This Technicality episode is sponsored by Skillshare.
Hey guys, I'm here, let's get technical.
Whoah!
That was a clean cut, pun intended.
Ok, well I tried.
If you were expecting my longer hair, you might have just been bamboozled.
Bamboozle.
I have always been obsessed with this word; along with unorthodox and fraternize, it’s
one of my favourite words of all time.
Bamboozle is jovial and incredibly fun to say, which makes it the perfect word for any
time you perplex someone.
But have you ever wondered where such a silly word like bamboozle comes from?
Well, turns out to learn the history of the word bamboozle is to learn the history is
ethnic groups in the United States.
Let me explain.
Considering how weird the word sounds and how often it’s used on Reddit, you might
think the word was created pretty recently, but check out this graph from Google’s Ngram
Viewer, a website that shows how frequently words are used in Google’s massive database
of documents written between 1500 and 2008.
It peaks in the middle of the 1700s.
You realize how crazy that is?
Finding out that bamboozle was popular in the 18th century is like finding out the word
“dank” was popular in the 17th century which is actually true because of course it is.
To understand bamboozle’s bamboozling popularity, we have to go back to the very beginning of
America.
When they first came here, colonists would initially settle in two places: the Chesapeake
and New England.
Despite both of these colonies being settled in a very similar timeframe by people from
the same country, the two regions developed into completely separate, almost opposite
societies.
To understand why this is, let’s take a deep dive into each society.
People originally came to the Chesapeake region in search of natural resources like gold,
silver, and copper.
The original expedition wasn’t financed by the Queen of England because the government
didn’t have enough money to flex on us by sending people to a whole new continent.
As a result, the trip was financed by the Virginia company, so the main goal wasn’t
to create some new lasting colony, but to super succ the resources outta the region
and turn a profit.
The Chesapeake started off terribly.
Settlers became inflicted with malaria, typhoid fever,
and dysentery as a result of a nearby swamp, and, as you might have guessed, there’s
not a ton of gold and silver in that region, and by “not a ton,” I mean “none at
all.”
To make matters even worse, the large majority of people who went to the Chesapeake were
elites; either craftsmen who were trained in working with gold and silver or the sons
of English nobles.
Not only did these people not know how to farm, they really didn’t like doing it.
So you know, disease and starvation, the fun stuff.
After a Native American uprising in 1622, creatively known as the Uprising of 1622,
the Virginia company was on it’s last legs and far from turning a profit.
In 1624, Virginia was sold to the English government, and, in a twist of fate, it started
becoming profitable.
Really profitable.
Because of one cash crop: tobacco.
Chesapeake’s climate and soil were perfect for growing tobacco, and, as a result, production
of the crop exploded from 200,000 pounds being produced in 1624, to 15 million in 1664, to
30 million in 1680.
This made people go crazy and eager to cash in on this newfound wealth at the expense
of concepts like communityand family.
Men significantly outnumbered women by four or five to one, meaning marriage was rare,
and social life was poor.
It eventually got so bad they had to just sends ships from England to the Chesapeake
filled with as many women as possible to try to balance out that ratio.
>> DAVE CHAPPELLE: Modern problems require modern solutions.
New England, on the other hand, was the exact opposite; while they succeeded in creating
solid communities and fulfilling family lives, their per capita wealth was nowhere close
to the Chesapeake’s.
New England was occupied by Puritans, and, to understand their beliefs, we have to do
a quick recap of what’s been going in England in regards to religion.
In the early 1500s, Henry VIII, the King of England at the time, hit up the pope and was
like “yo, Pope” (cuz that’s how he talked) “yo, Pope, can you annul my marriage to
Catherine of Aragon?”
And the pope said nah, so Henry VIII got really really mad and was like, “well than Catholicism
is no longer allowed in England,” and he created the Anglican Church in it’s place.
Ok so fast forward to the 1630s: Charles I is king, and he’s strongly considering introducing
Catholicism back into the Anglican Church, a church that just so happens to be silencing
Puritan ministers and scriptures.
Puritans were not having this, so they dipped and founded New England.
This is who the Puritans are: a subset of Protestantism that believed the Anglican Church
became too Catholic, and their hope with New England was to establish a perfect Puritan
society.
The implications of this are two-fold.
First, there was not a ton of toleration for anyone who disagreed with Puritan beliefs.
When Anne Hutchinson criticized Puritan ministers and Roger Williams promoted religious tolerance,
they were both banished.
Second, family life was incredibly important to the Puritans.
Families were patriarchal and would often consist of 5-10 kids, as shown in this painting
by Edward Savage.
I just love everyone’s facial expression in this painting, like, this girl is clearly
not having it, and this girl’s expression looks like the unamused emoji.
Families would have all of these kids so they could help on their family farm, which brings
us to the main way New Englanders made money.
They didn’t have a cash crop, and, instead, grew just enough food to get by and sell a
small surplus to places like Barbados, Jamaica, and the Chesapeake (who did not have any sustainable
source of food themselves).
The people in New England are also known as Yankees, and they’re the first of the five
main ethnic groups in 18th-century America we’re gonna talk about today.
Yankees were quite interested in stoicism and order; they repressed their emotions,
liked institutions and rules, and would seriously hate a flashy outfit like this, and instead
would opt for more muted colors.
Yankees mostly originated from east England, and, as a result, brought with them that sorta
New England/Boston accent that is so famous.
Park the car in Harvard yard.
Well I got her number.
How you like them apples?
Hint hint foreshadowing: the concept of introducing accents or words to the American vernacular
is gonna be a bit of a theme with these ethnic groups.
