"blue laws", 1755

[Geoffrey Nunberg]

> From: "Joel S. Berson" <Berson at ATT.NET>
> Date: September 28, 2010 8:25:25 AM PDT
> Subject: Re: "blue laws", 1755
>
> ...
> 2)  What is the best hunch today for to the origin of "blue
> laws"?  Has anyone associated "blue laws" with blue, adj., "being
> "dismayed, perturbed, discomfited; depressed, miserable,
> low-spirited"?  As in one might find in a sentence suitable for The
> 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee: "I doubt not that I wore my
> sadd-coloured cloaths for the Sabbath last Saturday ev'nin' because I
> was so sad and blue thinking about our blue laws"?  ("Blue" in this
> sense goes back to a1550, 1682, and 1783.)
>
> Joel


There's a discussion of this sense of 'blue' in a nice essay by
Kenneth M Morris, "Blue as a Marker of Intensification" (AS 51,1/2,
1976), which takes up a range of uses of 'blue' as an intensifier
(e.g.   ___ murder, true ___,  ___ sky, ___ in the face, ___ funk, ___
blazes, ___ streak, "as clear as ___ mud," etc.). He suggests that the
"blue laws" sense of the adj. had its origin when 17th c Scotch
Presbyterians adopted blue worsted rather than black silk stockings to
signal their opposition to foppery and faddishness (vd the Blue
Stocking Parliament of 1653), which in turn turned the preexisting
'true blue' into "a derisive epithet for those who looked with
disfavor upon the licentiousness of the times." The OED doesn't give
this sense of 'blue' or 'true blue', but it's in Farmer and Henley,
who cite Butler in Hudibras (1673): "For his religion... 'twas
Presbyterian true blue." They explain this use of 'blue' via the
Covenanters' desire to oppose themselves to the royal red.

Whatever the motivation for of this use of '(true) blue,' Morris
conjectures that it came to America with the colonists and influenced
the notions of 'blue laws'. This isn't wildly implausible -- at the
least it can't be concluded that the phrase has no 17th c. roots , as
the entry at snopes.com cited in Wikipedia suggests. So even if Peters
coined 'blue laws' itself, he may have been using 'blue' in a sense
already familiar to the colonists.

Geoff

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