A short TED talk by Mark Forsyth that starts with the fine old American slang word snollygoster ‘A shrewd, unprincipled person, esp. a politician’ (OED; 1895 Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch 28 Oct. 4/3 “A Georgia editor kindly explains that ‘a snollygoster is a fellow who wants office, regardless of party, platform or principles, and who, whenever he wins, gets there by the sheer force of monumental talknophical assumnacy’”) and proceeds to a very interesting discussion of how George Washington came to be called “president” (a lowly title at the time, meaning simply ‘An appointed or elected head of any gathering’; it was used for such things as shire meetings and dinner parties). I like very much his final remark about reality changing words far more than words can change reality. Thanks, Sven!
Pity they didn’t call him “Doge”.
The narrator of Clancy Sigal’s novel/memoir “Going Away” refers to JFK’s book as “Profiles in Snollygostering.”
Don’t blame JFK: he didn’t write it.
Forsyth’s attribution of “bold as brass” to Brass Crosby sounds fishy to me (splendid though it would be if true.) “Brazen” for “impudent” goes back a long way before the eighteenth century, I think, for one thing.
Anybody have any actual evidence? OED? I should be delighted to be proved wrong.
OED2 doesn’t support the Brass Crosby thesis, David, but it doesn’t contradict it either. It’ll be a while before the OED3 people get to it, unless they’ve capriciously chosen it for an out-of-sequence update. Here’s the relevant OED2 text:
4. a. fig. Taken as a type of insensibility to shame: hence, Effrontery, impudence, unblushingness.
[1588 Shakes. L.L.L. v. ii. 395 Can any face of brasse hold longer out?]
1642 Fuller Holy & Prof. St. v. x. 395 His face is of brasse, which may be said either ever or never to blush.
1682 Dryden Satyr to Muse 236 And like the Sweed is very Rich in Brass.
a1734 North Exam. iii. viii. ¶17 The Author hath the Brass to add, etc.
1780 F. Burney Diary & Lett. I. 318, I entered the room without astonishing the company by my brass.
1853 Lynch Self-Impr. 45 An empty, vaunting person, who has brass enough to face the world.
b. Colloq. phr. as bold as brass: very bold(ly) or impudent(ly); brazen-faced(ly).
1789 G. Parker Life’s Painter 162 He died damn’d hard and as bold as brass. An expression commonly used among the vulgar after returning from an execution.
1849 Lytton Caxtons I. i. iv. 27 Master Sisty (coming out of the house as bold as brass) continued rapidly [etc.].
1922 S. Weyman Ovington’s Bank xvii. 188 Seeing as he hung back I up to him bold as brass.
Thanks. Interesting. Looks like the timescale works for Brass Crosby being the ur-bold-as-brass, at any rate.
Seems a problem that the “bold” in “bold as brass” means “impudent” rather than “daring” though, which is what the courageous Mr Crosby surely was. That’s what made me think this was probably a bit of folk etymology.
Here’s the OED2 sense 4 of brass n.:
So the period is right for Brass Crosby (1725-1793), but it looks like the metaphor, if not the phrase itself, is indeed much older. The first occurrence of brazen-faced is 1573.
Forsyth’s attribution of “bold as brass” to Brass Crosby sounds fishy to me (splendid though it would be if true.)
That was my reaction as well.
snollygoster
I wonder if the goster element is the same as (or related to) the word gowster/gawster that was discussed here a while ago? the similarity in both sound and meaning seems to me too striking to be just coincidence.
“Pity they didn’t call him “Doge”.”
We’re still getting over the reign of our own Duce, though I am sure he would have screwed up trying to pronounce it.
Such a good word because it so aptly describes so many of those who hold or aspire to public office today, shame it’s no longer in popular use.
Cheers,
Andrew
This page is currently not indexed by Google. Let’s see if adding a comment has any effect…
Mark Forsyth’s name would’ve been familiar to Hatters in August 2012 since Hat had featured his blog on the origin of “taser” a month earlier. His blog, Inky Fool, is pretty decent in general; I was impressed with his investigation proving that Princess Elizabeth Never Giggled at T.S. Eliot, despite what the Queen Mother thought she remembered decades later — that’s a lesson in evaluating historical sources. So I was surprised to see him passing along the urban legend about “bold as brass”, which was probably invented long after the phrase, since there is nothing relating it to Brass Crosby in Google Books until 1983.
