In a new series of videos from Oxford University Press, Michael F. Suarez, S.J. talks about the importance of the scholarly edition and its evolution from print to digital.

Click here to view the embedded video.

For the full series, visit our “Putting scholarly editions online” playlist on YouTube.

Michael F. Suarez, S.J. is Director of Rare Book School, Professor of English, University Professor, and Honorary Curator of Special Collections at the University of Virginia. A Jesuit priest, he holds four masters degrees (two each in English and theology) and a D.Phil. in English from Oxford.

Ron Paul has two problems. One is his and the larger conservative movement of which he is a part. The other is ours—by which I mean a left that is committed to both economic democracy and anti-imperialism.

Ron Paul’s problem is not merely the racist newsletters, the close ties with Lew Rockwell, his views on abortion, or even his stance on the 1964 Civil Rights Act—though these automatically disqualify him from my support. His real problem is his fundamentalist commitment to federalism, which would make any notion of human progress in this country impossible.

Federalism has a long and problematic history in this country—it lies at the core of the maintenance of slavery and white supremacy; it was consistently invoked as the basis for opposition to the welfare state; it has been, contrary to many of its defenders, one of the cornerstones of some of the most repressive moments in our nation’s history[pdf]—and though liberals used to be clear about its regressive tendencies, they’ve grown soft on it in recent years. As the liberal Yale constitutional law scholar Akhil Reed Amar put it not so long ago:

Once again, populism and federalism—liberty and localism—work together; We the People conquer government power by dividing it between the two rival governments, state and federal.

As I’ve argued repeatedly on this blog and elsewhere, the path forward for the left lies in the alliance between active social movements on the ground and a strong national state. There is simply no other way, at least not that I am aware of, to break the back of the private autocracies that oppress us all.

Even people, no, especially people who focus on Paul’s position on the drug war should think about the perils of his federalism. There are 2 million people in prison in this country. At most 10 percent of them are in federal prisons; the rest are in state and local prisons. If Paul ended the drug war, maybe 1/2 of those in federal prison would be released. Definitely a step, but it has to be weighed against his radical embrace of whatever it is that states and local governments do.

Paul is a distinctively American type of libertarian: one that doesn’t have a critique of the state so much as a critique of the federal government. That’s a very different kettle of fish. I think libertarianism is problematic enough—in that it ignores the whole realm of social domination (or thinks that realm is entirely dependent upon or a function of the existence of the state or thinks that it can be remedied by the persuasive and individual actions of a few good souls)—but a states-rights-based libertarianism is a social disaster.

So that’s his problem.

Our problem—and again by “our” I mean a left that’s social democratic (or welfare state liberal or economically progressive or whatever the hell you want to call it) and anti-imperial—is that we don’t really have a vigorous national spokesperson for the issues of war and peace, an end to empire, a challenge to Israel, and so forth, that Paul has in fact been articulating. The source of Paul’s positions on these issues are not the same as ours (again more reason not to give him our support). But he is talking about these issues, often in surprisingly blunt and challenging terms. Would that we had someone on our side who could make the case against an American empire, or American supremacy, in such a pungent way.

This, it’s clear, is why people like Glenn Greenwald say that Paul’s voice needs to be heard. Not, Greenwald makes clear, because he supports Paul, but because it is a terrible comment—a shanda for the left—that we don’t have anyone on our side of comparable visibility launching an attack on American imperialism and warfare. (Recalling what I said in the context of the death of Christopher Hitchens, I suspect this has something to do with our normalization and acceptance of war as a way of life.) In other words, we need to listen to Paul, not because he’s worthy of our support, and certainly not because the reasons that underlie his positions on foreign policy are ours, but because he reveals what’s not being said, or not being said enough, on our side.

There is a long history in this country of the left not paying too much attention to the ways in which our leaders do things that set the stage for worse things to come. J. Edgar Hoover got a tremendous amount of traction under FDR and the New Deal because he was perceived to be a spit-and-polish, professional crime fighter. So trusted and hailed was he by liberals and progressives—when he worked for their leaders—that it was none other than Arthur Schlesinger, in The Vital Center (1949), who urged Americans to put their trust in Hoover rather than in the Red hunters of the far right:

All Americans must bear in mind J. Edgar Hoover’s warning that counter-espionage is no field for amateurs. We need the best professional counterespionage agency we can get to protect our national security.

In 1950, William Keller reports in his essential The Liberals and J. Edgar Hoover, while Truman was still president, Hubert Humphrey took to the floor of the Senate to declare:

If the FBI does not have enough trained manpower to do this job, then, for goodness sake, let us give the FBI the necessary funds for recruiting the manpower it needs….This is a job that must be done by experts.

Yet, as Ellen Schrecker rightly argued in Many Are the Crimes, her definitive account of McCarthyism:

Had observers known in the 1950s what they have learned since the 1970s, when the Freedom of Information Act opened the Bureau’s files, “McCarthyism” would probably be called “Hooverism.” For the FBI was the bureaucratic heart of the McCarthy era.

In the last week, liberals and progressives have been arguing about these issues; Digby has been especially cogent and worth listening to. The only thing I have to add to that debate is this: both sides are right. Not in a the-truth-lies-somewhere-in-between sort of way. Nor in a can’t-we-all-get-along sort of way. No, both sides are right in the sense that I laid out above: Ron Paul is unacceptable, and it’s unacceptable that we don’t have someone on the left who is raising the issues of imperialism, war and peace, and civil liberties in as visible and forceful a way.

Corey Robin teaches political science at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center, and is the author of The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin. He blogs at coreyrobin.com, where this post originally appeared.

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January 26, 1500

Pinzón Becomes First European to Land in Brazil

On January 26, 1500, Spanish sailor Vincente Yáñez Pinzón spotted land. He named the cape the Cabo de Santa María de la Consolación. The site was near modern-day Recife, Brazil, making Pinzón the first European to explore Brazil.

Pinzón was an accomplished navigator who had taken part in the famous 1492 voyage of Christopher Columbus. Pinzón commanded the Niña while his brother Martín commanded the Pinta (a third brother, Francisco, was Martín’s chief officer on that ship). It was not until 1499, however, that Pinzón set out on a new expedition.

In November of that year, he sailed from Palos, Spain, reaching the South American coast by the next January. He spent several months exploring the coast, reaching as far north as the mouth of the Amazon River. Pinzón noticed that the color of the water had changed and, after sampling that differently color water, found it to be freshwater, and not saltwater. He named the body the Mar Dulce, or Sweetwater Sea, and using the strength of the outflowing current, he sailed for the West Indies before returning to Spain.

Records and maps from the Age of Exploration are not always clear or without controversy. Pinzón’s sighting of Brazil is subject to these uncertainties. Some historians think that he landed in Venezuela, not Brazil, and encountered the Orinoco River, not the Amazon. They believe that Portuguese explorer Pedro Álvares Cabral—who certainly reached Brazil in April of 1500—was the first European to land there. At any rate, Portugal, not Spain, gained possession of Brazil and made it the cornerstone of its American empire.

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Delirium is a common but serious condition that affects many older people admitted to hospital. It is characterised by disturbed consciousness and changes in cognitive function or perception that develop over a short period of time. This condition is sometimes called “acute confusional state.”

It is associated with poor outcomes. People with delirium have higher chances of developing new dementia, new admission to institutions, extended stays in the hospital, as well as higher risk of death. Delirium also increases the chances of hospital-acquired complications such as falls and pressure ulcers. Poor outcomes resulting from delirium will reduce the patient’s health-related quality of life but also increase the cost of health care.

Delirium can be prevented if dealt with urgently. Enhanced care systems based on multi-component prevention interventions are associated with the potential to prevent new cases of delirium in hospitals. Prevention in a hospital or long-term care setting will lead to the avoidance of costs resulting from patients’ care. For example, the cost of caring for a patient with severe long-term cognitive impairment is high, and prevention of delirium could reduce the number of patients with such impairment. It will therefore reduce the cost of caring for such patients. Prevention could reduce lost life years and loss in health-related quality of life due to other adverse health outcomes associated with delirium.

The multi-component prevention interventions involve making an assessment of people at risk in order to identify and then modify risk factors associated with delirium. Delirium risk factors targeted in such interventions normally include cognitive impairment, sleep deprivation, immobility, visual and hearing impairments, and dehydration. The people at risk of delirium have their risk of delirium reduced through such interventions. The implementation of these interventions is usually done by a trained multi-disciplinary team of health-care staff. This means additional implementation cost. It would therefore be useful to know if this set of prevention interventions would be cost-effective. It was indeed found to be convincingly cost-effective by the UK National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) and was recommended for use in medically ill people admitted to hospital.

It is cost-effective to target multi-component prevention interventions at elderly people at both intermediate and high risk for delirium. It is an attractive intervention to health-care systems. In the United Kingdom the savings for the intervention would spread unevenly between the National Health Service (NHS) and social care providers. The savings to the NHS may be modest and largely accrue through lower costs resulting from reduced hospital stay, whereas the savings to social care are likely to be more considerable resulting from an enduring and diminished burden of dependency and dementia, particularly reduced need for expensive care in long-term care settings. The NHS acute providers may need to invest to implement the intervention and to accrue savings to the wider public sector. The current NHS hospital funding system does not incentivise this type of investment, and this could be a major structural barrier to a widespread uptake of delirium prevention systems of care in the UK.

