The backstory on “Snug as a bug in a rug.” (Spoiler Alert: Ben Franklin didn’t coin it.)

In 1771, Ben Franklin’s common-law wife, Deborah Read Franklin shipped a live gift to young Georgiana Shipley, the daughter of British friends in London.

It was an American gray squirrel that Deborah thought would make a nice pet for the girl.

Georgiana named it Mungo.

Mungo was also referred to as “Skugg.” That was a name commonly used for squirrels at the time, the way “Pooch” is used for dogs and “Puss” for cats.

About a year after Mungo became Georgiana’s pet, he escaped from his cage and was killed by a dog.

The Franklins heard about this misfortune and felt bad for little Georgiana. So, Ben wrote a letter to her to express his sympathy and try to cheer her up.

It is this letter, dated September 26, 1772, that led to the widespread belief that Franklin coined “snug as a bug in a rug,” which became an idiomatic way of saying someone or something is comfortable, warm and cozy.

The letter said, in part:

To Georgiana Shipley
Dear Miss,
London, Sept. 26. 1772

I lament with you most sincerely the unfortunate End of poor Mungo: Few Squirrels were better accomplish’d; for he had had a good Education, had travell’d far, and seen much of the World. As he had the Honour of being for his Virtues your Favourite, he should not go like common Skuggs without an Elegy or an Epitaph. Let us give him one...

Here Skugg
Lies snug
As a Bug
In a Rug...

If you wish it, I shall procure another to succeed him. But perhaps you will now choose some other Amusement.

Remember me affectionately to all the good family, and believe me ever your affectionate
friend,

B. FRANKLIN

Franklin’s letter is certainly the most famous use of the saying “snug as a bug in a rug.”

However, as noted by the indispensable Phrase Finder website, the excellent book Who Said That First? and other authoritative sources, it’s not the origin.

The phrase had previously been used by Francis Gentleman in his satirical play The Stratford Jubilee, published in England in 1769.

Gentleman was an Irish-born playwright, actor and critic who spent most of his working years in London. He’s also known for writing the proto-science fiction tale A Trip to the Moon in 1764, under the pseudonym “Sir Humphrey Lunatic.”

In The Stratford Jubilee, a male character says he’s heard a certain widow “has the mopus’s” (a slang term for having money). If she does, he boasts, he plans to “have her, as snug as a bug in a rug.”

This has been cited as the first appearance of “snug as a bug in a rug” in print. But it’s possible that its use in the play indicates it was already part of the common vernacular in England.

It seems probable that Franklin heard it during one of his visits there. Indeed, he was in London in 1769, so he may have seen or read Gentleman’s play.

The word snug was originally a nautical term, meaning to make a ship or things on a ship safe and secure. Thus, in the 1700s, “snug as a bug in a rug” was probably used with the concept of being secure or securing something in mind — which is slightly different than the more modern sense of being comfortable, warm and cozy.

At any rate, poor Mungo the squirrel wasn’t comfortable, warm and cozy when Ben Franklin wrote his letter. He was a cold, dead Skugg.

R.I.P., Mungo. This post’s for you.

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“I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.” A real quote, a misquote or pure fiction?

On September 22, 1776, during the American Revolution, a former school teacher named Nathan Hale was hung by the British for being a rebel spy.

According to legend, Hale uttered a stirring, patriotic line before his death:

       “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.”

What he actually said is uncertain. But modern historians doubt that it was the famous quotation most of us are familiar with.

Hale was an officer in General George Washington’s Continental Army in 1776.

That September, after the British captured New York City, Washington asked for a volunteer to go behind the British lines to gather intelligence. Hale volunteered.

On September 12, wearing civilian clothes, he took a boat from Stamford, Connecticut to Long Island to carry out his secret mission.

A week later, he was detained and searched by British troops. They discovered he was carrying incriminating papers indicating that he was part of General Washington’s growing ring of spies.

British General William Howe quickly ordered Hale to be executed.

According to the eyewitness account recorded in the diary of British officer Frederick Mackenzie (sometimes spelled Mackensie), Hale did say some brave last words on the day he was hung. But Mackenzie doesn’t mention the classic “I only regret…” quotation. Nor does any other eyewitness account.

Mackenzie’s diary does note:

“He behaved with great composure and resolution, saying he thought it the duty of every good Officer to obey any orders given him by his Commander-in-Chief; and desired the Spectators to be at all times prepared to meet death in whatever shape it might appear.”

Nearly five years later, on May 17, 1781, the Boston Independent Chronicle ran a story about Hale’s execution. It quoted him as saying:

“I am so satisfied with the cause in which I have engaged, that my only regret is, that I have not more lives than one to offer in its service.”

In the book The History of New England, published in 1799, author Hannah Adams wrote that Hale “lamented that he had but one life to lose for his country.”

Adams credited William Hull for her account. He was a former American general who may have been the source for the 1781 story in the Boston Independent Chronicle.

Hull claimed to have heard about Hale’s last words from a British soldier who witnessed the hanging.

In 1848, Hull’s daughter published his memoirs. Apparently, it is that book which first included the line that became famous.

According to Hull’s memoir, shortly before Hale was hung:

“…Few persons were around him, yet his characteristic dying words were remembered. He said, ‘I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.’”

It’s questionable whether Hale spoke those exact words. But it’s plausible that he said something like them.

Hale was a Yale graduate and a teacher. He was undoubtedly familiar with the play Cato, a tragedy about the Roman leader called “Cato the Younger,” written by the English playwright and poet Joseph Addison.

The play was written in 1712, but it was still highly popular in America in the late 1700s.

In Act IV, scene 4, Cato says:

“How beautiful is death, when earn’d by virtue!
Who would not be that youth? What pity is it
That we can die but once to serve our country.”

That last sentence, penned by Addison, is now widely believed to be the origin of the legendary patriotic quote (or misquote) later attributed to Nathan Hale.

Whatever Hale actually did say before being hanged, at age 21, he said it on today’s date in 1776.

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“No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.”

In many books of quotations and on thousands of websites H.L. Mencken is credited with the famous quote “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.”

Most sources fail to mention that this “quote” is actually the traditional paraphrase of what Mencken actually wrote — not a true quote.

It’s based on something the acerbic journalist, editor and social critic said in his column in the September 19, 1926 edition of the Chicago Daily Tribune.

He titled that day’s column “Notes on Journalism.”

His topic was a recent trend in the American newspaper business: “tabloid newspapers” that were geared toward uneducated readers, including those Mencken described as “near-illiterates.”

Mencken noted that tabloids had several advantages over traditional newspapers like his own Chicago Daily Tribune.

They were lighter and less bulky than daily newspapers that had “two or three sections and weigh a pound or more.” In addition to making them easier to read, that meant tabloids could be “distributed much more quickly than the larger papers.”

“A boy on a motorcycle,” Mencken wrote, “can carry a hundred copies of even the bulkiest of them to a remote junction in ten or twenty minutes, but the old style papers have to go by truck, which is slower.”

In his usual dry way, Mencken also poked fun at the idea that most people wanted the content of newspapers to be more substantive and intellectual than what tabloids typically offered.

He opined that when a tabloid became successful the owner often tried to make it more respectable and “reach out for customers of a higher sophistication.”

Mencken said that was a mistake and, near the end of column, summed up why by writing the words that were later turned into the shorter famous “quote” about underestimating the intelligence of the American public.

His actual words were:

“No one in this world, so far as I know — and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me — has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.”

Over time, this longer quote came to be paraphrased and misquoted, most commonly in the form “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.”

In the column, Mencken continued his thoughts about the public’s choices in reading matter and politicians by adding:

“The mistake that is made always runs the other way. Because the plain people are able to speak and understand, and even, in many cases, to read and write, it is assumed that they have ideas in their heads, and an appetite for more. This assumption is a folly.”

Looking around at the media and political landscape today, Mencken’s opinion might be deemed more prescient than ever.

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“Too cheap to meter” – the infamous nuclear power misquote…

In the annals of the long, still-ongoing debate over nuclear power, the most infamous words are undoubtedly “too cheap to meter.”

The origin of this phrase is a speech given on September 16, 1954 by Lewis L. Strauss, a former Navy officer who was appointed Chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission in 1953 by President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Ever since Strauss gave that speech, many anti-nuclear activists have assumed and claimed that he literally said electricity from nuclear plants would be too cheap to meter.

Of course, nuclear power did not turn out to be “cheap” from a cost-per-kilowatt-hour perspective. At least, not compared to traditional energy sources like coal, oil and hydropower, which have been economically “cheap” but are arguably more “costly” in terms of their long term impacts on the environment (barring incidents like the Fukushima meltdown).

Anyway, putting aside that debate, it has long been clear that electricity from fission-powered nuclear plants is not and never will be “too cheap to meter.”

Thus, for decades, the phrase has been ridiculed and held up as the prime iconic example of absurd claims made by supporters of nuclear power.

Except that Strauss didn’t actually say what opponents of nuclear power think he said.

The focus of his speech to the National Association of Science Writers in New York City on September 16th, 1954 dealt with how modern scientific research, in general, would lead to better lives for future generations. And, his meter remark was about electric energy, in general, not nuclear power in particular.

As reported in the New York Times the next day, what Strauss really said was this:

“Our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter...will travel effortlessly over the seas and under them and through the air with a minimum of danger and at great speeds, and will experience a lifespan far longer than ours, as disease yields and man comes to understand what causes him to age.”

For an excellent in-depth look at the facts about Strauss’ speech and his “too cheap to meter” remark, read the page about it on the Canadian Nuclear Society website.

And, regardless of which side of the nuclear power debate you’re on, you might want to keep in mind an old saying that applies to any type of energy that is used to generate significant amounts of electricity — “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”

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“I can see Russia from my house!” The famous Sarah Palin quote that she didn’t actually say…

On September 13, 2008, actress Tina Fey took a break from her hit TV show 30 Rock to make a guest appearance on Saturday Night Live, where she was formerly a writer and cast member.

