Nitsuh Abebe’s latest “On Language” column (archived; see this post) is on the word frictionless, which is not particularly interesting in and of itself; I was skimming along:
“Frictionless” used to be an intensely physical word: It first thrived in the late 1880s, when the engineers of the Second Industrial Revolution were scrambling for new lubricants, bearing designs and low-friction alloys to keep factory machines from grinding themselves to bits.
Today’s use, though, comes from computing, in which “friction” is anything that stands between a user and the completion of a task — whether it’s learning complicated system architecture or having to click a single additional “OK” button to order shoes. Removing those obstacles was, for a while, the tech world’s grand selling point.
…when I got to this:
These complaints [about “the dream of a frictionless existence”], funnily enough, echo the oldest use of “frictionless” cited in the Oxford English Dictionary — from an 1848 satirical poem, which mentions “a brain cool, quite frictionless, quiet, / Whose internal police nips the buds of all riot, — / A brain like a permanent strait-jacket put on / The heart that strives vainly to burst off a button.”
I thought the date must be wrong — that sounded more like 1948 than 1848 (especially “internal police” and “permanent strait-jacket”). But when I investigated, I learned that sure enough, it’s a quote from James Russell Lowell’s “A Fable for Critics,” which is indeed from 1848 (and is indeed the earliest OED cite, along with “1848 in J. Craig, New Universal Dictionary”; the entry is from 1898). Here’s some more context (it’s a very long poem):
Sons fit for a parallel—Thompson and Cowper;
I don’t mean exactly,—there’s something of each,
There’s T.’s love of nature, C.’s penchant to preach;
Just mix up their minds so that C.’s spice of craziness
Shall balance and neutralize T.’s turn for laziness,
And it gives you a brain cool, quite frictionless, quiet,
Whose internal police nips the buds of all riot,—
A brain like a permanent straight-jacket put on
The heart that strives vainly to burst off a button,—
A brain which, without being slow or mechanic,
Does more than a larger less drilled, more volcanic;
He’s a Cowper condensed, with no craziness bitten,
And the advantage that Wordsworth before him had written.
I confess I had no idea Lowell could be so lively; I may have to investigate him further. At any rate, does anyone else feel that the bit originally quoted seems more modern than its date?
Yeah, it does. On a less interesting note, the word “frictionless” appears to have been used by engineers even before the conventionally-understood start of the Industrial Revolution: See https://archive.org/stream/chronologicalin01offigoog/chronologicalin01offigoog_djvu.txt, in the listings for 1736
I also agree although whether the text is actually that atypical for 1848 or whether instead our stereotypes about how folks wrote in 1848 are imprecise might require further inquiry. Cutting the other way, I wonder whether the “police” in “internal police” are actually metaphorically a buncha uniformed guys w/ guns and badges or whether that’s instead a different sense of “police” like wiktionary’s sense 5 of the noun: “(archaic, now rare) Synonym of administration, the regulation of a community or society. [from 17th c.] .”
I note that put is pronounced pʌt, an exception to the FOOT-STRUT split. Lowell was from Massachusetts. I’ve only heard one person pronounce it that way, and he spoke Texan.