I started Joe Zadeh’s Noema piece The Shrouded, Sinister History Of The Bulldozer and was pulled up short at the very beginning:
According to an 1881 obituary in a Louisiana newspaper, the word “bulldozer” was coined by a German immigrant named Louis Albert Wagner, who later committed suicide by taking a hefty dose of opium dissolved in alcohol. Little else is recorded about Wagner, but his term became a viral sensation in late 1800s America, going from street slang to dictionary entry in just one year. It likely originated from a shortening of “bullwhip,” the braided tool used to intimidate and control cattle, combined with “dose,” as in quantity, with a “z” thrown in for good measure. To bulldoze was to unleash a dose of coercive violence.
I like the fact that they link to the actual newspaper; the relevant text is most of the way down the left-hand column of p. 2 of the Donaldsonville Chief for November 5, 1881, so you can verify the summary. The lively little obit begins:
Louis Albert Wagner, a dissipated German about 45 years old, committed suicide in New Orleans recently by taking a dose of laudanum. He lived in East Feliciana parish a number of years prior to his death, and was the reputed coiner of the word “bulldozer” that has grown into general use and received recognition at the hands of our contemporaneous lexicographers.
But of course it’s absurd to take your etymologies from newspaper stories, however colorful, so I wanted to investigate for myself; happily, the OED revised their entries for bulldoze and bulldozer in 2022, so we have as authoritative an account as can be obtained. The latter entry says:
1. Originally and chiefly U.S.
1.a. A member of any of various vigilante groups operating in the southern United States in the late 19th cent., characterized by their use of threats and acts of violence to prevent African American voters from casting ballots for candidates of the Republican party (now historical). Later more generally: a person or group using aggression, intimidation, or coercion; a bully or thug.
The bulldozers rose to prominence in Louisiana during the final year of Reconstruction (1863–77), when their tactics of coercion and intimidation succeeded in suppressing the African American Republican vote in the 1876 Presidential election and secured a win for Democratic candidate Samuel Tilden. Cf. regulator n. 4.1876 A few ‘Bulldoozers’ (regulators) passed through St. Francisville on the night of the first.
New Orleans Republican 7 March 6/11878 All this I know is very jolly for, as the Americans would say, the great ‘Bulldozer’ of Europe.
North American Review November 426
[…]1.b.† A large-calibre pistol. Cf. persuader n. 2a. Obsolete.
[…]2. U.S. A type of mechanical forging press for bending large pieces of iron and steel, used esp. in the manufacture of components for the railway.
[…]3.a. A heavy construction vehicle, typically moving on caterpillar tracks or large tyres, having a broad bucket or blade at the front for pushing and (often) lifting earth and other loose material, used for clearing and levelling uneven ground and for demolition. Also: †an attachment with a bucket or blade of this type designed to be fitted to the front of a tractor (obsolete).
Originally denoting a piece of earthmoving equipment comprising a long frame with wheels at the back and a broad curved blade at the front, designed to be drawn by a team of horses or mules. Such devices were later used with motor tractors, before the manufacture of blade and bucket attachments specifically for use with tractors began in the early 1920s. In early use, bulldozer is used variously for the earth-pushing component and the vehicle equipped with it, and in individual instances it can be difficult to determine which is intended.1916 J. & R. Malone outfit showing Dump Wagon and Bulldozer.
Earth Mover September 29/2 (caption)
[…]3.b. figurative. A person with a robust and powerful physique. Also: a person exercising irresistible force, especially in disposing of opposition.
[…]
Etymology:
Origin uncertain. Perhaps < bulldoze v. + ‑er suffix¹, although the verb is first attested slightly later than the present word and is itself of uncertain origin: see further discussion at bulldoze v.
Compare also bulldoze n., bulldozed adj., bulldozing n., bulldozing adj., all first attested in corresponding senses in 1876. For further discussion see also etymological note at bulldoze n.
