Keep Your Powder Dry

If someone tells you to keep your powder dry, they are really telling you to remain cautious, stay calm, and be ready for a possible emergency or a sudden change for the worse. Some may claim it’s the ancestor idiom to the phrase take care but it really isn’t since take care doesn’t really cover everything keep your powder dry covers.

For those who may not understand what that means, this harkens back to the day when weapons required loose gunpowder to fire. For gunpowder to work properly, it must be kept dry.

INTERESTING SIDE NOTE 1: Gunpowder is known as one of the “Four Great Inventions of China” and was invented during the Tang Dynasty of the 9th century, and when guns appeared in the 13th century, gunpowder found another opportunity beyond arrows, rockets, bombs, and fire lances. It was particularly popular during the days of flintlock when powder and flintlock were carried in a horn slung to one side. It was susceptible to moisture, and if it wasn’t dry, it tended to clump and misfire instead of ignite and fire properly. By the 19th century, smokeless powder, nitroglycerin, and nitrocellulose were invented, and gunpowder saw its popularity decrease.

On 19 September 2020, the Washington Post reported on what Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said in the article, “Trump Says He Will Nominate Woman To Supreme Court Next Week.” It was clear what he meant when he used the idiom.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell privately told his members in a letter circulated Friday night to keep their powder dry on where they stand on proceeding with a confirmation fight this year.

The idiom was used in the 1945 movie, “Keep Your Powder Dry” starring Lana Turner (8 February 1921 – 29 June 1995), Laraine Day (13 October 1920 – 10 November 2007), and Susan Peter (3 July 1921 – 23 October 1952) as three Women’s Army Corps (WAC) recruits. Lana Turner’s character is a spoiled rich party girl who signs up in the hopes it will make her look more responsible to the trustees of her trust fund will give her the rest of her inheritance thereby leaving her free to party even more than she already does.

Susan Peter’s character is that of a young wife whose husband is in the Army who is doing something productive to help the cause while her husband is fighting, and Laraine Day’s character is an Army brat who can’t wait to join the military so she can be a soldier every bit as good as her father.

INTERESTING SIDE NOTE 2: Lana Turner’s character is top of her class when it comes to identifying aircrafts but not because she’s an excellent student while in class. It has to do with how many pilots she dated before she joined the corps.

INTERESTING SIDE NOTE 3: Agnes Moorehead (6 December 1900 – 30 April 1974) — which many remember as Samantha Steven’s mother, Endora, in the 1960s series “Bewitched” — plays the role of the company commander, exuding an understated but unmistakable authority. She plays the role with dignity and compassion without breaking the military chain of command.

Margaret Mead used the idiom in the title of her book “And Keep Your Powder Dry: An Anthropologist Looks at America” published in 1943.

The Times Literary Supplement of 1908 made use of the idiom in this passage:

In thus keeping his powder dry the bishop acted most wisely, though he himself ascribes the happy result entirely to observance of the other half of Cromwell’s maxim.

INTERESTING SIDE NOTE 4: The Times Literary Supplement was a supplement to the British daily national newspaper The Times (which was known as The Daily Universal Register from 1785 through to 1788 when it changed its name) when it first appeared in 1902 but by 1914, it was its own separate publication. Among the distinguished writers and authors who contributed to the publication are T.S. Eliot, Henry James, and Virginia Woolf.

The idiom appeared in print in 1888 in the book “Irish Minstrelsy: Being A Selection of Irish Songs, Lyrics, and Ballads with Notes and Introduction by Henry Halliday Sparling” in a poem by Irish British Army officer, Member of the Royal Irish Academy, and Commissioner of the Treasury of Ireland, Lieutenant-Colonel William Blacker (1 September 1777 – 25 November 1855) and publishing under a pseudonym. Every stanza ends with a slightly different variation of the idiom, but always ends with keep your powder dry.

INTERESTING SIDE NOTE 5: The poem was originally published in 1834 in The Dublin University Magazine titled “Oliver’s Advice: An Orange Ballad” and was a well-known poem of over fifty years by the time it was printed in the 1887 publication.

