Wrote William MacLeod Raine in the Western novella "Bucky O'Connor" (1910).
The original meaning of "think tank" was brain. I learned that just now from the OED.
In 1964, the St. Louis (Missouri) Post-Dispatch quoted Harry Truman saying that he wants to live to be 90 "if the old think-tank is working." I guess the skull is the container — the tank — and the brain the contents. I see that people also said "think box."
Does anyone still use the phrase "think tank" like that? It would be confusing, now that "think tank" has come to mean "A research institute or other organization providing advice and ideas on national or commercial problems" (OED).
The oldest published appearance of that usage is:
1958 Econ. Jrnl. 68 362 The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (known in some quarters as the Think Tank) at Palo Alto.
The parenthetical was needed. Shortly thereafter, quotation marks eased the term into our vocabulary:
1962 N.Y. Times 3 Nov. in D. L. Larson Cuban Crisis 230 Robert Kennedy had stepped out of a ‘Think Tank’ meeting that morning to return a call from the President.
1967 Mrs. L. B. Johnson White House Diary 8 Oct. (1970) 577 Mt. Hope Farm..will be the site for the environmental planning center—a sort of a ‘think tank’ for city-planning experts.
By the time Nixon took over, the scare quotes were gone... or were moved over to a coinage of Nixon's, "brainwork":
1969 Hutchinson (Kansas) News 22 Jan. 1/4 He [sc. President Nixon] said he is going to..take over a smaller room across the street as a kind of think tank for what he called ‘brainwork’.
Brainwork — for thinking — that never caught on. Or did it already exist and its association with Nixon killed it?
I see an OED entry for "brainwork," and it appeared in print in 1606: "Oh Philocalia, in heauy sadnes & vnwanton phrase there lies all the braine worke, by what meanes I coulde fall into a miserable blanke verse presently."
And I like this (from 1703): "I am fully convinc'd that Brain-work infeebles the Body extreamly."
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William MacLeod Raine sounds like a dude, and not a real cowboy.
"Yeah, he'll wet himself."
The modern definition of "think-tank" also kind of works with the quote, turning it into a more general criticism of modern policy. Politicians make bad decisions based on the advice of think-tanks and other policy groups whose analysis is only barely connected with the real world.
"Think Tank" is now also a brand of small cans of oxygen and aromatherapy infusions that are supposed to increase memory and cognitive ability, and also a brand of bags, backpacks, cases, and other equipment for camera enthusiasts.
The fellow you featured yesterday -- Justin Bronk, Research Fellow for Airpower at RUSI -- is at the Royal United Services Institute, which could be the world's oldest think tank. It claims to have been founded by the Duke of Wellington in 1831, but I doubt they've been thinking much for all 191 years.
Nowadays, Think Tanks create Brain Farts
I had never really thought about the origin of the phrase, but if I had been asked to guess at it, I would guessed it was a reference to a single brain rather than a collection of them.
Today's think tanks make me view the phrase as oxymoronic.
Harry Truman came up short on his quest to reach 90- died at age 88. The wife lived to 97.
Interesting. I have never thought about think tank as my brain or in an individual way, or of the origin of the term think tank. However, my brain really is a think tank of two often conflicting voices. There is almost a constant responding of my mind to sensations that are detected by my body and then my automatic habitual tendencies to respond/react to those sensations, and my awareness and observation of this process and usually trying to modify my habitual response with a more appropriate response. My think tank is the duo of my causes and conditions formed self and my higher self or awareness. Often, my higher self is dormant and my habitual self is running the show. This situation often doesn't come off well. I think I'm nothing special and this is the way it is with everyone. A think tank as we speak of it now is probably operating in a similar fashion, but with more competing selves.
"William MacLeod Raine sounds like a dude, and not a real cowboy."
True, but don't you wish you could come out with lines like that — "It hadn't penetrated my think-tank that this was your hacienda when I came mavericking in." It's really a form of polysyllabic humor — funny because of the way unusual, long words are inserted all over the place. Compare W.C. Fields. I wrote about that here, back in 2004.
Love the sheer gaudiness of Raine's sentence. Maybe not genuine cowboy, but definitely genuine cowboy poet. Also, I'm seeing quotation of this sentence by Putin as a possible way out of his Ukraine mess.
I've never heard "maverick" as a verb before. I had the meaning confused with "steer," which changes the sentence quite a bit.
You can get Raine’s book free at the link in the post.
"Brainpan" has been in use since the 12th century to mean skull or brain enclosure.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/brainpan
I first heard the term in a movie about the Hatfields and McCoys that starred Kevin Kostner.
