Michael Bérubé - American Airspace

Etymology interlude

Yesterday’s post has apparently spawned a great deal of commentary among scholars of the late Colonial period and the early Republic. Exceptionally learned reader Jay, for instance, writes in comments to ask, “Is that Madison quote the first known use of the term ‘wing-nut?’ It sounds like an expression Ben Franklin might have coined.” Good catch, Jay! Franklin is indeed usually credited with the earliest use of the term. In 1774, after Prime Minister Lord North had personally denounced Franklin, saying that his “radical Whiggery . . . amounted to nothing less than treason to the Crown of England,” Franklin replied that “those who defend every last Act of this arrogant King George, no matter how incompetent or intolerable these be, are very like the Wing-Nuts of a Machine of shoddy conceit, that spin so furiously as to fly cleanly off their Handles.”

Franklin’s response sparked what most scholars call the “pamphlet wars between Whiggery and Wing-Nuttery.” In fact, even for some years after the British surrender at Yorktown it was common for American patriots to speak belittlingly of the “wing-nuttery” of their opponents-- who, for their part, tended to be authoritarian believers in Divine Right, astonishingly ignorant not only of King George’s positions on the issues (as was shown by a study conducted at the time by researchers in Maryland) but also of his obvious degeneration into madness. After the “Era of Good Feelings” during Monroe’s presidency, the term fell into disuse until it was revived by “bloggers” in the early 21st century.

This has been an Etymology Interlude! Regularly scheduled blogging will resume sooner or later.

Posted by on 10/23 at 04:35 PM

Dear Michael:

Thanks for clarifying! But there may be an error here.

Recent research has shown that in fact “wing-nuttery” may be of earlier coinage. In 1644, after being soundly defeated by Cromwell in the North of England, Prince Rupert’s royalist army ran into King Daneri’s heavily armed warriors from the kingdom of Uqbar. They were on their way to invading the remote province of Lilipputaq, accused by King Daneri of storing large quantities of poisoned arrows. Upon learning of their plans, Prince Rubert replied: “What say’st thou? I offer thee a word of wisdom: such invasion is wing-nuttery!”

Ben Franklin is believed to have been familiar with the exchange between King Daneri and Prince Rubert, reported in volume XVII of the Tertius Fox Encyclopedia. He may have picked it up there.

Posted by on 10/23 at 09:41 PM
Interesting.

It’s good to see the long history of the ‘wing-nut’ from the American Revolution. I’ve actually had someone argue with me that the Iraqi insurgents were comparable to the British troops during the Revolutionary war…

Posted by thehim on 10/24 at 04:12 PM
I’ve been amused time and time again by the term “f*cking f*cktard”, which is bandied about frequently by certain home-made journalists on the right as a colorful description of American Liberals. Is it true that the etymology of this phrase can be traced to King George himself after a particularly daunting colonic?

Posted by on 10/24 at 04:17 PM
Catarpa, I don’t know anything about a kingdom of Uqbar. In fact, I am strongly inclined to believe that you have invented this quote, and this kingdom, in order to make mockery of serious archivists like myself. Fie, fie on such idle raillery as this. And maryh, “f*cking f*cktard” is actually of extremely ancient origin: it first occurs in Anglo-Saxon verse, where Hrothgar asks Beowulf to dispatch that f*cking f*cktard Grendel. Needless to say, any contemporary journalists’ analogies between Grendel and American liberals is sheer wing-nuttery, since Grendel was on the Geatish far right and most closely resembled a kind of large misshapen Bill O’Reilly wielding a loofa.

And thehim, if the Iraqi insurgents are like the British in the Revolutionary War, and (as Reagan once put it) the Contras were the moral equivalents of our Founding Fathers, do you suppose we could get these two groups together for some live re-enactments?

Posted by Michael on 10/24 at 06:40 PM
I believe you are mistaken concerning the etymology of f*cking f*cktard with regard to it’s supposed resemblance of Grendel to a kind of large misshapen Bill O’Reilly wielding a loofa. I could be wrong but I don’t think that loofas were known in that part of Northern Europe at that time. What you have mistaken for a loofa must be a felafel. No doubt the felafel had become known in those far reaches due to trade with the Middle East via the Volga River.

Posted by on 10/24 at 07:11 PM
Michael, how can you shamelessly claim not to be familiar with the kingdom of Uqbar if you have yourself *blogged* about Uqbar, on 9/14 to be precise, when you mistakenly located it in Southern Iraq, probably to discredit Uqbarian documents regarding the Iraq-Niger-yellowcake connection? Ah, this is getting mixeder and mixeder indeed. Don’t you get taught any rigorous philology in English departments these days? How can we trust these flip-flopping liberal bloggers passing for serious archivists?

Posted by on 10/24 at 08:23 PM
Barry is right about the close etymological connection between “felafel” and “loofah,” but interestingly, the loofah had been introduced to northern Europe and Scandinavia as early as the fourth century, chiefly by Ostrogoths who traded them for what were known at the time as “earth shoes.” Apparently these shoes allowed you to walk more healthily and naturally while you were storming and pillaging the cities of the Roman Empire, and so they were highly prized.

As for Uqbar, I do remember a hacker named Tristero who took over this blog for a few days and posted all manner of fashionable postmodern nonsense under my name. I wouldn’t take any of that stuff too seriously, though. International Kerning Society indeed.

Posted by Michael on 10/25 at 03:00 AM
Berube is up to his misleading mischievous nonsense once again.

“Wing-Nut” is simply a dialect corruption of some well-known early 19th Century New Orleans brothel slang: “wang-nut,” ie, a hooker who took her job seriously.

Any scholar remotely familiar with the history of jazz (originally “jass,” aka “f*ck") knows this.

Posted by tristero on 10/25 at 05:06 AM
And thehim, if the Iraqi insurgents are like the British in the Revolutionary War, and (as Reagan once put it) the Contras were the moral equivalents of our Founding Fathers, do you suppose we could get these two groups together for some live re-enactments?

Sure, if they can take some time off from re-enacting General Lee’s victory in the Civil War.

Posted by thehim on 10/25 at 06:04 AM
Interesting bit about the Ostrogoths. Of course, the felafel wouldn’t be known in Northern Europe or Scadinavia until at least the 9th century. This is why felafels never became part of Spanish cuisine via the Andalusian Muslims or mozarebs as the Arabs invaded Visigothic Spain in the early 8th century. It is well known that the Umayyad prince Abd ar-Rahman I, founder of the Umayyad dynasty in Spain, regretted to the end of his days having to flee from the `Abbasids for fear of his life with such haste as to leave his mother’s famous recipe for felafels back home in Damascus.

Posted by on 10/25 at 07:13 AM
Wait a minute. As far as I remember, “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” is all about how people believing in - and writing about - Tlon can make Tlonish artifacts appear in our world.

‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors”, as you might say.

Hmm.

Jacksonian hell! They’re Borgesian!

Posted by on 10/25 at 09:25 AM

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