A gambler trying
to pull more cash from a table might invoke Lady Luck with the plea . . .
“Baby needs a new pair of shoes!”
An economist
looking to pull more cash from the economy might look to . . .
“Prime the pump.”
But priming
an economic pump is easier said than done.
The modern economy is so complex, with so many inputs, outputs, factors,
conditions and unexpected consequences, that instituting any new economic
policy is, to some degree, just a crap-shoot, regardless of how sound the underlying
economic principles seem.
It is
therefore fitting, perhaps, that both expressions originated from the same
source – the desperate and creative minds of hungry newspaper editors.
“Baby needs
a new pair of shoes” can be traced to mid-19th century newspaper
editors who used tales of personal woe to shame their advertisers into paying
their bills:
Where is money coming from to pay for paper for our next
issue? We cannot get a quire without the
cash in advance. We have borrowed until
our credit is gone. We have worked two
years for nothing and boarded ourselves – or rather our wife has boarded us,
“free, gratis, for nothing.” Our
compositors want their wages. Our
landlord wants his rent. Our children want shoes and our wife wants
a new calico dress.
Grand River Times, December 5, 1855,
page 1.
I traced the
transition to the modern gambling form of the expression in my earlier post, Baby
Shoes, Calico dresses, African Golf and Crabs - a Dicey History and Etymology
of "Baby Needs a New Pair of Shoes!"
The economic
sense of “prime the pump” can similarly be traced to an anonymous newspaper
editor encouraging its readers to spend money on advertising to “prime the pump”
of their business:
Albany Ledger (Albany, Missouri), July 28, 1899, page 1. |
The same anecdote appeared
in more than one hundred newspapers over the next several years, mostly through Kansas, Missouri and the Midwest, but also in places as far removed as Minnesota to Texas and and Ohio to Washington and Oregon.
In 1916,
"muckraking" journalist William Hard introduced the expression to a wider
audience with his essay, “Big Jobs for Bad Times” (Everybody’s Magazine, Volume 35, Number 2, August 1916), which the Oxford English Dictionary cites
as the earliest known example of the expression. See: “Priming the pump,” Mark
Liberman, LanguageLog, May 12, 2017.
Hard predicted
an imminent depression – “Bad Times”:
To stimulate the economy, Hard proposed a nationwide program of large
public works projects, to include dams, bridges and roads – “Big Works”:
He imagined
President Woodrow Wilson (as nearly as he could “clumsily approach his
inimitable style”) addressing leaders of labor, business and banking:
“When the waters of business are stagnant, gentlemen, it
becomes necessary, if I may say so, to ‘prime
the pump.’”
The big work
of literally moving water into the desert and out of the swamps might stimulate
the economy:
The expression became fodder for political cartoonists and advertisers
during the 1920s. See: “Priming
the pump: a cartoon history,” Ben Zimmer, LanguageLog, May 13, 2017.
In 1930, when the country was in the midst of an actual
depression, a pro-Hoover cartoonist imagined President Hoover using public construction
funds to prime the pump of the economy and pull the country out of depression:
New York Tribune, Inc. 1930 (image from “Priming the pump: a cartoon history,” Ben Zimmer, LanguageLog, May 13, 2017). |
Whatever Hoover did, or intended to do, it did not work.
But it was President Roosevelt who later became better known
for successfully “priming the pump” with his New Deal, Works Progress Administration and other public works programs (all of which may have owed a debt of thanks to William Hard's "Big Works for Bad Times"), although even Roosevelt had his doubters:
"The New Deal Pump", dated to 1930 (see “Priming the pump: a cartoon history,” Ben Zimmer, LanguageLog, May 13, 2017). |
Metaphoric pump priming hearkened back to a day when
many people had to pump their own water up from a well. In order to coax
the well into working properly, you had to fill the pipe with water so that it
could efficiently draw suction.
But literally priming pumps could be as unpredictable as
metaphorically priming the pump of the economy – it is pointless if you use
more water than you get out or go into debt borrowing the priming water.
As related by a satirist in 1914:
In the old days, when we had our own well, getting water for
family use was a serious business. As I
told you, the well was seven miles deep, and the water would all run out of the
pump. Then the dad-blistered pipe had to
be primed. I guess you know what priming
a pump is like. You have to pour down
more water than you expect to get back, and then wiggle the blamed old handle
up and down for three hours to get the water started. Sometimes the first priming wouldn’t do the
trick, and then you had to go around among the neighbors and borrow enough
water to do it over again. . . .
“Halcyon
Days, Adventures of a Grouch,” El Paso
Herald, March 10, 1914, page 4.
Priming the
pump could also be dangerous – it was possible to drown in the process:
Estherville Daily News (Estherville Iowa), May 23, 1895, page 7. |
In 2017, a
new president is set to roll the dice and “prime the [proverbial] pump.”
“Baby needs a new pair of shoes!”
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the pump” economy origin history etymology expression idiom “priming the pump” dictionary language etymology history origin expression idiom "prime the pump" "priming the pump" trump
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