Black Out (as in “censorship”)

When people talk about black outs, they can mean one of three things:  to cut or turn out the lights or electric power; to prevent or silence information or communication; or to become unconscious. 

Preventing or silencing information or communication, either in its entirety or in part, is derived from the 15th century word “blackening” which means to defame a person.  In other words, if someone was the subject of a negative commentary on his person, it was said that the speaker was “blackening” the subject’s reputation.

It’s only from a black out — keeping the “blackening” from being expressed to others — that the subject could maintain a pristine reputation, whether it was warrantedor not.

The Milwaukee Journal of May 21, 1984 ran a news bite with the headline, “Bucks Black Out USA Telecast” and continued with this additional information in the first paragraph:

The National Basketball Association playoff game between the Milwaukee Bucks and the Boston Celtics Monday night, scheduled to be televised by the USA Network, will be blacked out within a 35-mile radius of the City of Milwaukee.

On October 8, 1965 the Windsor Star ran a news story entitled, “Reds Black Out Moon Shot News” that reported on the Soviet space program.  It read in part:

The Soviets today placed a news black-out on the face of Luna 7 hours after the space rocket was to have reached the surface of the moon.  All indications were that the unmanned instrument probe failed to make a soft landing.

Oddly enough, a black out doesn’t always have to be caused by the media as shown by an article in the Palm Beach Post on September 25, 1950 entitled, “Smoke From Canadian Fires Black Out Much Of The North.”  The story addressed the thick layers of smoke coming from Canadian forest fires in northern Alberta and effecting the Great Lakes area with smoke that “brought the darkness of night to many cities in midday.”  The states most affected by the thickest smoke palls were Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan, although the smoke had also spread as far south as Virginia and Iowa.  What is particularly interesting about this natural phenomena is that:

Some callers [to the Washington Weather Bureau] wondered whether the strange darkness had anything to do with atomic bombs.  Others thought tonight’s scheduled total eclipse of the moon had arrived sooner than expected.  Street lights were turned on early in many places.

Even back at the turn of the previous century, black outs occurred as read in a news story carried in the Poverty Bay Herald in New Zealand on August, 24, 1912 about Queen Mary and her son, the Prince of Wales (23 June 1894 – 28 May 1972). 

He is only permitted to read the London Times among the English papers, and his tutor is to carefully black out anything verging on the objectionable in the Paris Temps, the only French paper he is allowed to see.

The Prince of Wales — officially invested as such in a special ceremony at Caernarfon Castle on July 13, 1911 — became Edward VIII and abdicated the throne in order to marry American socialite Wallis Simpson.

iI should be noted here that the Prince of Wales was the eldest son of the Duke and Duchess of York, who later became King George V and Queen Mary, and his great-grandmother was Queen Victoria.  When the First World War (1914–18) broke out, Edward was the minimum age required for active service and he was keen on enlisting as well as keen on serving on the front lines.

Back on track with this idiom, during the 1760s and 1770s, a political reformer and polemicist, writing under the pseudonym of Junius, portrayed the press as “an essential restraint for bad men and impediment to bad measures.”  In fact, in his book “Dedication to the English Nation” he wrote in 1772:

The liberty of the press is the palladium of all the civil, political, and religious rights of an Englishman.

Speaking for the radicals, he stated that he was not causing dissension by way of “blackening the reputations of the nation’s leaders.”  Instead, he believed the press should have, along with others powers, the right and freedom to expose a politician’s every action.  He stated that press prosecutions did more damage than the questions and news accounts originally published by the press.  This is, in part, how incomplete, false or delayed news reports were referred to as black outs.

Cotton Pickin’ Minute

On March 11, 2011 Conservative Senator Don Meredith accused Liberal Party Leader Michael Ignatieff of using a racist slur when he uttered the phrase “cotton pickin’ minute.”

Idiomation is providing the history of the phrase here — along with newspaper articles to illustrate the phrase — for those who are wondering how the phrase came about and whether it is a racist slur.

Back on November 17, 2009 on the NBA website, the following was part of the article published to The Optimist page:

I know this is a basketball column, and I’ll get to the Cavaliers fifth straight win in just a cotton-pickin’ minute. But these anemic performances by the Browns cannot stand! Not if we’re going to win the Lombardi Trophy before stuff starts blowing up. I’m so old, I remember when the Browns used to score touchdowns. Several of them – IN A SINGLE GAME!

