Democratic Sentinel, Volume 19, Number 38, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 September 1895 — Where “Jingo” Game from. [ARTICLE]

Where “Jingo” Game from.

The origin of the word “jingo,” now so freely used on both sides of the Atlantic, is tlrhs related by a correspondent of the Boston Herald; “Some years ago, at the time of the Turkish atrocities in Bulgaria (so vividly described aud so vigorously reprobated by Mr. Gladstone), the advisability of English intervention was agitated by a large war party, whose membera were of all shades of political opinion and joined forces only on this one point. There is no public question in England that does not sooner or later get into the songs in the music halls, and so one of the most popular singers of the day wrote a ditty, with these lines for a chorus: “ ‘We don’t want to fight, but, by jingo! if we do, We’ve got the men, we’ve got the ships, we’ve got the money, too!’ “This song was received by the patrons of the music halls with every demonstration of enthusiasm, and the refrain quickly found its way into, the newspapers. An anti-interventionist journal one morning contemptuously referred editorially to the extremists as ‘jingoists.’ The word was not long afterward heard on the floor of the House of Commons, aud quickly thereafter took its place in the popular vocabulary, being presently simplified into ‘jingoes.’ A severe storm in England in December last was marked by the deposition of notable quantities of salt on the trees, the ground and various objects at considerable distances from the coast. Similar phenomena have been observed rarely before. Mr. G. Symons has shown in the Monthly Meteorological Magazine that the spray of the ocean was carried to distances of between seventy-five and one hundred miles from the sea.