Spelling bee is back. So am I

Spelling Bee is back. At the end of the marathon, this year’s winner spelled correctly the word bromocriptine, received $50,000 cash, a commemorative medal, $2,000 from Merriam-Webster, $1,000 in flight credit from Delta Air Lines, and $400 of reference works from Encyclopedia Britannica. “Spelling fast is what I do every day,” explained the winner, an eighth-grader from California. As noted, the winning word was bromocriptine. May the youngster never use this medication!

Actually, bromocriptine is not a hard word compared to the other monsters he spelled at a lightning speed: Philepitta, Metohija, hwyl, and Bhubaneswar. Don’t pity my ignorance, but I recognized none of those words, and since some of our readers may not know them either, I’ll provide definitions. Philepitta is a bird name. Metohija is part of Kosovo; the place name is Greek. Hwyl is Welsh for “excitement”; it never occurs outside the Welsh context. (Incidentally, despite all the efforts to save Welsh from extinction, it is still an endangered language.) Finally, Bhubaneswar (not to be confused with Nebuchadnezzar) is a city in India.

The prize winner, as the NYT informed its readers, spelled more than one word every three seconds, and the author of the article mentions some more words used in the competition: oconee bells (a flower name), catometope “a division of crabs,” and Faesulae, the name of an ancient city in Italy. History is good to know. Yet botany and carcinology are rather special branches of scholarship, are they not? I understand: “Crabbed Youth and Age cannot live together,” but I refuse to surrender.

One learns from the article that the world can boast of a spelling community and that seasoned instructors teach young people to compete. Naturally, the world is also full of ambitious parents, ready to pay coaches who specialize in hard words and know how to spell them fast. What a waste, what a tragic waste!

I have been dealing with students most of my life. Among the hundreds of the young people I see at my lectures, I rarely find anyone who is aware of what happened to Tom Sawyer, David Copperfield, and Natasha Rostova, or who recognizes the word Decameron, let alone the names Walter Scott and Washington Irving. I suspect that their teachers belong to the same lost generation. But catometope and Philepitta, which sound like cat on my top and Philadelphia pita deserve everybody’s attention, do they not? Child abuse! Parents of the World, unite against it! I said so years ago and will repeat it today. Of course, the winner receives a good sum of money. Money, “the stuff that passes from hand to hand and never grows warmer,” as Mowgli put it. The money will be spent, but time never returns. Has this year’s winner, who is of Indian heritage, read The Jungle Book?

In 2026, one of the tough words was quillaia, pronounced “key-eye.” It designates a type of bark that yields a soapy lather, originally a word from the Mapuche language, native to southern Chile. Greece, Chile, Albania, Wales…. What about English words?

Our readers know that for at least a century and a half some of the brightest people in the English-speaking world have fought for reforming English spelling. An English Spelling Society was founded in 1908, but attempts to make conservative and partly irrational English spelling more accessible to learners are decades older. Now that English is used so widely all over the world, those attempts deserve special attention. Such efforts have been very mildly successful only in the United States (thanks to Noah Webster). Our spellcheckers do not solve the problem: before making a mistake, the speller has to learn how to try to spell Peru, kangaroo, rue, grew, through, and rhubarb (add guru for good measure); occurrence and endurance; rally and valley, to say nothing of valet. And don’t forget all those horrors with grey and gray and triplets like crayon, reign, and arraign.

Those are the words whose spelling millions of native English speakers and foreign learners have to cram. Do we need oconee bells to make people’s lives even more miserable? We may ask: will English spelling ever be reformed? I keep hoping against hope. Most of those who will read the examples cited above will probably agree that rue, crew, and through should not only rhyme but also be spelled alike.

All the arguments against the Reform are known, and indeed every change disrupts the status quo by definition and makes someone unhappy. But are we happy now? Spelling has been modified by law in several countries. The most drastic reform took place in Russia after the 1917 revolution, but the project predates 1917: it was only implemented by the Bolsheviks. In our lifetime, spelling has been modified in Germany and less drastically in Iceland. We need someone like Elon Musk to support the idea, and before you can say Jack Robinson, our atrocious spelling will also be reformed. (The article in the NYT is titled “He can spell ‘bromocriptine’ faster than you can say it.”)

I was mildly amused to read that Webster Unabridged and Encyclopedia Britannica support the Scripps National Spelling Bee. A dictionary like Webster Unabridged is not only a great national treasure. It is also a historical museum. It should not be abused for the purposes of an insane competition. The Spelling Bee ruins the brain of the youths who believe that they have achieved something useful and praiseworthy. And as concerns the prize, the winner and $50,000 will soon be parted. I would like to finish my diatribe on a less pathetic note. In the pronunciation of the speakers of American English, at least in the Midwest and in some other parts of the country, latter and ladder, writer and rider are homonyms pairwise. The voicing of t between vowels is a phenomenon well-known to British dialectologists. This is the reason pottage (as in a mess of pottage) became poddage and finally (by rhotacism) porridge, which Goldilocks ate up, knowing nothing about historical phonetics. My students write deep-seeded for deep-seated and futile for feudal. I am so happy they never venture into the spelling beehive.

_{Featured image: A school spelling bee in 2011. Photo by Heather Temske. CC-BY-2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.}

OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.

Restive people never rest

Some parts of the story I am going to tell can be found in most dictionaries, but it is the attempts to connect a few distant dots that may be interesting to those who wonder “where words come from.”

Rest “repose” is a Germanic word with cognates among other related languages, that is, for instance, in Dutch, German, and Scandinavian. At one time, it had the form rasta, as still in Gothic, a fourth-century language, known to us from a translation of parts of the New Testament into it. Yet the Gothic word rasta meant “a mile,” not “rest”! One Germanic mile was equal to two Gaul leagues or five kilometers, a bit over three miles, the distance a walker is supposed to cover on foot in an hour. Consequently, in those days, “rest” had a more concrete sense (namely, “a distance after which one rests”) than “relief from activity.” The history of all abstract words in language runs along similar lines.

This first step in searching for the etymology of rest looks convincing. But we may perhaps go the proverbial extra mile, to obtain a deeper solution. In this blog, I have more than once referred to the old German journal Wörter und Sachen (“Words and Things”). It featured many papers about how words developed their meanings in the process of labor activities. Some such conjectures did not stand the test of time, while others have weathered well. One of the most active contributors to that journal was its founder Rudolf Meringer (1859-1931), for whose contributions I have unbounded admiration. Among other things, he suggested (but in a different periodical) that rasta is related to Gothic razn “house.” This was a great idea. One can find guarded positive mentions of it in all dictionaries, but I doubt that caution is needed here. Meringer guessed well.

Those interested in the origin of other Germanic words designating human habitats will find some information in my posts for January 21 and February 4, 2015 (the essays deal with house and home). Among other things, I noted that the grammatical gender of some such words tends to be neuter. Germanic neuter nouns had the same form in the singular and the plural (like Modern English sheep: one sheep ~ many sheep), so that when we deal with Old English hūs (ū designates a long vowel, as in the modern word who), we cannot know whether the reference is to one building or several “houses” linked together, as is the case with the Old Icelandic word hús (here, ú designates a long vowel).

Characteristically, Gothic razn was also neuter, a circumstance hardly ever discussed in the scholarly literature on this word. In any case, razn, which must have been a place for rest, probably consisted of two or even more adjoining structures, rather than being a separate building. Old English ræsn, a word obviously related to razn, meant “plank, beam,” which means that the Old Germanic razn was made of wood. However, a few non-Germanic cognates of razn refer to branches, switches, and the like. Thus, we get a glimpse of the way old houses were constructed, but hardly of why speakers chose the sound complex raz– (from ras-) to designate one type of their habitat.

Perhaps ras– (a verb, not unlike rush and dash) imitated the sound a branch makes when waved through the air? Unless a word is an obvious onomatopoeia, like puff, hush, grunt, and so forth, we never learn why it has the form that has come down to us. But I find some support for my idea in the fact that quite a few non-Germanic cognates of rest refer to “rush (!), attack.” As Henry Cecil Wyld put it in The Universal Dictionary of the English Language: “We might suppose that the primary meaning of the base was ‘movement’, whether into action or away from it, from which latter sense we later got the sense retreat, cessation from action, rest.”

Disregard the inelegant phrasing and note: “into action or away from it”! The related forms of ras-, as they appear in Greek and elsewhere, are treated with caution or even distrust in some dictionaries and as certain in others. I tend to agree with those who trace English rest, German Ruhe, and Dutch rust (they all have the same meaning) to the root erē– ~ rē– and share Wyld’s interpretation of the root (“movement into or AWAY from action”). I would therefore be happy if my sound-imitative treatment of the Germanic root ras– could find some support: swish branches, build a house, and have a rest!

The old word for “house” can still be discerned in English saltern “saltworks” (that is, a place where salt is prepared commercially), from sealtærn; in barn, from berern, a building for storing “bern,” that is, barley; and in ransack, from Scandinavian (rann-saka, “to search a house,” but the “searching” was performed then, as now, for the purpose of plundering.

Restive, though it now means “restless, fidgety,” once meant the opposite, namely, “inactive, inert”! A restive horse refuses to move. The word goes back to the root of the Romance verb having the sense “to remain in the same position,” from Latin restāre “to rest.” Closely related is English arrest. One wonders at the erratic history of this late borrowing, which emerged in English only in the middle of the sixteenth century: “intractable,” then “stubborn,” and finally, “restless, unruly.” The OED presents, as always, a full picture of this history. The most common sense today (that is, “restless”) surfaced in books only in the middle of the nineteenth century, that is, in Dickens’s days! And we show surprise when unexpected semantic leaps are said to have occurred in the remotest past. 

An Old Idiom

To set up one’s rest “to make up one’s mind, to pause for rest, to halt.” Robert Nares explained this phrase in his indispensable 1822 book A Glossary; or, Collection of Words, Phrases, Names, and Allusions to Customs, Proverbs, &c. Thought to Require Illustration… From the game of primero, meaning “to stand upon the cards you have in your hand, in the hope that they may win.” Nares explains the rules of the game and gives numerous examples. In 1907, the idiom was still known. The OED has one comparatively recent example.

Postscript

I am sincerely grateful to the readers of this blog who responded to my plea for comments. Indeed, there was a break between August and February. It was caused by personal reasons and had nothing to do with paucity of responses. The rest is of course silence.

_{Featured image: The Long Walk. CC-BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.}

OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.

Is there an L in both?

My grandmother was one of those speakers who had an r in the word wash, pronouncing it warsh. For her, the nation’s capital was Warshington, D.C., and the vegetable was a squarsh. That r-ful pronunciation is known as an intrusive r. I’ve got it too, though mine is variable. Sometimes I have an r in wash, washcloth, and Washington, and sometimes I don’t.

There is also something called the intrusive l, which occurs when someone pronounces the word both as bolth. You can also find the intrusive l in mouth and south, though that is less common. I noticed it in the speech of my students in the Pacific Northwest. Typically, about 15% of any given class pronounced both with an l. So what’s going on?

One possibility is that the l is a naturally occurring co-articulation. What does that mean? Well, notice how the o is a vowel produced in the back of the mouth, with the tongue at mid-height and the lips rounded. The b is also a sound made with rounded lips—a bilabial stop in the lingo. Your lips close the airflow and then open it to produce the buh-sound. Go ahead and make some b-sounds and o-sounds and bo-sounds.

The th of both (it’s a single consonant spelled with two letters) is what’s known as an interdental fricative. What that means is that the tongue goes between the teeth (hence the interdental part) in order to obstruct the airflow and create friction (hence the fricative part). Say the th-sounds a few times.

Well, what happens to your tongue as it moves from the back-rounded bo to the word-final –th? Say both slowly a few times and see what you notice your tongue doing. Do you notice how similar the tongue movements are for both and for bolth? For me, both has a slightly lower position of the tongue blade as it goes from bo to th, so perhaps the l-sounds of bolth comes from some speakers having a slightly raised tongue during that transition from bo to –th.

The intrusive r of warsh may have a similar genesis. The consonant r holds a special, quirky place in English phonetics and phonology. There is the historical r-lessness of southern England and of certain American dialects, the linking r that shows up in words like Cuba(r) and idea(r), and the syllabic r of words like bird, which is pronounced brd. The intrusive r of warsh seems to be its own thing, most common among older, rural speakers (and their grandchildren). There’s a back-rounded w and back vowel a followed by sh. Sh is a palatal fricative, meaning the friction is produced with the tongue approaching the hard palate (the front of the roof of your mouth). Along the route from back wa to palatal sh, your tongue makes a gesture close to an r. Try saying wash and then marsh a few times, and you’ll feel where your tongue is going. 

By the way, just as there is a linking r sound (as in Cuba(r) and idea(r)), there is also a linking l sound in some dialect areas of English (such that spa is is pronounced as spal is and drawing is drawling). The linguist Bryan Gick of the University of British Columbia has studied the emergence of such sounds in a 1999 article in the journal Phonology and a 2022 article in American Speech, and he shows how certain articulatory gestures can sometimes create the l-sounds and r-sounds. Gick also notes that “gestural overlap” is a likely cause of the r in warsh. The same, I think, can probably be said for bolth. 

My grandmother would approve.

^{Featured image by Merve Sehirli Nasir via Unsplash.}

OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.

Much <i>hubbub</i> about very little

Soon after the blog Oxford Etymologist came into existence on March 1, 2006 (more than twenty years ago!), I wrote a post on the word hubba-hubba (in those days, I was told not to exceed one page of text, and of course, there were no illustrations). Numerous comments followed. Some time later (on November 22, 2006), my topic was hullabaloo, and again multiple comments rewarded my modest effort. In those days, a stream of responses established a close tie between my readers and me (hence the now defunct section “Monthly Gleanings”). Though I have no idea why that stream has dried up, today even a single comment makes me happy, for “he who is not satisfied with a little is satisfied with nothing.” Perhaps I should stick to the letter H. Anyway, I decided to woo my fickle luck again and will now add hubbub (see the image gracing the title) to that ancient series.

Exclamations, interjections, and war cries are usually hard to trace to their origins. Oops, upsy-daisy, drat, hurrah, hello, hi, and their likes look natural to speakers but not to language historians. Even oh and ah have nontrivial origins, because when people are in pain or are genuinely surprised, they do not emit such genteel “vocalic gestures”: they scream. Hubbub is of course not an interjection, but it makes one think of hullabaloo and other “emotional” H– words denoting noise. We can also remember hoopla and the bird name hoopoo ~ hoopoe.