Glen McAdoo wrote a piece for the Lahontan Valley News and Fallon Eagle Standard on July 25, 2005 that was entitled, “Just A Cotton Pickin’ Minute.”  In his piece, he included this bit:

It seems like they are intent on coming up with a new tax, or an increase in an old one, just about every week. Where I was raised folks would be saying, “Now wait just a cotton pickin’ minute. Tell me again why ya’all are doin’ this.”

Back on August 21, 2001 in a Letter to the Editor from Jonathan F Phillips to The Tennessean newspaper in Nashville (TN), Mr. Phillips wrote in part:

Now wait a cotton pickin minute. Tennessee had plenty of tobacco settlement money to fight any and all tobacco ads aimed at children. But where is that tobacco settlement money going?

It would appear that the phrase has been used quite a bit in the past decade alone and in newspapers throughout the southern states no less.  But how far back does that phrase go?

The Lawrence Journal World newspaper ran an advertisement on May 15, 1963 written by Lee of Ramsey’s Decorating Service in Lawrence, KS.  Entitled, “Take A Color Pickin Minute” it began with:

I do not mean a cotton pickin’ minute, I mean a color pickin’ minute.  That’s all it takes to obtain the exact color that is proper for you, your home, and its attractiveness.

And on December 7, 1958 Herbert Jay Vida wrote an article entitled “Notes On My Cuff” for the Los Angeles Times that began:

HOLD IT NOW — Now just hold on for a cotton pickin’ minute.

Back in 1914, The Courier published a story about a 17-year-old teenager named Claude Rice.  The newspaper was mighty proud of the young lad for the following reason:

The world’s record cotton picking has been excelled by a boy named Claude RICE, 17 years old, living at Biggers, Randolph county. The boy was picking on a wager of 1,000 pounds of cotton. He picked 1,193 pounds of cotton in 12 hours and 35 minutes. The first three hours he averaged 120 pounds an hour. In 30 minutes from 4:00 to 4:30 o’clock, he picked 56 pounds. RICE is a member of the boy’s corn club of Randolph County, known as the largest corn club in the United States. John R. KIZER, farm adviser, supervised the contest. The boy sold his cotton at ten cents a pound.

As readers can see, there’s no mention as to Claude Rice’s cultural background.  What we do know is that the teen surely could pick cotton!

Now, back in the day, picking cotton required considerable labour to clean and separate the fibers from the seeds.  The problem with hand picking cotton was that dried bristles off the plant cut and scarred fingers, wrists and arms of those who picked cotton by hand. 

The first attempts at building a functional mechanical cotton picker was patented in the U.S. as early as 1850.  Samuel S. Rembert and Jedidiah Prescott patented a cotton-harvesting machine in Memphis, Tennessee that included this information in the original patent notes:

Our cotton picking machine can be duplicated and extended to such a width as to embrace several rows of cotton at once.

Over the next 100 years, over 1,800 patents were issued in the U.S. for cotton harvesting machines.  With more and more cotton picking machines being bought by landowners, field hands who used to pick cotton found themselves replaced by these new-fangled cotton-picking machines. 

While a skilled field hand could pick 20 pounds of cotton in an hour, a mechanical picker could pick 1,000 pounds in that same hour.  It didn’t take long for owners to realize that a bale of cotton (a bale of cotton weighed 500 pounds) cost them 8 times more to have them picked by hand than if they had them picked by machine.  In other words, a cotton picking minute — on the whole — was definitely more beneficial to owners when done by machine.

By the late 1960s, 96% of cotton crops in the U.S. were done by mechanical cotton picking machines.

But is “cotton picking” an insult? 

The phrase “cotton picking” arose in the southern U.S. states sometime during the 1700s and was used to describe something that was unpleasant or troublesome.  Back then, cotton was a garden crop tended by white as well as black Southerners and the cotton was turned into cloth for home use in much the same that flax was turned into cloth for home use in the North.

“Cotton-picking” became part of the vernacular in the U.S. and in time, it was the phrase swapped in for unacceptable comments such as “God-damn” or “damn” when in polite society or if women were present.

The verdict:  Cotton pickin’ minute is not a racial slur but calling someone a cotton picker could be considered an insult.

Related Entry:  “Screw Loose” from March 3, 2011.