INTERESTING SIDE NOTE 6: William Blacker and his cousin, Valentine Blacker (19 October 1778 – 4 February 1825) were both lieutenant colonels in the British Army as well as published authors. Sometimes they published under pseudonyms (William Blacker occasionally published under the name of Fitz Stewart), and this is why there are instances were they are confused with each other.

In the midst of the American Civil War, Father C. Mayer wrote an arrangement of a song titled, “Boys, Keep Your Powder Dry: A Soldier’s Song.” It was published by Blackmar & Brothers, and lithographed by B. Duncan and Company of Columbia, South Carolina in 1863. The idiom was used as the last line in each verse as well as in the chorus.

Not they who are determined to conquer or to die;
And harken to this caution, “Boys, keep your powder dry.”

Across the ocean and back in England, Punch magazine was having a grand time with politics on 25 February 1859 when it reported on Lord Palmerston’s efforts to alert the House of Commons to what he felt was the menacing aspect of continental affairs. It was printed in the same column that Mr. Punch advised Queen Victoria to keep her powder dry. The column was followed by a poem that addressed the issue of keeping her powder dry, as well as a cartoon.

Now shortly before Lieutenant-Colonel William Blacker’s poem was published in 1834, the idiom was bandied about by the Lords sitting for Parliament in the United Kingdom. One such occasion was 28 February 1832, in the discussion of education in Ireland was the subject, when William Pleydell-Bouverie (11 May 1779 – 9 April 1869), 3rd Earl of Radnor stated:

On that occasion, Mr. Archdal concluded his speech by saying, “My friends, I will now only add the words used by Oliver Cromwell to his army, when marking through a ford, ‘My boys trust in the Lord, and keep your powder dry.'”

“Trust in God and keep your powder dry” is repeatedly attributed to Oliver Cromwell (25 April 1599 – 3 September 1658). It is claimed that when Cromwell’s troops were about to cross a river to attack the enemy, he concluded his address to the troops with this idiom.

Allegedly, Oliver Cromwell said this to his regiment in 1642 when it was about to attack the enemy at the Battle of Edgehill, and allegedly Oliver Cromwell said this to the soldiers in 1650 at the Battle of Dunbar, and allegedly Oliver Cromwell said this every time there was a battle that involved crossing a river to get to the enemy’s side.

But did Oliver Cromwell ever say this? According to the Cromwell Museum there isn’t any evidence he ever said that. None. Not even once.

That doesn’t mean Oliver Cromwell didn’t say it, only that there’s no proof he said it. Maybe he said it, then again, maybe he didn’t. At the end of the day, however, it is very sound advice, don’t you agree?

Idiomation tags this expression to the 1820s with the earliest published version found in the 1832 papers that show the 3rd Earl of Radnor using the idiom indicating others understood what he meant when he talked about keeping one’s powder dry.

But who said it first is still up in the air.

To add a little extra fun to today’s entry, here’s “Keep Your Powder Dry” from the movie of the same name (back in the 1940s, face powder was the kind of make-up most women wore so enjoy the double meaning of the expression keep your powder dry).

Going Bodmin

If someone has gone bodmin or is going bodmin, you can rest assured the person is question is allegedly crazy or loopy, and probably in need of a nice long restful stay at a mental hospital. Even Bodmin Magazine agrees that going bodmin means the person being talked about has gone absolutely and utterly mad. The fact of the matter is that Bodmin is a respectable town in the UK, so why would anyone think an expression associated with Bodmin would mean that?

The quick answer is that the Cornwall County lunatic asylum — also known as St. Lawrence’s Hospital — opened on Westheath Avenue in Bodmin in 1815 on nine acres of land for the express purpose of dealing with those who were mentally unstable. The hospital was designed by John Foulston and George Wightwick. Cornwall County was the seventh English county to provide an asylum, and being one of the first asylums, word of its existence spread quickly and effectively.

By 1818, Bodmin had 112 cells, and accommodations for 72 patients. It became the first county in the South West to have an asylum for the insane long before the 1885 Act that stated asylums could only be built in certain areas, and long before the Care in the Community Act was passed in the 1990s.