"Think tank" is an interesting phrase to mean brain or mind. It captures how multiple thoughts can kind of randomly swim around in your head and collide in semi-random ways.
Raine sounds clever. I never heard of him, but maybe I should order his novella. A friend uses the term brain bucket, but It might not be
widely used. Metaphors can be useful, over used and used to obscure. The concept of the political think tank is often oxymoronic.
Most so called “think tanks” are just political party adjuncts that produce talking points and agitprop. The term “think tank” is almost an alliterative, euphemism that suggests neutrality and objectivity. The OED is good for identifying early written appearances of certain words,
but it tells us very little about oral usage. For example, we know very little about the Anglo-Saxon spoken language, partly because there was only a small amount of surviving literature. The only authentic “Beowulf” manuscript was severely damaged in a fire, and the missing text had to be reconstructed by linguists. How valid is that? It survived pretty much by accident, and it is a major source of our knowledge of Anglo-Saxon and its vocabulary.
When I was a kid there was an expression: put your thinking caps on…
Must be on the think tank.
He was probably a gay fellow, before that term got ruined also.
@farmgirl, well when I was young (back during the Eocene) we used to use the phrase “going for a swim in the think tank” or “taking a dip in the think tank” to mean thinking hard about some subject. Brookings had been established, and RAND, but I don’t think the term was in widespread use for places like Brookings and Heritage and the like. So perhaps we were accidentally using it to mean our brain case.
The nuns who taught me were using it- had us go through the motions of putting it on our heads and tying a bow under our chins lol. We were little kids- but it stuck w/me. I gotta go work now- in the stink tank… uh, barn lol
Maybe not genuine cowboy, but definitely genuine cowboy poet.
There's a murder mystery (maybe Asimov's Murder at the ABA?) that uses the term "poet lariat." I've always liked that coinage.
When I was a kid there was an expression: put your thinking caps on…
And speaking of books that I used to have somewhere, in The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles (a children's book; my Dad read it to me, and then I reread it myself a year or so later), three kids visit the forbidding dark house on the big lot and find it inhabited by Professor Savant (!), who gives each of them a genuine thinking cap before taking them on a boat ride into another world. I forget what the other two were like now, but one was a thing like an inverted funnel; in the tube on top you put a sprig of rosemary (for remembrance, you know).
Wow- Sr Bonita had to have read Last of the Really Hreat Wangdoodles- and if you knew her? You wouldn’t have thought she could think of a Whsngdoodle! I’ll have to check out that book. It sounds like fun. Someday I’m praying we get Grandchildren <3
Whangdoodles …
""Brainpan" has been in use since the 12th century to mean skull or brain enclosure."
I had thought that was more of a standard term, like "skull," and not a colloquial way to refer to the brain, but I can see at OED that it did have a colloquial application. Examples:
a1641 R. Montagu Acts & Monuments (1642) ii. 117 It is a starveling conceit of Innovating brain-pans.
1693 Oxford-act i. 7 A Full and True Relation..In this own fruitful Brain-pan minted.
1797 E. Nairne Dog-tax 3 She–(God bless her brain-pan) really thought That pigs..Could get a living, merely of themselves.
1822 W. Scott Fortunes of Nigel I. xi. 187 ‘And a hard word it is,’ said Richie, ‘as my brainpan kens to this blessed moment.’...
2005 Hotdog June 86/3 The last big space invasion movie, Independence Day, offered..images of Earthly destruction that still resonate in moviegoers' brainpans nine years after we first saw them.
What about brain child? I haven’t heard that for a long while.
You can read "Bucky O'Connor" at Project Gutenberg — https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1809/1809-h/1809-h.htm
Longer excerpt:
The sheriff's unflinching look met the outlaw's black frown serene and clear-eyed.
“And would he know that you had committed suicide when you ran this place down and came here?” asked Leroy, with silken cruelty.
“Well, he ought to know it. The fact is, Mr. Leroy, that it hadn't penetrated my think-tank that this was your hacienda when I came mavericking in.”
“Just out riding for your health?”
“Not exactly. I was looking for Miss Mackenzie. I cut her trail about six miles from the Rocking Chair and followed it where she wandered around. The trail led directly away from the ranch toward the mountains. That didn't make me any easy in my mind. So I just jogged along and elected myself an investigating committee. I arrived some late, but here I am, right side up—and so hearty welcome that my friend Cork won't hear of my leaving at all. He don't do a thing but entertain me—never lets his attention wander. Oh, I'm the welcome guest, all right. No doubt about that.”
I love the lyrical rhythms Louis L’Amour created, best. I read them all through graded and high school. The world he created was a refuge. I still read them now and again when I want to meet up w/old friends.
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