The Lexicographer's Rules

It seemed like a nonce term when I first read it, but the Dictionary of American Regional English says ferrididdle, also spelled fairydiddle and meaning a red squirrel or a flying squirrel, goes back to 1893.

Nice word: piggin, defined in the 1913 Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary as “a small wooden pail or tub with an upright stave for a handle,—often used as a dipper.” The 10th and 11th editions of the Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary still have it as an entry, although as this article points out, piggins aren’t as common as they used to be. The supposed origin of the word, as given in the article, is unlikely. The 1913 Websters explanation tracing it back through Gaelic is far more likely. (Source Link)

In researching peter player ‘a robber who uses administers knockout drops to victims’ for the Historical Dictionary of American Slang, I came across an article that says the term peter player was named after a Peter Sawyer known for using knockout drops on victims.

If that’s true, then peter player may have been the original form, and its synonym peterman, as well as peter ‘a sedative; knockout drops,’ may be derived from it.

From the Sandusky (Ohio) Register, May 18, 1894, p.7, reprinting an article from the New York Sun:

It would be hard to find a lower class of criminals in this city than the cowardly frequenters of the Bowery, who nightly secure victims through the medium of what is known in police parlance as “knocker out."…They are known to the police as “Peter players,” because the pioneer of the business in this country was old Peter Sawyer, as desperate a crook as ever got in the hands of the police in this city. […]

A form of administering “knocker out” which came in after Peter Sawyer’s snuff game went out was by a ring with an adjustable stone. The stone was worn inside the hand, the plain band of the ring belting the outside of the finger. A spring would move the stone to one side. Under the stone the crooks would conceal a morphine or opium pill, which they would drop into a glass of beer or whiskey.

Knocker-out is now a disused term, but at the time it meant someone or something which literally (such as a boxer, a peter player, or sedatives) or figuratively (such as a beautiful woman or someone very competent at a task) knocks someone out.

This claim that Peter Sawyer is the source of the term is also repeated in Asbury’s Gangs of New York, first published in 1927 (and very little like the movie supposedly based on it, by the way), as well as in Luc Santés Low Life (1991), but Santé probably got it from Asbury, who probably got his information, in turn, from the New York Sun or other newspapers. Asbury wrote (p. 181):

The late [eighteen-]sixties also saw the beginning of a reprehensible practice of using knock-out drops to deaden the senses of a victim while the thieves picked his pockets or appropriated his jewelry. Laudunum had occasionally been employed by the crimps of the old Fourth Ward water front to drug a sailor so he could be shanghaied without too much protest, but no effective use of drugs for the sole purpose of robbery was made in New York until a California crook, Peter Sawyer, appeared in 1866, and aroused such a furore in police and criminal circles that the former honored him by calling the practitioners of his art peter players. At first Sawyer used nothing more deleterious than snuff, which he dropped into his victim’s beer or whiskey, but later he and other peter players came to depend principally on hydrate of chloral. Occasionally they used morphine.

A crimp, according to Asbury, was someone who “operated boarding houses where sailors were robbed and murdered and from which they were shanghaied” (p. 48).

In his book, Sante adds the detail Sawyer came to New York City in the 1850s (p. 108).

I’ve found no other trace of Peter Sawyer, but I admit I haven’t looked very thoroughly. It’s one of those tasks I could spend weeks on for no result.  I’m satisfied, for the moment, by the minor delight of antedating OED’s entry for peter by four years.

Maybe this is the answer to all the emails I get from people claiming to have created a previously unknown word. Most of the time they’re wrong—they didn’t invent a unique word, but merely re-coined it (see this post on what “to coin” can now mean: not to invent a word, but merely to say it in a noteworthy fashion), or heard it before and it stuck in their subconscious, or even—and this is true—they know perfectly well they didn’t invent the word in question but they’re making a power grab anyway.

Much of the time, even if it does appear that the word is absolutely original (as far as can be determined in the searchable written record), the word is a sure loser. Doomed to fail, as most words are. They’re like mayflies, I always say—a single day on this earth looking for love, then oblivion. Like most of the words in Merriam-Webster’s Open Dictionary. Losers.

Yet there’s a need for recognition. That’s all most neologizing correspondents want. “Remember me. I was the one.”

Googlemark uses the Google programming interface to live search the Google index for the a string typed in the Googlemark search field. If it finds it, it says so. If it doesn’t, you get to register your word as a Googlemark. It’s like a trademark only for words that don’t exist in Google. That makes it your word. You now have some kind of proof. Of course, if you created a brand new word and Google indexed it before you can Googlemark it, then you’re screwed.

I found the site, incidentally, because someone tried to Googlemark chillax and clicked over to my web site when the word proved not to be Googlemarkable.

In any case, I Googlemarked the word butternuttership which I define as an unpaid internship in which the intern subsists on candy out of vending machines. It’s based loosely on the Nabisco Nutter Butter cookies with a slight rearrangement of the name. Not many vending machines have them, but snickership and trailmixship seemed like 12-hour losers instead of the full 24-hour loserdom of butternuttership.

And here’s my Googlemark for butternuttership (apparently the 107th Googlemarked word):

butternuttership

(Source Link)

Already in OED, so no point in recording it as a cite, but worth pointing out: chitting ‘sprouting, germination; spec. the process of allowing potatoes, etc., to sprout.’ In the gerund/noun form, it dates to 1727. The verb to chit ‘of seed: to sprout, germinate’ dates to 1601. (Source Link)