I usually avoid  discussing nouns, adjectives, and verbs whose detailed and often transparent origin can be found online or in any good dictionary. Yet the amount of information varies from work to work. Though hubbub seems to be a case in point (nothing new, and nothing to write about), this is an illusion. All sources say approximately but not quite the same thing and not enough. Here is the etymological part of the entry hubbub from The Century Dictionary (though this monumental reference work is seldom consulted today, I treat it with great respect): “Formerly also hobub, hooboob, also whoobub (apparently, simulating whopp, hoop); also extended or reduplicated hubbub–boo, hubbleshow, hubble-shubble—words showing imitative variation of a base *hub, probably of interjectional origin, but perhaps in part of hoop, shout.” An asterisk denotes a reconstructed form.

This is all very true. However, there is a hitch in dealing with that entry. Compare the information from the last edition of Walter W. Skeat’s An Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, 1911: “Imitative. Cf. Gaelic ub, interjection of aversion. Formerly also whoobub, a confused noise. Hubbub was confused with hoop-hoop, reduplication of hoop; and whoobub with whoop-hoop.” (Many years earlier, Skeat suggested that perhaps the source of hubbub was indeed whoop-whoop.) Surprisingly, The Century Dictionary does not mention Gaelic, and Skeat, who begins (!) with Gaelic, uses only the irritating word cf., that is, confer, compare. Old dictionaries often tell us to “compare” different forms. How are we supposed to do it?

The volume of the OED with the letter H appeared in 1901, and the entry on hubbub rather cautiously suggested the Irish (that is, Gaelic) origin of the English word, but the second edition of The Century Dictionary ignored this tip. By contrast, The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (1966), derived from the OED, states unhesitatingly: “Of Irish origin .” It then cites a few (irrelevant?) Irish words for disgust and amazement, but the alleged source is supposed to be the battle cry. Can interjections be borrowed? Yes, indeed. The bookish word alas is from Old French. Oh goes back to Latin, via Old French. So does ah, a truly international word. Upsy-daisy is from Dutch.

Hubbub, its history and etymology, attracted a good deal of attention in the nineteenth-century popular press (as usual, in Notes and Queries). The most curious analogy takes us to hubbub,a game like dice, played at one time by some Native Americans. Here is a passage from the book by Henry Spelman Relation of Virginia (1613; I have modernized the spelling): “Drums and trumpets they have none, but when they will gather themselves together, they have a kind of howling or whopub, so differing in sound one from the other as both part (sic) very easily be distinguished.” The earliest example of English hubbub from a text in the OED goes back to 1555.

The ship Pilgrim arrived in America in 1620. By that time, hubbub had become widely known in England. Even Shakespeare used it, though he spelled the word as who-bub. Speelman may have identified the native word with the one he had known at home. But this is unlikely. William Wood in New England’s Prospect (1634) described hubbub as a game resembling dice (“…smiting themselves on the breast and thighs, crying out, Hub, Hub, Hub!”). English hubbub is certainly not from Algonquin, but the coincidence is striking. Similar words have been found in some other languages. For instance, in 1904, a report from Egypt mentioned habub “a dust storm of considerable extent.” Hubbub is, most certainly, an onomatopoeia that could have originated almost anywhere at any time. The question is whether the English word is native or borrowed and, if borrowed, then from where.

Thanks to the excellent research of two scholars, David Greene and Alan Bliss, we know a good deal about the history of hubbub. The seemingly plausible suggestion that hubbub is from French, rather than from Irish, should be discarded. But surprisingly, the Irish form is from English! The source of hubbub must have been the Middle English adverb abo “above,” pronounced as aboo. This pronunciation has been recorded even in some archaic eighteenth-century British dialects. The etymon of hubbub seems to have been some war cries like Irish ub! ub! ubub!

But this reconstruction leaves out the origin of initial h in hubbub. Though the history of this h is unclear, we should note that the earliest form of hubbub, recorded by the OED, has the spelling whobub. Similar spellings were common in the sixteenth century and some time later. As Alan Bliss explained, the story may or even must have begun with fubbub, whose f became voiceless hw (as in the pronunciation of those who say what, which, why with voiceless hw) and later h. Details would take us too far afield. All we have to know is that, most probably, hubbub originated in Early English, was taken over by the Irish, and later returned to English. Not unexpectedly, the word changed its pronunciation more than once along the way. To us this itinerary is full of gaps, and we are left wondering why in the sixteenth century the word was reborrowed into Early Modern English. However, something about this itinerary has been traced with a good deal of certainty, so that hubbub is not “a word of unknown origin,” which is good. Thus, after all, our ado (hubbub) was not about nothing.

P.S. Thank you for the comment on sorrow. The alleged tie between the Hittite and the Germanic words is curious, but of course, its existence cannot be demonstrated, unless both forms are sound-imitative.

_{Featured image: Photo by Joe Van. CC-BY-2.0 via Flickr.}

OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.

Music therapy musicianship: a call for change

The following is offered as a manifesto: a bold assertion of our unique musicianship. We – music therapists – are different from performers and educators. If you are a music therapy student or clinician, consider this an affirmation of who you are. Your musicianship matters much more than you know.

How are we different?

A focus on people

First and foremost, we are musicians of the people. When we engage with participants, we are employing musics that diverse people listen to in their everyday lives. We also use the instruments common to these musics.

An example: I (Bill) am a percussionist who sings and plays thousands of diverse songs, emulating the qualities of different genres. I change these qualities to sound like the original, or to convey a different feel. I improvise using a range of musical frames (e.g., rhythms, progressions, modes). I compose lyrics to songs on the spot while accompanying through an improvised structure. This is only a surface understanding of my unique musicianship, and only one example.

Interactive engagement

Performance is NOT our focus. We focus on musical interaction that can lead to growth or change. We develop shared intentions with participants based on strengths, needs, backgrounds, interests, access to music, and their musicality/musicianship. We navigate with our clients a dynamic balance between structure/safety and creativity/autonomy. Our music-making is not tied to a “score,” but rather to in-the-moment modifications. We are musically vigilant (Ruud, 2020) and musically responsive.

Aesthetic sensitivity

We center our aesthetic sensitivity on people. We listen for more than what is in a song or piece, more so to the qualities of the music that participants and the environment give us: in the sound of a voice faintly singing, in a drum profusely struck, in a breath, in the sound of an ICU machine. We listen as witnesses, and integrate and respond in kind.

We see the values of music in their diverse and connected presentations: as a human right (Clements-Cortės et al., 2024), as a human technology (Patel, 2007), as a tool (Thaut, 2005) or resource (Rolvsjord, 2005) for promoting health, and as a medium for experience (Aigen, 2005; Dewey, 1934).

Why is this difference important?

While affirmation is an imperative of this research, systemic change is our overarching goal. The musics and processes that we employ in our work as music therapists are often peripheral in academic training outside of music therapy-specific courses. Common curricula are greatly informed by classical training and performance, and do not provide our musicianship the amount of space it needs to be truly developed and reinforced.

In many schools of music, music therapy students provide a major portion of student credit hours and funding. Students should not be subsidizing a system that focuses on areas outside of their needs. They should be paying for engaging experiences that clearly prepare them for where they are headed. Students should be taking courses with faculty who create an engaging environment within which these students’ unique music knowledge, music skills, and aesthetic sensitivity are valued.

First steps toward change

We invite you to dig deeper into our two articles (Matney et al., 2024; Meadows et al., 2025) and their supporting analyses. For those of you who are music therapists, students, and educators, we think that you will see parts of yourself and your work authentically represented.

Moving forward, we believe the following offers us the beginning steps toward change:

1. Affirmation: Understand and affirm this uniqueness with those around you (and within you!). Small acts change cultures. For our colleagues in various music and health fields, we hope you may affirm those you work with.
2. Advocacy: Assert the difference, with both objectivity and with pride, in informal and formal conversations.
3. Instigation: Even if shifts begin small, we collectively can find ways to move the curriculum toward greater relevance for music therapy musicianship. We can discuss what content exists in what courses, and how that content does or does not meet the needs of music therapy students. We can instigate change, moving toward classes, content, and timelines that benefit each student’s effort and investment.

The 21^st Century Commission on Music Therapy (2024) has provided concrete and practical recommendations for restructuring curricula. Drafts of new AMTA musicianship competencies seek to provide greater detail, but do not yet go far enough in discussing the nuances of our musicianship: the processes of shared music making and musical responsiveness.

Affirm, advocate, and instigate. Together, we can shift the current culture to foster the future of music therapy as ‘musicians of the people.’

^{Feature image by Andrew K via Unsplash.}

OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.

Think before you tan: why sun awareness matters

Sun Awareness Week (11-17 May 2026) is the British Association of Dermatologists’ (BAD) annual week-long campaign dedicated to raising awareness of the public health risk of sun exposure, from traditional tanning to sunbed use. The week also aims to teach the public about the importance of good sun protection habits, including ways you can check for signs of skin cancer.

Tanning and sunbeds

Sun damage is normally caused by ultraviolet rays from the sun, known as UV rays.

Two types of UV rays can penetrate the Earth’s atmosphere: UVA rays and UVB rays. UVB rays are largely responsible for that perennial summer problem, sunburn. However, both types of UV rays are responsible for potentially more serious issues—specifically skin ageing and skin cancer—the most dangerous version of which is melanoma.

Tanning beds, also known as sunbeds, are well-known for allowing tanning year-round, and are also a source of those UV rays, and can provide an even greater risk for melanoma than their natural counterpart. This is because tanning beds also produce UV rays, but at a much higher concentration than normal, making tanning beds faster, but capable of far more skin damage. That is not to say that traditional tanning is safe; however, sun exposure can be harmful in any amount, to any age group.

Sun protection, prevention campaigns, and public awareness of skin health risks are vital in preventing skin cancers and premature skin ageing.

Recent research from the BAD family of journals—the British Journal of Dermatology, our educational journal Clinical and Experimental Dermatology, and our open-access journal Skin Health and Disease—offers new insights into preventing skin damage and life-threatening skin cancers. Here are some highlights.

Tanning bed trends internationally

In 2009, the International Agency for Research on Cancer classified indoor tanning as a source of Class I carcinogens—the highest level known. As a result, almost 25 countries globally have banned their use for minors—though anyone using a sun bed before their mid-thirties is at a higher risk of developing skin cancer later in life. A study published in BJD showed that Ireland is one of the countries that passed the Public Health (Sunbeds) Act in 2014. Since then, Ireland has seen a dramatic 40% reduction in registered tanning businesses. The key message of the study was that a targeted multi-pronged approach is needed to inform and stop the use of sun beds.

Although the ban on younger people who use sunbeds is helpful in pre-empting later skin cancers, tanning beds are still considered sources of carcinogens, with no safe level of exposure. In the United Kingdom, the regulation of sun beds is poor, as seen in this study, with many beds in sun tanning businesses recorded at settings far higher than the legal limit. This finding also correlates to higher melanoma rates in parts of northern England, with over 50 percent of businesses in some regions over-exposing customers.

Nail lamps and skin damage

Sun beds are not the only indoor source of UV rays. Getting one’s nails done can also pose a surprising risk of UV ray exposure through nail lamps, which help to rapidly dry gel lacquer using similar technology to full-body tanning beds. Individuals using both (ideally not at the same time) can be at risk of skin-damage conditions such as pseudoporphyria.

Sun exposure and athletes

Amongst those who spend much of their time in the sun, student athletes risk over-exposure to UV rays year-round, no matter where in the world they play. Novel research from Stanford has shown that when provided with a short video explaining the risks of sun-exposure, with the free provision of sun-protection in the areas that student athletes frequent, had a positive effect on attitudes towards sun protection usage.

Sun awareness in the medical field

Sun protection awareness campaigns can also benefit healthcare workers. An observational study from Ireland demonstrated that a digitally based sun-awareness campaign targeted at healthcare workers (857 workers completed the survey) in their places of employment raised not only raised the awareness of the importance (79%) of using sun-protection, but also increased the likelihood that healthcare workers would discuss sun protection universally.

Research has shown that clinicians emphasize the use of SPF-containing sunscreens and cosmetics, even though they also do not always meet the standard guidelines themselves. Clarification of sunscreen application guidelines, and further dissemination of the risks of the limits of cosmetics containing SPFs, may be in order—for physicians and the public alike.

Why public health outreach for sun exposure matters

Social media is emerging as an essential tool for raising awareness of the risks of sun exposure and preventing sunbed use among younger generations. Alternatively, social media has also raised interest in sun bed use—especially in the guise of ‘wellness’ and cosmetic applications. Research has shown that individuals who frequently use sun beds are more likely to sunburn as adults and participate in higher risk sun-exposure while using lower-UV ray blocking sun protection.

Acne can be the bane of any teenager—or adult. While some turn to tanning beds for temporary acne relief, adolescents can be unaware of the risks of frequent tanning bed use until the damage may be too late to prevent.

Finally, there is evidence that public health campaigns on skin cancer in both the United Kingdom and Australia have had the positive effect of steadying the rate of melanoma in young adults—especially when those campaigns are based on published research that confirmed the cancer-causing nature of ultraviolet radiation from all types of tanning.

Sun Awareness Week highlights the need for sun protection, education, and awareness about the risks that can contribute to skin cancers—not just from tanning beds. If you notice any changes to skin lesions or moles, then it is best to consult your doctor.

Contribute to the conversation this #SunAwarenessWeek and explore the latest research collection from each of the BAD journals, and check out our Patient Hub for more Sun Awareness resources.

^{Feature image by ClickerHappy via Pexels.}

OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.

Why recovery after a hip fracture is about more than bones

For many older adults, a hip fracture arrives without warning, suddenly changing the course of daily life. Walking becomes difficult, routines are disrupted, and the freedom to live independently can suddenly feel uncertain. Yet when people recovering from hip fractures are asked how they make sense of what has happened, a familiar phrase often emerges: “It’s just part of getting old.”

This widely held belief plays a powerful role in shaping recovery. It influences not only how people understand their injury, but how they imagine what comes next, and whether they believe improvement is possible.

Research published in Age and Ageing, following people from diverse social and cultural backgrounds after hip fracture, suggests that recovery is shaped by far more than the physical aspects of surgery and rehabilitation alone. Beliefs about ageing, cultural norms, family expectations, and the realities of daily life all influence how people approach recovery and whether they take action to prevent another injury.

