I’m reading Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here, which I’ve had for decades but for some reason decided was appropriate reading now, and I came across this sentence describing a picnic in 1936:
But for the parked motorcars, the scene might have been New England in 1885, and you could see the women in chip hats and tight-bodiced, high-necked frocks with bustles; the men in straw boaters with dangling ribbons and adorned with side-whiskers—Doremus’s beard not clipped, but flowing like a bridal veil.
I asked my wife if she knew what a chip hat might be, but she had no more clue than I did, so I looked it up in the OED (entry revised 2021):
chip hat
Now chiefly historical.
A light hat woven or plaited from thin strips of wood, palm leaf, etc.
1723 Wears a mix’d Orange Coloured Gown, and a Chip Hat.
Stamford Mercury 2 May 211/21859 The wood of the White Willow has been extensively used in the manufacture of chip-hats.
W. S. Coleman, Our Woodlands 651966 A debonair young man..with a broad-brimmed chip hat of the kind the prisoners wove from strips of maple wood.
T. H. Raddall, Hangman’s Beach i. iv. 552015 This combination of chip hat, cap, light-patterned gown, and white apron..would have been typical morning dress.
Crit. Inq. vol. 41 634
Once again I am dismayed by the OED’s casual approach to crediting authors; that last citation is from Steve Hindle’s “Representing Rural Society: Labor, Leisure, and the Landscape in an Eighteenth-Century Conversation Piece” (Critical Inquiry 41:3 [Spring 2015]: 615-54). Furthermore, the full sentence reads:
As John Styles points out, this combination of chip hat, cap, light-patterned gown, and white apron over petticoat, shift, and stays would have been typical morning dress even for a duchess walking in St James’s Park in 1744, so the basic constituents of the female wardrobe portrayed in miniature by Haytley actually serve to conceal rather than convey social distinction, which would only be revealed at close quarters in the quality of the fabrics and the accessorizing.
You’d think it would have been useful to include the phrase “in 1744,” which seems important context. At any rate, now we all know what a chip hat is, and I’ve fulfilled my contractual obligation as regards the inclusion of hat-related material.
If google images is to be believed, this is an example with some interesting explanatory text.
Chip hat
Apparently the term ‘Chip hat’ referred to the raw material, rather than to the style of the finished product.
Chip hats
Yet another—
Another chip hat
That last one gives a good idea of the construction.
Also, the period at the end of the quote is a lie, never mind the capital letter at its beginning. Both take up more space than doing it right, so I can’t see an excuse.
I saw an interesting image of one on the Met Costume Institute’s feed; it was from the mid-19c and its crown was buttoned on and made of fabric, so it could be used as a sunshade or as a full hat, and I am sure that the buttons would have been hidden by trim, ribbons, etc., when worn. A replaceable crown would probably extend the life of the brim, too, as the creases are always where such hats break first.
These hats strongly resemble the traveler’s hat seen on ancient Greek vases.
Why should the OED credit authors qua authors? Either Steve Hindle is a perfectly normal Anglophone using a normal English word (in a specific technical context suitable for publication in Crit. Inq.) that doesn’t “belong” to him personally or he’s a weirdo whose idiolect shouldn’t count as evidence of the lexemes used by normal Anglophones that the OED should record. I do think a longer quote could have been nice and the “even for a duchess” point might be as salient as the “in 1744” point.
Chip hats were once familiar enough to be called simply “chips”, as seen in the OED’s main entry for chip, n.2, sense I.4.b.i., now obsolete. Likewise there are chip baskets, also called “chips”, sense I.4.b.ii., “chiefly British”, and that one is still current, with a citation from 2009.
Good lord, I’d never have guessed that sense.
here’s an article about the multilingual 2020 video production of the WPA Theater Project’s adaptation of It Can’t Happen Here. it seems to no longer be available to watch, which is a shame. i wasn’t wowed by the adaptation itself – which i think was direct from the WPA scripts in yiddish, spanish, and english, and newly translated from the english version into the other languages – but the production was a theatrical feat, in part because multilingual performance is so rare in the u.s. ‘legitimate’ theater.