Notes
This word has been connected from a relatively early date to a remark made by a German-born former Confederate soldier called Louis Albert Wagner (c1836–81) said to be living in East Feliciana, Louisiana in the 1870s. However, given that the wording of the remark is variously reported and evidence to confirm a connection with this individual is lacking, these accounts may well be apocryphal. […]
So let’s see that etymological note at bulldoze n [The action of bulldoze v. 1; (also) intimidation or coercion, or an instance of this. Obsolete]:
Probably < bulldoze v., although compare bulldozer n., bulldozing n., bulldozed adj., all of which, like the present word and the corresponding verb, are first attested in the same year: the relative priority of words in this group, the relationships between them, and their ultimate etymology are all unclear.
Notes
With use in sense 1 compare the following examples of bull-dose and bull’s dose explained as a term for very large dose (of beating administered as punishment, or of medicine), literally ‘a dose fit for a bull’ (compare bull n.¹, dose n.) or ‘a dose of the bullwhip’ (compare bullwhip n., bull-whack n.):
1876 Bulldozled—That’s the word which is puzzling the etymologists just now. It seems to have originated with that pleasant family of colored brethren called the ‘Union Rights Stop’, who live around Point Pleasant…The ‘Stop’ were in the habit of giving warning calls once, twice, three times, to those whom they desired and demanded should join the ‘Stop’. If on the third and last call, they did not comply with the demand and take the oath, the unfortunate negro who refused was taken to the woods and given a bull-dose of the cowhide on his naked back. A cool hundred well laid on was considered a bull’s-dose for once; and the victim either listened to such potent reasoning and took the oath as a member, or fled the country. From a bull’s dose soon came the verb to bull-dozle.
New Orleans Times 7 July 4/4
[…]Earlier evidence for bull-dose and bull’s dose in these senses outside accounts of the etymology of bulldoze v., bulldozer n., and related words appears to be lacking, and it is possible that they reflect a later rationalization or folk etymology of those words rather than evidence for earlier use of the present word on the one hand or of its etymon on the other. For a later and apparently isolated contextual use of bull-dose with reference to flogging as a form of punishment outside the context of political intimidation in Louisiana compare quot. 1903 beside an earlier telling of the same story, which does not use bull-dose:
1866 They said I’d best not kill him [sc. a former slave accused of theft], but that he ought to be whipped. I sent to the stable for a trace, and gave him a hundred and thirty with it, hard as I could lay on.
J. T. Trowbridge, South xl. 2921903 They said I’d best not kill him, but that he ought to be whipped. I sent to the stable for a trace, and gave him a bull-dose with it, hard as I could lay on.
J. T. Trowbridge, My Own Story ix. 342With sense 2 compare bulldoze v. 4, bulldozer n. 3a.
And the etymology for bulldoze v:
Origin uncertain. Perhaps ultimately < bull n.¹ + dose n., although the semantic motivation and proximate etymology are both uncertain and disputed.
[…]Notes
Historical context and related words
This verb and the related formations bulldozer n., bulldozing n., bulldozing adj., bulldozed adj. are all first attested within a few months of one another in corresponding senses and contexts. The word for which earliest evidence has been found is bulldozer n., although the relative priority of words in this group and the relationships between them are uncertain.Proximate etymology and semantic motivation
It has been suggested since 1876 that the verb is ultimately a compound of bull n.¹ and dose n., a ‘bull (or bull’s) dose’ being explained as a flogging fit for a bull; a variation on this theory identifies the first element with bullwhip n. or bull-whack n., and explains a ‘dose of (the) bull’ as a flogging with a whip of this kind. These suggestions are based on the premise that the original sense of the verb must have been ‘to flog (severely)’; compare e.g. the following:1881 A ‘bull-dose’ means a large efficient dose of any sort of medicine or punishment. To ‘bull-dose’ a negro in the Southern States means to flog him to death, or nearly to death.
Saturday Review 9 July 40/2However, early unambiguous contextual examples of the verb with specific allusion to flogging appear to be lacking, and although quot. 1876² at sense 1a [Lorenzo Jackson, of J. A. Campbell’s plantation, was bulldozed, terribly whipped, the excuse being he had stolen a gun in 1872. New Orleans Republican 24 June 1/4] has been interpreted as showing this sense, this is not the only possibility—other examples from the same year indicate that the verb bulldoze was used to cover various kinds of racially and politically motivated violence and humiliation used against African Americans, including shooting, stripping, kidnapping, and hanging (compare e.g. quot. 1876¹ at sense 1a).