Even with strong uptake of best-practice acute hospital-based care for hip fractures, a concerning pattern remains. Many patients struggle to stay engaged with rehabilitation or longer-term fracture prevention once they return home. In our research published in Australasian Journal on Ageing, fewer than half of patients followed through with physiotherapy strength and balance exercise after discharge, and even fewer sought related dietary advice or other preventative support. These findings suggest that clinical care does not succeed in isolation. For recovery efforts to be effective, recommendations must make sense within the social and cultural settings of people’s everyday lives.

Recovery after a fracture isn’t just a personal journey; it’s shaped by cultural values and social expectations. For people from collectivist cultures, in which a “we” oriented sense of self is prioritised over an individualistic “I”, recovery is tied to family and community responsibilities. Exercise and rehabilitation were meaningful when they enabled role fulfilment, such as caring for grandchildren, preparing meals for communal gatherings and contributing to household activities, rather than focusing solely on independence. On the other hand, those from individualist cultures often viewed recovery as a path to regaining autonomy, with success defined by walking unaided or avoiding dependence on others. Neither perspective is a one-size-fits-all, but both highlight how aligning recovery with personal and social values can strengthen motivation. When this alignment is missing, even the well-intended advice can feel disconnected or difficult to maintain.

For effective recovery and refracture prevention after a hip fracture, healthcare providers must involve families as partners in care. In cultures where family bonds and collective decision-making are deeply valued, understanding expectations is critical to prevent the risk of well-meaning but limiting advice like “take it easy”. Such reassurance, while comforting, might unintentionally hinder a patient’s full recovery potential. Healthcare providers can help reframe these conversations, empowering families to advocate for progress while respecting cultural values of filial piety.

At the same time, healthcare teams can also inadvertently hinder recovery potential. A focus on acute bone and wound healing, short-term safety, and hospital discharge, while important, may sometimes overshadow conversations about longer-term recovery and potential. When recovery goals are shaped mainly by what feels most safe rather than what feels possible, expectations can narrow, and momentum can stall. Models of care that integrate rehabilitation and prevention into the home environment, such as hospital in the home (HITH) or rehabilitation in the home (RITH), may help bridge the gap between hospital-based care and everyday life, creating continuity across settings rather than a sharp divide at discharge.

As populations age, even with age-specific reductions in some regions, the number of patients with hip fractures will increase, making recovery and the prevention of further injury ever more important. Viewing recovery through a broader lens, one that includes culture, beliefs, relationships, and lived context, helps explain why recovery journeys vary so widely. When care recognises these influences, recovery can become more than bone healing and regaining physical function. It can support people to rebuild confidence, remain connected to what matters in their lives, and reduce the risk of future injuries, including fractures, in ways that are both meaningful and sustainable.

^{Featured image by @daejeung via Pexels}.

OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.

Pen to Paper with Peter Mancall

Writing a volume for the Oxford History of the United States is an exercise in both synthesis and ambition. The series has long set the standard for American historical writing, and to join it is to enter a multigenerational conversation about how the story of the nation’s past should be told. In the interview that follows, Peter Mancall reflects on writing for that tradition, the historians, and reading habits that have inspired and shaped his thinking.

1. You’ve spent decades studying early American history. What first drew you to this period, and what continues to hold your curiosity after all these years?

I became an early American historian during graduate school, lured into the field at first by Bernard Bailyn, who became my advisor. I had not studied this period as an undergraduate, but it sparked my interest almost immediately when I got to my PhD program. I found an arena to investigate the issues that drove me to become a historian—the chance to explore the lives of lesser-known people whose actions shaped North America.

2. Your book opens the Oxford History of the United States—a series known for reshaping historical understanding. What does it mean to you to set this foundation for the entire narrative arc of early American history?

The OHUS has a long and well-deserved reputation as a source of sparkling narratives about the American past. As a historian who had moved towards writing narrative, which I have previously done in three books that focused on what an individual’s life could tell us about a crucial topic, I could not resist the chance to write a narrative history that stretched across a continent—and beyond. Having now finished this book, I am in awe of those who wrote these earlier volumes. Each is a work of great scholarship, but just as important, compelling style. The art of history, as others have said more elegantly than I can, lies in the telling of the story as much as the contents. It is daunting to think that my book will be the first in a chronological sequence that tells a history of the nation over several thousand pages. But I hope that my emphasis on contingency and agency, the concepts that drive my approach to writing about the past, set the stage for the many unexpected and unpredictable turns told in the luminous books that follow mine.

3. The OHUS series aims to integrate narrative storytelling with rigorous scholarship. This obviously requires both a scholar’s discipline and a storyteller’s instinct. How has your approach to writing evolved over the course of your career?

I began to write narrative about 25 years ago for a book about the younger Richard Hakluyt, who, among other things, was an avid promoter of the English colonization of North America. While writing that book, which appeared in 2007, I became increasingly interested in questions central to writing narrative, especially trying to develop characters and scenes to move the story forward. That led me to two tragic figures—the explorer Henry Hudson, not during the years of his glory but instead on his last voyage when he could not escape a world he had created; and Thomas Morton, a lawyer exiled three times from early New England. In these works, I hope I have shown readers how individuals wrestle with the hands they must play, sometimes with cards they have dealt to themselves.

4. Many readers associate early American history with the English colonies, but your work ranges far beyond that. Which non-English actors—Indigenous, African, or European—do you think readers will be most surprised to encounter?

Since historians of early America have long been integrating non-English actors into our stories about the colonial era, I am not sure that readers will necessarily be surprised to find Indigenous, African, and European figures jostling in the pages of my book. They may be more surprised by my insistence that we need to tell the stories of everyone who lived in this era, which means a great deal of attention in this volume to Indigenous peoples, who outnumbered everyone else across the centuries I cover in the book. The smaller stories I tell reveal depth and complexity and, I hope, bring to life a narrative that needs to trace the arc of the story from the so-called 30,000-foot perspective. I hope I have succeeded in telling that large history through the accumulation of many intimate moments.

5. If readers take away one big idea from Contested Continent that reframes how they think about American history, what do you hope it will be—and why is that idea particularly relevant now?

I think that those who have looked at early American history have been shaped by three overarching explanations for what happened. The first emerged at the time: Europeans took control over the Americas because this was what the Christian God dictated. The second came later and became associated with scholars like Frederick Jackson Turner: the history of North America, and especially that of the United States, witnessed a clash of civilizations and cultures, with Europeans and Euro-Americans emerging on top because of the advantages they allegedly possessed. The third, the dominant narrative in recent years, emphasizes that European conquest was largely the result of the spread of infectious diseases, part of what the historian Alfred Crosby labeled “the Columbian Exchange.” Each of these narratives presumed European success in the Americas. But as I hope I reveal in Contested Continent, there was no certainty that Europeans would prevail in the contest for the Western Hemisphere. I end my book with a series of events from 1675 to 1680 to suggest that tumult, not stability, defined the American experience, and that it had for centuries.

6. Are there historians, past or present, whose work you feel especially in conversation with in Contested Continent?

I hope that my book will be looked at with other wonderful, long-form versions of early American history. I hope that my book is read alongside Bernard Bailyn’s The Barbarous Years, a brilliant narrative focused on the experience of people in eastern North America from the time of the founding of Jamestown in 1607 to the era of rebellion in the 1670s. My geographic and chronological framing is different from Bailyn’s. For example, my story starts much earlier than his. But when he wrote that book near the end of his storied career, I saw it as reflecting his uncertainty about the fate of our society. My book, too, reflects ambivalence about the future and tries to explain the causes for what some would see as our current predicament, namely the dangers that humans pose to our planet and too frequently to each other.

7. What kinds of books—historical or otherwise—do you find yourself returning to for inspiration, whether for craft, perspective, or pleasure?

I find inspiration in what many people refer to as creative non-fiction, especially stories focused on individuals or specific moments. The writers who embody this approach for me are people like Jonathan Harr, especially in A Civil Action, and Patrick Radden Keefe in Empire of Pain. Harr once gave me great advice about how to start a book, which I took to heart and have shared with many others over the years. I also turn to great works of fiction that get at issues about human motivation and character. While writing Contested Continent, I looked again at Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby—not for their plots but instead for how each, in relatively short works, was able to summon complex portraits of characters in vividly drawn scenes. Even on a large canvas, the small scenes matter.

Featured image by Debby Hudson via Unsplash

OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.

Pen to paper with Jonathan Parshall

Jon Parshall has spent his career asking big questions about how wars are remembered, argued over, and ultimately understood. Best known for his meticulous work on the Pacific front of World War II, Parshall has long been drawn to the structural questions of how wars are fought and won. His upcoming, highly illustrated book marks the most ambitious project of his career so far, distilling years of research into a single, sweeping year. In the conversation that follows, Parshall reflects on the historians who shaped him, the challenges of thinking on a global scale, and what surprised him most along the way.

1. You’ve spent decades studying World War II. What first drew you to this period, and what continues to hold your curiosity after all these years?

I’ve always been interested in ships, and building a kit of a Japanese heavy cruiser as a fifth-grader was sort of the entry point to World War II for me. What remains endlessly fascinating about it is that our understanding is constantly changing. I’m very much of the belief that history is a journey; it’s always dynamic, always evolving. That’s what keeps it fresh and engaging.

2. You’ve written extensively about the Pacific War, including the award-winning Shattered Sword. What drew you to 1942 as a standalone subject, and why do you see it as the pivotal year that defined the global trajectory of World War II?

I came out of  Shattered Sword mulling the nature of “turning points” and “decisive battles” within the war and wanting to educate myself regarding the larger structure of 1942. The year begins with a global Allied dumpster fire, yet ends with the Allies on the offensive basically everywhere. How did that happen? What was going on “under the hood,” so to speak? It turns out: a LOT. There’s no simple answer. That’s what the book addresses.

3. 1942 is a year in which the balance of power shifted across multiple theaters—Pacific, Eastern Front, North Africa, and the Atlantic. Which theater or campaign did you find most challenging to narrate in a way that made sense as part of a single worldwide story?

Without question, the Eastern Front. There are two fundamental problems, the first being a lack of sympathetic characters, as we watch the minions of one horrid despot battling the minions of another horrid despot. Moreover, the enormity of the theater often means reaching for unsatisfying narrative generalities—like one army “slicing” through another army. It’s difficult to construct a story that feels personal or relatable. The solution lies in providing enough micro-views of the situation on the ground to make conveying the larger events comprehensible.

4. 1942 includes hundreds of your own maps and timelines—a rare level of visual narrative in military history. Why was it important for you to build the story of the war year with this kind of granular, visual clarity?

I’ve always loved maps. I’m a visual learner. Shaded-relief maps help to convey, even if only subliminally, things like, “Oh, yeah, the Japanese couldn’t advance this way, now could they, because there are some hella big hills over here!” Likewise, the monthly timelines help readers understand not only chronology but also the connection points between different theaters. The war was vast—it was happening everywhere all at once. Seeing events laid out temporally helps create a framework for understanding their relationships.

5. What was your motivation for making such a comprehensive account? At over 1,200 pages, do you not have concerns about inflicting muscle strain on your readers?

The fundamental problem is one of creating an engaging narrative. If you do this story at too high a level, it becomes abstract, generalized, and boring. I wanted to dedicate an appropriate level of detail to the battles. But doing that for every major battle worldwide during the year inexorably leads to more page count than I had originally hoped for! If you’re going to do that to a reader, you have to give them lively dialog, lots of maps and pictures, bits of humor (I hope!), and other Easter eggs. There’s a pertinent quote from Pink Floyd in the book, another from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and a third from J. R. R. Tolkien. Can you find them?

6. Are there historians, past or present, whose work you feel especially in conversation with in 1942?

The two that have most influenced my thinking this year are Richard Overy and my friend Richard Frank. Overy and I have similar views regarding the necessity of describing the war in its totality in order to understand its outcome. One theater or battle won’t do. You must look at the whole enchilada. Rich and I share a common understanding, forged over many years and beers, regarding the importance of the Asia-Pacific theater to the overall trajectory of the war, particularly early on when the USSR was on the ropes.  

7. If readers take away one big reframing of how to think about World War II from 1942, what do you hope it will be?

Allied victory was neither inevitable nor obvious at the beginning of the year. Likewise, there was no single turning point, but rather dozens of inflection points that ultimately reshaped the war’s trajectory from one of Allied ruin to Allied triumph.

8. What kinds of books—historical or otherwise—do you find yourself returning to for inspiration, whether for craft, perspective, or sheer pleasure?

Great question! I still re-read The Lord of the Rings almost yearly. I love a good fantasy novel. Other than that, though, it’ll probably be something World War II-related—the “Need-to-Read” pile never seems to get smaller!

Featured image by Romain B via Unsplash

OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.

What matters most for children in their family relationships?

Navigating the vast number of opinions about what matters most for children’s healthy development can be a daunting and seemingly endless task. From politicians to journalists to self-styled ‘parenting experts’, everyone has an opinion on what children need in their family relationships and how parents should provide this. These opinions can range from the relatively mundane aspects of everyday parenting, for example, how parents can encourage children to brush their teeth, to larger socio-political and legal questions, such as who is allowed to use fertility treatment to create their families, who is recognised as a parent, and what this means for children.

Too rarely does evidence manage to break through the heat and noise of these debates, yet developmental psychologists have spent decades addressing the questions of how family relationships shape child development and what really matters for children. We draw on classic and cutting-edge research on family relationships to highlight three factors that psychologists have consistently found to shape children’s development across different relationships, transitions, and cultures, which can enable children to thrive within their families.

1. Relationship quality is more important than family structure

Empirical evidence has consistently shown that the quality of relationships between family members matters far more for children’s healthy development than who lives together and how they are related. Research into the aspects of parent-child relationships that predict outcomes for children has shown that responding in a sensitive (i.e., timely and appropriate) way to a child, consistent provision of support and boundaries, and open communication facilitate positive mental health and social development in children. Similarly, positive, co-operative relationships between parents and siblings also support healthy child development.

Furthermore, studies that have looked at different family structures, whether that be the number, gender, sexual orientation, or gender identity of parents in a family, the way in which families were created, or whether family members share a genetic connection, have provided robust support in this area. What a family looks like matters far less for how children develop within that family than how family members treat each other.

This is not to say that family relationships, whether between parents and children or between siblings, must always be calm and non-conflictual. The presence of appropriate levels of conflict within family relationships, when handled well (i.e., respectfully and flexibly), can actually be beneficial to children and adolescents in helping them learn and practice different communication skills.