In the work undertaken as part of the NICE guideline on delirium, the additional cost of implementing the intervention was based on the description of the intervention that required additional staff for delivery. It is possible that the guideline provides an important under-estimate of cost-effectiveness. This is because it might be possible to implement the intervention within existing resources. The intervention is designed to address risk factors for delirium by delivering the sort of person-centred routine care that people might expect to receive. For example, better attention to hydration, nutrition, medication reviews, mobilisation etc. Such an approach appears feasible in routine care although more scientific evidence is needed to demonstrate a reduction in new cases of delirium.

The case for widely deploying multi-component delirium prevention interventions is strong. Such interventions are very likely to be cost-effective in older people who are at risk of delirium. Such interventions will cost-effectively reduce the additional burden of delirium in older people who are likely to be battling with other co-morbidities.

Anayo Akunne is a Health Economist and Director of KSG-Trans Limited. He trained as a Pharmacist with a master’s degree and a PhD in public health / health economics. He worked as a health economist on the NICE Guideline on the diagnosis, prevention and management of delirium (CG 103). He is a co-author (with John Young and Lakshmi Murthy) of the paper “Cost-effectiveness of multi-component interventions to prevent delirium in older people admitted to medical wards.” This paper has been made publicly available by the journal Age and Ageing. You can read it in full and for free here.

January 25, 1971

Idi Amin Takes Power in Uganda

Source: Library of Congress

Obote had led Uganda’s independence movement in 1962 and had served as its first prime minster. In 1966, though, he deposed Uganda’s king and had a new constitution written that created a republic with himself as president. Amin was an ally whom Obote named as head of the army and air force at that time.

Amin decided to move against Obote when he was under investigation for his leadership of a gang of thugs. His brutality emerged quickly. Prominent Ugandans — including the police official who had been investigating him — were killed, some by armed toughs and others in mysterious circumstances. Several thousand soldiers were killed on Amin’s orders, decimating the armed forces but putting it firmly under his control.

Amin formed four different security organizations, which he used to carry out his harsh rule. Estimates suggest that as many as 300,000 people were killed in his violent rule.

Amin’s leadership was also marked by actions based on fleeting moods. Late in 1972, he ordered all Asians expelled from Uganda. The departure of some 35,000 people, many of whom owned businesses, crippled Uganda’s economy. A Muslim, Amin was extreme in his condemnation of Israel and once praised Adolf Hitler’s execution of millions of Jews.

Fear drove several different assassination attempts between his coup and 1979. That year, Amin sent troops into neighboring Tanzania to harass some villagers. In response Tanzania’s leader, Julius Nyerere, ordered a counterattack that was joined by thousands of Ugandans. Within weeks, the rebels had seized power and Amin had fled to Libya. He died in Saudi Arabia in 2003.

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In these videos, John Reader, author of Missing Links: In Search of Human Origins talks about the treasure hunt that is the search for the missing link.

Is it possible to discover the missing link?

Click here to view the embedded video.

What is it like finding the remains of an ancient pre-humanoid?

Click here to view the embedded video.

Can scientists draw firm conclusions from fossil finds?

Click here to view the embedded video.

John Reader is Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Anthropology, University College London. A writer and photographer with more than fifty years of professional experience, his work has included contributions to major international publications, television documentaries and a number of books, including including The Untold History of the Potato, Africa, Pyramids of Life with Harvey Croze, and Rise of Life. His latest book, Missing Links: In Search of Human Origins, published in October 2011. John Reader has previously written about Australopithecus sediba for OUPblog.

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In late November and early December of last year, some 195 national delegations met in Durban, South Africa, for the 17th Conference of the Parties (COP-17) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the latest in a series of international negotiations intended to address the threat of global climate change due to increased concentrations of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases (GHSs) in the atmosphere, largely a consequence of the worldwide combustion of fossil fuels, as well as ongoing deforestation.

Any assessment of the Durban climate negotiations needs to take note of the three major outcomes from the negotiations: (1) elaboration on several components of the Cancun Agreements; (2) a second five-year commitment period for the Kyoto Protocol; and (3) a non-binding agreement to reach an agreement by 2015 that will bring all countries under the same legal regime by 2020. This package–in total–represents something of a “half-full glass of water,” that is, an outcome that can be judged successful or not, depending upon one’s perspective.

But an unambiguous outcome of the Durban talks is the fact that third element–the “Durban Platform for Enhanced Action”–has opened an important window. To explain why I say this requires a brief review of some key points from twenty years of history of international climate negotiations.

The Rio Earth Summit (1992)

The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, adopted at the UN Conference on Environment and Development (the first “Earth Summit”) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992, contains what was to become a crucial passage. The first “principle” in Article 3 of the Convention reads as follows: “The Parties should protect the climate system for the benefit of present and future generations of humankind, on the basis of equity and in accordance with their common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities. Accordingly, the developed country Parties should take the lead in combating climate change and the adverse effects thereof.” The countries considered to be “developed country Parties” were listed in an appendix to the 1992 Convention – Annex I.

The phrase–common but differentiated responsibilities–has been repeated countless numbers of times since 1992, but what does it really mean? The official answer was provided three years after the Earth Summit by the first decision adopted by the first Conference of the Parties (COP-1) of the U.N. Framework Convention, in Berlin, Germany, April 7, 1995–the Berlin Mandate.

The Berlin Mandate (1995)

The Berlin Mandate interpreted the principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities” as: (1) launching a process to commit (by 1997) the Annex I countries to quantified greenhouse gas emissions reductions within specified time periods (targets and timetables); and (2) stating unambiguously that the process should “not introduce any new commitments for Parties not included in Annex I.”

Thus, the Berlin Mandate established the dichotomous distinction whereby the Annex I countries are to take on emissions-reductions responsibilities, and the non-Annex I countries are to have no such responsibilities whatsoever.

The Kyoto Protocol (1997)

It was in direct response to this Mandate that the US Senate subsequently passed unanimously (95-0) the Byrd-Hagel Resolution in August of 1997 (Senate Resolution 98, 105th Congress, 1st Session) stating that: “It is the sense of the Senate that the United States should not be a signatory to any protocol to, or other agreement regarding, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change of 1992, at negotiations in Kyoto in December 1997, or thereafter, which would mandate new commitments to limit or reduce greenhouse gas emissions for the Annex I Parties, unless the protocol or other agreement also mandates new specific scheduled commitments to limit or reduce greenhouse gas emissions for Developing Country Parties within the same compliance period.”

So, in a very real sense, the Berlin Mandate brought about sustained bi-partisan opposition in the United States to the international climate regime and the Kyoto Protocol. This sealed the Protocol’s fate in terms of ever being ratified by the U.S. Senate. President Clinton did not submit the Protocol to the Senate for ratification, nor would Al Gore have done so had he been elected to succeed Clinton. Likewise, Senator John Kerry was explicit about his opposition to Kyoto when he ran for President against George W. Bush, and President Bush was subsequently more than explicit about his lack of support for the Protocol and, for that matter, the UNFCCC process. When Barack Obama ran against John McCain for President in 2008, one thing on which they agreed was their opposition to the Kyoto Protocol.

Beyond those decisive impacts on US climate politics, the Berlin Mandate had wide-ranging and worldwide normative consequences, because it became the anchor that prevented and has–until very recently–continued to prevent real progress in international climate negotiations. With 50 non-Annex I countries having greater per capita income than the poorest of the Annex I countries, the distinction is clearly out of whack. But, more important than that, this dichotomous distinction means that:

(a) half of global emissions soon will be from nations without constraints;
(b) the world’s largest emitter–China–is unconstrained;
(c) aggregate compliance costs are driven up to be four times their cost-effective level, because many opportunities for low-cost emissions abatement in emerging economies are taken off the table; and
(d) an institutional structure is perpetuated that makes change and progress virtually impossible.

Fast Forward to Copenhagen (2009) and Cancun (2010)

The dichotomous Annex I/non-Annex I distinction remained the central feature of international climate negotiations ever since COP-1 in Berlin in 1995. Then, at COP-15 in 2009, there were hints of possible change.

The Copenhagen Accord (2009) and the Cancun Agreements (2010) began a process of blurring the Annex I/non-Annex I distinction. However, this blurring was only in the context of the interim pledge-and-review system established at COP-15 in Copenhagen and certified at COP-16 in Cancun, not in the context of an eventual successor to the Kyoto Protocol. Thus, the Berlin Mandate retained its centrality.

Finally, We Arrive in Durban (2011)

The third of the three outcomes of the December 2011 talks in Durban, South Africa, which I mentioned at the beginning of this essay–the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action–completely eliminates the Annex I/non-Annex I (or industrialized/developing country) distinction. In the Durban Platform, the delegates reached a non-binding agreement to reach an agreement by 2015 that will bring all countries under the same legal regime by 2020. That’s a strange and confusing sentence, but it’s what happened, and it’s potentially important.