According to historical records, the major mental disorders that were dealt with at Bodmin were mania, dementia, and melancholia. Of course, there were moral disturbances resulting from domestic troubles, religious excitement, fright and various shocks, among others, and physical disturbances caused by accident, injury, intemperance, or brain disease.

In its heyday, there were as many as 2,000 mental patients being treated at Bodmin, admitting both private patients and ‘pauper lunatics.’ By 2002, it was determined Bodmin was to be permanently closed, and so it was.

SIDE NOTE 1: The area known as Bodmin Moor is the setting for the novel “Jamaica Inn” by author Daphne du Maurier. Lost on Bodmin Moor in the dark, the remote location of the inn sparked her imagination, leading to the story about smugglers and cut-throats!

SIDE NOTE 2: Dozemary Pool in Bodmin is the legendary last resting place of King Arthur’s sword, Excalibur.

But enough about Bodmin, and back to the expression!

In 2018, UK poet Andrew Siddle used the expression not only as the title of one of his poems, ‘He’s Going Bodmin‘, but repeatedly throughout the poem.

A few years earlier, on 2 March 2012, a delightful blog called Rusty’s Skewed News Views published a blog entry titled,”Cornwall Gone Bodmin for Pasty Contest.” The blog owner reported that “aspiring pastry chefs and an assortment of cooks from around the planet” had arrived in Cornwall for the first annual World Pasty Championships.

Back in 2004, the British television series “Doc Martin” starring Martin Clunes as Dr. Martin Ellingham debuted with the first episode titled, ‘Going Bodmin.’ While the series begins with the doctor moving to the village of Port Isaac in Cornwall (England), by the end of this episode, Doc Martin has concluded he made a mistake moving to the village, and plans to return to London … which he doesn’t do as shown by the subsequent episode in the series. The series is currently in its ninth season.

The expression is a local expression. Any county that had a asylum became infamous in its own area by way of referencing the town in the county where the asylum was located. For example, in Exeter, people were ‘going Digby.”

While the expression wasn’t used often in written circumstances, it appears to have been the go-to expression in conversations. Idiomation therefore pegs this to scant years after the asylum in Bodmin was open for business meaning somewhere between 1818 and 1820.

Fire-Eating

When someone delivers a fire-eating speech or uses fire-eating language, you can assume there’s some element of danger or surprise involved. After all, who isn’t impressed and in awe of the circus fire-eater? However, in every day terms, someone who is a fire-eater is usually a belligerent person or a militant partisan and by extension, fire-eating language or fire-eating speeches are meant to be hostile and aggressive. In politics, fire-eating refers to extremist political views that deviate significantly from mainstream, accepted political beliefs.

Just three years ago, on August 22, 2010 the Daily Banter published a story by Bob Cesca entitled “The Screeching, Fire-Eating Mob” in which he addressed a violent video making the rounds online at the time. He began his article with this:

This video is disgraceful and makes me ashamed to be an American. Here we see a throng of ignorant fire-eaters protesting against Park 51 and subsequently accosting an African-American man who made the mistake of looking vaguely “muslim-ish” (John Cole’s word).

In “Religion and the American Civil War” edited by Randall M. Miller, Harry S. Stout and Charles Reagan Wilson and published in 1998 by Oxford Press, a number of authors discussed the subject in various essays. Whether it was Drew Gilpin Faust or Christopher Grasso, Samuel S. Hill or Phillip Shaw Paludan, or any of the other contributers, the subject remained fresh and presented fact after fact for consideration. In Bertram Wyatt-Brown’s essay “Church, Honor, and Secession” the following was written:

[Benjamin Morgan] Palmer insisted that the southern white people’s “providential trust” required them “to conserve and to perpetuate the institution of slavery as now existing.” His widely distributed sermon had as much impact for secession in the lower South as Breckinridge’s for Unionism in the border states. Yet even this fire-eating divine conceded that the relationship of master and slave was scarcely all that the church could hope for.