2. Connection promotes autonomy

Until recently, it was not uncommon, particularly in Western countries, for parents to be told that the developmental task of childhood and adolescence was to achieve separation from parents. Research has consistently shown, however, that parents can best support children to develop autonomy in age-appropriate ways by maintaining a connection with them. This is the case whether we are looking at research on how parents can encourage their toddlers to explore a new environment, help their children manage the transition to starting school, or support their teens to navigate increasing independence and changing peer relationships. The presence of a consistent, supportive parent-child relationship facilitates rather than hampers the development of autonomy.

3. Supportive policies and communities matter

Finally, research from across different areas of developmental psychology shows us powerfully and consistently that families don’t exist in isolation and that the structures around them matter for children’s (and parents’) wellbeing. This is the case whether we are talking about parents’ access to social support (i.e., the presence or absence of family and friends), the provision or absence of statutory support, for example, in the case of families raising children with disabilities or special educational needs, or the legislative frameworks around families.

We know, for example, that policies around parental leave influence, and in some cases constrain, parents’ decisions about parenting and childcare during infancy, and that satisfaction with these arrangements is related to parents’ relationship quality and mental health, both of which affect children’s development. And discriminatory rhetoric and laws, for example, anti-LGBTQ+ legislation or legislation that negatively targets minoritized ethnic groups, can make children and families feel less safe by legitimising abuse towards the family and adding further burdens on family members to advocate for or defend their family. It should come as no surprise, then, that children and families do better with supportive communities and structures around them.

No two families or two relationships within a family are the same, but there are consistent factors within relationships that can support children’s healthy development. The extent to which families are able to provide these will differ depending on their knowledge, their previous experiences, the resources available to them, the challenges they face, where they live, and the extent to which the structures around them are supportive or obstructive of family life. Children and their families should be supported to thrive in all their diversity, and focusing on what the evidence tells us really matters for children is, surely, the best place to start.

Featured image by Juliane Liebermann via Unsplash.

OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.

Tearing apart a book

For several years, I taught a course on the history of publishing. We covered technology (from scrolls to scrolling), the impact of the book on culture, economics (how publishers and bookstores make money), and much more. I invited authors and editors to class. We toured a printing company and an audiobook studio. A ghost-writer friend came one Halloween. A book restorer told harrowing tales of damaged books and her heroic efforts to repair them.

One of the highlights for me was slicing and dicing a book in front of the class.

In a room full of writers, readers, and bibliophiles, cutting up a book never failed to elicit wide-eyed gasps and groans. There was a serious point to the cutting: to familiarize students with the parts of a book. As I cut, tore, and otherwise mutilated the book, I marked its various parts and passed around the remains.

I pointed out the two boards that made up the cover and noted the inner and outer hinges. I pulled back the endpapers and pointed out the pastedown and flyleaf. I marked up the front matter: the title page and the verso of the title page, with its copyright material, ISBN, and mysterious edition numbers. Sometimes there was a cloth headband atop the spine of the book, and we speculated about its purpose (protection of the spine or decoration?). It was rare to find a full-length sewn-in headband. 

We examined the text block of the book and pulled apart its signatures. (In a later class, I would give students a large-sized piece of paper with sixteen numbered blocks and challenge them to fold it to a correctly numbered signature.) We noted the gutter, the margin where the left and right pages come together. We looked at the ways in which the signatures were bound and contrasted that with the less expensive perfect binding and burst binding, which inevitably led to a discussion of textbooks that fall apart when you read them. One time, we got into a discussion of the differences between hot-melt adhesives and organic glues.

After the initial horror of the dissection, the students learned a lot from the exercise and were able to pick up just about any book and understand how it was made. 

You can try this exercise at home, with a thrift-store hardback, a Sharpie, and a box-cutter. Just remember to cut away from your body. Safety first.

^{Featured image by Karim Elmissiry via Unsplash.}

OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.

Sit thee down, sorrow!

It is easier, following Shakespeare, to tell sorrow to sit down than to discover where the word sorrow came from. No fear: sorrow is native—only joy is borrowed. The word that interests us is Common Germanic. Its cognates have been attested in all the Old Germanic languages: in the fourth-century Gothic translation of the New Testament, in Old Saxon, Old High German, and Old Icelandic. Outside Germanic, even in the ancient Tocharian language, an apparently related noun turned up, though there it means “disease.”

Words designating abstract concepts usually have concrete foundations. For example, sad goes back to the idea of “sated; weary.” Dutch zat and German satt still refer to a full stomach (among other things), and Latin satis (as in the root of the English borrowings satiated and satisfaction) means “enough.” Sad “melancholy, unhappy,” it appears, has a most prosaic foundation. Attempts to find a similar concrete foundation of sorrow have been less than fully satisfactory, to use the polite jargon of disgruntled etymologists.

However, one thing is almost certain: sorrow is related to neither sore nor sorry, while those two words are indeed related to each other. Yet for centuries, sorrow, sore, and sorry have formed a union and influenced one another. It is quite natural that speakers looked upon such similar-sounding words referring to similar concepts as related. To repeat, the sense of sorrow developed from “physical pain” to “grief.”

The origin of many ancient names of diseases and physical defects is obscure for an important reason. People were afraid to pronounce frightening words. The situation is familiar: talk of the devil and he will come. For instance, someone will say wolf (cry wolf, as it were) or bear, and the beast, which of course knows its name, will hear it, take it for an invitation, and arrive. That is why Germanic has bear, that is, “a brown one,” rather than some continuation of ursus, and Russian has medved, literally, “someone searching for and knowing honey.” For the same reason, the etymology of ache is almost impenetrable. Taboo names were meant to be undecipherable, and they often remain such to us. (By the way, from an etymological point of view, ill is one of the most obscure English words.)

I have mentioned taboo for a reason. Among some rather secure Slavic and Lithuanian cognates of sorrow (Tocharian has already been mentioned) we find a few words meaning “disease, sickness” and “to be sick, ill.” The most problematic forms related to sorrow are those beginning with sw-. Among the Old Highs German words, the verb sworgen turns up. Where is the initial sw– from? The w after s is not accidental here. Also, a secure Albanian cognate once began with sw-, and the first syllable of a rather probable Sanskrit cognate was sū-.

It is rather likely that also the Old Germanic root of sorrow once began with sw– and later lost w under the influence of its “twin” word sorrow. The group sw– is often sound–imitative and sound-symbolic. Consider the following list of Modern English words beginning with sw– (the numbers in parentheses refer to the century of their first attestation in writing): swab “mop” (15), swagger (16; swag also exists), swank (19), swarm (Old English), swarm “climb” (16), swash (16), sway (16), sweep (14), swell (Old English), swift (Old English), swig (17), swill (Old English), swindle (18), swing (partly Old English), swipe (19), swirl (18), swish (18), switch (16), swither “to hesitate” (16), swoon (13), and swoop (16).

I realize that reading word lists is not the most entertaining occupation in the world. But I needed a background for my hypothesis. I suggest that sorrow or rather Old English sorg ~ sorh and its Germanic cognates, all of which sounded almost the same, were “emotional” sw-words. It is hard to tell what this sw– alluded to (perhaps sometimes to the loss of balance and erratic movement: consider swing, sway, swipe, and the rest). Above, I did not mention swamp, a late word in English (17). It has always meant “low-lying wet ground,” and swamps are not good to walk in.

Later, sorrow, Sorge, and their likes influenced sworg-, all of which survived but lost none of their emotional impact. Etymologies of this type cannot be proved: they are not theorems. But considering that dictionaries are happy with the statement “ultimate origin unknown,” I see no harm in offering my hypothesis. If I am right, taboo probably played no role in the history of sorrow, but emotion did: it shaped its origin, and chance modified its ultimate form.

As is well-known, people are afraid of two things: of venturing to say something new and of repeating something so trivial that it needs no proof. Above, I committed both sins. English etymological dictionaries do not begin their story of sorrow with sw-. Yet in other sources, matter-of-fact references to sw– in this context are common. Among other places, I found them in the earlier editions of the main German etymological dictionary and in the writings of the great French scholar Antoine Meillet. Thus, I said something that is new (no one has explained the variation s- ~ sw-) but not earth-shattering. If some historical linguists decide to comment on my reconstruction, the first thing for them to do will be to reread F. O. Lindeman’s paper in Indogermanische Forschungen 98, 1993, 48-54, and the chapter “Sorga” in the 1957 book by Heinrich Götz Leitwörter des Minnesangs (pp. 93-105). The absence of comments will give me much sorrow.

In the meantime, I’ll mention a novel titled Frau Sorge (that is, “Lady Sorrow”) by Hermann Sudermann. Today, few people have heard of it. Yet the epoch described in that book is worth remembering. At one time, I read many such sad books, including John Greenwood’s novel The True History of a Little Ragamuffin. Maxim Gorky read and admired it in his youth.

A few remarks on sorry may not be out of place here. Its Old English form was sārig “pained at heart,” as defined by The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (thus, with a long vowel in the root). Later, that is, in Middle English, ā changed to ō (it did so in all words: hence stān to stōn and stone) and was shortened before the “heavy suffix” -ig. This is when sorry began to interact with sorrow.

The title of today’s essay is from Love’s Labour’s Lost. I preferred it to the trodden-to-death more in sorrow than in anger. Familiar quotations with sorrow are numerous. I will finish this post with my favorite lines by Shelley: “The desire of the moth for the star,/ Of the night for the morrow,/ The devotion to something afar/ From the sphere of our sorrow.”

Postscript. My thanks are to Martin Smith for citing German bergen “to protect” in connection with the post on burg (April 1, 2026) and to Ian Richie, who cited the place from Rob Roy, to which I referred in the post for April 15, 2026. See the comments following those posts.  

NOTE. For scheduling reasons, the next post will appear two weeks from today.

_{Featured image: La Mélancolie by Louis-Jean-François Lagrenée. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.}

OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.

The Kissinger Tapes

When one reads thousands of pages of transcripts of Henry Kissinger’s phone conversations from his time in the Nixon and Ford administrations, as I did, one gets a pretty good sense of his personality, temperament, and character. The man had an appealing sense of humor and a quick wit, which he sometimes used to break tension. One can even see his humor on display during pressure-packed crises (of which there were many). He could be charming and self-deprecating, and he was an inveterate flatterer. He heaped praise on President Nixon, who was aware that it was often phony and doubted Kissinger’s loyalty. He was invariably deferential to Nixon, always addressing him formally as “Mr. President.” His standing with Nixon was always a paramount concern.

Kissinger often affected intimacy with people (“I’m talking to you as a friend”), particularly with journalists, as if he were taking them into his confidence, which was one way he seduced them. Journalists tended to be deferential to him, and many sought his “guidance.” He had considerable powers of seduction through his charm, flattery, humor, feigned forthrightness, and sharing of intimacies. He was prone to flirting with female journalists, including Barbara Walters, who was upset by false news stories linking them, and he enjoyed his playboy reputation. Of course, his famously powerful and quick mind is evident in his phone transcripts.

Also evident is his impressive capacity to handle an enormous workload and withstand an endless series of headaches while working long hours. Kissinger seemed to have boundless stamina and to require little sleep. He was an extraordinarily hard worker. His days were long. He had superior diplomatic skills, aided by, among other things, his people skills, fortitude, brilliance, grasp of every conceivable issue, and bargaining acumen—not to mention his duplicity and double-dealing. And he was an adept bureaucratic infighter in Washington.

Kissinger could be impatient, sarcastic, and derisive with his aides, highly demanding and even abusive. He threatened firings when particularly upset. He was often arrogant, caustic about the “morons” and “lightweights” in the Nixon administration that he had to put up with, and contemptuous of them. He repeatedly threatened to resign, mainly over his difficulties with Secretary of State William Rogers, who he thought was an idiot and disliked intensely, and over his treatment by Nixon.

He was deceitful and a habitual liar; he appeared to have little hesitation about lying. Kissinger lied frequently to colleagues and journalists. A master, serial leaker, he told the journalist Mary McGrory “he does not leak anything,” and he might denounce to a colleague a news story that bore his fingerprints as “a disgrace.” And he lied repeatedly about his involvement in the Nixon administration’s secret wiretaps of officials and journalists, false-reporting system for the secret Cambodia bombing, and internal discussions about Watergate, and about his knowledge of the Plumbers extralegal investigations unit and his former aide David Young’s participation in it.

Kissinger was also a backstabber and two-faced. Not many colleagues escaped his barbed tongue behind their backs. And he was secretive and conspiratorial. It was not unusual for him to complain about people conspiring and waging campaigns against him. Like Nixon, he could appear paranoid about enemies. (He once remarked to his assistant Alexander Haig, half joking, that acute paranoia in Washington would be diagnosed as excessive complacency.)

He was strikingly callous to the deaths and suffering inflicted by his and Nixon’s policies in Vietnam. He can be found in his phone conversations exulting over all the dead Vietnamese bodies piled up following U.S. bombing strikes. He once threatened not to airlift imperiled and retreating South Vietnamese soldiers out of Laos during the disastrous 1971 invasion of Laos.

He placed great value on being “tough” and “strong,” and being willing to act “brutally” (he expressed disdain for “pansy” language). He could be ruthless and seemingly unimpeded by morality, secondary as it was to both America’s interests as he saw them and to his own interests.

Kissinger never intended for the transcripts of his phone conversations to be released publicly. He had claimed that they were his personal papers and donated them to the Library of Congress under an agreement that gave him control over them. But after the National Security Archive, an organization that fights to limit government secrecy and increase the public’s access to government records, contested Kissinger’s control of the transcripts with the National Archives and State Department and exerted legal pressure on them to recover them, the two agencies asked Kissinger to turn over the transcripts to them. Based on legal advice, Kissinger ultimately complied. It was a crowning achievement of the National Security Archive.

Kissinger was surely nervous about releasing his phone transcripts. He’d been worried about the release of Nixon’s own tapes, aware that they could be damaging to him; he had advised destroying them. But while he said that the tapes of his phone conversations had been destroyed after being transcribed, the transcripts were now out in the world, a great gift to history.

_{Feature image by Markus Winkler from Pixabay.}

OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.

Hogs, hedges, hedgehogs, and BA’s

About a year ago (to be exact, on February 19, 2025), I discussed the origin of some obscure idioms, the hardest of which was to go the whole hog, though a hog on ice also makes one wonder. It is frustrating that the origin of hog is unknown. The word surfaced in Middle English, and it would seem that a relatively recent monosyllabic animal name (and hog always had only one syllable) need not give language historians too much trouble. But this is not the case, as the history of dog (Old English) and hog (Middle English) shows. All we can know for certain is that twelve and six, and three centuries ago, people coined words, motivated by the same impulses as today. They have always produced monosyllables like big, dig, gig, bog, gag, smug, and lug, and most of them were “emotional,” that is, sound-imitative or sound symbolic. Hogs grunt. Is the word hog onomatopoeic? Do swine “say” hog-hog or pig-pig? Perhaps. In any case, their Dutch siblings “say” big-big!

