[lg policy] Etymology of 'trump'

Tue Aug 25 14:21:18 UTC 2015

 Trump, Card
[image: Donald_August_19]
<http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/files/2015/08/Donald_August_19.jpg>

“Donald August 19″ by Michael Vadon via Wikimedia Commons

It’s difficult to read any standard definition of the word *trump* and not
feel that the lexicographers had an eye on the contemporary political
moment.

The word may have never been on our lips as often as in the past year. The
Google Ngram Viewer demonstrates an enthusiasm for the word *trump *as peaking
in the 1890s
<https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=trump&year_start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=0&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Ctrump%3B%2Cc0>,
back in America’s Gilded Age, after which it went into decline until the
beginning of this century. Now it seems that the media shall let no
*trump-*less
day go by.

*Trump *is a feature of bridge and other card games, many of which persist
in our linguistic imagination primarily through literature. My experience
of whist is restricted to novels. But as card players know, *trump *on its
own can stand in for *trump card, *so the two terms are not easily
disentangled.

The word *trump *has, in fact, different definitions, and they in turn
derive from several different etymologies. Depending on the sense of the
word you’re looking for and the dictionary you turn to, *trump *can be
derived from Italian *trionfi *and so related to English *triumph, *or
through High German to a cognate of the English *trumpet, *or through
French to the verb *tromper, *meaning to deceive.

For example, Oxford’s online French dictionary looks at *tromper *with
attention to the political, as in the example *tromper l’opinion publique/
les électeurs  *(*“*to mislead the public/the voters”).

*Trump * has, of course, many other associative meanings, frequently
denoting some aspect of superiority. *Merriam-Webster
<http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/trump>* ranks them as three:

1. “a card or a suit any of whose cards will win over a card that is not of
this suit”;

2. “a decisive overriding factor or final resource”;

3. “a dependable and exemplary person.”

As a verb, *to trump *is straightforward, aggressive, simple, positive: “to
get the better of.”

These moments of dictionary prescience might lead us to think that *trump * is
the name of any of the contestants in the presidential sweepstakes, since
any one of them needs to get the better of all the others, becoming “a
decisive, overriding factor” one way or another, in order to win over
lesser — and therefore* trumpable* — candidates.

*Trump *seems to bear connotations of both quiet power and big noise. The
*OED* demonstrates the connections between *trump* and many senses of *trumpet.
*In 1805, Sir Walter Scott’s *The Lay of the Last Minstrel * included the
line “When louder yet, and yet more dread, Swells the high trump that wakes
the dead!”
<https://books.google.com/books?id=6I9JAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA187&lpg=PA187&dq=the+Lay+of+the+last+minstrel+%2B+%E2%80%9CWhen+louder+yet,+and+yet+more+dread,+Swells+the+high+trump+that+wakes+the+dead.%E2%80%9D&source=bl&ots=w9NrhmMGNP&sig=NCzUGaWUEKDJOs_X4T1Ai8NMFqE&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CB4Q6AEwAGoVChMIzs77jIfCxwIVR1YeCh3TGwjd#v=onepage&q=the%20Lay%20of%20the%20last%20minstrel%20%2B%20%E2%80%9CWhen%20louder%20yet%2C%20and%20yet%20more%20dread%2C%20Swells%20the%20high%20trump%20that%20wakes%20the%20dead.%E2%80%9D&f=false>

This sense of  *trump* as trumpetlike takes on a further range of
associative and imitative meanings, from a crane’s neck to an elephant’s
trunk and “the proboscis of an insect” (I pass over the sense of *trump* as
sound resulting from digestive misfortune).

Dictionaries are subtle things. Unlike *Merriam-Webster,* the *OED’*s sense
of *trump *as an element in card games is less certain, more contingent.
Thus the *OED* gives us *trump * as “a playing-card of that suit *which for
the time being ranks above the other three” *[italic mine, or perhaps
Hillary Clinton's]. There is risk in being *trump*.

Yet to “turn up trumps” is to have good fortune, to have something lucky
happen to you. On the other hand (this is very much an on-the-other-hand
term)  a *trump * can be “a thing of small value, a trifle.”

What might be most interesting. then, about *trump* is its capacity to
function as an auto-antonym, a word containing multiple meanings among
which are opposites. A *trump * can be “a person of outstanding excellence”
(*OED*) — or a fraud.

Like *cleave*, a word whose opposite meanings (to split, to cling to) are
dear to readers of John Milton, the word *trump *looks in both directions.

And that might be the only connection this writer can draw between the
high, heroic style of 17th-century poetic politics and the national
spectacle unfolding before us, like a game of cards.

http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2015/08/25/trump-card/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

-- 
=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+

 Harold F. Schiffman

Professor Emeritus of
 Dravidian Linguistics and Culture
Dept. of South Asia Studies
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305

Phone:  (215) 898-7475
Fax:  (215) 573-2138

Email:  haroldfs at gmail.com
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/

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