The suggested etymology from bull n.¹ and dose n. also appears to imply transmission via an intermediate noun, although evidence for the independent existence of such a noun form in the required sense is not frequent or straightforward (for full discussion compare bulldoze n. and see etymological note at that entry). An etymology from dose n. is also difficult to reconcile with the α forms and with β forms in ‑dooze, ‑doose, both of which are attested early (see further note on forms below).
Note on forms
With the α forms perhaps compare U.S. regional bedoozle to confuse, perplex, bewilder (attested from the mid 19th cent. or earlier), and possibly also frequentative verbs in ‑le suffix.
With the β forms perhaps compare the variant doze at dose n. Forms.
So it’s all a lot messier than I would have supposed. (For the sudden appearance and rapid spread of a colorful word, cf. hooligan.) Note that the OED’s “said to be living in East Feliciana, Louisiana in the 1870s” shows a lamentable ignorance of American topographical nomenclature, implying as it does that East Feliciana is a town or city; in Louisiana, a parish is what the rest of the U.S. calls a county. Similarly, many viewers of Midsomer Murders think the fictional Midsomer is a town rather than a county; they, however, are not (by and large) lexicographers, so their ignorance is forgivable.
You can in some contexts in AmEng say someone is “living in COUNTYNAME” without saying “County” out loud, although it would be generally unidiomatic in such contexts to say in “COUNTYNAME, STATENAME.” In an Irish context you can I think say e.g. either “living in Kerry” or “living in Co. Kerry,” right? (Easiest when the county doesn’t contain a city/town of the same name to risk ambiguity the way e.g. “living in Kildare” would.)
And of course as the apparently violent etymological backstory of “bulldozer” became opaque to more recent generations, those looking for a more violent-sounding lexeme coined https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killdozer_(disambiguation)
By “those” I presume you mean Theodore Sturgeon, since the others (presumably) made use of his coinage.
I can’t antedate Sturgeon but it feels like the sort of thing that plausibly could have been independently coined on multiple occasions by multiple coiners. I was personally contemporaneously aware of the Eighties band without being aware of the 1974 movie, and wikipedia could stand to add a [citation needed] to the claim that the band took their name from the movie although they certainly could have. If anything I might have thought the band might have named themselves after the rampage-in-Granby-Colorado usage, but the timeline is all wrong for that.
typically moving on caterpillar tracks
‘Caterpillar’ for this purpose became a brand name for the company based in East Peoria, Illinois.
Fun fact: by the early 2000’s, when the Asian tiger economies were eating their lunch by building earth-moving equipment lighter and cheaper than those lumbering behemoths [**], the company changed its branding to agile ‘Cat’, with logo.
[**] The larval stage metamorphoses into behe-moths, ‘innit.
I can’t antedate Sturgeon but it feels like the sort of thing that plausibly could have been independently coined on multiple occasions by multiple coiners.
Strongly disagree; it feels to me like a very unlikely coinage that was so striking it was seized on by others. The Sturgeon story is (or was back in the day) very famous.
Perhaps my earlier statement could be rephrased as “those looking for a more violent-sounding lexeme seized on Sturgeon’s coinage of …” That would cover the notion that the coinage was non-obvious ex ante but once coined turned out to meet a felt need.
That works for me.
In an Irish context you can I think say e.g. either “living in Kerry” or “living in Co. Kerry,” right? (Easiest when the county doesn’t contain a city/town of the same name to risk ambiguity the way e.g. “living in Kildare” would.)
The following counties have no namesake town; “County Foo” is seldom used; it would be marked, akin to an American saying “the State of Texas”.
Clare* Down* Fermanagh Kerry Laois Meath Offaly Tyrone Westmeath. (*named after Clarecastle and Downpatrick)
The following recently created counties never have “County Foo”. The county council might use “County Fingal” but nobody plays along.
Dún Laoghaire–Rathdown, Fingal, South Dublin
When there is a namesake town Foo, the smaller it is relative to the county Foo, the more likely bare “Foo” will mean the county, and the town will be “Foo Town/City/Village”. Probably only in Dublin is the city large enough to be the default and force the county to have obligatory “County Foo”.