Why then is the hedgehog called hedgehog? The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (1966) explains: “So named from frequenting hedgerows and its pig-like snout.” I assume that the corresponding page in the OED online has not yet been edited, because the same formulation appears there. Or perhaps there is nothing to edit in this statement. Perhaps. Hedgehogs may be attached to hedges, but it is amazing that such an inconspicuous feature was chosen for naming the familiar rodent. Isn’t our solution too good to be true?

Hedgehogs don’t live in America, and every time I discuss the Grimms’ tale “The Hare and the Hedgehog” with my students (I often teach German folklore), I have to describe the protagonist’s way of life. I also very much admire the end of the tale, the storyteller’s advice: “If you are a hedgehog, always marry a hedgehog.” I have seen many young people who disregarded this advice and paid dearly for it.

What are the most conspicuous features of the hedgehog? A hedgehog, if attacked, rolls itself into a prickly ball (what a wonderful way of hedging against enemies!), but other than that, it is easily domesticated and is great fun to have at home in summer except that you cannot pet a hedgehog. Also, like mongooses, hedgehogs attack and devour snakes.

In my opinion, the name hedgehog does not do justice to the creature’s behavior and shape. It is also unclear why English replaced the ancient word for “hedgehog” with a new (dialectal?) one. German, Dutch, and Scandinavian have retained the Indo-European name (such is German Igel; the Slavic name is also related to it). Be that as it may, since the hedgehog’s projecting mouth and nose do resemble a snout, prickly hog (this is what the creature is called in numerous Dutch dialects) would be a more accurate name than hedgehog.

Let us now leave hogs to their devices and look at the noun hedge. This word has a dramatic history. The Old English for hedge was hegg. I will not go into phonetic niceties and will only say that hegg is related to haga “enclosure, yard.” Hegge yielded hedge, and haga became haw, as in hawthorn, which is also familiar from the last name Hawthorn. Yet haga is also recognizable, because we know the place name The Hague, Den Haag (see is image in the header). The name of the capital of the Netherlands has retained its ancient form and even its definite article. Last week, we looked at burg and its likes, and I noted that town is akin to Icelandic tún “enclosure.” This is what town meant (consider Modern German Zaun “fence”), exactly like Den Haag.

The most dramatic part in the history of the root we now see in hedge and haw concerns the Old English word hagosteald “bachelor; warrior.” Its counterparts elsewhere in Germanic displayed several meanings: “king,” “retainer,” “servant,” “peasant,” “widower”—a partly incompatible medley of senses. But only at first sight. Among other things, the original “enclosure” was the feudal lord’s residence. In those days and much later, the eldest son inherited his father’s property. His brothers, those who aspired to a career, had little choice and usually became soldiers, or, to use the feudal term, retainers (the same situation with the younger brothers continued into the nineteenth century). Those retainers were, of course, bachelors, and as far as language is concerned, the step from “bachelor,” to “widower” (a male without a wife) must have been short. In Modern German, Hagestolz (now obsolete or facetious) still means “bachelor”; stolz “proud” is a product of folk etymology.

It is amazing how words change their meanings and attain secondary senses, which oust the original sense. From “king’s retainer” to “bachelor”! But incompatible senses also coexist in modern languages and give us no trouble. This, for example, happened to English bachelor. Its Old French source meant “young man aspiring to knighthood,” while Medieval Latin baccalārius referred to a laborer on an estate (baccalāria “area of ploughland”). Though our BA’s don’t aspire to knighthood, getting a college degree is an important step to the proverbial room at the top. And we, the readers of this blog—well, we have made a long way from a piece of enclosed land to the heights of historical semantics. In our journey, we passed by hogs and hedgehogs, visited The Hague, and almost attained a BA. (Yet I keep wondering whether hedgehogs have anything to do with hedges.)

To Our Readers

My sincere thanks to the two readers who have researched some obscure words and asked me about their origin. My resources are good but limited. I have an excellent etymological database and a huge collection of books on word origins. If they provide me with no answers, I give up. This is especially true with regards to the non-Indo-European languages. Alas, all etymologists are in the same position. They know only what little they know.

From My Collection of Useless and Evil Proverbs

It is amazing how many proverbial phrases people have invented to demean women! Here is an Early English gem in its original spelling: “…by the common prouerbe, a woman will wepe for pitie to see a gosling goe barefoote.” John Heywood, a sixteenth-century playwright, is mainly remembered today for his collection of proverbs. He knew the saying quoted above, and it was familiar to English readers of Notes and Queries as late as 1891. Walter Scott seems to have made one of his characters use this saying in Rob Roy (so I have read but did not check). As usual, we have no information about the date and the author of this saying, but the ugly “sentiment” is familiar. The Russian saying “A woman’s tears are water” is still current. What a shame!

_{Featured image: Charlemagne at Court, illuminated manuscript. Public domain via Picryl.}

OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.

<i>Unabridged</i>: some thoughts on a new book about dictionaries and words

Unabridged refers to the title of Webster’s great dictionary. The author of the book, published by Grove Atlantic Monthly Press (New York) in October 2025, is Stefan Fatsis. This volume of nearly 400 pages has the subtitle: “The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary.” Below, I will summarize my impressions of Fatsis’s book. Perhaps Unabridged in the title also refers to the volume’s scope, because it presents a broad picture of British and American lexicography for more than two centuries.

Fatsis has been a passionate word lover since early age, so his foray into the history and practice of dictionary making was not a whim. He approached his project in the best way possible: he got himself hired as a lexicographer-in-training, spent several years with Webster, wrote numerous definitions, spoke to dozens of specialists in the United States and at Oxford, and finally produced this book about dictionaries and dictionary making—not only about Webster’s Unabridged. Rarely does he say something that gives away his insufficient mastery of the subject. Thus, on p. 71, he calls Notes and Queries an obscure British journal. In fact, it was for years one of the most popular weeklies in the English-speaking world, and it still exists. The OED has always been fully aware of it. But this is just faultfinding. Fatsis did become an expert.

I am surprised that we never met. For years we attended the same biennial conferences of The Dictionary Society of North America, talked to and made friends with the same people, and listened to the same presentations. Better late than never. Now we’ll meet virtually in this blog. The book, which in addition to the indispensable introductory remarks, acknowledgments, endnotes (excellent endnotes), bibliography, and an index, contains thirteen chapters. Among other things, they are devoted to the history of Webster’s dictionary. Who were the two Merriam brothers? Their names are now indelibly tied to Noah Webster’s. We do know such hybrids, Schubert-Liszt and Verdi-Liszt, for example. What stands behind the symbiosis? In this case, the story is worth reading. 

Two main questions about dictionaries recur again and again. How many words should be included? And how should they be defined? How, for example, do you define in, as, so, oh, weather, be, and thousands of others? And does anyone need such definitions? New words flood language (any language) at all times. When we study the past, we depend on written records, because only such as are extant. But even a dictionary of Old English, which deals with a closed corpus, is incredibly difficult to put together. Though a living language grows every minute, most of us need not worry about this circumstance. We know what we know, and if some word is new to us, we may either disregard it or look it up. But lexicographers have to anticipate everybody’s questions, and when we do look up a word (for its meaning, spelling, pronunciation, use, or origin), we expect it to be there. Hence this endless, self-defeating chase for the words coined the day before yesterday, yesterday, or five minutes ago. Hundreds of them are stillborn. For an online dictionary space is not a problem, but paper editions cannot be allowed to weigh a ton.

Fatsis believes that modern dictionaries should be all-inclusive: if a word exists or once had, in the poet’s words, its singing minute, get hold of it and rejoice. Also, volatile slang, obscenities, and ethnic slurs? Well, yes. This book is by far not the first one about dictionaries and their problems. Webster’s Third had the audacity to include the F-word and the seemingly innocuous ain’t (my spellchecker still underlines ain’t in red). Today the storm that followed the publication of that dictionary is hard to imagine. The unpronounceable F-word? My goodness! This is the most frequent word (plus its derivatives) hundreds of people use actively. Even our elected representatives constantly feel f-ed up by their f-in’ opponents and share their hurt feelings with the public. Why should dictionaries be guardians of good manners? Actually, they often (and nowadays, even regularly) do play this role, by explaining how certain words are used, where they may or should be avoided, and so forth.

What I missed in this book is a broad discussion of dictionary inclusion and culture. A great dictionary, a monument erected for all times, does feature all the words it can net, but this feast is partly wasted. The vocabulary of our young people is tragically small. Even the books by Mark Twain and Jack London (whom our American children and grandchildren seldom read, if at all), to say nothing of Jane Austen, Dickens, and Thackery, are full of words they don’t understand and don’t care to learn. Dictionaries are getting richer and richer, while individual vocabularies have dwindled like Balzac’s la peau du chagrin (my favorite phrase, which, much to my chagrin, no student I have met so far was able to understand).

More harping on the same note! Fatsis did not mention Spelling Bee, this institutionalized torture chamber, but devoted an enthusiastic chapter to the Word of the Year. What passions, what spirited discussions about a moth that will die an hour later! And all that from the people who call themselves linguists. That says something about the level of modern linguistics. Fatsis, as I said, takes the liveliest interest in such contests. He is a man of liberal views, investigates at great length the history of the adjective woke, likes the new use of pronouns, and many other things that are not to my taste. But I am a highbrow, while he would probably be proud to call himself a lowbrow (no offence meant, and I hope no offence taken). I would prefer chapters on pronunciation and etymology in dictionaries. Both subjects are barely mentioned in the book.

Glossaries and dictionaries have existed for millennia, but the Internet and AI killed their print versions. Such is the way of all flesh. Though even today people sometimes ride horses in towns, usually they drive cars. The OED and Merriam Webster have survived so far by resorting to websites and ads of all kinds and thus attracting funding, but even they have gone online. All print editions have succumbed to the spirit of our virtual epoch. Do you still remember Funk and Wagnalls, the glorious Random House, and the many editions of Heritage Dictionary? Gone, all gone, and with them hundreds of lexicographers were, to use the impolite British phrase, made redundant. In his recent interview with the Pennsylvania Gazette, Fatsis said (in connection with print books and newspapers): “The New York Times is thriving in part because of its growth of its games and recipes offerings.” Hear, hear!

My conclusion? A fine book. Read it from cover to cover. Some chapters are truly excellent, the best one being about the late collector Madeline Kripke. The last two chapters are also excellent. And here is the opening sentence of the Introduction: “I fell in love with the dictionaries on my eleventh birthday. My big present that day in 1974 was Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language (Second college edition, Deluxe Color edition), published by the World Publishing Company of Cleveland, Ohio).” Nothing is better than remaining true to one’s first love, especially when it is reciprocated.

_{Featured image: Image from page 450 of “The California horticulturalist and floral magazine” (1870). Public domain via The Internet Archive on Flickr.}

OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.

An etymological ham<i>burg</i>er

My thanks are to Keith Ritchie, who in his comment on the previous post noted that in Scotland, trousers are still called breeches. Unintentionally, today’s word also begins with the letter b, as the italicized part of the title indicates, but it has nothing to do with clothes.

English speakers and speakers in the wide world know the German word burg from place names (Magdeburg, St. Petersburg, and so forth), though only hamburgers, or rather burgers, as they are called, made burg really famous. The closest English cognates (that is, related forms) of burg are all over the place but hidden in compounds and not always easily recognizable. Such are –bury (as in Canterbury), –borough (as in Scarborough and Gainsborough), and of course, –burg itself, as in Edinburgh, with its unexpected pronunciation of –burgh and the redundant h at the end. (But think of Pittsburgh, USA, and of Charles Lindbergh: they could not do without final h either!) Incidentally, the noun burrow “rabbit’s or fox’s hole” is, quite probably, also related to burg, so that Alice in Wonderland need not have been surprised to find the place so well-inhabited.

The word that interests us is one the most ancient and most often-discussed words in historical Germanic linguistics. It occurred in all the earliest texts of the Germanic family, including the fourth-century Gothic Bible. The Old English form was burg; –bury in place names is a relic of the now extinct dative case. As far as we can judge, the ancient burg ~ borg existed for protecting people. Therefore, it does not come as a surprise that the verbs bury and borrow are also derived from this root. Protection is a loose concept. Thus, borrow means “to take on pledge or credit.” Note: on pledge or credit!

The trouble with the origin of burg ~ borg is that we have a great lot of information and cannot always decide which bit of it to use. The nouns attested in the oldest Germanic languages and cited above meant “height, wall; castle; city.” The Gothic Bible was translated from Greek. The Greek word the translator saw was pólis “town,” but we do not know what exactly pólis meant in fourth-century Greek. (Note: we are dealing with Medieval, not Classical Greek!) “Town” is a loose concept. In the remote past, Germanic people did not live in towns. The German cognate of English town is Zaun “fence.” Greek pólis also takes us to “fortress, enclosed space on high ground, hilltop.” The beginning was the same everywhere.

Apparently, the early town was a place fenced in. Russian gorod “town” (as in Novgorod “new town”) also refers to a fence. Likewise, the Icelandic tún, a letter for letter cognate of town and Zaun, is a fenced, fertilized home meadow surrounding a farmhouse. Yet the idea that the initial meaning of all our words was “fence,” though defended by some reputable scholars, has little appeal. Likewise, the gloss Gothic baurgs (pronounced as borgs) ~ Greek pólis is less illuminating than it may seem at first sight, because in another Gothic text, baurgs renders the Greek word for “tower” (“stronghold to flee to”?). The German word Bürger did indeed mean “inhabitant of a town,” while its Gothic counterpart seems to have meant “citizen.” On the whole, despite the numerous unclear points, we may say that German burg once referred to “enclosure; protection; fortification.”

What then was the origin of this word? German (and Common Germanic) Berg “mountain” comes to mind as a possible cognate: berg and burg, if related, had different vowels by a regular rule. But were “burgs” built on mountains? If they were structures within an enclosure, mountains were a rather unlikely place for those “towns.” On the other hand, mountains gave people good protection from attackers. We also notice Latin burgus, a borrowing of Greek púrgos “tower, fortification.” Germanic tribes were Ancient Rome’s neighbors for centuries, and borrowed words went both ways. Many Latin words infiltrated Germanic and several other languages, while quite a few others went from Germanic to Latin. However, importing such a Germanic word to or borrowing it from Medieval Greek is improbable.