Rather than adopting the Annex I/non-Annex I (or industrialized/developing country) distinction, the Durban Platform focuses instead on the (admittedly non-binding) pledge to create a system of greenhouse gas reductions including all Parties (that is, all key countries) by 2015 that will come into force (after ratification) by 2020. Nowhere in the text of the decision will one find phrases such as “Annex I,” “common but differentiated responsibilities,” “distributional equity,” “historical responsibility,” all of which had long since become code words for targets for the richest countries and blank checks for all others.

A Dramatic Departure

Thus, in a dramatic departure from some seventeen years of U.N. hosted international negotiations on climate change, the 17th Conference of the Parties in Durban turned away from the Annex I/non-Annex I distinction, which had been the centerpiece of international climate policy and negotiations since it was adopted at the 1st Conference of the Parties in Berlin in 1995.

Because of this, the international law scholar, Daniel Bodansky, has labeled “the Durban Platform a complete departure from the Berlin Mandate.” Likewise, Indian professor of international law, Lavanya Rajamani says that Durban delivered a “new process and with it, a clean slate on differentiation.” And Elliot Diringer of the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, finds the overall Durban deal to be “delicately poised between two eras–the fading age of Kyoto, and a new phase … with developed and developing countries presumably on a more equal footing.”

This is of vast potential importance, but only “potential” importance, because just as it was the Kyoto Protocol’s numerical targets and timetables that fulfilled the Berlin Mandate’s promise, it remains for the delegates to the UNFCCC to meet this Durban mandate with a new post-Kyoto agreement by 2015 (to come into force by 2020). Only time will tell whether the Durban Platform delivers on its promise, or turns out to be another “Bali Roadmap,” leading nowhere.

So, with such uncertainty, what’s the “unambiguous consequence” of Durban that I referred to above?

An Unambiguous Outcome: The Platform Opens a Window

The Durban Platform–by replacing the Berlin Mandate–has opened an important window. The national delegations from around the world now have a challenging task before them: to identify a new international climate policy architecture that is consistent with the process, pathway, and principles laid out in the Durban Platform, namely to find a way to include all key countries (such as the 20 largest national and regional economies that together account for upwards of 80% of global carbon dioxide emissions) in a structure that brings about meaningful emissions reductions on an appropriate timetable at acceptable cost.

Having broken the old mold, a new one must be forged. There is a mandate for change. Governments around the world now need fresh, outside-of-the-box ideas from the best thinkers, and they need those ideas over the next few years. This is a time for new proposals for future international climate policy architecture, not for incremental adjustments to the old pathway. I trust that this call will be heard by a diverse set of universities, think tanks, and for that matter, advocacy and interest groups around the world. For example, with 48 research initiatives in Australia, China, Europe, India, Japan, and the United States, the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements is prepared to contribute to this effort.

A Symposium on “Post-Kyoto International Climate Policy Architecture” appears in the current issue of the Review of Environmental Economics and Policy. Robert N. Stavins is the Albert Pratt Professor of Business and Government, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, Director of the Harvard Environmental Economics Program and the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements, as well as a University Fellow of Resources for the Future, and a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

There’s a new breed of dictionary, untouched by human hands. The New York Times reports that teams of programmers have developed software that automates the making of dictionaries, eliminating the need for human lexicographers, who may favor some words and neglect others. These new dictionary droids comb the web, selecting words in context, defining them automatically based on that surrounding context, and tabulating the definitions and citations for subscribers to consult online. And they do it all faster than you can say Google.

The web has made possible a democratizing of the dictionary. There are no editors with their annoying biases to stand in the way, so with just a couple of clicks users can see words in their natural habitat and choose exactly which one best suits their purpose. To paraphrase the old New Yorker cartoon, on the internet, everybody’s a lexicographer.

No human dictionarian sifts through the massive online corpus to figure out the various senses and connotations of each word, its history, etymology, or pronunciation. This leaves users free to do the job of lexicography themselves. They can even assign a word to any part of speech they want, or make up a new part of speech entirely if they like. There are no usage labels warning that a particular word might not be national, current, or reputable, or that some readers might find it stuffy or offensive. And there’s no grammar nazi shaking a minatory finger and muttering, “dictionary droid ain’t a word.” I just used dictionary droid online. It will soon be collected by a dictionary droid. Ergo, dictionary droid is a word. And if you don’t know what dictionarian or minatory mean, you can find them in the OED, a dictionary compiled by all-too-fallible humans.

What would the old lexicographers think about the web’s new dictionary droids? Back in the eighteenth century, Dr. Johnson’s ’net was “any thing reticulated or decussated, at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections.” That definition sounds like it was created by a droid, and if Johnson actually had to define internet today, he’d probably come up with something equally convoluted.

The nineteenth-century lexicographer Noah Webster had his own word quirks. Webster preferred bridegoom to bridegroom because it comes from the Old English word guma, meaning ‘man,’ not groom, which refers to ‘someone charged with caring for horses,’ and he wanted to respell deaf as deef, to reflect how it was pronounced by his fellow New Englanders. So I imagine Webster would have changed lots of the spellings he found online and taken out all the dirty words, which is what he did when he translated the Bible after he finished making dictionaries. Finally, James Murray, the first editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, would probably give up the 3×5 slips on which he wrote each word, together with a context illustrating it, and make a PowerPoint stack for every word instead.

Above: Dr. Johnson’s definition of network, from his Dictionary of the English Language (1755). Below: Noah Webster’s definition of bridegoom, from An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828). In 1833 Webster published his translation of the Bible, which used euphemisms instead of dirty words, “language which cannot be uttered in company without a violation of decorum,” so that women and children could read the scriptures without blushing.

New technologies give rise to the fear that they’ll render human workers obsolete. Computer-driven robots build our cars, and the ranks of autoworkers have diminished. But we still need people to figure out how to make the kinds of cars that drivers will want to buy. Newspapers downsize as readers get their news online. But just because someone uploads an eyewitness video from their phone doesn’t mean we don’t need professional journalists to gather facts, conduct interviews, and actually report a breaking story or interpret its events in retrospect. So it is with dictionaries.

Lexicographers today benefit greatly from the massive databases of words-in-context that the web provides, and all the major dictionary makers, along with other language researchers, are hard at work figuring out how the web can help them better understand the history and current state of language.

Computers can sift and sort all this word data in nanoseconds. They can pull out of an online corpus, for example, every use of the word the, together with the words that surround it, plus metadata about the source text (magazine, novel, television show, website, Tweet, phone call; when and where it was published or uttered; who might have written or said it, and to whom). But while they’re great at pattern recognition, computers don’t deal well with lexical nuance. We still need human lexicographers to evaluate the data gathered by the dictionary droids and interpret it for dictionary users, amateurs who appreciate the convenience of clicking on a word for its meaning, but don’t want to assume the role of professional word nerd for themselves.

The web is full of the kind of linguistic data that makes real lexicographers drool, so crunching all those online words in the service of dictionary-making is a worthy task. And most dictionarians recognize the importance of publishing their dictionaries on the web, because online is now where readers go to look up words. But although writing algorithms to automate the process of defining words, creating entire dictionaries untouched by human hands, might save on labor costs, it’s not likely to give dictionary users the word histories, the accurate definitions, or the other kinds of lexical guidance that they really need. Of course the real downside to online dictionaries, both those generated by web-crawling software and those created by professional lexicographers, is that you can’t use them to press flowers or have them double as booster seats when small children come to dine.

James Murray, first editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, shown here in his study at Hogwarts. Were Murray making dictionaries today, he would probably give up the 3×5 slips on which he wrote each word, together with a context illustrating it, and make a PowerPoint stack for every word instead.

This article originally appeared on The Web of Language.

Dennis Baron is Professor of English and Linguistics at the University of Illinois. His book, A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution, looks at the evolution of communication technology, from pencils to pixels. You can view his previous OUPblog posts here or read more on his personal site, The Web of Language, where this article originally appeared. Until next time, keep up with Professor Baron on Twitter: @DrGrammar.

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In Heart of Buddha, Heart of China: The Life of Tanxu, a Twentieth Century Monk, James Carter traces the life of Tanxu, an unknown but extraordinary Buddhist monk. Defined by a desire for a desire for an activist Chinese nationalism that maintained the nation’s cultural and social traditions Tanxu’s life story portrays twentieth century China from empire to republic, through war, famine, and revolution.

A century ago, Tanxu used his temples to establish physical links between Buddhism and Chinese nationalism. At the same time, though, he was guided by the belief that the physical world was illusory. The title of his memoir, “Recollections of Shadows and Dust,” uses a common Buddhist phrase meant to convey the impermanence and illusion of the material world, hardly the theological emphasis one might expect from a man who transformed cityscapes with his work in brick and mortar. I tried to understand this apparent paradox as I researched Tanxu’s career, but my connection to him remained impersonal, even distant, and strictly academic.

