Charting a Path to "Frisco" in 1849
In 1939, David Warren Ryder published a brief “book,” San Francisco’s Emperor Norton, in which Ryder claimed — without any evidence — that Emperor Norton issued a proclamation against the use of the word “Frisco” for San Francisco. According to Ryder, the Emperor wrote that “Frisco” had “no linguistic or other warrant.”
Leaving aside Ryder’s contentious — and still unproven — claim of imperial authorship for this so-called proclamation, the embedded claim that “Frisco” has no “linguistic warrant”…warrants scrutiny.
Recently, I uncovered the ship journal of Isaac Wallis Baker, who captained the bark San Francisco on its Gold Rush voyage from Beverly, Mass., to San Francisco between August 1849 and January 1850.
In one entry from December 1849, written aboard the San Francisco when the ship was in the Pacific off northern Mexico, Baker pens a poem in which the opening verse rhymes “Francisco” with a riff that points to an obsolete 16th-century word, “frisco,” that the Oxford English Dictionary gives two meanings: (a) “a brisk movement in dancing; a caper,” and (b) “a term of endearment.”
Baker’s journal was documented in 1923 — but it appears that this entry has remained buried and unnoted for the last century.
If you like “Frisco,” you’re gonna love this.
Even if not, you’ll learn something new!
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