The Greek noun púrgos is of obscure origin, perhaps itself a loan from some neighboring language. Many of our readers have certainly heard about the famous Pergamon altar (see the header). Pergamon is a Greek place name, and the first syllable (perg-) sounds almost like berg-. In travels from Scandinavia to Greece, from Burgundy (note the place name!) to Pergamon and all the way to the ancient Hittite kingdom, one finds similar place names and similar (almost identical) words having the root berg– or perg– (vowels of course alternated according to the well-known rules : e ~ o ~  u), with the form berg/perg predominating, and all of them refer to fortresses and mountains.

It was therefore suggested long ago that we are dealing with a so-called migratory word, probably pre-Indo-European. In such situations, linguists often refer to the substrate, that is, some unknown ancient language of an extinct tribe. But a migratory word is not even a borrowing from a substrate: it is a term that travels all over the enormous continent (in this case of Eurasia). Of course, it had some source, but we can no longer discover it. Its vowels adapt to the rule of the “guest” language, and the words pretend to be native. They do become native, though they are, rather, naturalized foreigners. Isn’t it odd that a word like German Bürger goes back to an alien root?

As a final flourish, I would like to note that the trouble with the root b-r-g is as acute in Slavic as in Germanic. For example, Russian bereg means “bank; shore,” and bereg– is also the root of a verb meaning “to preserve; keep in safety.” Both words show some phonetic irregularities, and familiar hypotheses have been offered about their history. Cognates of the noun and the verb have been recorded all over the Slavic-speaking world. As far as I can understand, some link between the words in Germanic and Slavic has been recognized, but the borrowing by Slavic from Germanic does not look like a viable option. Nor do Slavic etymological dictionaries refer to substrates or migratory words. A hamburger is a relatively simple thing. All the rest is questionable and complicated.

_{Featured image: photo of the Pergamon Altar by Miguel Hermosa Cuesta. CC-BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.}

OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.

Implicit negation is easy to miss

One of the odder bits of language use is the phenomenon of overnegation, or misnegation. This is much different than the overly fussy stigmatizing of double negatives like “I didn’t see nothing” or “Nobody didn’t see anything,” which are common, colloquial, and not at all confusing. No one takes “I didn’t see nothing” to mean “I saw something.”

Misnegation is a rather more complicated situation where a negation and a hidden negation conspire to trip up a writer, as in this example from a Hägar the Horrible comic strip (first noticed in a 2018 post by writer Stan Carey). Hägar says “This is the only time of year when I miss not having a nine-to-five job.” When his sidekick Lucky Eddie asks “Why?” Hägar says it’s because “I never get to go to an office Christmas party!” The word miss hides a negation and if you “miss not having a nine-to-five job,” you would be missing the absence of such a job. But what is meant here is that Hägar misses ever having a nine-to-fiver.   

Misnegations happen in speech quite frequently, but unless they are in print or online, we may overlook them. The term seems to have first cropped up in 2004, on the Language Log blog in a series of posts by the linguist Mark Liberman and others. Two of the most common types of misnegations involve expressions of the form:

no NOUN is too ADJECTIVE to VERB

and

it is IMPOSSIBLE to UNDERESTIMATE X

The first type is found in examples like “no detail is too small to ignore,” where the intended meaning is “all details matter, regardless of how small,” or “no detail is too small to matter.” With the misnegation, it actually reads as if details are routinely ignored and none are too small to receive that treatment. Liberman offers some true-life examples:

No one is too young to avoid being tempted.

No business is too small to avoid or ignore protecting itself from another business using its name, product, service, or invention.

Kelly… said that in the playoffs no advantage is too small to ignore.

No error is too small to ignore—I want to make the second edition perfect!

If these make your head hurt, just wait.

The second type of misnegation is found in examples like “It is impossible to underestimate Springsteen’s influence,” and many similar examples. If “overestimate” means to attribute too high a value and “underestimate” means to attribute too low a value, then one is saying “It is impossible to attribute too low a value to Springsteen’s influence,” which is presumably not what is meant, unless it is a backhanded compliment.  

Here are some more real examples:

The challenge of creating weekly scripts that move seamlessly among six clearly defined principal characters cannot be underestimated. (Liberman found this one in The New York Times, 2004)

All of which is to say that we can never underestimate the psychological impact of language’s massive migration from the ear to the eye, from speech to typography. (from Neil Postman’s The Disappearance of Childhood, noted in Stan Carey’s post)

Tracy and Shelli contributed to the band in those early days in ways that cannot be underestimated. (from Charles R. Cross’s Heavier Than Heaven, also noted by Carey)

There are other types of misnegation as well. Ben Zimmer points out some examples of overnegation that arise from one too many nots: It’s HARD NOT TO X AND NOT Y.

It’s hard not to walk into a press conference these days and not hear, at some point, “With scholarships where they are today…” (The Michigan Daily)

But it’s hard not to read Olney’s book and not appreciate the key members of the team that dominated baseball for half a decade. (Deseret News)

[In researching the period] it’s hard not to look at 1910 and not see what’s coming down the road. (Provincetown Banner)

The first not in each example means that one is not doing the walking, reading, or looking. But if you are not doing those things how can you then not hear, not appreciate, or not see what’s coming. The first not in each example is causing the problem and needs to go. And Zimmer points that that you also get misnegation with the variant “It’s hard not to do X without doing Y” as in “It’s hard not to think of the art of New Mexico without thinking of Georgia O’Keeffe” (his example from the Tucson Weekly).

And then there’s the phrasing “fail to miss,” where there is a pair of negative verbs and no not, and the expression is used to mean “fail to see.” That one was made famous by sportscaster Dizzy Dean, who told fans “don’t fail to miss tomorrow’s game.”

For writers and editors, it’s important to be aware of the possibility of misnegation or overnegation. Editing and style guides don’t tell you to put things in the affirmative for nothing.

^{Image by MasterTux from Pixabay. Public domain.}

OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.

Endless trouble with <i>breeches</i>

The trouble begins with the pronunciation of the word breeches. Why does breeches (seemingly so, in the US) often rhyme with riches, rather than reaches? In the best books on the history of English, I could not find a satisfactory answer, but this complication is minor. The real problem is the origin of the word. (I cannot do this without an impotent jab of AI, this wolf in sheep’s clothing. I asked the computer about the short vowel in breeches, and AI supplied me with several lines of nonsense.)

The names of articles of clothing are often troublesome to an etymologist, partly because they tend to travel from land to land with the objects they designate, so that, for example, specialists in English etymology are called upon to deal with the history of Greek, Latin, Celtic, or Slavic words (to name just a few of the possible sources) and offer opinions about the data they know imperfectly or not at all.

As long as we stay with breeches, consider some other names for “loose-fitting garments for the loins and legs” (dictionary definitions of the most common words are a joy to read): pants (shortening of pantaloons; Italian), trousers (French), jeans (also Romance), knickerbockers (from a proper name), and in connection with proper names, bloomers may be mentioned. Probably, most people remember the origin of Levi’s.

Breeches and its cognates have traveled over half of the world for centuries, and over time, a mountain of linguistic literature dealing with the word has accrued. This word certainly originated in the singular (that is, breech was meant). It occurred in all the Old Germanic languages, except Gothic. We know Gothic only from a fourth-century translation of the Gospels (the original was in Greek), but the characters mentioned in the New Testament did not wear trousers (or breeches). The forms of the word in the recorded Germanic languages are so similar that all of them either go back to the same ancient native protoform or were borrowed from the same foreign source. That form or source must have sounded as brōk (ō designates a long vowel, approximately as in Modern English awe; as far as we can judge, that brōk rhymed with Modern English hawk).

And here’s the rub. If the word was native (Germanic), why did people call that article of clothing brōk? (Such is of course the perennial question of all etymology: only onomatopoetic, sound–imitative words, like ga-ga and croak, are transparent.) As regards brōk, we know only one thing for sure. The old noun was singular (that is, breech). To give a relatively late example, in a thirteenth-century German romance, the youth’s mother sews such a brōk (German bruoch) for him as part of a one-piece hunting outfit.

Since the Germanic word refuses to reveal its origin, historical linguists looked at the evidence in other languages and, naturally, noticed Celtic brāca (a similar meaning), along with its less common doublet bracca. The once powerful Celts were close neighbors of the “Teutons,” as Germanic-speaking tribes were referred to in the past (the German form is die Germanen). Germanic and Celtic share numerous words, and sometimes such words occur only in those two language groups. They may designate natural phenomena (shadow belongs here), tribal property (the most interesting term in this group is town), social relations(here the history of free and oath is worthy of notice), and so forth. The most spectacular borrowing from Celtic into Germanic is perhaps iron: apparently, it was the Celts who taught their Germanic neighbors how to deal with iron.

Even when a word has been recorded only in Germanic and Celtic (that is, without cognates elsewhere: in Greek, Latin, Slavic, and so forth), we cannot be sure who borrowed from whom or whether speakers of both language groups borrowed their word from a third source about which we have no information. The recorded Celtic forms that interest us are braca and bracca. Whence the long consonant in bracca? This cc is usually called emphatic, but what was so emotional about a rather trivial piece of clothing? Or did the word once have n in the root (branca?), so that nc became cc? To repeat: who borrowed from whom? Or was there a third source from which the Celts and the “Germanen” borrowed both the piece of clothing and its name? Incidentally, the oldest (unrecorded) Celtic form is also controversial.

Elmar Seebold, the most recent editor of Fridrich Kluge’s etymological dictionary of German, wrote a detailed entry on Bruch and pointed out that the Germanic word has a less opaque history than the Celtic one, because it may be related to the verb break, while the Celtic word has no cognates. But the relation of breech to break is uncertain, and I could not verify the Old English and Old Icelandic names of the body parts Seebold cites. Where then are we? In a sadly familiar place: the hunt was exciting, but the target escaped us. Breech is a very old Germanic and Celtic word, whose ultimate origin has not been found. The etymologist, as I have noted more than once, is a lonely hunter.

Recently, I cited a proverb advising us not to eat cherries with great men. Such adages seem to have bookish origins: they are insipid and too long, even bombastic. In one’s breeches (synonym: in one’s buttons) “perfectly fit” was recorded in several parts of England a century and a half ago and sounds like a genuine “folk creation.” Probably the same holds for the phrase to wear the breeches “to usurp the authority of the husband.” A medieval equivalent of this phrase existed in Italy, and in the nineteenth century it occurred in French and Dutch. Incidentally, in medieval Iceland, the husband was allowed to divorce his wife if she wore breeches. A look at breeches in the OED is also revealing. Other than that, stay in your breeches.

_{Featured image: Christ with his disciples, A.N. Mironov. C-BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.}

OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.

Americana: enter hillbilly. Moby Dick follows

This is a continuation of the previous post, devoted to all kinds of country bumpkins. Hillbilly looks like the most uninspiring word to discuss: it is so obviously made up of hill + billy. This is also what the entry in the OED online says. The entry has not yet been updated, but as regards etymology, there may not be anything to update. Though the word is rather old, the dates of its first occurrence in print vary. In a source for 2008,1893 is mentioned. The extremely detailed entry in Wikipedia gives 1892. Webster’s dictionary online pushes the date to the 1880s but gives no references. Those details matter little: apparently, the word became rather well-known toward the end of the nineteenth century, which means that it was coined earlier. We have no way of knowing how much earlier.

From an etymological point of view, hillbilly does not look more exciting than, for example, blackboard. A blackboard is indeed a black board, but think of blackmail, blacksmith, greyhound, blueprint, greenhorn, and redneck. Is their origin fully transparent? Greyhound is particularly tricky (even though the dog is grey!). Hillbilly may also contain a secret, among other reasons, because compounds and collocations with rhyming components (like claptrap, hobnob, hodgepodge, and Georgie Porgie) are almost too good to be true, that is, their origin may not be as transparent as it seems. On the other hand, Oscar Wilde wrote a tale titled The Sphinx without a Secret. You never can tell.

Surprisingly, an alternate etymology of hillbilly has been offered. The Dictionary of American Regional English quotes a well-known passage from an old column in the New York Times: “Protestants who came of Appalachian stock were called ‘hillbillies’ and the term connoted ignorance, poverty, vile habits and, in general, low lifers perfectly at home in a pig pen.” Jack Morgan published a short note on the subject in the journal Comments on Etymology (22/8, 1993, p. 22). He was intrigued by the emphasis on Protestant and cited another researcher, in whose opinion the word hillbilly goes back to the emigrants’ preoccupation with their hero “King Billy” (that is, William of Orange), so that they became known as Billy-boys of the hill country. This is a very unlikely source of hillbilly (to put it mildly).  

The historians who stress the North English/Scottish ancestry of the original settlers “of Appalachian stock” failed to find a probable source of the word in Scotland (that is, no appropriate etymon ofhillbilly exists in Scots). Most likely, the word hillbilly is an American coinage, though this fact does not exclude a non-Appalachian “ancestor.” The authors of the article published in the journal American Speech 83, 2008, p. 215, say: “… prior to [!] the word’s chief association with mountaineers in Southern Appalachia and the Ozarks, hillbilly was also generally used in the American language to refer to residents of hill country, especially those in the backwoods districts, in the lower Midwest and Deep South” (emphasis added). To conclude, anyone from hill country was a hillbilly! (Those interested in JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy and the discussion of this book will find a lot of information on the Internet.)

I’ll now cite a curious German parallel to hillbilly. German Hillebille is a wooden hardboard that served as a primitive signaling device, chiefly in the Graz mountains. People struck it in case of fire and on many other occasions. The etymology of this word is unknown, because neither component of Hillebille means anything in German. Only some dialectal Dutch cognates of hille– seem to contain allusions to romping and other precipitous movements. Between 1894 and 1898, a spate of publications appeared in the local, now little-remembered, but at one time well-read German periodicals describing the device, but almost nothing was then or later said about the word’s origin (the few suggestions I found are not worth discussing). The German Wikipedia describes the device, gives a picture of it, and points out that no connection exists between the German and the American noun. (In America, this connection would not have occurred to anyone, because outside Germany, Hillebille is a word people do not know, while I ran into it more or less by chance.)

Indeed, the similarity is, most probably, coincidental, except that both might be “emotional formations.” English hillbilly is a humorous coinage, even if it surfaced as an offensive sobriquet, while the German noun is rather obviously sound-imitative. Nothing points to the fact that German immigrants brought this word to the Appalachians and produced a German-English pun, that is, turned Hillebille into Hill Billy. Only the coincidence is curious. Thus, we have come full circle: Hillbilly emerged unscathed (a “Billy” from the hills), while the German near-homonym remains unexplained and unrelated to its English twin.