For some reason, “bold as brass” wasn’t recorded in the OED’s first edition; maybe they were paying less attention to phrases early on? It wasn’t added until the 1972 Supplement.
“Snollygoster” made a comeback in the 2000s.
Princess Elizabeth Never Giggled at T.S. Eliot
I wouldn’t buy a used car from A N Wilson. And the Spectator does not set great store by veracity in its article-writers. (It’s much worse nowadays, but this was already true by 1990.)
I’m unconvinced by the theory of misremembering, all the same – I make that kind of ‘it was something about an empty place’ mistake fairly regularly.
Of course, I now can’t think of any good real life examples. I do seem to consider all of Northumberland to be interchangeable, and call Rothbury Bellingham (and vice versa) – also Morpeth and Alnwick – if that counts.
So I probably wouldn’t call ‘Lucky Jim’ ‘Fortuitous David’, because that’s a bit random, but I might call it ‘Fortunate Son’. (Or ‘The Search’, if I could only remember that it was about academia!)
If I couldn’t remember the name of the Harry Potter book I might call it something like ‘Harry Potter and the Unpleasant Objects’ – that’s a bit different, because I wouldn’t think it actually was the name, but it would be enough of the idea of the name that someone else would probably know which book I meant.
It almost seems like he’s gone out of his way to invent implausible examples – I wouldn’t really be surprised if someone at some time has called ‘Casablanca’ ‘Marrakesh’ (vaguely thinking of the Crosby Stills and Nash song), but not ‘Rabat’, since as far as I know it hasn’t turned up in popular culture.
I’m sure there’s actual research about this, but I don’t know the right words for it!
(Not that I never do the ‘shape of the word’ kind. I sort of thought that Eugene Onegin was the man who’d never had a costlier funeral, and then had to look that up when it became clear he wasn’t!)
All else aside, I agree with Jen about the misremembering, as Forsyth presented it. I agree that common words would not be misremembered as rarer synonyms, but I can see how fortuitous would be misremembered as lucky, though not the other way around.
I am glad to hear I am not the only one who found that bit very strange.
I also find the “that’s not how people misremember” part totally unconvincing; but a wrong conviction on how the world works can spur someone to dig out what actually happened, as seemingly in this case.
So I probably wouldn’t call ‘Lucky Jim’ ‘Fortuitous David’, because that’s a bit random, but I might call it ‘Fortunate Son’.
I just ran across this in Tim Parks’s NYRB review of Paul Larkin’s translation of Lykke-Per by Henrik Pontoppidan (all threads are one!):
And an analysis of Lykke-Per.
Link?
Note that Per is hypocoristic for Peter, and in Sweden (where his father immigrates from) it’s Pär. Lykke is indeed “good fortune,” Lady Fortuna as opposed to Lady Luck. Luck in a game of chance is held, but lykke is more “success” or “a good outcome,” or the feeling (“happiness”) engendered by these. You can be lykkelig without being heldig. Indeed the traditional benediction for people entering a competition or sitting an exam or job interview is held og lykke!.
And an analysis of Lykke-Per.
Link? (he repeated pointedly)
Jen and everybody else: You are right about Forsyth’s odd theory of memory, and personally I have no problem believing that someone could (momentarily) misremember “The Waste Land” as “The Desert”, especially considering that the part about “here is no water but only rock” goes on for a couple dozen lines. That’s a big weak point in Forsyth’s post; I skimmed past it and focused on the quotation from Eliot’s letter, but, well, what Hans said.
(Experiment successful: this page is now indexed by Google.)
@Hat, I thought I tested it, but the HREF is clearly not there now. But it’s here. Imma test it better this time.
An oh, TIL that in the eternal tradition of callow youth not listening in class, for the last 50 years I’ve been conflating Lykke-Per (first volume 1898) with Pelle Erobreren (Martin Andersen Nexø, first volume 1906). Both boys would have been christened Peter, but Pelle (more suionum) is not native in Danish.
(I still don’t know where the /k/ in Spanish Suecia/sueco and other Romance came from, in Latin it seems to have been something like Suetidi (from ON Svíþjóð) or earlier Suiones. There is no L suecus in Wikt.en and the RAE doesn’t show a Latin source [which it often does]. Allegedly it’s a root cognate of L suus and so on, meaning something like “our own guys”. Cf the first name Sveinn).
Ah, I was going to ask if one of the two was written as a counterpoint to the other.
