I’ve always had a soft spot for the I.W.W. (I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night, alive as you and me), and I enjoyed this thorough discussion of the origin of their nickname, Wobblies. Conclusion:
All of our research has shown so far that the origin of the term Wobbly cannot be determined, and so we have to unfortunately admit that we don’t honestly know the answer. Though the true origin of the epithet “Wobbly” remains a mystery, most of us IWW members gladly use it to describe ourselves, because the term has become an integral part of the IWW’s history and culture.
I admire their restraint and their dedication to accurate documentation, especially striking in people who are not professional lexicographers. Thanks, Kári!
When I started railroading on the Southern Pacific in 1963 the (much smaller) Western Pacific was generally called “the Wobbly.” I think “wobbly” was a jocular way of saying “W,” and got applied to the IWW, as to the Route of the California Zephyr, for no other reason than that they had W’s in their name.
Back in the ’60’s, I was a proofreader for my college newspaper, and the resident radical on the paper’s staff organized all the proofreaders into an IWW local. We never went on strike, but it did create a dilemma for me when I had my draft physical– we were all handed a form that asked whether we’d ever had anything to do with subversive organizations, as defined by the ‘attorney general’s list’. Of course, the IWW was on the list, so I just neglected to answer that question. I don’t think anyone noticed.
Thanks for the historical reminder. Joe Hill would turn over in his grave if he could see the corporate triumph now.
I always heard it was a riff on how the Chinese railroad workers said the W in IWW. Don’t know if the Chinese dialects that would have been spoken here have a W like we have in english. The context, as I heard it, was that if these laborers were asked about union affiliation, their answerr sounded a lot like “I wobbly wobbly” and an insult/shorthard referent was born.
Could be a backformation myth, though. The IWW seems to acknowledge it, though [http://www.iww.org/culture/myths/wobbly.shtml]
Gah, I didn’t see that you had referred to the same link as I mentioned. Never mind *sigh*
“I think “wobbly” was a jocular way of saying “W,” …”: I remember a childhood joke based on pronouncing “w” as wubble-you. Mind you, that was some distance from the Western Pacific railroad.
P.S. I am still amused that some people say www as “double-u, double-u, double-u”. I say “wee, wee, wee” and everyone seems to understand. Someday, no doubt, some grievance-monger will take offence on behalf of Muslims.
Does anyone say “dubya dubya dubya”?
To Dearieme and Marie-Lucie: presumably in the interest of concision, some American military men say “Doubleyou doubleyou two.” It’s interesting that some people experience syllables visually (or typographically), not aurally.
Jonathan Morse: It’s interesting that some people experience syllables visually (or typographically), not aurally
What exactly do you mean by “experience”, in the expression “experience syllables aurally” ? In my neck of the woods, everything a person hears is experienced aurally, and vice versa. However, not everybody there knows what a syllable is, whether heard or seen.
Marie-Lucie: most people in the US do. Almost no one says “double U.” It gets reduced in one way or another, most of the time to something resembling “dubya.”
It’s probably just a nonsense word. It’s my understanding they had a whole vocabulary of their own, like a linguistic secret handshake.
Or maybe they just knew their whole philosophy was doomed from the start.
P.S. I am still amused that some people say www as “double-u, double-u, double-u”. I say “wee, wee, wee” and everyone seems to understand.
Some people ? I’ve never heard anybody in the UK say anything but double-u. If I heard “wee,wee,wee” I’d think it was a reference to the Three Little Pigs or someone with a bladder problem.
The Kiwis, sensible folk, say dub dub dub. Though it gets fewer grins than wee wee wee.
“I’ve never heard anybody in the UK say anything but double-u”: but it is rather moronic to say an abbreviation that’s so longand slow – why not just say world wide web? Or use one of those radio alphabet thingies – “whisky, whisky whisky” would save three syllables.
but it is rather moronic to say an abbreviation that’s so long and slow
No, it’s moronic to create an abbreviation that’s so long and slow. I’ve never understood why whoever came up with “www” didn’t realize how stupid it was.
It’s probably just a nonsense word. It’s my understanding they had a whole vocabulary of their own, like a linguistic secret handshake.
