screw loose/a screw

[George Thompson]

This is from the NY Herald, May 27, 1842, p. 1, col. 5.

[A convict, awaiting a trial on an additional charge, escaped "by walking out of the prison door in broad day light."  The Herald complained that this was the 3rd escape in recent months.]  The keeper must look to his "screws" as some of them are certainly more than loose.

This alludes to the expression "to have a screw loose", which the OED cites from 1810, 1821, 1848, 1833, 1841, 1870.  The citations are in that order, which seems odd.  All I think are from English sources.  So this passage, though 32 years later than the earliest citation, stands as the first American citation.

In addition, the passage exhibits the word "screw", referring to a prison guard.  Curiously, this sense isn't in the OED at all, although Partridge's Dictionary of the Underworld traces it to 1821, I think -- it's not to hand -- and it's also in Farmer & Henley.  It was Brendan Behan's ordinary term for prison guard in Borstal Boy.

GAT

George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern Univ. Pr., 1998.