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We've got the ships, we've got the men, we've got the money too.
So went a popular music-hall song by G. W. Hunt, circa 1878. What people were singing about in those days was Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli's hawkish foreign policy with Russia, threatening the Russians with war if they kept messing about with Turkey. Because, really, what else would you sing about but foreign policy?
Although used as a mild oath colloquially since about 1694 (inspired, it is said, by the nonsensical conjurer's spell, "presto-jingo!"), "Macdermott's War Song" helped jingo evolve into its current meaning, denoting a "cocky, pugnacious, shrill, xenophobic chest-thumping" brand of patriot (in the words of Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of Allusions). "By jingo" became a rallying cry for those Brits who supported intervention in the Russo-Turkish War, leading critics to refer to Disraeli supporters, disparagingly, as jingoes and their worldview as jingoism.
Hunt's song and its attendant chauvinism spread to the U.S. several decades later as American imperialism began to take hold. The Americanized version of the song, in describing a riveting three-way fishing conflict with Britain and Canada, went a little something like this:
We don’t want to fight, but by Jingo, if we do,
We’ll scoop in all the fishing grounds and the whole Dominion, too.
Also during this time, President Benjamin Harrison’s secretary of state James G. Blaine was nicknamed "Jingo Jim" for his aggressive approach to foreign affairs.
Jingo began life as, of all things, a euphemism for Jesus.
More cultural jingo references: "next to of course god america i"
Also, the late Orbit Magazine, a free paper in Detroit, used to have an advice column written by Baby Jingo, the World’s Smartest Baby. His political leanings were unclear, but he did have a giant cranium.
Woo-hoo!
We all know the original indigo cotton work pants were made by Levi Strauss, a Bavarian immigrant who went west with bolts of canvas to make tents but found a much more lucrative market selling sturdy, durable canvas pants and overalls to toothless prospectors with scraggly white beards and battered hats. He founded his company in 1853 as a western branch of his family's New York dry-goods store; 20 years later, Strauss and a Nevada tailor named Jacob Davis began reinforcing the pants with copper rivets, and a thousand miners rolled their packs of Luckies into their t-shirt sleeves and strode into the sunset looking "cool." (Actually, that word wouldn't be appropriated to describe the with-it and rebellious for another 80 years or so. So just pretend.)
But Strauss didn't call them jeans, even though the word was in use from at least 1843 (English novelist Robert Smith Surtees’ Handley Cross contains the first reference to pants called jeans, far from the dusty mining camps of Califor-ni-ay). In the late 19th Century jean denoted not a garment but a type of fabric, a strong cotton twill called jean fustian as far back as the 1500s. The term jean comes from Janne, the Old French name for Genoa, the Italian city where the cloth was first woven.
Denim also has geographic roots; it comes from serge de Nimes, the French town that produced a tightly woven wool-silk blend. There is some controversy over whether the modern cotton denim has anything at all to do with the actual serge de Nimes but can't we all just get along?
According to the Levi’s site, denim and jean were two different fabrics, with denim being the sturdier of the two. The words are used interchangeably now.
Anyway the pants, which went from work clothes to fashion statement in the 1930s following the popularity of various jeans-clad silver-screen cowboys, were called waist overalls. Catchy, no? They were often dubbed Levi’s after about 1940, when the company began selling them nationwide. (Side note: Strauss changed his name to Levi after moving to America. If he hadn’t, we might all be wearing Loeb’s.)
After a transitional stint as jeans pants, they finally came to be known as jeans in the 1950s. Can you imagine life without them?
Other sources:
Dictionary of Word Origins, John Ayto
Made in America, Bill Bryson
Hot dogs are so American they even have their own special-interest group, the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council, whose Web site is a cornucopia of wiener-related tidbits, such as the top-ten hot-dog consuming cities (Chicago: #3).
The NHDSC delicately refers to hot dogs being composed of "specially selected meat trimmings," i.e., not muscle, which regular meat like steaks and chops comes from, but the…uh…other stuff. H.L. Mencken once described the hot dog disdainfully (but not altogether inaccurately) as "a cartridge filled with the sweepings of abattoirs."
What hot dogs are not filled with (we hope, anyway) are dogs. So how did we get the name?
In 1852, the butcher's guild in Frankfurt-am-Main created a smoked, spiced sausage in a thin casing, dubbed a "little-dog" or "dachshund sausage" for its obvious resemblance to the low-riding German dog. (Those funny Germans!) Its other popular name was, of course, the frankfurter. Wiener comes from a similar sausage made in Vienna. Unlike the usual wursts, dachshund sausages were usually sold with bread.
In 1871, an immigrant German butcher opened the proto-hot dog stand at Coney Island, selling the dachshund sausages wrapped in a milk roll. By 1893, the portable meat-tubes were already a regular accompaniment to baseball games and other sporting events.
The popular legend on the etymology of hot dog holds that a cartoonist named T.A. "Tad" Dorgan attended a polo match in New York in 1901 where vendors roamed the aisles imploring patrons to "get your red-hot dachshund sausages." Enchanted, Dorgan drew a smiling dachshund nestled in a long bun, but couldn't spell dachshund, so he captioned it "hot dog!" and thus the food got its name. Charming, but untrue.
According to the NHDSC, historians have never been able to find this alleged cartoon, even though Dorgan's body of surviving work is vast.
The real source of hot dog: Like so many unpleasant things in America, it came from Yale. The term had been recorded there as early as 1894 as a sarcastic description of the dubiously composed sausages that vendors peddled from "dog wagons" near the dorms.
Hot dog's country cousin corn dog originated at the Cozy Dog Drive-In in Springfield, Illinois, in 1949. It was originally called the distinctly less-appetizing crusty cur.
What do the Portuguese call "hot dogs," I wonder?
Our local hot-doggery -- two Howard DeVotos with pickles, please!
I'll put up a real entry tomorrow. You have my word.
Etymology:
Online Etymology Dictionary
The Word Spy
OED Word of the Day
Worthless Word of the Day
Language:
The Vocabula Review
linguablogs
Naming:
Behind the Name
Edgar's Name Pages
more links soon...
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Technical stuff done by Mister Jimmie, a cunning linguist in his own right.