Perhaps you didn’t notice that the linked article comes from the IWW itself, and they would presumably know if it was just a nonsense word. Also, no need to use the past tense, since they’re still around.
Or maybe they just knew their whole philosophy was doomed from the start.
Like I said, they’re still around.
Marc, all the people I know in Canada pronounce “double-u” – you distinctly hear the “l” even if the word is said fast and slightly slurred. “Dubya” as popularized in a certain well-known family does not have the “l” sound. I don’t know whether this is the normal pronunciation of “double-u” in some places, or peculiar to the nickname.
I too say “dub dub dub”, and only once has anyone questioned me about it. (Alas, this is not to say that only once has anyone failed to understand it. The reluctance of people to ask questions still, after half a century, manages to surprise me.)
It’s nice, though, that the majority of sites no longer require it: “languagehat.com” works as well as “www.languagehat.com”.
www certainly is less said these days – the BBC seems to have dropped it on air in reference to its sites – but I can’t for the life of me see a problem in saying double-u for w.
Just as I had a long back and forth with the writer of a computer magazine column who insisted that “thankyou” as one word was now the common and sensible spelling, an assertion for which I could find no evidence.
And another thing ….
Disgusted
Tunbridge Wells
It’s particular to the nickname. It might be a Texas thing, too. My grandfather and his brothers were all named “William [Something]” and were all called by their initials: WL, WE, WJ, etc., pronounced dubya-el (actually closer to “dub-yell”), dubya-ee, etc.
But I’ve never heard anyone say the ‘L’ in ‘double-U’ when giving a URL, since that would make it three syllables instead of the quicker two of “dubyuh.”
As for the longevity of the IWW, their goals of abolishing wages and uniting workers as a class are about as dead as dead can get. They appear to have 2,000 members today. Down from a peak (in 1923!) of 100,000.
Not the picture of vitality.
But I’ve never heard anyone say the ‘L’ in ‘double-U’ when giving a URL, since that would make it three syllables instead of the quicker two of “dubyuh.”
Are we such an overstressed society that people worry about the time lost in pronouncing three syllables rather than two ? I despair.
About www:
Nobody says “triple W” in English? (double-u or what you want).
That’s the way we mostly say it in Argentina. Though it’s a bit different in Spain because we call this letter “doble v” and they call it “uve doble” .
Not stress, necessarily, but humans tend to abbreviate when it saves time.
There is now a pretty public park, with old cottonwoods and ducks in a creek, at a place where Joe Hill has been riddled with bullets. In the shadow of the spruces stands a historic marker. The plaque speaks of polygamists who served time here for their faith. Not a word about the wobblies. How do you properly translate забвение into English?
There is or was a radio announcer around here who, I swear, had a bit of a speech impediment. One of the effects was to slow her down on the sound of the letter ell. “double-you” came out sort of like “double-gyou”, so you would hear “double-gyou double-gyou double-gyou” when she had to name the radio station’s website. And of course the name of the station also started with W, so it was actually “double-gyou double-gyou double-gyou dot double-you … ”
In Iceland people say “vaff vaff vaff” for www which means “vee vee vee.” In our defense the letter W isn’t used in the Icelandic language (and it’s called “tvöfalt vaff” i.e. “double vee”).
How do you properly translate забвение into English?
Usually “oblivion,” but here I think “the memory hole” would be appropriate.
In Iceland people say “vaff vaff vaff”, whereas in Norway it’s dogs. Germans say “vee vee vee” though, don’t they?
It’s pretty common with “ve ve ve” in Norwegian too. Hardly anyone says “dobbeltve dobbeltve dobbeltve”, even if we have the letter in the alphabet. I’ve been saying “world wide web”, like in “world wide web languagehat com”. But of course, “vaff vaff vaff” sounds far cooler!
@Ø Is “around here” Atlanta by any chance?
I’m now ashamed to have said “wee wee wee”: from now on it’ll be “three wees”.
I find the fourth explanation the most convincing. Picking up a derogatory nickname and throwing it back just fits with the combative mentality. It’s not uncommon as a reverse synecdoche. Like, among schoolchildren when someone with big curly hair is called ‘Baldie’.
