Throughout the country’s long history, the United States’ presidents have each achieved a remarkable set of honors, prizes, and firsts.
Woodrow Wilson is the only US president ever to have held a Ph.D. President Taft is the only person to have both held the presidency and served as ‘Chief Justice of the Supreme Court’. On May 22, 1849, Abraham Lincoln became the first and only president to be granted a US patent, No. 6,469, for a device he designed that lifted boats over shoals. And in 2005, Bill Clinton became the first US president to win a Grammy Award, picking up the prize for Best Spoken Word Album for the audiobook of his autobiography, My Life. (Jimmy Carter went on to win the same award three times in 2007, 2016, and 2019, while Barrack Obama has won it twice before he became president, in 2006 and 2008.)
Of all the presidential achievements, however, one of the most bizarre is that of Thomas Jefferson, who, it could be argued, is responsible for inventing an entirely new way of saying “goodbye” that became a popular catchphrase across 19th-century America.
The story begins sometime around the start of Thomas Jefferson’s second term as president, in the early 1800s. One day, he was out riding around his Monticello estate in Charlottesville, Virginia, when he happened to bump into a gentleman who was also out on his horse, and who accompanied him on the remainder of his trek. The man, it seems, failed to recognize that his new riding companion was the President of the United States, and the two men simply continued to chat casually as they rode along.
As it often does, however, the gentle small talk quickly turned to politics, and still blissfully unaware that he was riding with the President, the man began to angrily badmouth the entire current US administration, culminating in a vocal attack on President Jefferson himself. The Louisiana Purchase of 1803, the man declared, had been nothing but a “wild scheme.” The 1807 Embargo Act — which halted trade in protest over the British and French treatment of America during the Napoleonic Wars — was a disastrous diplomatic misfire. And, according to this man, the president’s plans for a so-called “gunboat navy” were even more preposterous. Throughout all the complaining and the angry invective, however, Jefferson remained resolutely silent.
Eventually, the pair arrived back at the road leading up to Jefferson’s estate, and despite now knowing precisely what the man thought of him, the president calmly asked him if he would like to join him for a drink and some refreshment. The man gratefully accepted, and as he stepped down from his horse, finally decided the time was right to ask his new friend his name.
“Thomas Jefferson,” the president replied. “And you?”
Suddenly, and at long, long last, the events of the previous hour or so dawned on the man, who paused for a moment before answering. “My name is Haines,” he answered curtly, before jumping back up onto his horse and galloping away as fast as he could, without another word.
Jefferson, in typically self-effacing style, reportedly relished telling this particular tale to his friends and colleagues. The story had become well known enough to make its way into print for the first time in the early 1840s. Thanks to that, by the mid-19th century, “My name is Haines!” Had become a quirky and popular catchphrase in American slang. It was used whenever anyone needed to depart from somewhere quickly and without the usual formalities, or else whenever a terrible error was suddenly realized and the time had come to bail out of a conversation.
Sadly, the popularity of the phrase—like many catchphrases—proved short-lived, and its use in American English appears to have dwindled after the Civil War. By the turn of the century, few people, if any, were still using it. Nevertheless, Thomas Jefferson’s peculiar contribution to our language remains recorded in one of the dustier corners of the dictionary to this day!