Stalled in the mountains, we will progress to the ocean with our Americana. Chapter 53 of Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick is titled “The Gam.” Those who have read the book will remember that it opens with a page bearing the title “Etymology.” Therefore, they won’t be surprised that the author supplied us with the following explanation toward the end of that chapter: “GAM. Noun—A social meeting of two (or more) whale-ships on a cruising-ground; when, after exchanging hails, they exchange visits by boats’ crews; the two captains remaining, for the time, on board of one ship, and the two chief mates on the other.” A good professional definition, even though not containing an explanation of origins.

The OED online features this odd word but cannot offer a decisive etymology. Indeed, such a monosyllabic word might come from all kinds of sources. Erich Maria Remarque even wrote a novel about a woman named Gam (certainly, not his best book). Once again, I have nothing to offer, except for an uninspiring lookalike. Russian gam (pronounced like English gum) means “great noise; ruckus.” The word is probably sound-imitative (onomatopoeic). Could English gam also once refer to a noisy gathering? To conclude, we ended up with two obscure, possibly sound-imitative, words, whose origin should have been clear, but the solution escaped us. As usual, I am turning to our readers’ expertise. Perhaps someone knows more about Hillebille and gam than I do. If so, kindly send us your comments.

_{Featured image: Photo by Ken Jacobsen. Public domain via Pexels.}

OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.

Hobnobbing with a hillbilly

It is unimaginable how many denigrating names people have invented for our breadwinners and shepherds! Those names were, I assume, coined by city dwellers who did not want to soil their hands with earth and manure. Urban dwellers are urbane and genteel, while dwellers in villages are villains. Right? To be sure, those are the most extreme traces of the medieval (feudal) attitude toward the populace, but our more modern vocabulary is neither more tolerant nor gentler.

A look at some of the better-known synonyms for hillbilly is worth an effort. One such word is hayseed, a late sixteenth-century metaphor, now, at least in the US, mainly remembered as meaning “comical rustic.” (Rustics, except in the opera Cavalleria Rusticana, are comical by definition, aren’t they?) Now, what is wrong with the inconspicuous, tiny hayseeds, “grass seeds obtained from hay,” as dictionaries very properly inform us. Yet a hayseed is also one of the names for a country bumpkin. The suffix –kin in bumpkin is Dutch (as in mannikin, napkin, Wilkins, and the unforgettable bare bodkin), so that the entire noun bumpkin is probably also of Dutch origin. It seems to mean “a little tree” (implying a blockhead?).

Wood has not fared well in our metaphors. For instance, Russian dubina “a big wooden stick” (stress on the second syllable; the word more or less rhymes with English farina) means “idiot.” The root bump– in bumpkin ends in an excrescent sound (that is, a sound added without etymological justification: see the post for last week) and means “wood,” as do English beam and German Baum. The implication seems to be clear, because wood is neither gentle nor genteel. A wooden smile will hardly meet with a sweet response. Nor is a wooden gait graceful. However, a bumpkin does not have to be a country dweller. Oliver Goldsmith introduced a rather endearing spoiled brat and trickster Tony Lumkin in his play She Stoops to Conquer. The name, modeled on bumpkin, became proverbial. Tony was not a “hayseed.”

Back to the countryside, where one is expected to meet numerous hicks and rubes. Surprisingly, hick is Hick, a doublet of Rick (Richard), just as Hob is a doublet of Rob, and Hodger of Roger. The union of h and r has a long and interesting history, but it is anybody’s guess why just Hick became a synonym for bumpkin. We may also ask why our genteel restroom is called john and sometimes jenny, while Shakespeare’s contemporaries used a jake for the same purpose. Words from names are countless, and you need a historical linguist, rather than any Tom, Dick, and Harry, to explain their origin. Modesty prevents me from discussing dick, but Richard arrived at Dick by way of its rhyming partner Rick (who, as we have seen, is also Hick). Hick is as good a synonym for “country bumkin” as any other.

More words like bumkin? Take joskin. It sometimes seems that any name, supposedly or really common, might acquire the sense “hayseed.” Yet most peasants were never called Hick! The same holds for Rube, briefly mentioned above. Rube is short for Reuben. According to the story known from the Old Testament, Reuben came to a sad end, but to repeat, Reuben/Rube was never among the most popular names in the English-speaking world, and especially in the countryside. Why then are hicks also called rubes? Just to commemorate a man cursed by his father and to transfer the guilt to an uncultivated villager? Incidentally, some of the names mentioned above are rather recent, a fact that complicates our story even more.

The stock of names for hayseeds and their ilk is almost inexhaustible. Louts and lubbers (the latter as in landlubber) join this motley, nondescript company. Lout is supposedly related to a verb meaning “to bend” (by way of “clown”?). No one takes this derivation seriously, but every dictionary mentions it with a question mark. Lubber is also problematic. Its Old French lookalike does mean “swindler,” but though Middle English may have borrowed such a word from French, more likely, lobur ~ lobeor ~ lobre was part of the Common European slang of the lower classes and criminals (such words existed; this jargon or argot, is called Gaunersprache and Rotwelsch in German).

Another etymology traces lubber to Middle Dutch lobben “clown” (again clown!) with reference to words for “lump.” More probably, the French, Dutch, and English nouns are indeed part of thieves’ (wandering traders’, strollers’) late medieval jargon, used in several parts of Europe. The very word slang may have a similar origin. See the post for September 28, 2016 (“The origin of the word ‘slang’ is known”) and the comments.

The king of hayseeds is probably the hillbilly. The etymology of hillbilly is of course clear, isn’t it? By no means! To this subject the entire next post will be devoted.

POSTSCRIPT

1. Last week, I mentioned William Bates, the author of an excellent essay on the origin of limerick in Notes and Queries, and expressed my regret that I could not find any information about him. As usual, my colleague Dr. Stephen Goranson came to the rescue. This circumstance did not surprise me. Over the years, I have often witnessed his uncanny ability to ferret out all kinds of well-hidden information. This time, he sent me an obituary of Dr. Bates (1821-1884) from the Birmingham Daily Post, an important regional newspaper. Willian Bates, a surgeon, was also well-known in the world of art and literature. The short obituary made a special mention of his contributions to Notes and Queries. A century and a half ago, permanent association with NQ might make one famous or at least distinguished. Those were days! I may add that my database of English etymology features fifteen contributions by William Bates to word origins. No doubt, he also wrote on other subjects. Incidentally, I, too, searched for William Bates and found two celebrities called this, but not the one unearthed by Stephen Goranson.

2. I have a rich database of obscure proverbs and idioms. Here is one of them: “Those that eat cherries with great persons shall have their eyes sprinkled out with stones.” Its analogues have been recorded in German, Romanian, and in a famous medieval Dutch poem. Such an elaborately picturesque and seemingly usleless proverb! Does anyone know its source? Perhaps Dr. Wolfgang Mieder, our great specialist in this area, will enlighten us. Anyway, enjoy a peaceful image of eating cherries below.

_{Featured image: A group of farmers harvesting paddy in Bangladesh. Photo by Zaheed Sarwer Khan. CC-BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.}

OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.

Five surprising facts about baseball [map]

As a game, baseball has multiple antecedents and ancestors, most notably an English children’s game called rounders. But as an organized spectator sport, baseball is native to the United States. Still, the sport spread quickly beyond U.S. borders, and took hold in many other parts of the world. It became the national sport of both Cuba and Japan, and migrated from there to many of the lands where fans pay to watch live games and also follow professional leagues abroad. Here are five sites that illuminate baseball’s complex geography.

_{Featured image by Tim Gouw via Unsplash.}

OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.

A tortuous journey: the word <i>pamphlet</i>

In English, pamphlet is synonymous with booklet, brochure, but in some other modern European languages, a pamphlet makes one rather think of its synonym lampoon. The word surfaced in writing in 1415, and only two things are clear about its origin: pamphlet did not carry political overtones when it was coined, and it must have had a foreign source (or, because of its spelling with ph, was at least understood to be a loan from Latin or Greek).

It is astounding how often and how passionately scholars and amateurs at one time discussed the origin of pamphlet in the popular press. The main vehicle was, as usual, Notes and Queries, but no old etymological dictionary missed the word. The OED online presents a clear picture of the history of the word and supports a well-argued etymology, which was first offered in 1874 by the great French philologist Gaston Paris in Revue Critique, for September 26, 1874, p. 107. The full OED volume with the letter P appeared in 1909.

These are the main old hypotheses about the derivation of pamphlet. Perhaps the etymon is the French phrase par un filet “(held together) by a thread,” with reference to a single occurrence of the word written as paunflet (as though panflet, with u inserted) and an additional reference to French brochure “brochure” (brocher “to stitch together”; see a picture of a relatively old brochure in the heading). This etymon has been offered and rejected many times, because pamphlets contained a page or two, without a cover, and did not have to be connected by means of a thread.

Another suggested source was papyrus, and I might have passed it by as devoid of interest if it had not been defended by Frank Chance, a talented philologist. In some form this hypothesis can already be found in Stephen Skinner’s 1671 etymological dictionary of English. Chance believed that in a word like papyrus the consonant m might easily be inserted (another insertion!). He cited a few analogs of this phenomenon but not English empty: this adjective goes back to ǣmtig. Also,sumpter “packhorse” developed from Old French som(m)etier; in it the entire group mp is excrescent (that is, added without etymological justification). The Old Dutch noun pampier meant “paper.” Frank Chace believed that pampinus and papyrus “got mixed up.” There is a cruel law of etymology: the more complicated the proposed derivation, the greater the certainty that it is wrong. Not without regret, I have to dismiss Chance’s hypothesis as unrealistic.

A somewhat similar guess was offered in 1889 by Richard Stephen Charnock, a good folklorist but a totally unreliable word historian: “…from Spanish papeléta, diminutive of papél paper from which, with an infixed m, pamphlets might have been formed.” Why the infix, and why Spanish?

Naturally, Walter W. Skeat did not stay away from this discussion either. He reconstructed the date when papyrus probably turned up in English texts and came to the conclusion “that the word must be French, with a Greek root.” And here the Greek historian named Pamphila appeared on the scene (she was discovered long before Skeat in this context). Pamphila lived in the first century CE and enjoyed great popularity. Her multiple works are, it appears, lost. As far as our word is concerned, the posited way must have been from the author’s name to a common noun. The process is common. For instance, we may say that travelers take a Baedeker when they go abroad. Yet in the latest edition of A Concise Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, Skeat wrote: “Etymology quite uncertain. We find French pamphile, the knave of clubs, from the Greek name Pamphilus. Similarly, I should suppose that there was a French form *pamphilet [the asterisk denotes here and below a reconstructed form] or Late Latinpamphilētus, coined from Latin Pamphila….” At the end of the entry, he added a noncommittal reference to Gaston Paris.

Pamphlets were erotic (“amatory”) tracts, and as early as 1344, Richard de Bury, Bishop of Durham and a great bibliophile, recollected in his book Philoliblon (“The Love of Books”) that the youths of his generation had cared more for fat palfreys than for leanpanfletos (sic). In those days, students were advised to stay away from pamphlets! Surely, the learned Pamphila need not interest us in this context. Such was also the opinion of Hensleigh Wedgwood, Skeat’s main predecessor in the area of English etymology. Another Pamphila, responsible for the manufacture of silk, enjoys renown. She cannot be the heroine of our tale either.

The most detailed summary of older views on the history of the word pamphlet will be found in an article by William Bates (Notes and Queries 3/V, 1864, 187-169; see also NQ 3/IV, 1864, 325). I am sorry that I could not find any information about this extremely knowledgeable man.

The second edition of The Century Dictionary summarized some of the attempts to explain the derivation of pamphlet and listed four main hypotheses: 1) from a supposed Old French *paum-fueillet (as though “a leaf of paper held in the hand”), 2) from a supposed Medieval Latin *pagina filata “a threaded (sewed) leaf,” 3) from a supposed use of French par un filet “by a thread,” and 4) from a supposed Old French *pamfilet, Medieval Latin *pamfiletus, resting upon a name Pamphilus or Pamphila, of Greek origin. And here is the corollary at the end of the entry: “The last conjecture is plausible (compare the like personal origin of donet, a grammar, from the name Donatus, and of French calepin, a notebook, from the name Calepinus), but historic proofs are lacking.” My reference to Baedeker is less exotic. Yet I tend to agree with the conclusion by the Century Dictionary.

These are the reasons for my uncertainty. It is usually believed that pamphlet emerged in French, made its way into English, and was later retranslated by French. Perhaps so. I can only add that though words from names and titles are fine, no one, not even the knave of clubs, was called Pamphlet! It is understood that –et in pamphlet is a French suffix. English, –let (as in rivulet, bracelet, and their likes) seems to have emerged in English a century and a half later than the word that interests us. It seems that in 1415, no one in England would have divided pamphlet into pamph-let, but the new noun may have sounded vulgar. Sound groups like pump, pomp, pimp are sound-imitative (the German noun Pumpf means “a fart”). Perhaps this circumstance contributed to the word’s popularity among students. And as for the sound f after m in pamphlet, compare English humph, with its exotic spelling ph!

POSTSCRIPT

1. After the reemergence of this blog, two of our readers expressed their joy that THE OXOFORD ETYMOLOGIST is back on track. I am deeply grateful for their comments.

2. In connection with my derivation of yeoman, a reader reminded us of the British river yeo and suggested that the earliest yeomen might be recruited from that area. I could find no evidence of this connection, while the existence of another word with yeo– (which I mentioned) and of the Dutch cognate of yeo– seem to point in another direction.

3. In commenting on the history of limerick (see the previous post), Stephen Goranson pointed out that during the Civil War in the US, the phrase come to Limerick meant “get to the point, come to terms,” in connection with the Treaty of Limerick (1691). This is a most welcome reference. Search the Internet for THE TREATY OF LIMERICK.

_{Featured image: Pamphlet, “Adieux de madame la duchesse de Polignac aux francois,” 1789. Photo by Eliasdo, CC-BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.}

OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.

Trailblazing paths: iconic women through time [reading list]

In honor of Women’s History Month, we’re celebrating trailblazing paths taken by women whose courage and vision transformed societies. This reading list features five biographies that highlight women who resisted systemic barriers, confronted entrenched hierarchies, and fought for the dignity and safety of others. From activists and reformers to scientists and cultural leaders, these stories reveal how women—often overlooked or silenced—have pushed boundaries, protected the vulnerable, and inspired movements for justice. Together, they remind us that progress toward gender equality has always been driven by those who refused to accept the limits imposed on them.