This all changed with the unexpected series of events that led me to the Bronx. My research turned up a commentary that Tanxu had written on the Heart Sutra (a Buddhist sutra is a sacred text, usually purporting to record the spoken teachings of the historical Buddha). This brief and very popular text includes the famous construction “form is emptiness; emptiness is form.” Tanxu’s commentary was translated into English and widely read by Western Buddhists. One morning from my office in Philadelphia I emailed the Young Men’s Buddhist Association (YMBA), in New York, to request a copy. They were happy to comply, but more interesting was this aside in their response: “By the way…[our] Master Lok To is a dharma heir disciple of Master Tanxu.”
…
Tanxu and Lok To worked together closely during the 1950’s and Lok To came to North America with Tanxu’s encouragement. He settled in the Bronx at the invitation of local Buddhist laity, and established the Buddhist Association of the United States there in 1964. Ten years later, he moved to his current location, on Davidson Avenue and founded the Young Men’s Buddhist Association as a center for his translation work. There he has been for nearly forty years.
…
Sitting with Lok To, Lu Bin (a young nun), and Hoi Sang Yu (a lay Buddhist who would become one of my most important guides through Tanxu’s world), I share my interest in Tanxu, and what I know about him. I’ve been to Harbin, and Yingkou, and Changchun, places they’ve never visited. Had I been to Qingdao, they wanted to know? Not yet. But that was the Master’s most important temple – I had to visit there: they could arrange it. They could coordinate my travels to most of the important stops on Tanxu’s itinerary, including Ningbo, where Tanxu studied to become a monk, and Tiantai Mountain, where his sect of Buddhism was established 1,100 years ago. Lok To was formally the abbot of Chamshan Temple in Hong Kong, where Tanxu’s remains were interred. I was welcome there anytime.
…
The moment was exciting, but also unsettling. I am by training and disposition an academic: keen to observe, less eager to participate. Journalists are warned to report, not to become, the story. Was I not risking just this by accepting invitations to temples and posing before Tanxu’s memorial shrine? And there was the question of faith. I make no claims for or against the beliefs that Tanxu, Lok To, and the other monks shared. Did I belong here?

Five months later, I stand in a mountainside clearing overlooking Clearwater Bay in Hong Kong’s New Territories. A white stupa housing Tanxu’s earthly remains gleams in the tropical sun. It is a beautiful scene of green cliffs plunging into the azure waters of the South China Sea. As I contemplate the view, a monkey emerges from the forest and, with barely a glance my way, walks to the plate of offerings on the altar in front of Tanxu’s stupa. Taking an orange form the plate, it saunters casually back into the forest.
…
My immersion in Tanxu’s world is most complete as I follow the story of his ordination in the city of Ningbo, near Shanghai. Ningbo teems with an easy going affluence. Centuries ago it was one of the largest ports in Asia. Today, less hurried than Shanghai, less uncertain than Hong Kong, and less paranoid than Beijing, it is no longer one of China’s great cities, but seems to have found a comfortable rhythm being past its prime. And, like almost all Chinese coastal cities, Ningbo is in the midst of an explosive construction boom.
…
The day I arrived, the temple appears shabby and dark, but active. A handful of monks move among the pavilions. The temple’s abbot, Master Yixang, less than five feet tall with a long gray beard, greets us. He did not know Tanxu personally, but he is familiar with one of the temple’s most famous students, and he is happy to meet visitors who know about Tanxu, for it is a rare occurrence. He shows me where Tanxu prayed, studied, and slept. In the gathering twilight, the abbot leads us from these faded buildings to his office, where he brings out the architectural drawings for renovations to Guanzong Temple and the Ningbo Buddhist Association: it will be a grand, brightly colored compound with marble floors replacing the worn wood that creaks under my feet as I look over the plans. It will be an impressive complex, but I feel fortunate that I arrived before the renovations and can tread the very same boards Tanxu walked decades before.

As Tanxu studied in this monastery in the 1910s, approaching his fiftieth birthday, he no doubt reflected on all the brutality and deprivation he had observed in his life. The first of Buddhism’s Four Noble Truths declares, “All existence is suffering”: Tanxu had suffered, and had dedicated much of his life to the path that would enable humans to transcend that suffering. My travels with Tanxu had taken me across the world, several times, but the only way to get to the start of the story was to travel back in time. This story begins neither in New York nor Hong Kong nor Ningbo, but in the poverty and political turmoil that was North China in the late nineteenth century.

James Carter is Professor of History at Saint Joseph’s University, in Philadelphia. He has lived and traveled widely in China, is the editor of the journal Twentieth-Century China and the author of several books and articles on modern China, most recently Heart of Buddha, Heart of China: The Life of Tanxu, a Twentieth Century Monk.

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Downton Abbey opens with the telegram announcing that the Earl of Grantham’s heir, James Crawley, and his son Patrick, have perished in the sinking of the Titanic. Since Lady Mary was supposed to marry Patrick, the succession plans go awry, and this sets off a chain of events.

But how likely is it that an English aristocrat would have perished in the disaster? The British Inquiry (1912) found that those saved represented 203 out of 325 passengers in First Class (62.46%); 118 of 285 in Second (41.40%); 178 out of 706 in Third (25.21%); and 212 of 885 members of the crew (23.95%). Overall, 711 passengers and crew were saved of the 2,201 on board (32.30%).

Not surprisingly, with the emphasis on ‘women and children first’, the proportion of women passengers saved in First Class (140 out of 144, or 97.22%) was higher than that for men. But 57 of the 175 men were saved, or 32.57%. In fact if you were a male passenger in Second Class your chances of survival were very slim indeed – only 14 of 168 were saved, or 8.33%. And in Third Class your chances were only slightly better – 75 of the 462 were saved, or 16.23%. It was these figures which reduced the overall odds for men, since for men overall – both passengers and crew – only 338 of a total of 1,667 were saved, or 20.27%.

The opening of Downton Abbey suggests that the Titanic was a potent symbol of luxury and privilege. To be sure, there were English aristocrats in First Class, figures such as Lucy Noel Martha Dyer-Edwards, born Kensington on 25 December 1878, who had married Norman Evelyn Leslie, the 19th Earl of Rothes in April 1900. The Eton-educated Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon, fifth baron, was travelling with his wife Lucy, the well-known fashion designer. He was a talented fencer, and had represented Great Britain at the 1908 Olympics. This was a world where wealth was derived from land, and where deference was the norm. But their fellow travellers in First Class were more likely to be American or Canadian. Among them were the property developer John Jacob Astor; the businessman Benjamin Guggenheim; John Borland Thayer, Second Vice-President of the Pennsylvania Railroad; George Widener, son of P. A. B. Widener, a member of the board of the Fidelity Trust Company of Philadelphia; Charles Hays, General Manager of the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway; and Isidor Straus, co-owner of Macy’s Department Store in New York.

Much of the fascination of the Titanic is that the personal narratives of individual passengers and crew provide insights into the worlds they came from. In First Class, we can find businessmen, their families, and the maids and governesses who travelled with them, privileged certainly, but predominantly men whose wealth was based on the new commercial opportunities offered in the United States and elsewhere. In Second Class, there were the teachers, clerks, minor businessmen, clergymen, small time inventors and others who represented the trades and the growing middle class that relied on them. In Third Class, we see the poor and under-privileged, the ironworkers, bricklayers, farmers, labourers, bakers, gardeners, fitters, butchers, carpenters, grocers, butlers, shop assistants, toolmakers, valets, and blacksmiths. Many of them were migrants, not only from Britain, and especially Ireland, but from Belgium, Finland, Sweden, the Lebanon, and a host of other countries, leaving poverty or oppression for a better life in the United States. And among the crew, the Captain, ship’s officers, surgeons, stewards, stewardesses, waiters, engineers, lookouts, firemen, cooks, and plate washers. This then, is the real world of 1912: one of class conflict, religious sectarianism, mistrust and suspicion, leisure for some but grinding poverty for others, racism and prejudice, faith in technology tempered with scepticism, and optimism mixed with anxiety about the future.

In fact, the reality of life on board the Titanic is better captured by the human detail of more anonymous figures – among both passengers and crew. Lawrence Beesley, originally from Wirksworth in Derbyshire, was an English science teacher and widower, travelling to visit his brother in Toronto. Elin Hakkarainen, a domestic servant from Finland, was travelling with her husband Pekka to Monessen, Pennsylvania. Elizabeth Shutes, originally from Newburgh, New York, was only in First Class because she was the governess to her charge Margaret Graham. Hanna Touma was a mother and migrant from Tibnin, a village in the Lebanon; accompanied by her children Maria and Georges, her husband Darwis was already working in the United States, in Dowagiac, Michigan. Harold Bride, born Deptford, London, was the young Assistant Wireless Operator. And Violet Jessop, born in Argentina of Irish parents, was one of the Stewardesses. The Titanic did represent the last night of a small town, a cross section of Edwardian society. But it was a world of migrants as well as millionaires.

Dr. John Welshman is Senior Lecturer, History Department, Lancaster University, UK. He is the author of Titanic: The Last Night of a Small Town.

January 23, 1849

Elizabeth Blackwell Becomes First Woman to Receive a Medical Degree

Source: National Library of Medicine

Blackwell was born to a wealthy and progressive-minded English family that moved to the United States in the 1830s, when she was around ten. She became a teacher, though that profession did not engage her. One day, a dying friend told her that she might have endured her disease better if she had been attended by a female physician. The conversation planted the idea of becoming a doctor in Blackwell’s mind.

She received some rudimentary training in medicine in the home of a local physician and began applying to medical school. Geneva accepted her, in part because the student body — to whom the question of her admission had been put — treated the idea of a female medical student as a joke. Blackwell faced the hostility of some teachers, students, and townspeople, though she eventually disarmed critics with her dedication and seriousness.

