etymology
From Utopian Socialism to Scoubi-Doggle.
Everything I'm about to tell you is true. Or mostly true.
In the mid 19th century, England had a popular, mass political reform movement centered around a list of demands -- mostly concerning universal suffrage -- called the "People's Charter". This was, by today's standards, a moderate set of reforms; but it was drawn up in the context both of later days of utopian socialism, and the long shadow of the French Revolution. People considered it radical at the time, fought over it for decades.
One very-well-known downstream outcome of this time is the mainstream socialist movement's transition to harder-line "scientific socialism", onwards to the Russian revolution, full communism and so forth. We are, for a while, going to ignore that. Don't worry, we'll come back to the Real Communists most of a century later; in the meantime we're going to follow the downstream causal thread of a different, non-communist, otherwise ignorable Chartist.
People supporting the People's Charter were called Chartists. The Chartists are relatively important in 19th century English history, and socialist history, but for our purposes the important parts are two: first, that the People's Charter and Chartism in general failed, along with the failed revolutions of 1848; and second that one specific Chartist gave up his political activities around that time: a man named Samuel Smiles.
Smiles decided that, rather than agitating politically, he would write about individual virtue, culminating in a book he published called Self-Help: with illustrations of Conduct and Perseverance. It's a book about cultivating one's inner strengths: discipline, study, practice, patience, resilience, self-respect, self-reliance and so forth. It showers praise on individuals applying themselves to becoming great, calls out virtuous men from history, and suggests that all progress flows from such individuals.
This book was a huge success; both domestically and, coincidentally, in international markets. It had the fortune of being published during the high point of the Victorian Pax Britannica: Britain's dominance in world affairs. Many people took it as a sort of cultural explanation of why Britain and British culture was so successful at dominating the world. Overlooking, perhaps, the more obvious answers concerning military supremacy.
In particular, it was picked up and translated in 1871 by Nakamura Masanao, one of the many Japanese scholars (and eventual Christian converts) engaged in the Meiji-era import of random bits of western culture. The translation, entitled "西國立志編" ("Success stories of the west"), was a bestseller that contributed significantly to the internal cultural dialogue of Meiji-era Japan. Among its readers over the following decades, another Christian Japanese scholar, diplomat and writer, Nitobe Inazo, incorporated certain of these English Gentlemanly Virtues into the book he was writing about self-cultivation and virtuous behaviour in Japanese history: Bushido, the Soul of Japan. It was published in 1899, in Pennsylvania, in English; later translated back into Japanese.
This book was a pretty extensive historical fabrication (or at least .. stretch) on Nitobe's part; but like Smiles' work, it sounded good to people primed for a framework to explain their own recent industrial and military successes, and sold well in both domestic and international markets. Japan had been doing very well on the world stage recently, and a lot of people were wondering what its trick was. The book impressed itself particularly firmly on two people relevant to our story: a British military officer named Robert Baden Powell, and wannabe-cowboy and soon US President Teddy Roosevelt. Both these men really liked cultivating manly, military, outdoorsy virtues.
Our story now briefly splits in two again, following the two aforementioned fans of Bushido: one -- Baden-Powell -- was so inspired by "the Soul of Japan" that he founded (in 1908) a new organization based on its ethos, to train boys in such manly virtues: the Boy Scouts (yes, them). The other of these two people -- Teddy R -- fought in wars, did a stint as President, wound up a patron of the Scouts, and is otherwise of interest to our story only because his fifth cousin, one Franklin D Roosevelt, came to the presidency several years later and implemented America's somewhat notorious socialist bundle of policies called the "New Deal". We'll get back to that.
Around this time -- a few years earlier, let's say, the late 1890s -- American education was laying out some similar youth-cultivating plans of its own, the form of universal standards for secondary education; among the broad-access, standardized secondary schools opening up at the time New York's "Boys High School" opened its doors in 1897. Just up the road from it, one of its future students named Abel Meeropol was born. Abel grew up in New York, enrolled in New York Boy's School (by then named DeWitt Clinton High School), graduated in 1921, and remained there teaching English for the next 17 years. We'll get back to Abel, but it's slightly relevant to our story here that Abel was Jewish.
