one of the Franks managed to cross the Atlantic still bearing his name of "Son of the South freeborn landowner", which translates to Benjamin Franklin.

*Probably.

Spangled Drinking Songs

A spangle is, of course, a little spang: a spang being a small, glittering ornament. To be spangled is to be covered in small spangs, a fate that befalls the best of us at times.

I came across spangled in a work by Thomas Moore - not the famous one, you understand, but the nineteenth century Irish poetaster. He wrote:

   As late I sought the spangled bowers

   To cull a wreath of matin flowers,

It was one of his translations from the Greek poet Anacreon. Anacreon was an ancient boozer and lover and lyric poet. His poems (anacreontics) are about getting drunk and making lyrical, Attic love (by which I mean Greek love, not sex in a garret*). Anacreon was therefore a Good Thing.

Anacreon was, indeed, such a good thing that in the eighteenth century an English gentleman's club was founded in his memory. It was called the Anacreontic Society and was devoted to "wit, harmony and the god of wine". It was a very musical affair and two members wrote a society drinking song called "To Anacreon in Heaven". John Stafford Smith wrote the tune and the society's president, Ralph Tomlinson wrote the words. The first verse went thuslyly:

To Anacreon in Heav'n, where he sat in full glee

A few sons of harmony sent a petition,

That he their inspirer and patron would be

When this answer arrived from the jolly old Grecian

"Voice, fiddle, and flute,

No longer be mute,

I'll lend you my name and inspire you to boot,

And, besides, I'll instruct you like me to intwine

The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine."

Bacchus's vine is, of course, booze. It was a good song and became rather popular. Because it was hard to sing, it became an ad hoc test of drunkenness used by the Enlightenment police. If you could sing To Anacreon in Heaven in tune you were sober and free to go. This is, if you think about it, an odd fate for a drinking song.

Unfortunately it was so popular that it was usurped and stolen by a chap called Francis Scott Key who wrote new words that weren't about drink but about being able to see a flag flying after a bombardment. His words went:

O say can you see by the dawn's early light

What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming,

Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight,

O'er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming.

And the rockets' red glare,

The bombs bursting in air.

Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there;

O, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave,

O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

And the new title that he gave to an old drinking song takes us straight back to Small Spangs.

*There was a young man from Peru

Who had nothing whatever to do:

So he ran to the garret

And buggered the parrot,

And sent the result to a zoo.

Languages in America

There is a myth that German nearly became the official language of the United States of America. This is not true, but the USA still has no official language and an awful lot of immigrants. Until about 1920 the majority of Americans had not been born in the country. Anyway, the map below interested me. That's probably because I like language and like maps. I am a foolish cartographer.

Click to enlarge.

Last year I went on holiday to New Mexico, to do which I had to complete the near impossible task of spelling Albuquerque. I had been given to understand (strange phrase) that the predominant language would be Spanish, but never actually heard anybody speaking it.

N.B. A tip of the blogger's bowler to Walk in the Words.

Yippee-Ki-Yay, Oedipus

As an Englishman I never understood the word Yippee-ki-yay, as in 'Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker'. As Quentin Tarantino so wistfully put it, "I thought it was just a coldblooded thing to say to a motherfucker before you popped a cap in his ass. But I saw some shit this mornin' made me think twice."

Or, more precisely, I saw two things that made me think once.


The first is the Singing Cowboy, Roy Rogers, performing the classic song I'm An Old Cow Hand. (I'm afraid there's an advertisement at the beginning but it's very short).




The second is the original scene from the original Die Hard movie, from which yippee-ki-yay emerged. YouTube only has the audio, but that, gentle motherfucking reader, is all you need. Hans Gruber and John McClane are chatting away to each other on their walkie-talkies.




The line was repeated in the following movies (2: good, 3: terrible, 4.0: don't you understand decimal bloody places?) but in those later attempts to use the same shit twice, the meaning is, tragically, lost.

Druthers and Tar Babies

There are precisely a million and one little differences between American and British English. The Inky Fool once had to go on the run after stubbing out a fag butt in San Francisco. Here for the sake of mutual comprehension and edification are two strange and wayward usages from that strange and wayward continent:

A couple of days ago I got an e-mail from deepest, darkest America* that concluded:

If I had my druthers, each day would consist of 36 long hours. But some asshole stole my druthers.

Now the first thing I thought was obviously that he'd misspelled arsehole. The second thing I thought was that in ancient Rome the day was divided into twelve hours from dawn till dusk, which meant that during the summer an hour was actually longer. And then I noticed that I have no idea what druthers are.

A split google later I discovered that it's a shortening of would rather (to 'drather to druther) and is an exclusively American phrase meaning preference. The first recorded use is in an 1870 story called Centrepole Bill and goes:

If I was a youngster, I 'drather set up in any perfession but a circus-driver, but a man can't always have his 'drathers.

Which explains something, but not the spelling of Centrepole.

The second reason that I was considering odd Americanisms was a question on the Dear Dogberry page which I recently set up as a kind of agony aunt column. The question concerned an article in The Guardian by the bleeding-heart left-winger Norman Tebbit. He referred to the coalition between Tory and Liberal thus:

A marriage of convenience between those two political tar babies hugging each other to death might make an enjoyable spectacle, but the consequences for the country will be baleful.

Which is all well and good, but nobody in England knows what a tar baby is**. Well, children, once upon a time there was a fox and the fox wanted to kill a rabbit. So the fox took the obvious route of making a baby out of tar and putting a hat on it. The rabbit came past saw the tar baby and said hello. When the tar baby didn't reply the rabbit flew into a rage and attacked it, but as tar is sticky the rabbit became stuck. The more the rabbit tried to extricate himself the more trapped he became.

This story is of doubtful validity at best and there are naturalists who go so far as to dismiss it out of hand. It was a folk tale told in the plantations of the Deep South and was collected by a chap called Joel Chandler Harris and put into his Uncle Remus book.

As the whole point of tar babies is that they are inanimate it is hard to see how they could hug each other to death. There may even be a hint of a mixed metaphor somewhere between the married and homicidal babies.

There are Americans who believe the term to be racist. Americans can detect racism in the way that a compulsive gambler can detect that he'll be lucky today. There is a whole Wikipedia page devoted to Controversies about the word "niggardly".

So now we know about tar babies, but Americans don't know about Norman Tebbit. One country is the winner here, but I'm not sure which.

Norman Tebbit addressing a Guardian-reader

*I have never been to Williamsburg VA but imagine it to be both profound and gloomy.
** This assertion is based on my having conducted a rigorous survey of several people.