Prejudice made it difficult for Blackwell to establish a practice after her graduation. In 1853, she opened a clinic for women in New York City. She was eventually joined by her sister Emily and by Marie E. Zakrzewska, both of whom she had encouraged to earn medical degrees. The clinic grew and in 1857 was renamed the New York Infirmary for Women and Children. Eleven years later, Blackwell opened the Woman’s Medical College associated with the infirmary. In 1869, she returned to England, where she lived and worked for the rest of her life.

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Neandertal communication must have been different from modern language. To repeat a point made often in this book, Neandertals were not a stage of evolution that preceded modern humans. They were a distinct population that had a separate evolutionary history for several hundred thousand years, during which time they evolved a number of derived characteristics not shared with Homo sapiens sapiens. At the same time, a continent away, our ancestors were evolving as well. Undoubtedly both Neandertals and Homo sapiens sapiens continued to share many characteristics that each retained from their common ancestor, including characteristics of communication. To put it another way, the only features that we can confidently assign to both Neandertals and Homo sapiens sapiens are features inherited from Homo heidelbergensis. If Homo heidelbergensis communicated via modern style words and modern syntax, then we can safely attribute these to Neandertals as well. Most scholars find this highly unlikely, largely because Homo heidelbergensis brains were slightly smaller than ours and smaller than Neandertals’, but also because the archaeological record of Homo heidelbergensis is much less ‘modern’ than either ours or Neandertals’. Thus, we must conclude that Neandertal communication had evolved along its own path, and that this path may have been quite different from the one followed by our ancestors. The result must have been a difference far greater than the difference between Chinese and English, or indeed between any pair of human languages. Specifying just how Neandertal communication differed from ours may be impossible, at least at our current level of understanding. But we can attempt to set out general features of Neandertal communication based on what we know from the comparative, fossil, and archaeological records.

As we have tried to show in previous chapters, the paleoanthropological record of Neandertals suggests that they relied heavily on two styles of thinking – expert cognition and embodied social cognition. These, at least, are the cognitive styles that best encompass what we know of Neandertal daily life. And they do carry implications for communication. Neandertals were expert stone knappers, relied on detailed knowledge of landscape, and a large body of hunting tactics. It is possible that all of this knowledge existed as alinguistic motor procedures learned through observation, failure, and repetition. We just think it unlikely. If an experienced knapper could focus the attention of a novice using words it would be easier to learn Levallois. Even more useful would be labels for features of the landscape, and perhaps even routes, enabling Neandertal hunters to refer to any location in their territories. Such labels would almost have been required if widely dispersed foraging groups needed to congregate at certain places (e.g., La Cotte). And most critical of all, in a natural selection sense, would be an ability to indicate a hunting tactic prior to execution. These labels must have been words of some kind. We suspect that Neandertal words were always embedded in a rich social and environmental context that included gesturing (e.g., pointing) and emotionally laden tones of voice, much as most human vocal communication is similarly embedded, a feature of communication probably inherited from Homo heidelbergensis.

At the risk of crawling even further out on a limb than the two of us usually go, we make the following suggestions about Neandertal communication:

1)  Neandertals had speech. Their expanded Broca’s area in the brain, and their possession of a human FOXP2 gene both suggest this. Neandertal speech was probably based on a large (perhaps huge) vocabulary – words for places, routes, techniques, individuals, and emotions. We have shown that Neandertal expertise was largely based on long-term memory. Much of this store of information was in the form of procedures, but we suspect an equally large part of this ‘how to’ information existed as verbal knowledge in the form of terms.

2)  Many of these words also existed in stock sayings, also held in long-term memory, much like the idioms and adages in modern language (the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” variety).

3)  Speech depended heavily on environmental and social information to disambiguate word clusters. Clues from context can be very effective. U.S. readers may remember a television commercial in which four young men riding in a car each used only a single word, “dude”, and yet managed to have an intelligible conversation (for themselves and the listener).

4)  Neandertal speech regularly used questions, commands, exclamations, and perhaps directional reference (indicatives). The differences may have been marked via ‘aspect’ words, or morphological rules, or even grammatical rules. But the difference might also have been delivered through context or change in tone of voice, or even gesture.

5)  Neandertal speech was capable of describing new situations, as when they juxtaposed terms for animals and places that they had not combined before. So at least in this sense, their speech must have been able to express new thoughts, the linguists’ productivity. But given its likely heavy reliance on long-term memory, their productivity was probably limited to reshuffling a very large body of lexical elements and phrases.

This communication system would have been capable of delivering a very large amount of information in context, but would have been less capable than modern language of long range reference in the absence of appropriate cues. Neandertal language was direct and task relevant. It was capable of referring to events in the past, or future, or at distant places, but only in ways connected to a context shared with the listener. There is no reason to think that Neandertals created elaborate stories or myths. Recall that Neandertals appear not to have used fire in the same social way that modern humans do. Moreover, they had few interactions with neighboring territorial communities, and therefore no reason to have modes of speech that could be used to interact with strangers, or even acquaintances.

The picture of Neandertal speech we have just presented is a minimal one based on what we know about Neandertal life from the paleoanthropological record. Neandertal speech may have been more powerful and subtle than this picture suggests. It may have included features quite foreign to modern language that evolved in the Neandertal lineage since the time of Homo heidelbergensis. There just is no evidence that requires anything beyond the features we have presented.

The above post is an excerpt from the recently published How To Think Like a Neandertal by Thomas Wynn and Frederick L. Coolidge. Thomas Wynn is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs. Frederick L. Coolidge is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs. Wynn and Coolidge are co-authors of The Rise of Homo sapiens: The Evolution of Modern Thinking and co-editors (with Sophie A. de Beaune) of Cognitive Archaeology and Human Evolution.

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The new George Lucas produced film RED TAILS reminds American audiences of the heroics of the African American pilots in the Tuskegee training program. In historian J. Todd Moye’s book FREEDOM FLYERS: The Tuskegee Airmen of World War II, Moye captures the challenges and triumphs of these brave pilots in their own words, drawing on more than 800 interviews recorded for the National Park Service’s Tuskegee Airmen Oral History Project. In an excerpt from the book, here is one of their stories:

Horace Augustus Bohannon required no introduction to Jim Crow. The tenth of ten children born into very poor circumstances in Atlanta, Georgia, he knew all about racial segregation and unequal treatment long before he
came of age. “You knew that you didn’t go that way because that was white only, and you know that you’re supposed to be reserved—or preserved—over here. But that’s the way we came up. We had to learn to live with it,” Bohannon remembered. “Somewhere early in life, my mother got us to understand that if you live right, you could do well despite the segregation laws and so forth.” They could survive, if not thrive, even in the unjust system if they followed her simple piece of advice: “You do right.”

Bohannon’s family suffered terribly in the Great Depression, so he got the first of many jobs at the age of eight. His favorite childhood assignment was as a helper on a laundry truck, because the laundry service made pickups and deliveries at Candler Field, Atlanta’s airport: “Once you got there, there were these pilots standing around talking,” Bohannon recalled. “You didn’t get to touch the airplanes, but you were at least in the audience, listening to them talk, which I enjoyed.” The truck’s driver, “a full-fledged Georgia cracker, filled up with all the things that his father had taught him,” noted Bohannon’s interest, took pity on him, and tried to talk the boy out of what was quickly becoming his life’s dream. “Horace, I know you like that stuff, but I think you’re wasting your time,” Bohannon remembered the man telling him. “There is no chance in the world that you could ever work around them or be one of the pilots.”

“I did not argue with him, but I like to look back on it today, and I wish I could see that same man,” Bohannon said before he died in 2003. “He didn’t mean to be destructive; he just thought he was doing me a favor to say, ‘Don’t even dream about it.’ I never quit dreaming about it.” Bohannon worked his way through Booker T. Washington High School in Atlanta and went on to study at Lincoln University just outside of Philadelphia. When Lincoln began a program to train civilian pilots, Bohannon “wasn’t far back in the line of students that went down to sign up. It was so exciting,” he recalled, “because there was something new every day. I don’t care who you were; there was always something that you didn’t know, about flying, about the whole world.”

Bohannon dropped out of college after his junior year and returned home to earn money. A friend in Atlanta let him know about Tuskegee Army Air Field (TAAF), the military base under construction about a day’s drive away, in Tuskegee, Alabama. Tuskegee Institute had been training civilian pilots for a number of years and had just opened Moton Field, a primary flight training base it operated under contract for the Army Air Corps (AAC). Now the War Department was building TAAF from scratch on the outskirts of town.

The idea of building an air base intrigued Bohannon. He found a job at TAAF as a carpenter’s apprentice. Then almost as soon as he got to Tuskegee, he learned of a program in the works to train black instructor pilots for the incoming cadets. Bohannon used the skills he had learned in civilian pilot training to pass the entrance exam for that program, and he began the training course. When the program was unexpectedly interrupted, he found work driving the station wagon that ferried aviation cadets back and forth from their living quarters at Tuskegee Institute to Moton Field and later was hired as the timekeeper in the control tower, tabulating cadets’ flight times.