By the way, the song version of Joe Hill you linked to, it’s very good, though I’ve long taken to Paul Robeson’s. As a teenager I used to listen to Joan Baez all the time, but now I find false notes – not musically, interpretatively – in her singing.
All those who have a soft spot for Wobblies and Pete Seeger would enjoy today’s Radio 4 programme on The Rock Island Line.
@sashura:
I find the fourth explanation the most convincing. Picking up a derogatory nickname and throwing it back just fits with the combative mentality. It’s not uncommon as a reverse synecdoche. Like, among schoolchildren when someone with big curly hair is called ‘Baldie’.
This doesn’t explain “wobbly” for the railroad otherwise known as “the WP.” I looked for evidence that the IWW had had a particularly strong presence in that railroad’s workforce but never found any. I agree that “Wobbly,” during the IWW’s most active years, would have been a highly charged word, of pride or obloquy according to the speaker’s views, but I still think the origin was in the use of “wobbly” for “w,” because that explanation offers an account of additional data.
Atlanta
No, Boston.
This doesn’t explain “wobbly” for the railroad otherwise known as “the WP.”
No reason why it should, of course.
Sashura: Thanks for the pointer to Radio 4 which I normally listen to non-stop but was out for lunch today. Loved some of the older recordings, particularly the jailhouse one, but of the modern ones, can’t beat Lonnie’s for me.
you are welcome, Paul.
I found a Russian fan-site with an image of the IWW poster that says ‘I Will Win’ – IWW. There is also a good translation of Joe Hill into Russian, and a translation of Hill’s satirical adaptation of ‘Tipperary’ and an audio of ‘Tipperary’ in Russian. I’ve bookmarked the links on another machine, will post later.
I’m sure I must have mentioned here before that in Welsh “www” is pronounced “oo oo oo”, like a stereotypical chimpanzee – but if I haven’t, I have now.
The Bristol suburb of Lawrence Weston is referred to as “El Dub”. Took me a while…
When next I read a blog article, I am hoping that it won’t let me down as much as this one did. I mean, I know it was my choice to read it, but somehow I bizarrely thought that you’d have something well considered to say. All I saw is a heapof moaning about something that you could rectify if you werent too preoccupied desiring attention.
The spambot seems to have taken my admonition to heart.
As a new IWW member I just got my red card in the mail. Currently there are said to be between 7000 and 9000 members worldwide: there was a big “Trump bump” in in the U.S. in 2015.
@jc
Did a lot of them have heart attacks?
Not that I know of. Why?
Not to “diss” the glorious IWW, with its subtle use of the colour red on its website and its proud claim of representing “almost 9000” workers in North America, but I suppose (admittedly without any proof) that many of these “almost 9000” were already in 2015 of an age where a heart attack induced by Trump’s election is a real threat. A cluster of these heart attacks, if fatal, could explain a sudden downward movement in membership numbers…
Ah. No, I meant an upward bump, a “temporary increase in a quantity” (per Wikt).
I have not yet attended a NYC General Branch meeting, only an orientation meeting at which everyone (including the leaders) were in their 20s and 30s except me. I’ll see how things look next month.
Yes, one of the heartening things about the present moment is the renewed interest in unions, especially among young people.
Us poor folks haven’t got a chance unless we organize.
Educate, Agitate, Organize!
And so say Brother “D” with Collective Effort (I used to put that great cut on party mixtapes). ‘Cause there ain’t no party in a PO-lice state!
I’ve quoted it before, but this is still the best one-sentence summary of US history:
America was built, you understand,
By stolen labor on stolen land.
“you” is not in there. It would break the meter and is replaced by a rather long pause.
Instead, the Party always finds you…
America was built, you understand,
By stolen labor on stolen land.
All countries are built that way. However stolen labor is more true than stolen land: the land was vacated by diseases.
O RLY. You might want to talk to some indigenous people about that.
My eighth grade American History textbook (for the second of the three times I had American history as my primary social studies class) made a point of mentioning that the the IWW were sometimes known as “the Wobblies.” Even at the time, I wondered why that, of so many possible facts they could choose to impart, was considered worth including.