Meanwhile, over in Rochester New York, an Eagle Scout named Robert H. Link introduced a new word into the English language -- "boondoggle" -- seemingly off the top of his head. He used this as a nickname for his newborn child and, later, as a term to refer to a kind of arts-and-crafts leather bracelet his Scout troup made (as evidenced in the March 1930 Scouting Magazine. The term probably never would have made it out of Scouting jargon, but for having slipped from the lips of a witness in an alderman's hearing in New York, investigating (drumroll) ... what all the New Deal funds were being spent on.
Now we return to the New Deal. This, of course, was a stimulus and social relief program that involved the federal government spending quite a lot of money. Many people made political hay from this, trying to frame the government's actions as wasteful rather than productive. This is not the time or place to get into arguing about demand-side economic stimulus, but suffice to say, at some point the idea that the government was "spending billions of dollars to teach people arts and crafts" got into circulation, and so the Scouting crafting word "boondoggle" entered the political lexicon, as a shorthand for "stupid things governments spend money on". Socialist waste.
Returning to Abel Meeropol -- here's where things start to get a little weird -- we find an English teacher in his mid 30s very perturbed by a photograph of a lynching. Meeropol wrote a poem about the photograph called "Strange Fruit", and, as he was also an amateur musician, set it to music. This song was picked up and sung by Billie Holiday, recorded in 1939 (it was eventually her best-selling song) and launched Meeropol's songwriting career. It was not universally loved: Meeropol was, like many teachers, New Yorkers and Jews of the time, a communist, and he was hauled in front of an anticommunist investigations committee on charges that the song was paid communist propaganda.
In fact, in the intervening years since the New Deal and the second world war, America's feelings towards socialism had turned from merely critical to downright adversarial: the House Un-American Activities Committee especially became a focal point for purging suspected communists from public life, culminating in the famous 1951 trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. These were two other New York Jews, children of immigrants and former communists who spied on US atomic programs for the Soviet Union. The Rosenbergs were executed in 1953, leaving two orphan children. Meeropol, being a sympathizer, schoolteacher and all around decent community member, adopted the kids.
The next year -- 1954 -- Abel Meeropol wrote another successful song called "Apples, Peaches and Cherries" (sung by Peggy Lee). It has nothing to do with communism or lynching; but it does contain one, harmless line of scat singing that's relevant to our story: the line goes "scooby-dooby-scoo-doo". This song was, in turn, covered in 1958 by a French singer named Sascha Distel, in the form of a song merely called "Scoubidou".
This song went to the top of the charts in France. Maybe it's his twinkling eyes, I dunno. Anyway, it was an unauthorized cover and Meeropol sued for royalties, of which his adopted kids -- Robert and Michael Rosenberg-now-Meeropol -- continue to recieve payments to this day. But that is not important to our story.
What is important -- finally -- is that a secondary, astounding event was unfolding in France in the late 1950s. One word: plastics. In particular, a kind of plastic lace came on the market in France, in arts and crafts supply shops. A plastic lace that could be woven into bracelets, much the same way Scouts wove leather "boondoggles". But, being French, the children playing with this plastic lace had no such term for their craft, so they reached for the nearest nonsense-word they had at hand: the name of a popular song "Scoubidou".
Thus we have -- and to be clear I really struggled to arrange this in anything close to a linear timeline -- a word in 2016, referring to a kind of bracelet: Scoubi-Doggle. This word encapsulates, within its etymology, a set of causal linkages between a song, a community of communists in New York, a slur used by New York anti-socialists (and eventually the whole world) for wasteful spending, a form of arts and crafts practiced by Scouts, and the self-improvement movements from which it originated. All weirdly, causally downstream from .. the Chartist movement.
I think.
What's most remarkable to me is that .. as far as I can tell, this linguistic history of "Scoubi-Doggle" has nothing at all to do with the Large Cartoon Dog named Scooby-Doo. I believe it is actually, amazingly, a form of convergent linguistic evolution.
Anyway that -- and watching the new Ghostbusters movie, which you should totally go see -- is how I spent my Saturday.
