This week’s theme
Characters related to slavery who have become words in the English language

This week’s words
Jim Crow
Simon Legree
Uncle Tom
topsy
Aunt Tom

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A.Word.A.Day

PRONUNCIATION:

(TOP-see)

MEANING:

noun: Something growing without intention or direction.

ETYMOLOGY:

After Topsy, a young enslaved girl, in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Earliest documented use: 1885.

NOTES:

Topsy, a young girl, is purchased by the slaveholder Augustine and she becomes friends with his daughter Eva. When Eva asks Topsy who made her, she replies, “Nobody, as I knows on. I s’pect I growed. Don’t think nobody never made me.” The cute reply became popular in the English language to refer to an unplanned or an enormous growth.

USAGE:

“The securities lending business had grown like topsy without any proper supervision, ballooning to as much as $2 billion.”
Ben Butler; Fast Cars, Big Houses, Hot Money; The Australian (Canberra); Sep 13, 2018.

“But [Channel 4 is] also that uniquely British thing: a hodge podge that works, an institution you couldn’t invent because, somehow, it’s just grown. Topsy TV.”
Peter Preston; If Channel 4 Didn’t Exist, You Couldn’t Invent It; The Independent (London, UK); May 10, 2016.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY: