The term “prime rate” does indeed go back to that period, but it has nothing to do with the “prime rate” meaning of the 20th century which is about the best rate a bank charges it’s best customers.
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It also turns out that the word “gullible” isn’t in the dictionary.
Are you sure? What did it mean then?
The OED says
I guess it’s always possible that the meaning in the 1877 sentence was talking about bank interest, but the OED still linked it to duties.
samclem, please don’t make categorical remarks on the back of your interpretation of one sentence. Fact is, there’s a good chance that the OP’s ridiculously-seeming etymology has a lot of truth. Whatever the other factors in the phrase’s origin (and there’s always many, unlike what etymologists like you to believe… perhaps it did start off with a different technical meaning, and certainly the fact ‘prime’ means ‘best’ was a big part of the story), Nathaniel Prime was a very big guy in the investment banking industry (one of my sources claims he was the leader of its inception) and anyone who used the phrase ‘prime rate’ knew who he was. It’s a pun. Get it? To make it funnier, for all we know, Nathaniel might’ve made his money giving bad rates.
Alex. To use your own words, “Fact is,” there is no evidence that the term “prime rate” has anything to do with Nathaniel Prime.
*Note–the bolding in Alex’s statement was done by me.
Fact is, there is evidence. The evidence is circumstantial, but let us not be imprecise. The years roughly line up with a highly influential, albeit forgotten, character. Technically speaking, what there’s no evidence for (even circumstantial) is that there isn’t a connection. Just so we have our facts straight.
Right. Because the Time of London in 1815 would care about an American banker.
Alex. You can’t prove a negative. (Did I say that right?)
What your mission is, should you decide to accept it, is to provide some positive evidence.
Fact is, false etymologies don’t rely on evidence. They depend on someone pulling a notion of his ass and promoting it as true with absolutely nothing to back it up and much to say that it’s nonsense.
The evidence isn’t even circumstantial. All we have is a vague temporal relationship, but no actual evidence that the prime rate of interest was named after Nathaniel Prime. Even the book review that you cite in post #16 doesn’t say that the book established Nathaniel Prime as the origin of the term.
If the guy was named Nathaniel Smellovitch, and the financial term was the Smellovitch Rate of Interest, then we might more reasonably draw connections between the name and the financial term. But the word “prime” is, in itself, a common word, and one whose meaning fits perfectly well with its use in the financial term.
Sure you can. Eg, if ‘prime rate’ was used before 1800, that would do it. If you show no one’s really heard of the guy Prime, that would be evidence too. Anyway, is “you can’t prove a negative” some sort of defense you use for your cynicism?
Well you do realize that’s predicated on there being a consensus? Not on you deeming, “eh, doubt it.”
Well, of course. But a word can have more than one driving force behind it. The word “apologist” derives from Greek to mean to “speak in defence.” But in English its hints at “apologizing” and groveling casts a distinct overtone to its meaning, so that it’s commonly applied, as wikipedia puts it, to “individuals systematically…justifying orthodoxies, or denying certain events, even of crimes.” Plato’s Apology recounted Socrates’ noble defense speech at his trial. But today, to call someone an apologist is almost a put-down.
Yet lingusts, of course, will simply say the etymology of ‘apologist’ is Greek. Similarly, while “prime rate” is obviously correct English, Nathaniel contributed a back-of-the-mind (or maybe a tip-of-the-tongue) thought that made the piece of jargon popular. If without Nathaniel, the ‘prime rate’ was called the ‘benchmark rate’ or perhaps had no name at all (since not everything important has a name), what can we say is the etymology of the phrase? What really piques my interest is that Nathaniel wasn’t just a banker. He was the banker.
To repeat an earlier quote:
From One Hundred Years of American Commerce (published, 1895):
Like I said, if the benchmark rate of interest were to be named after anybody, this guy would be it.
You don’t know that; it’s pure and rank speculation.
Maybe. But just because this guy seems like a decent candidate does not mean that the term “prime rate of interest” has any connection to him whatsoever.
Continuing to quote books talking about Prime’s influence in early National era banking does not advance your point one iota. I concede his importance to the industry in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. What you cannot do is simply assert that, because he was an important banker and the term “prime rate” emerged in the same historical era, it must have been named after him.
There is a consensus. I infer this from the fact that not one acknowledged word expert can be found who suggests that prime rate means anything other than best rate, rather than being named after Nathaniel Prime.
Oh, right. That’s not a consensus. That’s unanimity.
