“A lawyer is a mouthpiece or a shyster or a lip,” a Saturday Evening Post article explained in 1929. No lawyer likes to be called a mouthpiece or lip—Frank Sinatra’s lawyer Milton A. (“Mickey”) Rudin waved a libel suit at Barron’s after it ran a letter from him in 1979 under the headline SINATRA’S MOUTHPIECE—but of the three terms, shyster is by far the strongest.

Efforts have been made over the years to derive shyster from such diverse sources as the name of Shakespeare’s character Shylock; from an old slang sense of shy, meaning someone ofdisreputable or questionable character; from the Gaelic siostair, a barrator, in the sense of one who initiates quarrels or groundless lawsuits; and from thesurname Scheuster, referring to a particularly unscrupulous lawyer said to have operated in NewYork City in the 1840s.

The Scheuster theory was the most widely accepted until Roger Mohovich, a newspaperlibrarian at the New-York Historical Society, discovered what is apparently the term’s first appearance in print. This came in an account on July 29, 1843, by Mike Walsh, editor of The Subterranean, of a conversation that he had had with an especially artful lawyer, Cornelius Terhune. Terhune asked Walsh, then campaigning against corruption in the courts, to take care to distinguish him from the many incompetent lawyers who flocked around the Tombs, as the Manhattan House of Detention for Men was commonly called. Terhune characterized such legal riffraff with a word that Walsh had never heard. So the editorasked him to explain.

“The Counsellor expressed the utmost surprise at our ignorance of the true meaning of the expressive appellation ‘shiseter’; after which, by special request, he gave a definition, which we would now give our readers, were it not that it wouldcertainly subject us to a prosecution for libel and obscenity.”

Mr. Mohovich forwarded this citation to Professor Gerald L. Cohen, of the University ofMissouri-Rolla, who had already done considerable research on shyster. (Among other laborioustasks, he had gone through lists of New York lawyers of the period without finding a Scheuster.) The professor knew that Walsh had spelled the word in different ways before settling on shyster and had applied it to incompetent lawyers before employing it as an epithet for unscrupulous ones, especially those who bilked inmates of the Tombs, demanding payment in advance for services that were never rendered.

Now the shiseter spelling and thecontext in which it first appeared enabled Professor Cohen to demonstrate in “Origin of the Term ‘Shyster’” (Forum Anglicum, 1982) that shyster evolved from shiser or shicer, underworld slang of theperiod for a worthless fellow, which derived in turn from the German Scheisser, an incompetent person or,more to the point, an incontinent one. And Scheisser, finally, comes from Scheisse, shit.

Which is why Walsh could not pass on Terhune’s definition without risk of prosecution—and why the term is a much greater insult than if it had derived fromShylock, shy, siostair, or Scheuster.

—Hugh Rawson

As a young man, George Washington bought and sold slaves without scruple, but his experiences commanding black troops on Revolutionary battlefields began to reshape his thinking. In his final will he made provisions to free “all the Slaves which I hold in my own right,” the only Founder to do so. In An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 416 pages, $30), Henry Wiencek tells the story of his moral transformation, weaving evidence from a wide range of sources into a compelling narrative.

Why did Washington wait so long to act? He himself owned fewer than half of Mount Vernon’s 317 slaves; most belonged to his wife’s estate. Unless he could induce Martha to free hers at the same time, slave families would be separated, and Martha’s determination toprovide for her children and grandchildren seems to have outweighed her loyalty to her husband. For the last 10 years of Washington’s life, he planned in secret, wary of a political backlash, worried that his wife and her heirs would try to stop him.

Did Washington father a child, West Ford, by a slave named Venus, as some Forddescendants have long believed? Wiencek concludes that Washington’s self-discipline and concern forhis reputation make it unlikely.

The hero’s flaw, if he had one, was his failure to free his slaves when he assumed the Presidency; he could have set a valuable precedent.

And he might have made a move even sooner. “The window had opened at Valley Forge,” Wiencek writes, “when Washington was in desperate need of black men for the American cause.” Two idealistic South Carolinians proposed recruiting slaves to the Continental Army by promising them freedom at war’s end, a scheme they hoped might eventually lead to abolition. But Washington gloomily concluded it was already too late to ask slaveholders to put national interests ahead of their own. “ThatSpirit of Freedom which at the commencement of this contest would have gladly sacrificedevery thing to the attainment of its object,” he wrote, “has long sincesubsided, and every selfish Passion has taken its place.”

Going over plantation records at Mount Vernon, Wiencek found heartening evidence that the slaves at least were bettering their lot long before Emancipation. “Nails disappeared by the barrel; the stable boy was stealing the horse feed; Washington figured that half of his pigs were being stolen; and so much seed was walking off that Washington ordered the seed to be mixed with sand soit would be too bulky and heavy to steal.”

It’s always a good time to celebrate military valor, and in Combat Jump: The Young Men Who Led the Assault Into Fortress Europe, July 1943 (Harper- Collins, 400 pages, $24.95), Ed Ruggero tells the story of the 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment, which made the Army’s first-ever full-scale paratrooper invasion during the Allied attack on Sicily in World War II. If the invasion had failed, the Army might have written off paratroopers as a weapon. Ruggero follows their story from induction to the end of the Sicily campaign, with much help from the men’s still-vivid recollections. Medal of Honor: Portraits of Valor Beyond the Call of Duty, by Nick Del Calzo and Peter Collier (Artisan, 272 pages, $40.00), honors the 3,440 American servicemen through the centuries whose bravery has been outstanding enough to earn them the nation’s highest military award. The book does this by telling the stories of 117 living Medal of Honor recipients. Each breathtaking story is illustrated with photographs showing the recipient during hisservice days and today.

The world remembers Samuel F. B. Morse as a successful painter who became even more successful inventing the telegraph. He saw things differently. Believing that President John Gtuincy Adams had personally denied him a key commission, he wrote, “He killed me as a painter, and he intended to do it…” and “I could wish that every picture I ever painted was destroyed.” About his technological breakthrough— and his patent battles over it—he wrote at one point that “if ever demoniac possession belonged to an invention, not seven but seventy have crept into the Telegraph.” In Lightning Man: The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse (Knopf, 489 pages, $35.00), Kenneth Silverman, the author of a Pulitzer- and Bancroft-prizewinning biography of Cotton Mather, reveals a turbulent man in aturbulent time he helped shape.