The Scots-Irish, the second ethnic group we’ll talk about, lived pretty wildly.
The exact opposite of Yankees, they hated any sense of order or authority and lived
in a way that seemed savage to other ethnic groups.
They really enjoyed whiskey, to the point where they’d serve it to kids, and they
had practically no social constraints, leading to some very demonetizing things.
Scots-Irish is actually a bit of a misnomer, the majority of people we call Scots-Irish
came from southern Scotland and northern England, and, with them, they brought slang like double
negatives (“I don’t got no Sprite Cranberry”), double positives (“He done did snatch my
Sprite Cranberry”), and subject-verb disagreements (“Them delinquents is running off with my
Sprite Cranberry”).
You probably know the Germans, the third ethnic group we’ll talk about, from the famous
Pennsylvania Dutch, but did you know they were also very skilled farmers?
While I couldn’t find anything on their contribution to the American vernacular, they
did contribute a lot to farming, such as using good crop rotation methods, contouring fields,
and applying manure as fertilizer.
They also brought with them a smattering of new, advanced technology, such as wagons,
draft horses, and new types of guns.
The Cavaliers, the fourth ethnic group we’ll talk about, were very cavalier.
HAA
Well, the aristocrats were, at least.
They enjoyed tobacco, sex, dancing, achahol, gambling, Hypebeast clothing, or what was
hypebeast clothing in the 18th century, and, as Pulitzer-Prize winning Historian Walter
McDougall puts it, “they flirted in ways that would have landed a Puritan in the stocks.”
Wild times indeed.
Most of the Cavaliers came from south and southwest England, predominantly London and
Bristol, and, they introduced the Southern accent, “Sir, this car ain’t mine,”
as well as words like yonder, grit, and flapjack.
>> FOGHORN LEGHORN: Now what's that... I say what's that boy up to. Better check on it yeah.
To understand the Quakers, the fifth and final
group we’ll talk about, we first have to understand this guy, William Penn.
William Penn’s father, also named William Penn, was a big financial supporter of the
British King, James II.
While Big Daddy Penn died in 1670, James II still had to repay his family, so he gave
Lil’ Penn land that would eventually become Pennsylvania.
It’s important to note that this Pennsylvania looked a bit different at this point.
While it did include what we currently know of as Pennsylvania, it also included the Delaware
valley and most of southeastern New York.
Penn’s management of Pennsylvania was rooted in his beliefs of equality.
People were free to practice whatever religion they so desired (an incredibly liberal concept
at the time), and, thus, Pennsylvania was know as “The Holy Experiment.”
This lad even went so far as to buy the land of Pennsylvania from the Native Americans
who lived there, and then live peacefully with them, another concept America as a whole
didn’t really pick up on.
Penn himself was a devote Quaker, and Quakers, who believed in liberty being a universal
right and equality for everyone before God, really enjoyed Penn’s ideals of personal
and religious equality.
As a result, a ton Quakers flocked to Pennsylvania, specifically Delaware Valley.
While both groups valued family, the Quakers and the Yankees generally had reverse approaches
to life.
While the Puritans distrusted people and instead trusted institutions, Quakers trusted people
and distrusted institutions.
This explains a lot of their day to day living.
Yankees made public schools, Quakers made private.
Yankees were patriarchal, Quakers would address everyone as “friend” or “thee” regardless
of their status.
The Quakers originally came from the middle of England, and, as a result gifted us with
a vernacular that, while lacking in formal style, was rich with slang.
They brought us words like flabbergasted, thingamajig, by golly, brat, chock-full, and
the one, the only, bamboozle.
BOOM!
There we go, we took the scenic route, but that, lads, is the origin of the word bamboozle.
It truly shows how America is a melting pot.
If we go back to that Google Ngram Graph, it allows us to see some of the first uses
of bamboozle in literature.
People like playwright Colley Cibber and satirist Jonathan Swift were early adopters of the
word.
Swift, by the way, didn’t like it, and thought the word would fade quickly from the English
language.
Boy how he was wrong.
Now, I know what you might be thinking: if Jonathan Swift was alive today, his favourite
Skillshare course would probably be “Creative Writing: Crafting Personal Essays with Impact”
by Roxane Gay.
Hah, I was thinking that too.
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A Premium Membership gives you unlimited access to the high-quality classes on Skillshare,
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You’ll never be bamboozled by complicated concepts or new software ever again!
In all seriousness, I do actually use and love Skillshare.
I just finished my friend Thomas Frank’s course on creating a productivity system and
I loved it.
If that, or any one of their 20,000 other courses seem interesting to you, I implore
you to click the link in the description where the first 500 people get 2 months of Skillshare
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Act now for this special offer, and start learning today.
Thanks y’all!
I actually learned most of the stuff in this video in the AP US History class, so shoutout
to my teacher Kit for making that happen.
As a result, my main sources for this video are Eric Foner’s stupendous textbook “Give
Me Liberty!
An American History," aforementioned historian Walter McDougall’s writing on 1750 ethno-cultural
groups from his amazing book, “Freedom Just Around the Corner: A New American History,”
and some other outside resources that are in the description as always.
If you liked this video, it really helps if you click that infamous like button and be
sure to subscribe if you haven’t already.
If you want to check out more videos on history, I recommend How Did Internet and Cable Companies
Get Regional Monopolies? and any one of my two videos on Hamilton, all of which are on
screen right now.
Thanks to all my patrons at Patreon.com/Techicality, especially these awesome people.
Shoutout to my friend Lucas.
Thanks for watching, DFTBA, and explore on. Happy 2019, folks. That's a wrap!