The expression fire-eating was a favorite of author Robert Black in his book “Facism In Germany” written in 1974 and published in two volumes by Steyn Publications of London, England in 1975. Robert Black was the pseudonym used by Robin Blick and the more than 800-page book examined the roots of facism and Marxism in Germany as well as Italy and Russia within the context of its effects on Germany. The word fire appeared 44 times in this work and fire-eating appeared three times. Two of those instances are as follows:

Yet right up to the last days of peace, the SPD maintained what appeared to be a firm anti-war stand. The Austrian ultimatum to Russia was denounced in fire-eating language on 25 July, the SPD manifesto directly calling upon all party members and supporters ‘to express immediately in mass meetings the unshakable will to peace of the class-conscious proletariat’.

and

Neither were the German diplomatic corps in Moscow taken in by Stalin’s fire-eating speeches on the prospects of revolution in Germany, which in order to preserve his Communist credentials, he was obliged to make more often than harmonious Soviet-German relations would have otherwise found politic.

The Sunday News Journal of September 25, 1957 ran a news story entitled, “Ike’s Action Draws Fire Eating Words.” It discussed the reaction some Senators had to President Eisenhower’s decision to address segregation and integration in schools in the southern states. The legality of the President’s move was questioned and some were concerned that it would cause more trouble than it intended to prevent. Eisenhower, however, defended his actions as he was concerned that mob rule might overtake the situation of riots over school integration in Arkansas, and thereby menace the safety of the United States of America as well as the free world. This was the news story’s opening paragraph:

Officials’ reaction to Pres. Eisenhower’s federalization of the Arkansas National Guard in an effort to bring about racial integration in the public schools tended to split along South-North lines with Dixie condemnation ranging from fire eating talk of armed resistance to much milder condemnation.

On September 19, 1939 the Milwaukee Journal made no bones in the headline it ran with the story by Alfred F. Pahlke on Adolf Hilter’s speech where he announced Germany’s agreement with Russia. The reporter stated that Hitler’s voice was “deceptive, merely the lull between barrages of machine gun oratory when the words from the mountaineer’s throat, never soft or tender, burst forth as hard as bullets pelting the enemy” and that Hitler’s voice had “few shadings, few stops and registers” but that had “the most of his limited variety.” The article was entitled, “Fire Eating Herr Hitler Now Weighing Words.”

A generation earlier on May 21, 1913, the Mansfield Shield carried a story on the front page that came out of Washington as reported by the United Press. The story related how President Woodrow Wilson had called Mississippi Senator Sisson to his office to ask him if the speech he intended on delivering to the House intended to use language that might be construed by the Japanese as inviting belligerency thereby complicating the situation between the U.S. and Japan. That article was entitled, “President Sends For And Admonishes Fire-Eating Southern Legislator.”

It seems that politics is the place where the expression is most often used as seen in the New York Times on March 27, 1893. Just as the fighting continues in Northern Ireland, so it was back in 1893 with the Irish in Ulster continuing to rise up against the British. The article stated, “If Ulster has to fight for her liberties she will put into the field an army of 50,000 men, decently armed and equipped.” The headline that accompanied the story read, “Those Fire-Eating Ulsterman Will Defy Parliament And Raise An Army.”

It was in the October 24, 1856 edition of the New York Times that great pains were taken to conceal the identity of the author of a letter printed in the paper that day, carrying the headline, “A Queer Development: A New Plot Of The Pro-Slavery Democracy.” The newspaper prefaced the letter with a statement that the newspaper owed it to fairness to say that “the writer of the letter [takes] pains to conceal his identity, ensurring us that events will vindicate the truth of his statements, but that under no circumstances can he be known in connection with them.” In the letter that followed that comment, the following was written in part:

If it should turn out, therefore, when those packages are opened that the electors of four or five Southern States cast their votes for some new Democrat — Douglas, or Wise, or Jefferson Davis — his name will go into the House as the third candidate, and Mr. Fillmore will be ruled out! The balance of power will thus be transferred from the Fillmore men to the fire-eating section of the Democracy: and with such a rod in their hands they anticipate an easy victory.

In the late 1840s, the Wilmot Proviso was introduced repeatedly into the House Of Representatives. It led to spirited debates about the Tariff of Abominations which led to the Nullification Crisis. Those outspoken Southern nationalists who supported the concept of an independent Southern nation and who argued in favor of “disunion” became known as fire-eaters and their spirited comments became known as fire-eating.