In March 1943, unable to save enough money to allow him to return to Lincoln, Bohannon quit his job at Moton Field and went back to Atlanta to drive a cab. By September he had saved enough money to resume his studies and was back in Pennsylvania. Once there, he found out that he had been drafted into the Army. He turned back around and reported to Fort Benning, Georgia, in October. He applied for transfer and was accepted into the flying corps, transferred to Keesler Field for basic training, and made his way back to Tuskegee as a flight cadet. Bohannon was surprised at how well he took to military life, but he did, mainly because “in the Army Air Corps you got to know just millions of people who had dreams and desires and so forth.” He cherished the camaraderie he developed with the cadets he met there, young men like Charles Johnson Jr., whose renowned father was the president of Fisk University in Nashville; Mitch Higginbotham, whose first cousin A. Leon Higginbotham would become a distinguished attorney and federal judge; and “Pokey” Spaulding, whose family managed the North Carolina Mutual Insurance Co. in Durham, North Carolina, one of the most prosperous black businesses in the country. At the outset of the program, the AAC only accepted cadets who had completed at least two years of college, so the Tuskegee training program drew from the black elite. Pilot Roscoe C. Brown Jr. may have been correct when he said, “The Tuskegee Airmen were probably the most talented group of African-American men ever brought together in one place.”

Sixty years later Bohannon could still recite the “dodo” verses he was forced to memorize as a cadet. If an upperclassman asked, “What time is it?” he had to stand at attention and say, “ ‘Sir, the inner workings and hidden mechanisms of my poor chronometer are in such a sad state of discord with the great sidereal movement by which all time is commonly reckoned that I cannot with any degree of accuracy give you the correct time. However, without fear of being too wrong or too far off, I will say that it is fifty-eight minutes, twenty-two seconds, two ticks of a tock past the hour of four, sir!’ Oh, we had a good time,” he recalled.

Bohannon remembered December 20, 1944, the day he graduated from the cadet program, as one of the proudest of his life, because he got to show his family around TAAF. “Papa came, and of course on guard at the gate were a black sergeant, a black corporal, a black private. The whole military is black,” Bohannon said. “As he drives up through there, they find some other men doing their work—all over the place, except for the very top cadre of officers, we’re all black. And that place was clean, orderly. I wish you could have seen it.” His family was impressed.

J. Todd Moye is an Associate Professor of History and the Director of the Oral History Program at the University of North Texas and author of Freedom Flyers: The Tuskegee Airmen of World War II. A historian of the American civil rights movement, he directed the National Park Service’s Tuskegee Airmen Oral History Project from 2000 to 2005. He consulted on Double Victory, the Lucasfilm documentary about the Tuskegee Airmen.

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Newt Gingrich, class warrior and scourge of the capitalist elite! Bet you didn’t see that one coming.

Veteran Gingrich-watchers wouldn’t have predicted the latest Newt incarnation, either, but they probably weren’t too surprised. Over the course of his long political career – he first ran for Congress almost four decades ago – Gingrich has been consistently inconsistent and predictably unpredictable. Whatever the issue, he has been on all sides of it.

Obviously one can point to the chameleonic shifts that Gingrich’s GOP presidential rivals already have highlighted, including his former support for government-mandated health insurance and his now-regretted collaboration with Nancy Pelosi on the dangers of global warming. But take the subject of, for example, the Republican Party’s relations with African-Americans. Gingrich has lately been spanked by the New York Times editorial page for implying that black Americans prefer food stamps and government dependency to jobs, and indeed his efforts to stir white racial resentments seem likely to worsen the Republicans’ already dismal standing with black voters in the 2012 elections. But Gingrich has not always traded in this sort of George Wallace-style, minority-baiting populism. In 1989, after he won election as House Republican whip, Gingrich told an interviewer that his goal was to build the GOP as “a caring, humanitarian reform party.” He believed that “one of the greatest mistakes the Reagan administration made was its failure to lead aggressively in civil rights.” And despite his recent criticism of Mitt Romney as a despicable “Massachusetts moderate,” Gingrich in that same 1989 interview identified himself with “the classic moderate wing of the party, where, as a former Rockefeller chairman, I’ve spent most of my life.”

For all of his reversals, it’s hard to tag Gingrich as a flip-flopper, if only because he argues his positions with a vehemence matched only by the vehemence with which he later argues diametrically opposed positions. It’s not inconsistency so much as political schizophrenia, although the logic of his changing postures always seems transparently obvious to Gingrich if no one else.

It’s possible that the upcoming South Carolina primary will be Gingrich’s last, snarling stand, after which he at last will pass from the national political stage. Or perhaps he will emerge as the conservative alternative to Romney and take his improbable criticism of Bain Capital all the way to the Republican convention. Who knows? With Gingrich, all attempts at prediction seem futile.

But his presidential run suggests at least some of the ways in which American politics has changed since Gingrich led the “revolution” that resulted in the 1994 GOP takeover of Congress. The recent $5 million donation to a Gingrich-supporting Super PAC is evidence of the growing influence of money in politics, which Gingrich did much to advance as Speaker. Republicans’ apparent willingness to write off black voters points out that political polarization, as championed by Gingrich, now threatens to extend to social polarization, in which ethnic groups and social classes will be seen as homogenous and partisan voting blocs rather than as Americans whose needs must be addressed by both parties. The intensification of partisanship, in turn, makes it less likely that whoever wins the 2012 presidential election will be able to secure bipartisan agreement for any significant measures to combat the problems that confront us.

It’s possible, though, that Gingrich will be remembered by historians not so much for the things he did as for the breakthrough he might have achieved. One of the more eye-opening political histories of recent years was Steven M. Gillon’s The Pact: Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, and the Rivalry that Defined a Generation (Oxford University Press, 2008). Gillon revealed that in 1997, after the Republicans’ failed budget shutdown, Gingrich entered secret talks with Clinton to find common ground on reform of the Social Security and Medicare programs, the financial stability of which already was threatened by the aging of the baby boomers. The two leaders reached a tentative compromise in which Republicans would agree to use the budget surplus of the late ‘90s to strengthen the programs rather than spend it down as tax cuts, while Democrats would accept the incorporation of privately managed accounts into Social Security. As Gingrich told Gillon, “We were trying to think through the necessary reforms to modernize America to move into the twenty-first century.”

The budding agreement was derailed by the revelation of Clinton’s sexual encounters with Monica Lewinsky. The result was Clinton’s impeachment proceedings, the election of George W. Bush, the dissipation of the budget surplus, and the arrival of record-setting deficits heralding the coming age of austerity. Gingrich is partly to blame for the political failures of the past decade, but he once had the potential to redeem them as well. It’s not a pitch he can make to South Carolina voters, but it’s one that Americans should keep in mind when evaluating this talented and maddening figure.

Geoffrey Kabaservice is the author of Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, From Eisenhower to the Tea Party and the National Book Award-nominated The Guardians: Kingman Brewster, His Circle, and the Rise of the Liberal Establishment. He has written for numerous national publications and has been an assistant professor of history at Yale University. He lives outside Washington, DC.

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The charismatic Elder Price of Broadway’s Book of Mormon musical famously and energetically sings “I Believe!” in a boisterous catechism of odd Mormon beliefs. But Elder Price is only one voice in a chorus broadcasting Mormonism’s strangest doctrines. While the Mormons portrayed in the musical are presented as basically good if generally deluded, many discussions of the Mormon tradition emphasize the utter absurdity of their beliefs. The average reader is left wondering how on earth Mormons could be so credulous. In context, though, these caricatured beliefs make a certain kind of sense.

There are two general points that need to be made before discussing any relevant context for specific beliefs, though. First, Mormon belief is as diverse as that of any other religious tradition. Mormons include dogmatic fundamentalists and believers not unlike mainline Protestants, while large numbers of practicing Mormons hold few-to-none of the beliefs circulating in the media. Second, Mormonism began at the tail end of the early modern era, and we now look back at its history across a cultural chasm. Early Mormons sounded like many of their peers and predecessors in early America. Several traditional Mormon beliefs are fossils of a lost worldview at the same time as Mormons participate in modern American society. Anecdotally, Mormons currently boast the top women’s historian in the nation, a successful financier running for president, and a conspiracy theorist with a chalkboard selling gold on cable television. All are true to their Mormon roots and they signal the diversity of Mormon belief.

With those two caveats in mind, let’s consider two of the more distinctive beliefs attributed to modern Mormonism.

Humans will have their own planets in the afterlife, and God lives on one such planet named Kolob.

In the phrase of the Book of Mormon musical, Mormons “believe that God has a plan for me, and that plan includes me getting my own planet,” and “God lives on a planet called Kolob.” These phrases roughly approximate the beliefs of some, though far from all, Mormons even now. The context for these beliefs requires understanding the role of family and the significance of ancient views of the universe in early Mormonism.

Mormon founder Joseph Smith believed that the work of the universe was the creation of relationships, connections he framed within a notion of the family that encompassed all of humanity, indeed the entire cosmos. Ancient ideas about parallels between the structure of the universe and human existence heavily influenced Smith’s views. Smith and his followers understood celestial bodies as participating in a kind of family relationship parallel to that of humans. Family relationships, especially those between parent and child, were central to the Mormon worldview, and Mormons saw the relationship between God and Jesus as parental (they strongly rejected the traditional Trinitarian view of God dominant within Christianity). Mormons therefore believed that the basic meaning of life was to parent. After Smith’s death, several of his closest followers tried to imagine what it would mean to (a) be like God and Christ, and (b) parent in heaven. They imagined that they would participate in creation the way God and Christ had. It seemed logical that their participation could potentially result in the creation of new planets.