I read Pelle Erobreren at a tender young age after recommendation from my mother. I have never read Lykke-Per. The title and the serialization made me think it was an old-fashioned series of optimistic stories for youths with aspiring parents.
“lucky pierre”? apparently not: the ribald meaning, saith green, is younger than the novel – at least in english. the other direction would be interesting, but seems unlikely.
@Trond, you are not the only one to see a connection. A reference from WP.da: Elizabeth Blicher: Hovedpersoner og kvindeskikkelser — Replik til Knud Wentzels artikel »Per og Pelle« i Pontoppidaniana nr. 3 (2024). I don’t have time to find the Wentzel article just now. Said I. https://tidsskrift.dk/pontoppidaniana/article/view/146876
But the 6th-century Latin chronicle by the Goth Jordanes calls them Suehans, so maybe the /x/ got adopted as /k/. (The whole thing might mean Sweden is the horse-nourishing Argolid.)
…or it’s a misreading of di as ci.
The greater mystery is how “Danish” became Russian датский with т. That makes sense as someone used to QWERT typing on a Russian keyboard, none whatsoever otherwise.
Wiktionary:
Just finished the Tim Parks review of Pontoppidan, and in the final passage he has a brief comparison of translations:
Denmark… Romania… I see…
Yeah, dacia, for a moment I forgot about that. Spanish does have Dinamarca, maybe that’s why. Wiktionary does have that one in Latin, “used instead of [D]ania because of the similar sound” which is pretty weak of an etymology even if true. There would almost have to be some influence from suecia too, which is still unexplained. Unless, of course, the conflation of Romania and Denmark as “foreign parts” was the original sin and the Swedes just got pulled along. Stranger things have happened, but it would be hard to prove.
Lars M.: I don’t have time to find the Wentzel article just now. Said I.
I can sympathize with that. It seems to belong to a
navelgazinghermeneutic academic tradition of literary criticism I have little time for – even in review.The Wikipedia has a very full article on Dacia (Scandinavia) with bibliography for those who wish to follow up. Ultimately, it all seems to be due to Dudo of Saint-Quentin. (Short comment because I have grading and reviewing to do.)
his version is some 30 to 40 per cent longer than Lebowitz’s, which is itself a little longer than the original
i can see why a significant difference in length between two translations could reflect badly on one of them, but i don’t know what the expected norm is for danish-to-english prose translations, so can’t tell which one.
All I would have to go on here is Otto Jespersen’s famous remark on how Danish tends to be much wordier than English, basd on which the English language version being longer would be a bad sign in itself already.
Thanks, @Xerib. So there is no sound laws or anything involved in using dacia for Denmark instead of dania, it “really” is the name of the Roman province north of the Danube that was extended to Scandinavia. (Not helped by conflating the Getae, a sister tribe of the southern Dacians, with the Goths or the Geats). Where the /k/ in the ethnonym of the Dacians came from, may be interesting depending on your tastes, but it’s only indirectly a source of the /k/ in dacus. Whether suecia has a /k/ by analogy, is a good question.
FWIW, when needing to keep the length of an English translation (from Danish) to the original length or word count, I usually found it difficult. Possibly because I was trying to get the meaning exactly right, a freer translation might be shorter. But for very short texts, like the legends on buttons in a GUI, you could get burnt by a Danish word that didn’t fit. (We like our compounds, like the Germans do).
Probably. You’ll have to add Francia to the list of medieval Latin geographical names serving as a model. And of course, these forms with -cia had /ts/ or something similar in medieval Latin.
But Spanish sueco points at ML /sweku/ or the like, so I assume the /k/ is real.
Since Lykke-Per has come up, I’ll add this letter to the TLS:
Could be backformed.
Um… I can at least say with some conviction that whatever Lykke-Per has in common with Peer Gynt, it doesn’t have in common with Pelle.
Peer Gynt is one of those plays made entirely from common sayings.
I felt like that when I saw Dr Faustus: “The text of this play has been taken almost entirely from a book of familiar quotations!”
@DM, I don’t know if there was something like /franko/ for “French” in ML; of course Spanish has francés, which would seem to be the default derivation from Francia. But I’m sure that even without that there would be plenty of support for an analogy like suecia::sueco. It’s just that analogy as an explanation is hard to falsify, so I don’t like it. At least Spanish doesn’t have daco; it’s Dinamarca and danés.