The following are arranged in approximately descending order of how small the town is relative to the county. Personally I would always say “Tipperary Town”; in my mind, the song “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” necessarily refers to the county though Jack Judge may have differed.
Dublin Limerick Galway Londonderry/Derry†** Waterford Cork Sligo Kilkenny Armagh** Longford Wexford Roscommon Carlow Kildare Cavan Monaghan Wicklow Tipperary Donegal Leitrim Antrim** Louth Mayo
† Some styleguides use Derry for the city and Londonderry for the county; further research needed on how this affects the “County Foo” probability
** Counties in Northern Ireland were abolished for local government purposes in 1973, which I guess reduces their salience locally.
I appreciate mollymooly’s insights. There’s the song “Star of the County Down,” but maybe that’s a marked usage or just explained by the lyricist’s need for two* extra syllables to make the words fit the music.
*Or three, if the “the” is gratuitous and might be unidiomatic in ordinary conversation.
“the County Foo” and “the County of Foo” are very ornate.
My earlier thoughts only considered disambiguating county from town, whereas “County Down” might sometimes avoid a miscue from the homophonous dictionary words. “Star of Down” might be a song by System of a Down, or an award from the Pillow Manufacturers’ Association.
a miscue from the homophonous dictionary words
Indeed. “He drowned in Kilkenny” also may refer neither to the town nor to the county.
That may indeed account for the apellation Smithwicks, which would have started as a way to avoid ambiguity. Pity the man who was taken in by the Guards because he was overheard saying he was going to Kilkenny.
Here’s an example of I guess “elegant variation”:
“The elder son eagerly informed me that though they were living in County Fermanagh they were really men of Cavan, and that made all the difference. The men of Fermanagh were not like the men of Cavan, and they had no friendship for their neighbours on this side of the lough.”
— from the impressively-titled _An Englishman in Ireland: Impressions of a Journey in a Canoe by River, Lough and Canal_, written by R. A. Scott-James and published in 1910.
(The boundary between Fermanagh and Cavan was not at that time an international border although it subsequently became so.)
You can see the passage in context, thanks to Google Books:
An excellent illustration, JWB. “County Fermanagh” is not strictly necessary but primes that we are discussing counties and not towns, which is useful when we soon come to “Cavan”. This, and subsequent mentions of either county, do not need the prefix, since we have already been primed.
“Smithwicks” is the old name; like most venerable beers in Ireland, the name is that of the brewery, which is the surname of the founder. “Kilkenny” is a slightly different recipe aimed at the export/tourist market and named accordingly.
“County Durham” is usual, too.
Durham is or at least was no run-of-the-mill county but a quondam County Palatine. I could be wrong about this (and google books suggests some instances) but it seems like Durhamshire is rarer than most Blankshire possibilities, even for the English counties most commonly referred to as merely Blank. But I’m not sure if County Durham arises because Durhamshire feels non-cromulent, or if the usage of County Durham is itself what makes Durhamshire feel non-cromulent.
The north is all a bit unusual – Durham’s traditional three northern neighbours are Northumberland, Cumberland and Westmorland. I don’t know why, because as soon as you get over the border there’s Berwickshire and Roxburghshire again. And ‘Durhamland’ would sound very odd!
‘Durham’ alone is definitely the town unless you’re very strongly primed to expect otherwise.
3a is the main (only?) meaning in current British English – is it the same in the US?
Yes, although I imagine some people use it figuratively as in 3b.
@Kate: there’s a lot of metaphorical use of “bulldozer”, and even more of “bulldoze” in the u.s., which mainly would fall into what the OED has as 3b. i think most of it could be thought of as connecting back to the original(?) meaning – it centers on the idea of overwhelming force (with a strong implication of excess, and of being illicit or illegitimate) – though almost all of it is now through the image of the earthmoving machine, rather than the overseer’s whip or the large-bore pistol.