At the time, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama and his running mate Joe Biden were in a seemingly close race with Republican presidential nominee John McCain and his recently unveiled pick for Vice President, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin.

Ten days earlier, on September 3, Palin had given a rousing speech at the Republican National Convention that made her an immediate national celebrity. (The famed “Hockey Mom/pit bull/lipstick” speech.)

The following week, she was riding fairly high in public favorability and did a series of high profile media interviews.

One was with ABC’s Charles Gibson.

On the topic of foreign policy, he asked whether Alaska’s proximity to Russia gave her any special insights into Russian actions. Palin responded with a somewhat puzzling non-sequitur:

“They’re our next-door neighbors, and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska, from an island in Alaska.”

Two days later, on September 13th, Tina Fey appeared in a sketch on Saturday Night Live in which she played Sarah Palin and SNL regular Amy Poehler played Hillary Clinton.

At one point in the skit, Poehler, as Clinton, made the intellectual-sounding comment that “diplomacy should be the cornerstone of any foreign policy.”

Fey, looking remarkably like Palin, gave a response that mimicked Palin’s folksy style and satirically echoed the answer Palin used in the interview with Gibson.

With an engaging, Palin-like smile, she blurted:

“And I can see Russia from my house!”

It was a hilarious line and a great political sketch. The following day – and for days thereafter – it was the biggest thing on YouTube and in the media.

It got so much attention that many people assumed (and some still think) Palin actually said she could see Russia from her house.

She didn’t.

But, along with things Palin actually did say in the weeks after her Convention speech, Fey’s now legendary quote did help create skepticism about Palin’s qualifications to be Vice President.

After Obama and Biden won the election, that became a moot issue and Palin went on to become a professional politically-oriented media personality rather than a politician.

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To boldly split infinitives that no man has split before…

You may have had English teachers who tried to repeatedly make you believe that you need to strictly avoid using split infinitives — such as “to repeatedly make” or “to strictly avoid.”

However, as explained by the authoritative Oxford Dictionaries site: “There’s no real justification for their objection, which is based on comparisons with the structure of Latin. People have been splitting infinitives for centuries, especially in spoken English.”

And, if you’re a fan of Star Trek (like me) you know that people will boldly be splitting infinitives long into the future.

This was first revealed to us on September 8, 1966.

On that night, the original Star Trek series debuted on NBC-TV.

That’s when we first heard William Shatner, as starship Captain James T. Kirk, speak the famed introduction used at the beginning of the show’s opening credit sequence:

“Space – the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.”

Of course, those last nine words became a famous TV catchphrase. And, “to boldly go” became the most famous split infinitive in modern history.

To English teachers who are willing to publicly agree that it is silly to always avoid using a split infinitive, I say “Live long and prosper.”

To those who still think it’s wrong to ever split an infinitive, I say: Hab SoSlI’ Quch!

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The Birth — and Death — of “the Hippies”

Credit for the origin of the term “hippies” is generally given to San Francisco journalist Michael Fallon.

Fallon coined the term in an article published in the San Francisco Examiner on September 5, 1965.

It was the first of a series of articles he wrote about the “new generation of beatniks” who hung out in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, at places like the Blue Unicorn Café on the corner of Ashbury and Hayes.

It’s likely that Fallon came up with hippies as variation of the jazz buffs’ term hipsters.

When he wrote his series of articles, beatnik was the common, somewhat-derogatory name applied to  counterculture types by people who weren’t themselves beatniks.

That term was coined in 1958 by journalist Herb Caen in his “Bagdad-by-the-Bay” column in the San Francisco Chronicle.

The headline for Fallon’s first article about hippies actually used Caen’s more familiar term.

Some online sources give the headline as “A New Haven for Beatniks,” though more authoritative sources say it was “A New Paradise for Beatniks.”

During the next couple of years, the term hippies was picked up by other journalists, by the media in general and by many hippies themselves.

It also became an epithet in the mouths of critics of the Sixties counterculture.

For example, by 1967 — “The Summer of Love” — California Governor Ronald Reagan began using an oft-quoted joke in his speeches, comparing hippies to Tarzan, Jane and Cheetah.

“We have some hippies in California,” Reagan deadpanned. “For those of you who don’t know what a hippie is, he’s a fellow who dresses like Tarzan, has hair like Jane, and smells like Cheetah.” 

By the fall of 1967, many hippies were tired of the term and all the media hype about them.

In October of 1967, a group of counterculture leaders organized a mock funeral event in San Francisco, called the “The Death of the Hippie,” to try to symbolically put an end to the term and the hype.

Some of the event’s organizers thought that the term freebie should be used to replace hippie. That didn’t quite catch on — at least not as a replacement for the name commonly used for those of us who “dressed like Tarzan” and had “hair like Jane” back in those days. (My late father called us “He-She’s,” God bless him.)

By the way, today is also the anniversary of On the Road, the most famous book by the coiner of the term “Beat Generation,” the grand-daddyo of “the beats,” Jack Kerouac. It was first published on September 5, 1957.

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