[Ads-l] Further Antedating of "Euchre"

MULLINS, WILLIAM D (Bill) CIV USARMY CCDC AVMC (USA) 0000099bab68be9a-dmarc-request at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Tue Aug 25 00:19:54 UTC 2020



>  In Newspapers.com, the advertisement mentioning "Ucre" appears as early as the Tennessean, Jan. 9, 1836.

I'm not surprised; when I found the "ucre" I previously mentioned, it was a side-effect of looking for early US manufacturers of playing cards.  I noted the 4/19/1836 date without trying to see if anything earlier was possible.
(And although Newspapers.com indexes the paper as "The Tennessean", the actual title of the paper from which these cites come is _Nashville Republican_.  I suspect that the title changed at some point, or the Tennessean bought the Republican.)



> I see furthermore that "eucre" appears in the Arkansas Times and Advocate, 25 Dec. 1835 (Newspapers.com).  
> Naturally, Barry Popik has been there already and clipped that article.

In my original post, I linked to an ADS-L Archive post the subject of which is "eucre (card game) antedated to 1837".  I tried to read it, but at that time the Archive was momentarily down.  So I assumed the 1837 date in the title was correct.  I just re-checked it, and the subject line is a typo -- the text of the message refers to and quotes a July 8, 1835 citation, slightly beating Barry's date.

But these can be substantially antedated:

1814 _Lancaster [PA] Intelligencer_ Mar 25 1/4 [newspapers.com, advertisement]
"James Y. Humphreys,
Card Manufacturer,
No. 61, South Second street, Philadelphia,
successor to Thomas DeSilver,
has constantly for sale,
Eagle, Eucre, Harry VIII. Merry Andrew, Com-
mon and French, and Spanish
Playing Cards"

And, while looking for the above, I found a completely different sense of "euchre," one not noted in the OED:

1830 _The Southern Agriculturist_ Sept p. 502
"After breakfast, in looking round the place, we perceived seventy or eighty bushels of euchre, just dug from about a quarter of an acre, grown from slips in seven months . . . It is a species of cassavi or cassada."
[This appears to be a quotation from "Abbott's Cuba"; I can't figure out what the referent is.]
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=njp.32101050722279&view=1up&seq=430&q1=euchre


1831 _The Southern Agriculturist_ Apr pp. 189-190
"I send you a specimen of the euchre plant -- you will perceive the horizontal piece is the original plant -- the vertical, the stock -- and the fibres produces the potatoe or root."
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=njp.32101050722261&view=1up&seq=211&q1=euchre




------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



More information about the Ads-l mailing list