1. A Slumless America: Mary K. Simkhovitch and the Dream of Affordable Housing by Betty Boyd Caroli

In this biography, Mary K. Simkhovitch emerges as a pioneering force in the settlement house movement and a central architect of American public housing reform. Betty Boyd Caroli traces Simkhovitch’s founding of Greenwich House in 1902 and her influential role in shaping early 20th‑century urban policy, including her leadership in New Deal housing initiatives, the creation of the National Housing Conference, and co‑authoring the landmark 1937 National Housing Act. Balancing an unconventional marriage, family life, and a relentless public mission, Simkhovitch became widely admired—once even depicted as a “Wonder Woman of History”—for her ability to confront urban poverty while advocating fiercely for immigrant communities and affordable housing. This biography, rich with historical insight, positions her as an enduringly relevant figure whose work helped define the federal government’s responsibility to support low‑income families.

Read more.

2. American Infidelity: The Gilded Age Battle Over Freethought, Free Love, and Feminism by Steven K. Green

American Infidelity traces the dramatic late‑19th‑century clash between a dominant evangelical culture and a rising coalition of freethinkers, feminists, and sexual reformers who sought greater personal liberty and challenged religious authority. Historian Steven K. Green follows this struggle through the activists who fought for birth control, divorce reform, and women’s autonomy, as well as the moral crusaders—including Elizabeth Cady Stanton—who worked to suppress them. Revealing how these “infidels” pushed for a more open, rational, and egalitarian society, Green shows how their movements were ultimately stifled but left a powerful legacy that continues to shape today’s debates over reproductive rights, censorship, and the role of religion in public life.

Read more.

3. COMBEE: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War by Edda L. Fields-Black

Winner of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for History

This book recounts the often‑overlooked story of Harriet Tubman’s 1863 Combahee River Raid, a daring Civil War operation in which she led Union spies, scouts, and two Black regiments up South Carolina’s river to destroy major rice plantations and liberate 730 enslaved people. Drawing on newly examined documents—including Tubman’s pension file and plantation records—historian Edda L. Fields‑Black, a descendant of one of the raiders, brings to life the enslaved families and communities who escaped to freedom that night and later helped shape the Gullah Geechee culture. Through this vivid reconstruction, the book reveals one of Tubman’s most extraordinary military achievements and the enduring legacy of those who fought for liberation.

Read more.

4. The Things She Carried: A Cultural History of the Purse in America by Kathleen B. Casey

The Things She Carried reveals how purses, bags, and sacks have long been critical tools for women asserting privacy, autonomy, and political power in America. Kathleen Casey shows how these objects—from 19th‑century reticules to the handbags carried by immigrant workers, civil rights activists, and Rosa Parks herself—became symbolic extensions of women’s rights struggles, allowing them to navigate male‑dominated spaces, protect personal dignity, and challenge discriminatory systems. Drawing on sources ranging from vintage purses to photographs, advertisements, and legal archives, Casey uncovers how women of all backgrounds used the bags they carried to assert agency, cross restrictive social boundaries, and shape pivotal moments in the fight for gender and racial equality.

Read more.

5. Frances Oldham Kelsey, the FDA, and the Battle against Thalidomide by Cheryl Krasnick Warsh

This biography tells the remarkable story of Dr. Frances Oldham Kelsey, the FDA medical officer who, in the early 1960s, prevented the dangerous drug thalidomide from being approved in the United States, sparing countless Americans from catastrophic birth defects. A pioneering scientist who earned advanced degrees in an era with few female researchers, Kelsey resisted intense pressure from Merrell Pharmaceutical and spent nineteen months demanding solid evidence of the drug’s safety. Her unwavering stance not only kept thalidomide off the U.S. market but also spurred sweeping reforms in drug regulation through the 1962 Drug Amendment, which established modern clinical trials, informed consent, and stronger FDA oversight. Drawing on archival records and family papers, the book reveals her lifelong commitment to ethical science, her battles against industry hostility and institutional barriers, and her enduring legacy as a vigilant protector of public health.

Read more.

Explore our extended list of titles on Bookshop (UK | US) and Amazon (UK | US).

_{Featured image created in Canva.}

OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.

The “Freest Writer” in Stalin’s Russia

Laurence Sterne, the eighteenth-century author of Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey, might seem an unlikely figure to capture the imagination of early Soviet intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s. The Bolshevik Revolution dismantled the cultural institutions of the old regime, displaced much of the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia, and set out to create a new literary canon for a new Soviet reader. From the outset, literature was subject to political control.By the 1930s, the state increasingly defined a canon of approved literary classics, while the newly-established doctrine of Socialist Realism began to dominate official literary institutions.

What place could there be, in such a system, for an eccentric Yorkshire clergyman whose popularity in Russia had peaked more than a century earlier, at the turn of the nineteenth century? And yet, in the two decades following the 1917 Revolution, Sterne’s name began to appear with notable frequency in lecture halls, private correspondence, diaries, and unpublished manuscripts. Laurence Sterne and His Readers in Early Soviet Russia: The Secret Order of Shandeans traces Sterne’s reappearance in early Soviet culture. Drawing on letters, diaries, translation drafts, marginal notes, illustrations, and editorial correspondences, the book reconstructs how Soviet readers encountered Sterne and what they sought in his writing.

In mid-1920s Leningrad, an undergraduate student Edvarda Kucherova wrote to a friend: “You cannot imagine how much I adore Sterne. In a very personal way and with such gratitude, for he helps me live. Thanks to him, it is so clear that everything that is closest and most desirable is always so far away from us. Sterne taught me to understand and endure this.”

One of Sterne’s most influential early Soviet advocates was Viktor Shklovsky, a literary critic associated with the experimental literary criticism of the 1920s. In a 1921 pamphlet devoted to Tristram Shandy, Shklovsky presented Sterne as a ‘radical revolutionary of form’ whose digressive prose anticipated the poetry of the Russian Futurists and paintings by Picasso. Sterne’s Soviet afterlife, however, was not confined to the avant-garde circles. By the 1930s, as official discourse turned against modernism, Sterne continued to be read, but attention shifted from questions of form to philosophical and psychological concerns. Despite this change, one association remained constant. Sterne was repeatedly linked, whether approvingly or critically, with artistic and inner freedom.

The book takes Sterne as a point of entry into the everyday intellectual life of Soviet translators, critics, and readers. The circulation of works by the ‘freest writer of all times’ (as Friedrich Nietzsche once called Sterne) an author with no obvious utility for the Soviet state, allows the reconstruction of a form of intellectual life that existed alongside, and partly outside, the enforced unanimity of Stalinist culture.

Readers turned to Sterne for many reasons. In 1937, the celebrated Soviet writer Isaac Babel and his wife, Antonina Pirozhkova, consulted A Sentimental Journey while searching for a name for their newborn daughter. Among those drawn to Sterne in the 1930s was Gustav Shpet, one of Russia’s leading philosophers before the Revolution. Excluded from academic philosophy under Soviet rule, Shpet turned to literary translation as a means of both economic and intellectual subsistence. In his notes to an unfinished translation of Tristram Shandy, he read Sterne as a belated Renaissance humanist, an author who sought distance from his own times by immersing himself in older comic traditions. Shpet’s fate, however, underscores the limits of such refuge. Arrested during the Great Terror, he was executed in 1937.

The book follows figures from very different backgrounds. One of them is the Ukrainian critic Stepan Babookh. Before becoming a literary editor, most notably one of the editors of the 1935 Russian edition of A Sentimental Journey, he had been a worker, soldier and Bolshevik activist. Babookh discovered English literature while being held as a POW by the British during the war, first in an internment camp in India and later in a London prison. A self-taught intellectual of the new Soviet generation, he chose to abandon a Party career in order to become a scholar of English literature.

In the late 1930s, Izrail Vertsman, a scholar of Marxist aesthetics, defended the first Soviet doctoral dissertation devoted to Sterne. Vertsman belonged to a group of critics known as “the Current”, led by philosophers Mikhail Lifshitz and Georg Lukács. These intellectuals advocated more sophisticated forms of Marxist criticism, opposing the crude (in their view) sociological approaches of the 1920s. For Vertsman, Sterne embodied the spirit of creative renewal he associated with “the Current”, yet his private letters reveal the difficulty of reconciling his deep admiration of Sterne with the intellectual constraints of the Stalinist 1930s.

Through these intertwined lives, the book reconstructs what it calls the secret order of Shandeans—an imagined community of readers ranging from literary scholars, translators, and high school students to soldiers and Gulag prisoners. For many of them, Sterne’s humour offered an imaginary escape at a time of political uncertainty and mounting restrictions on creative freedom, when public expressions of individuality were becoming increasingly dangerous.

^{Featured image by Alexander Popadin via Pexels.}

OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.

Bob Turvey, a student of limericks

I have recently read two books by Bob Turvey: The Secret Life of Limericks (Ithaca, NY, 2024. 286 pp.), and Why Are Limericks Called Limericks: An Etymological Detective Story (Bristol, England: Waldegrave Publishing, 2025. 295 pp.). The first book was sponsored by The Mad Duck Coalition, about which I know nothing and am not certain whether it should be featured among the publishers. This, however, matters little, because what really matters is the author’s career and achievement. Last week, I promised to write about his books and am happy to be able to keep my promise.

The author’s career is certainly worthy of mention. Bob Turvey has a doctorate from Cambridge University. As a research chemist he worked in many countries and now lives in Bristol, England. He devoted forty years to studying the history of limericks, spared no money on buying old and recondite books, and never stopped learning more and more about his subject. Probably no one in the world knows half as much about limericks as he does, and therefore, I first envisaged a limerick in his honor, composed in my best Bristol fashion. “A limerick, new, for Bob Turvey?! / Indeed, but it went topsy-turvy. / Neither reason nor rhyme. / I am not in my prime, / Though still unabashedly vervy.” Too bad! I mean the self-effacing admission, but at least this is the first occurrence of the adjective vervy in English. Does the OED take note of blogs?

The earlier of the aforementioned volumes contain the history of eighteen famous limericks. By the way, according to Turvey, here is the most often translated limerick ever: “There was an old man of Boolong/ Who frightened the birds with his song/ It wasn’t the words/ Which astonished the birds/ But the horrible dooble-ontong.” This masterpiece is now almost forgotten, or perhaps it has fallen into temporary desuetude. One wonders what there is to study, while dealing with this or any limerick. Many, many things. First of all, the references. For example, what is and where is Boolong? Is it Boulogne? And why is French entendre pronounced in this ridiculous way? It turned out that such was indeed the way people pronounced the French group –endre when, for example, Dickens and Thackeray were active. No, it did not “turn out”: the fact had to be discovered and documented.

And who composed the limerick? We are not delving into the epoch of Homer or even Shakespeare: no limerick predates the nineteenth century. But popular limericks are almost folklore, and finding their authors is like chasing the author of “Little Red Riding Hood.” (By the way, as Jack Zipes has shown, this tale did probably have an individual author!) And here I am coming to one of the main points of my report.

The first printed version of nearly all limericks appeared in students’ magazines at Oxford/Cambridge or in newspapers. Bob Turvey sifted through tens of thousands of pages in British, American, Canadian, and Australian magazines and newspapers, many of which can now (fortunately) be found online, and sometimes (!) he ran into what seemed to be the first occurrence of the printed text. (I know only too well this labor of love, though in hunting for articles and long-forgotten notes on etymology I limited myself to journals and popular magazines. I realized that I would drown in newspapers, with their word columns and answers to the readers’ queries, and stayed away from this inexhaustible source.) But even the seemingly secure result may not be final. Thus, the author of the Boolong limerick remains undiscovered, though at least two viable candidates have emerged as such.

Is this labor worth the trouble? To my mind, certainly. To give an example from another area. Recently, a piece of music has emerged, with the notes written by Chopin. The piece has been known for years, and yet the discovery was hailed as a great sensation. And quite rightly so: Chopin’s own hand! Limericks are a noticeable part of the culture of the English-speaking world, and their history deserves the attention of those who care for culture. Unfortunately, “history” is made up of tiny details. Only later may they be assembled to produce an impressive whole. Bob Turvey collected countless fragments, and the mosaic he produced is impressive. I should add that he is often satisfied with negative results: he might not be able to find the exact date and the sought-for author, but always succeeded in rejecting fanciful hypotheses. Once again I see a parallel to my work. Sifting through numerous hypotheses of a word’s origin, I often manage to get rid of silly or fanciful conjectures but fail to discover the truth. Such is the way of all reconstruction, “The course of true love never did run smooth.”

Note my reference above to the culture of the English-speaking world. Limericks can also be produced in other languages, but only English speakers compose them by the hundreds. Bob Turvey noted how hard it often is for foreigners to understand the funniest limericks. He ascribed this fact to the specific English sense of humor, but his examples feature the people whose knowledge of English is inadequate for detecting a pun or a hidden reference. Though the English (French, Jewish) sense of humor certainly exists, we still don’t know why Edward Lear’s 1846 The Book of Nonsense was such a success. Limericks, though not called limericks, existed before him.

As noted, Turvey’s second volume is titled Why Are Limericks Called Limericks? But the book is also about when and who. The earliest mention the word limerick Bob Turvey dug up goes back to 1879, that is, at least a decade earlier than what one could find in old dictionaries. Now 1879 is also the date given in the OED online. Rather probably, limericks were called limericks because they were sung between verses of a song whose chorus included the name Limerick and typically invited the listener “to come to Limerick.” Why come to Limerick? The question remains open. For comfort, you will see a view of that town in the heading of this post. Anyone with a better derivation of the word limerick is welcome to contest this hypothesis. Limerick is certainly not a “corrupted” form of Learick.

You expected a sensation and received a reasonable hypothesis. That’s because the author of the books discussed above bases his conclusions on facts and is not interested in sensations. He is a true scholar.

POSTSCRIPT

I have recently received two questions. Since I am not sure when I’ll be able to post the next issue of my traditional gleanings, I’ll answer both right now. 1) Some people believe that the idiom chock a block is a loan from Turkish, in which an identical word means the same. This conjecture looks unconvincing, because their proponents are unable to show how the Turkish idiom reached English. In chock a block, the word chock is the same as in chockfull. 2) Another correspondent cited a Polish word, whose Russian cognate is diuzhii “strong,” and asked me whether I know it. Yes, I do. It is a cognate of English doughty and German tüchtig, whose origin has been explained quite well.

_{Featured image: King John’s Castle in Limerick by Eric the Fish. CC-by-2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.}

OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.