In Smith’s cosmic family of celestial bodies, Kolob (probably a minor variant of kokab, the Hebrew word for star) was understood to be the star closest to the actual location of heaven. Though relatively few Americans would endorse an actual physical heaven now, it wasn’t so uncommon when Mormonism arose and reflects in part the concrete way early Mormons read the Bible. If God truly existed, they thought, wouldn’t it be possible to encounter him in a literal heaven somewhere in the heavens?

Mormons wear magic underwear

Smith told his followers that the way to establish the family relationships that could interconnect all humanity was through special rituals that took place in buildings called temples. The Mormon temple liturgy contains various rites that think through what it means to be human and to create. As part of the temple system, Mormons acquire sacred undergarments, essentially an undershirt and boxer shorts. Mormon “garments” draw on images and themes from the Hebrew Bible, the Christian Bible, and Masonry, much as the temple liturgy does. These garments recall, respectively, the clothing of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, Old Testament priestly robes, Jesus’ burial shroud, and the robes of angels. By wearing this clothing Mormons affirm their commitment to Mormonism, their connections to all humanity and their new life in the death and resurrection of Christ.

Academics also see this clothing as a marker of cultural difference–a way to remind Mormons that they are indeed Mormons, a tool to resist the influence of outsiders. Something as richly symbolic as this garment would almost certainly be seen by some as having special power; various Mormons over the years (including hotel magnate Willard Marriott on “60 Minutes” in 1996) have made impressively literal claims about the power of these garments. Such beliefs are not much different from folk Catholic beliefs about the power of holy water or saintly relics, or modern American beliefs about the power of pomegranate juice, antioxidants, or St. John’s wort.

In historical context, some of the early Mormon beliefs that have persisted into portions of modern Mormonism are primarily concerned with puzzling through the meaning of life, our integration into the universe, the persistence and scope of human relationships. Though at times these beliefs bear a more antique flavor than many contemporary observers would favor, the Mormon tradition vigorously attempts to make sense of the world. In some respects these Mormon beliefs recall, in idiosyncratic specificity, the visceral stirrings of awe that strike many of us at some point when we stare into the night sky and wonder how we could possibly fit into the universe.

Samuel Brown is Assistant Professor of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at the University of Utah/Intermountain Medical Center and the author of In Heaven as It Is on Earth: Joseph Smith and the Early Mormon Conquest of Death. He is also the translator of Aleksandr Men’s Son of Man.

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Belinda Webb’s futuristic, dystopian novel, A Clockwork Apple (2008), follows Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange (1962) closely in many details: the first-person narrator’s name is Alex; the male Alex in A Clockwork Orange has “droogs” named George, Pete, and Dim (‘Dim being really dim’), while Webb’s female Alex has “grrrlz” named Georgia, Petra, and Mid (‘Mid being really mid’ — that is, middle class or brow, part of what Alex later calls the ‘unheard herd’). And so it goes, a Mancunian homage, but with an unexpected feminist agenda.

Webb could easily appropriate much of Burgess’ story, but not Nadsat, the infamous argot Burgess invented for Alex and his droogs, fashioned from Russian loanwords and various elements of English slang: ‘He looked a malenky bit poogly when he viddied the four of us, coming up so quiet and polite and smiling, but he said: “Yes? What is it?” in a very loud teacher-type goloss, as if he was trying to show us he wasn’t poogly.’ It is inimitable language, and beyond replacing Orange Alex’s characteristic ‘O my brothers’ with Apple Alex’s ‘sistaz’, Webb needed a new linguistic modus operandi.

In order to establish a distinctive voice for Apple Alex, Webb mashes up language of ‘the Street’, grrrl-powered slang, Joycean wordplay, and erudite vocabulary. So, ‘Petra is flicking paint from a thick brush against a wall. It is, however, a wall set aside for such endeavours. It means nish. It gets white-washed every evening. This feeble, fucking futile attempt at a pocket of self-expression. Widdershins and mumpsimus, my dear sistaz, sheer widdershins and mumpsimus’. Or, ‘She stares at her, trying to determine whether this ex-Blyton is capable of being a tregateur. Theyz don’t want to believe it, you see, not of Mid! … They also don’t see that there is another part of her that will never forgive her own for the dissing of her illusionment upon which she had been brought up before Moss-side’. Or, ‘Muvva is sat in the kitchen, twiddlin’ her grey hair. The box is left to blair, on and on, anon. The might of King Anon. An on an’ on an’ on’. Webb indulges the High Vernacular, in other words, complete with anachronistic puns.

Webb’s Alex fights against anything ‘mid’, anything ‘Blyton’ (the putative false consciousness of  Enid Blyton’s Sunny Days), especially against ‘impression management’ as practiced in polite conversation or the tabloids, different though these may seem to some. She and her grrrlz fight

with graceful ballet moves and,

more importantly,

with

WORDS.

Boustrophedon. Yep, both ways.

To write is to fight.

In Alex’s style, the learned weaves seamlessly with the lewd: boustrophedon ‘writing left to right, then right to left’, tregateur ‘trickster’, abnormis ‘irregular, unconventional’, and especially phrontistery ‘thinking place’, the seat of empowerment for one intent on locating the H.P. ‘higher power’ in herself. Alex knows these words because she is a reader, though reading and knowing make her a delinquent in the ‘PAFFETIK’ future world of ‘Madchester’. At home, she pulls ‘the canvas rug up off the floor and then prise up one of the old rotten floorboards and there, my dear sistaz, is my stash of mind power — that is, Books! I is in the fullness of haecceity now, my dear sistaz’. If your Latin fails you, look it up in the Dictionary.

In Webb’s novel, we are, significantly, on Alex’s side. This is a sharp turn from A Clockwork Orange. As Burgess wrote in The Listener (17 February 1972), ‘My hero or anti-hero, Alex, is very vicious, perhaps even impossibly so, but his viciousness is not the product of genetic or social conditioning: it is his own thing, embarked on in full awareness. Alex is evil, not merely misguided, and in a properly run society such evil as he enacts must be checked and punished’. No morally well-adjusted person can be on Orange Alex’s side.

Apple Alex is violent. She even kills representatives of the system. But she is a rebel, not a predator, delinquent, not evil. She rightly resists the world of Blytons and everything mid. As she puts it, ‘Belligerancy is Queen!’ And, ‘despite having spent some of our Grrrl power from the land of Angria, there is still plenty in the bank, so to speak — everything to fight against’. A properly run society ought to be run according to Alex’s values, not for the comfort of Blytons. If she goes too far to preserve her freedom, she is certainly misguided, but evil? As she switches styles from Street to Dictionary, she is a canny narrator, engaged, like any narrator, in a sort of impression management — but is she evil?

Apple Alex’s argot is no mere decoration but the full expression of her character, its private and public parts. And, as Burgess insisted in The Listener, Nadsat ‘is no mere decoration’ either. ‘It was meant to turn A Clockwork Orange into, among other things, a brainwashing primer. You read the book or see the film, and at the end you should find yourself in possession of a minimal Russian vocabulary — without effort, with surprise. This is the way brainwashing works’. Apple Alex’s style forces us to think like her, in all of her haecceity. While we resist such narrative coercion, our resistance merely recapitulates hers, rousing our sympathy, perhaps even our approval, much of the time.

Nadsat is shiny language that distracts us from Orange Alex’s horrible crimes. Readers need the distraction and they also need to confront the moral consequences of that distraction, their tenuous grasp of moral priorities. Orange Alex needs the distraction, too — the language show he puts on is a form of dissociation. In the end, though, it exposes not only a moral but a linguistic vacuum. This is the fundamental difference between Nadsat and Apple Alex’s style: Nadsat is thematically significant, but its relationship to the theme is oblique and (if the reader is not completely brainwashed) profoundly ironic. In contrast, Apple Alex’s language is motivated immediately by the novel’s feminist themes and expresses them directly, with an (albeit unacknowledged) earnestness inconceivable in Nadsat and opposed to its value in Burgess’ novel.

Brandon Robshaw’s review of A Clockwork Apple in The Independent (13 April 2008) begins with a two paragraph pastiche of the novel’s challenging style and ends swiftly with the judgement, ‘Are you tiring of this? Me too’. It illustrates the problem of what the linguist Michael Halliday calls anti-language, from teenage slang to the literary idiosyncrasy of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake — it could be that the invented language is tiring, that the author has erred in the saying, but it might just as easily be a case of bad listening, as when adults can’t hear the slang teens speak all around them, and the teens quite accurately complain that the adults aren’t listening to them — they refuse to listen on the terms set by teens as surely as teens refuse to conform to adult expectations. But, after all, do the teens really want the adults to listen? When the style of A Clockwork Apple rubs us the wrong way, when we reject its terms, we re-enact a fundamental sort of linguistic disconnection, after which we may find an occasional connection.