And over in England nearly a generation earlier, in the book entitled,  “A Defence of the Loyal Inhabitants of Dudley” written by a member of the Pitt Club, dated December 2, 1819 and published by J. Fawcett in London (England) in 1820, the following passage is found on page 78:

It is one, who is precluded the advantage of coming into personal contact with them, or he would not have condescended to pamphletizing this exposure, not that he assumes to himself, any invincibility of power, he is no fire-eater; but he would most strenuously endeavour to make His Majesty’s ministers, eat their own words, by double mouthfuls, in the presence of the assembled representatives of the nation.

Prior to that, Robert Powell was presented with a purse of gold and a large silver medal by the Royal Society in 1751 for his 60-year career which included fire-eating … the sort that includes flames and great physical danger. Idiomation was unable to find any mention of fire-eating being anything other than what Robert Powell and others engaged in at the time.

Of interest is the fact that the word fire is from the Middle English word furen which means to arouse or to excite, and dates back to the late 1300s. Fire-eaters first appeared in European courts in the 1667 when a fire-eater by the name of Richardson when his act was recorded in the Journal des Savants and later by diarist John Evelyn on October 8, 1672 in London. Prior to that, Sir Henry Walton had written a letter dated June 3, 1633 that detailed the performance of a fire-eater he’d seen perform in his travels.

With the use of the word fire-eater in a publication written in 1819 and published the following year, and the fire-eating feats recorded in 1751 (a 68-year span between the two dates), Idiomation feels that the real feat and the new meaning of the expression happened between these two dates. It is therefore reasonable to believe it came into existence sometime in the 1780s.

Lynch Mob

It’s thought that Captain William Lynch (1742–1820),  a farmer from Pittsylvania County, Virginia during the Revolutionary war organized groups of local townfolk– later called “Lynch Mobs” — to provide justice to British collaborators. It is said that sometimes this resulted in a hanging or “Lynching” or a non-trial form of justice.

However, the term “Lynch’s Law” was used as early as 1782 by a prominent Virginian named Charles Lynch (1736 – 1796) to describe his actions in suppressing a suspected Loyalist uprising in 1780 during the American Revolutionary War and those who followed in his footsteps were part of the “Lynch mob.”

According to the American National Biography:

What was purported to be the text of the Pittsylvania agreement was later printed in the Southern Literary Messenger (2 [May 1836]: 389). However, the Pittsylvania County alliance, if it was formed at all, was so obscure compared to the well-known suppression of the uprising in southwestern Virginia that Charles Lynch‘s use of the phrase makes it seem most probable that it was derived from his actions, not from William Lynch‘s.

It has been suggested since then that Edgar Allan Poe is the perpetrator of the story that Captain William Lynch rather than Charles Lynch was responsible for the term “lynch mob.”

His Name Is Mud

When John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln dead in 1865, he broke his leg trying to escape.  Booth sought — and received–  medical attention from a Dr. Samuel Mudd.  Now even though Mudd was convicted of being Booth’s co-conspirator in Abraham Lincoln’s death, and while it would be easy to conclude that the phrase came about as a result of this historic event, the fact of the matter is that the phrase “his name is mud” was already in use four decades before Lincoln was assassinated. 

Writing under the pen name John Bee, John Badcock’s book “Slang – A Dictionary of the Turf” published in 1823 stated:

“And his name is mud!” ejaculated upon the conclusion of a silly oration, or of a leader in the Courier.

What’s more, the “Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English” also referenced the phrase in its 1820 edition and stated that the phrase indicated an individual who was “utterly disgraced or defeated.”

However, an even earlier published record, the phrase can be found in the book by Tuus Inimicus entitled “Hell upon earth: or the most pleasant and delectable history of Whittington’s Colledge.”   This book was first published in 1703.

The phrase, however, goes back even farther to St. Gregory of Nyssa (335-390) — an unopposed advocate, along with Didymus and Diodorus of Tarsus, of universal redemption — who wrote in his “Sermo Catecheticus Magnus” that “man is mud whom God has commanded to become God.”