There’s also the fact that prime was being used in that sense 400 years before Nat was born, and was applied to any number of other phrases in the sense of first, best, or leading (as in prime minister) before he was a gleam in his parents’ eyes.
You don’t have facts or evidence to support your claim. You do have a coincidence. Coincidences have no backbone, unfortunately, and they can’t support any weight.
Will you let me assert that anyone who said “prime rate” (and, in the time before Greenspan, we can assume these weren’t Joes and Janes) in the first half of the 19th century knew who Nat Prime, “one of the most prominent figures” of investment banking, was?
Exapno, I understand where you’re coming from with ‘prime obviously means best’, but for God’s sake, can you stop saying retarded things like “the couple places I looked didn’t mention Nat therefore we can all say linguistic scholars are unanimous in agreeing he wasn’t a factor.” Seriously?
Fine. All you do to do is find the places where someone who isn’t a hapless amateur *does * say he was a factor.
See, I’ve read loads of stuff on the history of English, on word origins, on linguistics, and on the way new words, meanings, and usages spread through the language. One thing you find out very quickly is how awesomely awful the work of amateurs is when looking at origins. They don’t study how usages arise and how they spread. They don’t study how similar terms were used previously. They don’t know anything about how other languages treat equivalent words. What they do is cherrypick the evidence for something they like, brush aside anything to the contrary, and keep asserting that their pet theory must be taken seriously even though they have nothing but a set of associations in their mind to be factored in.
That’s a precise description of what you’ve been doing in this thread. If you want to provide some evidence, of any kind, other than the mere fact that a man named Prime was in the banking industry, we’re all ready to hear it. But if that’s all you have - and so far you give no, zero, other evidence - than it’s completely dismissible. It doesn’t fit into anything else we know. Were the English naming other things after American bankers in the early 19th century? No. They held our primitive banking system beneath contempt. Is there any evidence that the prime rate used in shipping ever was written was a capital P to indicate that it was named after a specific person? No. Is there any reason to think that N. Prime was such a big name in the 1920s that a rate would be named after him? Not at all. He was a small figure in history by that point. And we still have no evidence that the prime rate was written with a capital.
That’s how real language research looks at an issue, and I’m just scratching the surface of how much more work would be involved.
You don’t do any of that. You assert. You speculate. You don’t even bother to check to see if anybody out there might back you up. You have a coincidence and you elevate it into a theory. That’s the way amateurs go about it. You have no cause to complain when you are therefore dismissed as an amateur.
I’ll be happy to look at any evidence you can find. But assertions are of no interest. You’ve asserted your one fact over and over. You now need to go past it - way past it - if you want anything more.
Alex. Since the first use of the term(1815), so far as we’ve found, was from Great Britain, and involved “duties” rather than the best rate that was extended to best customers, do you mean to imply that the British derived that useage from Nat Prime?
I truly doubt that many in the banking industry in the first 30 years of the 20th Century knew who Nat Prime was.
Actually, that’s one area where i was actually able to find some evidence. Here’s an entry, taken from The Bristol Mercury (Bristol, England), Saturday, December 19, 1840; Issue 2649.:
Essentially the same notice can also be found in the Hampshire Telegraph and Sussex Chronicle (Portsmouth, England), Monday, December 21, 1840; Issue 2150.
Despite the fact that Prime was apparently a pretty important figure in American banking, the nineteenth century American newspaper databases that i have access to don’t show many editorial mentions of him. Interestingly, the place where he seems to come up most often is in the advertising sections of the newspaper. For an extended period in the early nineteenth century, he ran advertisements in various New York papers that said:
These occurred mostly in early 1805. In September 1805, he published a notical of removal, stating that he had moved his offices to Hammond Street, Greenwich, “near the Banks.” I initially thought that he might be talking about Greenwich, CT, but upon further investigation it seems that there was, in the early nineteenth century, a Hammond Street in Greenwich Village (it’s since been renamed), and it was near Bank Street.
Notices of Prime’s suicide in 1840 appeared in newspapers all over the north-east, including New York, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Connecticut.
One of the more interesting pieces about him appeared some years after his death, in The Southern Patriot of Charleston, South Carolina (December 9, 1847). It’s a potted history of his career and his firm. I’ve uploaded the article to my webspace, if anyone’s interested.
ETA: And i just noticed that samclem’s quote was referring to bankers in the early 20th century, not 19th. That’s probably true.
The ad is interesting. I wonder if he was playing off the known connotations of Prime by pairing it with premium, or was that standard language for such ads at that time?