This entry was originally posted at https://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/239236.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
Everything I'm about to tell you is true. Or mostly true.
In the mid 19th century, England had a popular, mass political reform movement centered around a list of demands -- mostly concerning universal suffrage -- called the "People's Charter". This was, by today's standards, a moderate set of reforms; but it was drawn up in the context both of later days of utopian socialism, and the long shadow of the French Revolution. People considered it radical at the time, fought over it for decades.
One very-well-known downstream outcome of this time is the mainstream socialist movement's transition to harder-line "scientific socialism", onwards to the Russian revolution, full communism and so forth. We are, for a while, going to ignore that. Don't worry, we'll come back to the Real Communists most of a century later; in the meantime we're going to follow the downstream causal thread of a different, non-communist, otherwise ignorable Chartist.
People supporting the People's Charter were called Chartists. The Chartists are relatively important in 19th century English history, and socialist history, but for our purposes the important parts are two: first, that the People's Charter and Chartism in general failed, along with the failed revolutions of 1848; and second that one specific Chartist gave up his political activities around that time: a man named Samuel Smiles.
Smiles decided that, rather than agitating politically, he would write about individual virtue, culminating in a book he published called Self-Help: with illustrations of Conduct and Perseverance. It's a book about cultivating one's inner strengths: discipline, study, practice, patience, resilience, self-respect, self-reliance and so forth. It showers praise on individuals applying themselves to becoming great, calls out virtuous men from history, and suggests that all progress flows from such individuals.
This book was a huge success; both domestically and, coincidentally, in international markets. It had the fortune of being published during the high point of the Victorian Pax Britannica: Britain's dominance in world affairs. Many people took it as a sort of cultural explanation of why Britain and British culture was so successful at dominating the world. Overlooking, perhaps, the more obvious answers concerning military supremacy.
In particular, it was picked up and translated in 1871 by Nakamura Masanao, one of the many Japanese scholars (and eventual Christian converts) engaged in the Meiji-era import of random bits of western culture. The translation, entitled "西國立志編" ("Success stories of the west"), was a bestseller that contributed significantly to the internal cultural dialogue of Meiji-era Japan. Among its readers over the following decades, another Christian Japanese scholar, diplomat and writer, Nitobe Inazo, incorporated certain of these English Gentlemanly Virtues into the book he was writing about self-cultivation and virtuous behaviour in Japanese history: Bushido, the Soul of Japan. It was published in 1899, in Pennsylvania, in English; later translated back into Japanese.
This book was a pretty extensive historical fabrication (or at least .. stretch) on Nitobe's part; but like Smiles' work, it sounded good to people primed for a framework to explain their own recent industrial and military successes, and sold well in both domestic and international markets. Japan had been doing very well on the world stage recently, and a lot of people were wondering what its trick was. The book impressed itself particularly firmly on two people relevant to our story: a British military officer named Robert Baden Powell, and wannabe-cowboy and soon US President Teddy Roosevelt. Both these men really liked cultivating manly, military, outdoorsy virtues.
Our story now briefly splits in two again, following the two aforementioned fans of Bushido: one -- Baden-Powell -- was so inspired by "the Soul of Japan" that he founded (in 1908) a new organization based on its ethos, to train boys in such manly virtues: the Boy Scouts (yes, them). The other of these two people -- Teddy R -- fought in wars, did a stint as President, wound up a patron of the Scouts, and is otherwise of interest to our story only because his fifth cousin, one Franklin D Roosevelt, came to the presidency several years later and implemented America's somewhat notorious socialist bundle of policies called the "New Deal". We'll get back to that.
Around this time -- a few years earlier, let's say, the late 1890s -- American education was laying out some similar youth-cultivating plans of its own, the form of universal standards for secondary education; among the broad-access, standardized secondary schools opening up at the time New York's "Boys High School" opened its doors in 1897. Just up the road from it, one of its future students named Abel Meeropol was born. Abel grew up in New York, enrolled in New York Boy's School (by then named DeWitt Clinton High School), graduated in 1921, and remained there teaching English for the next 17 years. We'll get back to Abel, but it's slightly relevant to our story here that Abel was Jewish.
