Is the expression ‘Teeming Millions’ taken from Bram Stoker’s Dracula, or was it a common phrase prior to that? I read Dracula for the first time a few weeks ago, and that was the only other place I have seen TM mentioned, when describing London at the start of one of the chapters.
W’ll have to ask Ed – I doubt Cecil can be bothered to give us an answer – the name goes back to the earliest days of the Straight Dope, which was long before cyberspace.
Ed sez that “Teeming Millions” predates his tenure on the job and goes back to the very first year the Straight Dope became a feature at the Reader, which means 1973 or therabouts.
We will try to find the exact column for the cite, but it may be lost in the mists of time.
Did Toto try to grab the corner of the curtain while you were talking to Ed?
The question above seems to predate Cecil by about a century. Dracula was published in 1897.
If anyone has a copy of the Compact O.E.D. (Oxford English Dictionary), they could try looking under “teeming” for luck. Sometimes the many phrase quotes they cite are just the ones you want.
If anyone does run across an earlier usage, they could update Cecil’s Wikipedia entry at Cecil Adams - Wikipedia
It was a not uncommon expression starting in the early 19th Century, usually referring to India/Asia and its population.
Cite?
from the short story The Head of the District, 1891*.
*though I guess that’s late 19th century
You have two choices:
Subscribe to a historic newspaper database as I do(newspaperarchive] or…
use Google book search.
From page 344 of The Baptist Magazine(1843)-“But a great motive that ought to stimulate us to prayer is the fearful position of the teeming millions with regard to eternity.”
Thank you, good Sir.
A word of caution to those using Google book search–it IS fallible. Just because a hit implies that it is from, say, 1843, that is possibly wrong. Quite often, the date is merely the earliest origin of that journal/book. It can lead to some pretty bad errors. And the fact that many things are “snippet view” only, compounds the problem. If you get a “full view” at least you can scroll back to the beginning of the book and check to see if it was published at that date.
In the cite above, posted by the esteemed Czarcasm, the hit is actually from 1843.
From page 75 of Discovery: The Popular Journal of Knowledge(1763)-"… reformers in this country would read this book first and so gain an insight into the matters which really sway the minds of India’s teeming millions…"
[edited to add]I got 328 hits for the term for the years 1800 to 1850.
Sheesh! After I warned you.
That hit is actually from 1924. Look at the left side of the snippet view. “Outlines of Fungi and Plant Diseases by F.T. Bennett.” That was published around 1924.
No. I had two other choices as well. I could have just taken your word for it, as a scholar and expert, like I would have with Cecil (Oh, wait, Cecil gets a lot of challenges, so scratch that.)
Or, which I did do, ask for someone with an OED to provide a cite. (If I had been posting at home, I would have done so myself, but I am travelling)
Or wait for Czarcasm, who’s an expert and scholar.
Would you like to amend that to say “Or wait for Czarcasm, who didn’t know the first thing about this subject until he followed samclem’s expert advice.”?
Yeah, sure, whatever keeps the peace.
Since when do we tell people who ask for a cite to do their own searches? I have no doubt that your original reply is correct, but I think that asking for a cite is more than valid. That is basically the engine of the whole fighting ignorance thing.
I think samclem’s point was that he used a paid-subscription database to find a reference, one must be a subscriber to access his cite, and he put out the Google book search option as an alternative, but did not use it himself.
Fair enough. Maybe a “I am getting them at oldbooksdotcom, here is the link. It costs $14 a year, so it is a steal” would have been more helpful.