Cannot steal land in the absense of anyone being able to show having been its legal owners 🙃
“Stolen labor” is meanwhile at least partially shielded against this nitpick, maybe depending on how willing one is to revolve on the terminology used by law to recognize e.g. wage theft.
(Come to think of it, same for “abortion is murder”, to remind anyone itching to argue that we shouldn’t care what the law says here exactly and just concede the analogy.)
I’m sure you wouldn’t want to conflate the concepts of right and wrong with the concepts of illegal and illegal. And there is no reason to limit the sense of a word like “steal” to contexts where a specific law has been broken. On the contrary, the legal sense is a technical term of art, and is parasitic on the lay sense.
Lots of things are wrong but nevertheless perfectly legal; indeed, on balance, that’s even a good thing.
And the world is not short of unjust laws.
For the uninitiated, the upsidedown smiley is, of course, a recently innovated sarcasm marker.
But I would agree with JC. Even if the one-sentence summary is in some lay sense true, it does not particularly identify its intended object; and I might even argue that, given the contribution of depopulative plagues unleashed by the Columbian Exchange, the U.S. is one of the countries least built on theft across history as a whole. We simply know and remember these thefts much better than, say, the ancient thefts of Neanderthal lands by our species, EEF lands by Indo-Europeans, Celtic lands by Romans and early Germanics…
That may though not actually contradict Hat’s point either; sometimes the most important facts about an entity are not its specific but its general properties.
I would urge you, too, to talk to some indigenous people about that. The fact that the entirety of North America was stolen from its indigenous inhabitants, however diminished a quantity may have remained after the (imported) diseases that wiped many of them out, is so obvious I find it odd that I have to argue the case. People were living on the land, other people came and declared “This is ours now” and pushed them off it (killing many of them in the process) — how is that not theft? And I don’t want to hear about legal documents, for Pete’s sake.
That may actually have been the Last Glacial Maximum.
That was greatly helped along, and also triggered in the first place, by none other than the plague.
O RLY. You might want to talk to some indigenous people about that.
McGirt v. Oklahoma is the big-name case regarding “stolen land” that turned out to be, in fact, stolen, even from a legal standpoint. But that was 19th century, well after most of the rest of formerly-Native-American land had been taken over.
I’m not sure how legal was the rest of the takeover; for all I know it might have been just as illegal even by the laws of the time, and/or only very technically “legal” by specific takeover-related acts that had completely no input from the inhabitants of the land.
Though TBF AFAIK when France sold the Louisiana Purchase to the USA nobody asked the locals either (…IIRC not even if we count the settlers in New Orleans etc. as “locals”).
(IIRC a few takeover cases had nominal input from deliberately-assembled “representatives” of the people being taken over, which were not in fact representative and might have been acting under duress. I’m not sure if any such cases occurred in North America, though.
A few more of the very early cases involved tribes who did in fact representatively(ish) agree to the land handover but apparently had little concept of what they were giving away in the first place.)
A few more of the very early cases involved tribes who did in fact representatively(ish) agree to the land handover but apparently had little concept of what they were giving away in the first place.
Yes, the local cultures had no concept of ownership of land — they seem to have felt they were agreeing to let people use it alongside them. If someone has no concept of ownership of something, does that mean it’s OK to take it from them? It’s not “stealing”? I find this whole conversation bizarrely legalistic. As DE says, stealing is not a legal concept.
Edward Hoby once said, relevantly for our purposes, that it was “lawful for a Christian to take away anything from infidels.”
The millions who died by violence in the twentieth century for the most part were killed by those acting in complete accordance with relevant laws. Similarly, for the most part the abduction and enslavement of millions of Africans transported to the Americas and their subsequent brutal treatment was in perfect conformity with strict legal norms.
You should obey laws, except when you shouldn’t.
@de
I would be interested in whether any of the perpetrators thought this was the case, apart from those operating under conditions of “emergency” or “martial” law. The penchant for Nacht und Nebel is not wholly attributable to a flair for the dramatic.
That’s attributable to awareness that some legal things are unpopular.