The other day I was passed by an emergency vehicle with a lightbar going that I thought at first was an ambulance, but I saw as it went past that it said “Police Transport Vehicle” on the side. “Ah, a paddy wagon!” I said to my children. “Also sometimes known as a Black Maria.” I wish I could say that they begged me to tell them how those names came about, but no. They preferred to listen to the radio. But it did bug me the rest of the afternoon, so I came home and looked it up on the Internet.
It looks like “paddy wagon” probably came from all those drunken, good-for-nothing Irish that needed to be bundled up and toted off during the 19th century (please address all legal correspondence concerning PC lawsuits to Cecil Adams, c/o The Last House on the Left, the Mind of God, Chicago, IL). However, “black maria” has me stumped. Shall I believe the all-too-facile explanation found below (the only one I could find at onelook.com)? Sounds to me like something cooked up on the spur of the moment by someone whose kids were nagging him for an explanation.
Seems to me that someone told me a long time ago that it had something to do with the card game “whist” or maybe it was hearts. I don’t play cards, so I don’t know. Didn’t see that mentioned anywhere.
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This sounds a little too pat to me.
Thoughts?
“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast!” - the White Queen
IIRC Boston plus French is a no go. Irish, yes, Italian, certainly, WASP, of course but French? Maybe the French just had the good sense to leave Boston before I was old enough to play there.
Are you driving with your eyes open or are you using The Force? - A. Foley
The French mud-barge appears to be an irrelevant side-note. The text is taken just about verbatim from Brewer, so we at least have a nineteenth century citation (from a moderately reputable British source) for this American term.
There’s also an interesting entry on the subject in The Facts on File Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins, but I don’t happen to have access to that book right now.
Origin: Cant [it came from the argot of the underworld]
Was general slang by 1902
Was colloquial by 1930, according to Hotten’s The Slang Dictionary, fifth edition.
According to Ware’s Passing English, it was occasionally rendered as sable Maria, which was absolete by 1920. {the double-asterisk is actually a representation of Partridge’s dagger}
When an thing or concept is described as a person, it’s called personification.
And now you have me doubting the quality of Partridge. (!) They are claiming an 1870 appearance labeled cant when we already have a reference that is 23 years older published in a newspaper. (I will cut them some slack on the grounds that Partridge is firmly grounded in British slang and it may have not made an appearance there until later (when/where some crook brought it home from the states).
The Black Maria exploding shell appears to have no relation to the paddy wagon.
I don’t think this will help, but from the German side (the artillery shell business got me thinking of this) the German slang equivilant for the Black Maria is Gruene Minna-- not “black Maria” but “Green Minnie”. For whatever it’s worth. . . Probably just popped up with the common use of a feminine name with the color of whatever the thing was for a slang term. Like Big Bertha for the cannon.
I wouldn’t worry too much for Partridge’s reputation. It’s not as though he could find the earliest possible citation by running a search engine. No matter how good you are, it’s always possible that there’s an earlier instantiation that nobody has unearthed yet.
Wikipedia: "In 1932, Black Maria suffered a broken leg as a result of a paddock accident and was humanely destroyed.
She was named after an earlier world famous black racehorse,whose name was pronounced Black ‘Moriah’, which was foaled in Harlem, New York, in 1826 who won many races (her purse winnings alone amounted to nearly $15,000, a very large sum for the period).The most famous exploit was on 13 October 1832, when she won the race for the Jockey Club purse of $600 at the Union Course. In 1870, an article about her in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine noted that “The track was heavy, and yet, to achieve a victory, twenty miles had to be run. We wonder if there is a horse on the turf to-day that could stand up under such a performance as this?”. Her speed was implied in the nickname given to horsedrawn black (or dark blue) Police prisoner vans of the period who swiftly whisked felons away from the scene of a crime. This name for a Police van was adopted in Britain and even France where a similar term was already in use."
My Da, born 1910, always pronounced it “Moriah”, but he was a Dubliner. “Paddy wagon” might have got you a knuckle sandwich.
Ngram viewer shows that the expression was at it’s peak in the USA before the Civil War, and then rose in popularity again with the arrival of the horseless ones, peaking in the 1950s in both the USA and UK…