Meanwhile, over in Rochester New York, an Eagle Scout named Robert H. Link introduced a new word into the English language -- "boondoggle" -- seemingly off the top of his head. He used this as a nickname for his newborn child and, later, as a term to refer to a kind of arts-and-crafts leather bracelet his Scout troup made (as evidenced in the March 1930 Scouting Magazine. The term probably never would have made it out of Scouting jargon, but for having slipped from the lips of a witness in an alderman's hearing in New York, investigating (drumroll) ... what all the New Deal funds were being spent on.
Now we return to the New Deal. This, of course, was a stimulus and social relief program that involved the federal government spending quite a lot of money. Many people made political hay from this, trying to frame the government's actions as wasteful rather than productive. This is not the time or place to get into arguing about demand-side economic stimulus, but suffice to say, at some point the idea that the government was "spending billions of dollars to teach people arts and crafts" got into circulation, and so the Scouting crafting word "boondoggle" entered the political lexicon, as a shorthand for "stupid things governments spend money on". Socialist waste.
Returning to Abel Meeropol -- here's where things start to get a little weird -- we find an English teacher in his mid 30s very perturbed by a photograph of a lynching. Meeropol wrote a poem about the photograph called "Strange Fruit", and, as he was also an amateur musician, set it to music. This song was picked up and sung by Billie Holiday, recorded in 1939 (it was eventually her best-selling song) and launched Meeropol's songwriting career. It was not universally loved: Meeropol was, like many teachers, New Yorkers and Jews of the time, a communist, and he was hauled in front of an anticommunist investigations committee on charges that the song was paid communist propaganda.
In fact, in the intervening years since the New Deal and the second world war, America's feelings towards socialism had turned from merely critical to downright adversarial: the House Un-American Activities Committee especially became a focal point for purging suspected communists from public life, culminating in the famous 1951 trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. These were two other New York Jews, children of immigrants and former communists who spied on US atomic programs for the Soviet Union. The Rosenbergs were executed in 1953, leaving two orphan children. Meeropol, being a sympathizer, schoolteacher and all around decent community member, adopted the kids.
The next year -- 1954 -- Abel Meeropol wrote another successful song called "Apples, Peaches and Cherries" (sung by Peggy Lee). It has nothing to do with communism or lynching; but it does contain one, harmless line of scat singing that's relevant to our story: the line goes "scooby-dooby-scoo-doo". This song was, in turn, covered in 1958 by a French singer named Sascha Distel, in the form of a song merely called "Scoubidou".
This song went to the top of the charts in France. Maybe it's his twinkling eyes, I dunno. Anyway, it was an unauthorized cover and Meeropol sued for royalties, of which his adopted kids -- Robert and Michael Rosenberg-now-Meeropol -- continue to recieve payments to this day. But that is not important to our story.
What is important -- finally -- is that a secondary, astounding event was unfolding in France in the late 1950s. One word: plastics. In particular, a kind of plastic lace came on the market in France, in arts and crafts supply shops. A plastic lace that could be woven into bracelets, much the same way Scouts wove leather "boondoggles". But, being French, the children playing with this plastic lace had no such term for their craft, so they reached for the nearest nonsense-word they had at hand: the name of a popular song "Scoubidou".
Thus we have -- and to be clear I really struggled to arrange this in anything close to a linear timeline -- a word in 2016, referring to a kind of bracelet: Scoubi-Doggle. This word encapsulates, within its etymology, a set of causal linkages between a song, a community of communists in New York, a slur used by New York anti-socialists (and eventually the whole world) for wasteful spending, a form of arts and crafts practiced by Scouts, and the self-improvement movements from which it originated. All weirdly, causally downstream from .. the Chartist movement.
I think.
What's most remarkable to me is that .. as far as I can tell, this linguistic history of "Scoubi-Doggle" has nothing at all to do with the Large Cartoon Dog named Scooby-Doo. I believe it is actually, amazingly, a form of convergent linguistic evolution.
Anyway that -- and watching the new Ghostbusters movie, which you should totally go see -- is how I spent my Saturday.
This entry was originally posted at https://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/239236.html. Please comment there using OpenID.