The 3b sense works, although AmEng has alternative construction-equipment analogies for the same meaning. E.g. early on in Eliot Spitzer’s tenure as Governor of New York, when he was feeling high and mighty and had not yet fallen afoul of the allegations that eventually caused him to resign in disgrace, he famously said to Jim Tedesco (at the time the Minority Leader of the lower house of the state legislature) “I am a fucking steamroller* and I’ll roll over you or anybody else.”
*I think BrEng may prefer “road roller”? AmEng has retained “steamroller” even though they are now generally powered by internal-combustion diesel engines rather than by steam.
Much like “steam shovel”, though that might be dying out as fewer children are reading about Mike Mulligan and his.
I remember English language publications mentioning that Ariel Sharon was nicknamed “the bulldozer”, and that seemed to refer to his personality, not the destruction of Palestinian homes.
@hans
https://thecomicnews.com/edtoons/archive/2006/0111/sharon/01.shtml
No one has yet mentioned that the word for the earthmoving equipment is sometimes eggcorned into “bullnoser.”
I think rozele is right, that the verb is more common in figurative use than the noun. Moreover, the overwhelimg force involved does not need to be physical, as this famous example shows:
I remember this particular instance from when I first read “The Gift of the Magi” thirty-eight years ago, because my mother actually asked me about what I thought the word meant in this context.
@J.W. Brewer: Another memory from my childhood is that we talked about “steam shovels.” However, that one seems to have nearly disappeared as a way of referring to present-day, diesel-engined construction equipment.
that seemed to refer to his personality, not the destruction of Palestinian homes
i’m not sure the two have ever been separable: one of sharon’s earliest moments as a public figure was his leading role in the Qibya massacre, in which his troops demolished palestinian homes with their residents still inside (not yet having the assistance of Caterpillar Inc, as he would in later life).
“Steamroller” is still usual among lay people hereabouts; I would struggle to retrieve the term “road roller”. Maybe construction professionals mock us for this, but I have not noticed.
Of course the tale of Mike Mulligan’s steam shovel is elegiac in tone, because in turns out the old girl is doing her last job and then being repurposed into another line of work (with Mike doing likewise), having been superseded in her traditional occupation by new-fangled competitors not reliant on steam power. And this in an elegy published over 85 years ago. (My oldest daughter didn’t care much for it although she and some of her younger siblings did like the same author’s less-well-known _Katy and the Big Snow_, starring a tractor who dabbles in snowplowing come wintertime.)
i can’t speak beyond myself, but my nyc/boston u.s. lects definitely use “steamroller” for all vehicle-sized asphalt-flattening machines, regardless of power source, as well as metaphorically. i may be overthinking it, but i think that “bulldoze” connotes more destructive violence to me than “steamroll” – the latter being about pushing past or silencing opposition, the former about destroying it.
(mike mulligan’s steam shovel, like the little red lighthouse, was a definite influence on my childhood development of an understanding about collaborative relationships with “inanimate” objects – which i’m now tempted to understand as an interesting strain of Constructivist thinking about what christina kiaer discusses under the rubric of “byt”, filtered through a u.s. Popular Front sensibility)
James Taylor, possessor of one of the wimpiest personae in rock-adjacent music, has a song in which he likens himself to a steamroller but AFAIK (I am not a completist …) not one in which he likens himself to a bulldozer. It has FWIW been theorized that his steamroller song was perhaps meant as a parody of a certain sort of macho-bluster lyrics common at the time among the white-blues-playin’-the-blues sort of rock musicians. (Peter Gabriel later likened himself* to a sledgehammer; I don’t know how that fits in to the distinction rozele was attempting to draw.)
*In each case “himself” should refer more precisely to the first-person-narrator character in the song in question, who may of course not be identical to the human who wrote the song and/or sings it.
ETA: I’ve never heard the version that I can recall, but the internet tells me that a cover of James Taylor’s “steamroller” song was recorded by Elvis Goddam Presley Hisownself on one of his not-very-critically-acclaimed late-career “fat-guy-in-a-jumpsuit” albums. I’m gonna guess that Elvis and his people didn’t take it as an arch parody of anything and didn’t perform it in that spirit.
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1466556063i/30719954.jpg
circa 1950
This was one of my early childhood favorites.