William Safire, “On Language: Janus Strikes Again” (New York Times, Jan. 11, 2004)
When I asked the Lexicographic Irregulars if the stirring phrase of indefatigability had a nautical origin, Doug Wilson, a member of the American Dialect Society, came up with an account of the International Sculling Races in The Brooklyn Eagle of Aug. 29, 1886: ”When asked as to his capacity for endurance, Beach replied, ‘I think I can stay the course.”’
Antedating that were citations sent in by Ben Zimmer at the University of Chicago about horses on a racecourse (The Times of London, 1879: ”Jockeys who have ridden him think he cannot stay the course ”) and, even earlier, about rowing competitions (an 1873 New York Times account about Dartmouth’s crew: ”All question as to their staying the course was set at rest”).
But wait — are we going off the semantic track? Zimmer notes that ”before this period, citations for stay the course invariably have the countervailing sense of ‘to stop or check the course (of something).”’ He offers up Edgar Allan Poe, in his 1835 ”Arabesque” tale ”King Pest the First”: ”But it lay not in the power of images, or sensations . . . to stay the course of men.”
Read the rest here.