Michael P. Adams is Associate Professor of English and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of English Language and Literature at Indiana University. He currently edits quarterly journal American Speech and is President Elect of the Dictionary Society of North America. His published work includes Slayer Slang: A Buffy the Vampire Slayer Lexicon (2003) and Slang: The People’s Poetry (2009). His most recent book, From Elvish to Klingon, published in November 2011. You can read more by Michael Adams on OUPblog here.

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January 19, 1903

Marconi Sends—and Receives—First Two-Way
Transatlantic Wireless Message

As you look for wireless hot-spots to connect to the Internet, thank Guglielmo Marconi. The Italian inventor championed wireless communication at the turn of the twentieth century—and demonstrated it on January 19, 1903, when he sent and received the first transatlantic wireless messages.

Marconi was inspired to investigate wireless communication by Heinrich Hertz’s studies of electrical and magnetic waves. He began experimenting in 1894, when he was twenty years old. His first successful signal traveled only 30 feet, but over time he built more and more powerful transmitters. By 1901, he could send a signal 200 miles.

Marconi dreamed of sending signals across the ocean. To transmit a signal, he built large antennas supported by four 210-foot high wooden towers. He built three of these transmission stations, one each in England, Nova Scotia, and Cape Cod. To send the long-wave radio signals he used, he needed powerful generators that produced 2,200-volts of electricity that a transformer increased to 25,000 volts. The noise of the generators could be heard 4 miles away.

After a successful test in December of 1902, Marconi demonstrated the equipment the next month. A telegraph operative tapped out a Morse Code message from President Theodore Roosevelt to British King Edward VII. “Taking advantage of the wonderful triumph of scientific research and ingenuity,” Roosevelt said, he sent greetings to the king and his people. Soon after, the king returned the president’s good wishes. The wireless age was born.

Wireless communication was quickly adopted by shipping companies. The importance of wireless messages was underscored less than a decade after Marconi’s demonstration. When the Titanic was sinking in 1912, its wireless distress calls reached the Carpathia, which steamed to the scene and rescued more than 700 people.

“This Day in World History” is brought to you by USA Higher Education.
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Tibullus was one of a group of poets known as the Latin elegists, whose number included Ovid and Propertius. Living in the age of Augustus, his poems reflect Augustan ideals, but they are above all notable for their emphasis on the personal, and for their subject-matter, love. Tibullus’ elegies are addressed to two different mistresses, Delia and Nemesis, and a boy, Marathus. Anguish and betrayal characterize Tibullus’ depiction of love’s changing fortunes, in poetry that is passionate, vivid, and sometimes haunting. Here, we’ve picked one of our favourite extracts from the Oxford World’s Classics edition. Enjoy… – Nicola

Book 1, Elegy 1 – line 45 to the end.
How sweet it is while lying down to hear fierce winds
and hold a mistress with a tender grasp!
Or when cold Austral winds are spreading sleet, what joy
to slumber safely with a fire’s help!
Let this befall me: may wealth be earned by one
who bears grim rain and seas that froth and foam.
O how much better that our gold and gems be lost
than any girl be crying as we roam!
Messalla, it is right you fight on land and sea
so spoils of war may decorate your home!
Chains of a gorgeous girl restrain me, and I linger
like a doorman at her stubborn door.
I want no praise, my Delia, if I am with you,
I’m asking to be labelled weak and dull.
May I behold when my final hour comes;
as I die, let me hold you as hands fail.
Delia, when flames engulf my bier you’ll weep for me,
and then you’ll mix your kisses with sad tears.
You’ll weep, for stubborn iron doesn’t wrap your breast,
nor is there flint inside your tender heart.
Nobody, neither man nor maiden, could return
home from that funeral and be dry-eyed.
Do not do damage to my spirit! Delia, spare
your unbound hair and spare your tender cheeks.
Meanwhile, as long as fate allows, let’s join in love!
First Death will come his features cloaked in gloom,
then age will sneak up, and it won’t be right to love
or speak seductive words with snowy hair.
Lighthearted love must be indulged while there’s no shame
in breaking doors and brawling gives us pleasure.
I’m a good soldier and good leader here. You troops
and trumpets, move it! Bring harm to the greedy,
and bring their lucre! Made secure by stacks I stored,
I’ll hate starvation and I’ll hate great wealth.

This excerpt is taken from Tibullus’ Elegies: With Parallel Latin Text, with a new translation by poet and translator A. M. Juster. The edition features an introduction and notes by Robert Maltby, Emeritus Professor of Latin Philology at the University of Leeds, and was published this month in the Oxford World’s Classics series.

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Every year, 90% of Americans give money to charities. There is at least one capital campaign to raise $25 million or more underway in virtually every major population center in North America. Smaller capital campaigns are even more numerous, with phone-a-thons, door-to-door drives, and mail solicitations increasing in popularity. Despite the ubiquity of fund-raising, we still have an imperfect understanding of the motivations for giving and the welfare implications for the giver. One may wonder: what moves all of these people to donate? Is such generosity necessarily welfare-enhancing for the giver?

We argue that there are two types of motivation for giving: individuals like to give, for example, due to altruism or warm glow, and individuals would rather not give but dislike saying no, for example, due to social pressure from the solicitor. The two motivations have very different welfare implications. The altruism (or warm glow) model (Becker 1974; Andreoni 1989, 1990) posits that giving is mostly supply-driven, and that it is utility-maximizing for the giver to give. Under this model, donations unambiguously enhance the giver’s utility as well as societal welfare. The social pressure model (Akerlof and Kranton 2000) posits that giving is mostly demand-driven, and that giving may be utility-reducing for the giver.

We tested for these two types of motivations in the context of in-person, unsolicited donation requests. We designed a door-to-door fund-raiser in which some households are informed about the exact time of solicitation with a flyer on their doorknobs. Thus, they can seek or avoid the fund-raiser. Building on a theoretical model, we designed a field experiment that allows us to test whether giving is welfare-enhancing or welfare-reducing for the giver.

THE EXPERIMENT

Our field experiment revolves around a door-to-door fundraising drive for two charities, a local children’s hospital, which has a reputation as a premier hospital for children, and an out-of-state charity, unfamiliar to most solicitees. Between April and October 2008, we approached 7, 668 households in the towns surrounding Chicago. The crucial aspect of the experimental design is to allow individuals to sort, that is, to either seek or avoid the solicitor. In our first treatment, a flyer on the doorknob notifies households one day in advance about the one-hour time interval in which a solicitor will arrive at their homes the next day. In the second treatment, Opt-out, the flyer also includes a box to be checked if the household does not want to be disturbed.

This design allows for a simple test of altruism versus social pressure in door-to-door giving. If altruism is the main driver of giving, the flyer should increase both the presence at home and giving. Because giving is utility-enhancing, givers should choose to stay at home. In addition, givers who would like to give in response to the flyer but who find it too costly to be at home should give to the charity via other means, such as mailing a check. Conversely, if social pressure is the main driver of giving, the flyer should lower both the frequency of opening the door and the frequency of giving.

THE FINDINGS

We report four main results, which are similar across the two charities. First, we find that the flyer reduces the share of households opening the door by 9% to 25% and, if the flyer allows checking a Do Not Disturb box, reduces giving by 28% to 42%. The latter decrease is concentrated among donations smaller than $10. These findings suggest that social pressure is an important determinant of door-to-door giving. Second, the simple flyer does not reduce giving. However, the flyer with an opt-out checkbox decreases giving significantly. Third, the decrease in giving in the opt-out treatment is driven by small donations up to $10; donations above $10, instead, increase slightly. Fourth, there is no effect on donations via mail or Internet.

Overall, the reduced-form estimates indicate that both altruism and social pressure are important determinants of giving in this setting, with stronger evidence for the role of social pressure. The lower frequency of households opening the door after receiving a flyer indicates that households are, on average, trying to avoid solicitors, consistent with social pressure. The social pressure interpretation is also consistent with the lack of donations via mail or Internet.

FIGURE IV
Frequency of (A) Answering the Door, (B) (Unconditional) Giving, and (C) Giving Conditional on Answering the Door Panel A presents the percent of households that answer the door under different treatment. The third set of bars (Opt-out treatment) also shows the percent opting out (shaded colors on top). Panel B displays the percent that give to the charity out of all the households in the treatment group (including those not answering the door). Panel C shows giving conditioned on answering the door, which equals the ratio of the estimated shares of unconditional giving (Figure IVB) and of households answering the door (Figure IVA). All estimates are obtained from regressions that control for randomization fixed effects.

CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATION

We find evidence that both altruism and social pressure affect door-to-door charitable giving. We estimate that about half of donors would prefer not to be contacted by the fund-raiser either because they would prefer not to donate, or because they would prefer to donate less. As a result, the estimated average welfare effect of the door-to-door campaigns in our sample is negative. Although this could be used as an argument to introduce a do-not-solicit or do-not-call list for charities, our findings suggest a simple alternative: to provide an opportunity to the households to sort or, even better, to opt out.

We conjecture that our results are likely to extend to other high-pressure approaches to raise money, such as phone-a-thons, charity banquets, auctions, lotteries, and so on, but likely have less explanatory power with lower-pressure approaches, such as mail solicitations. We hope that future research builds on this strategy to provide more evidence on behavioral phenomena.

To read the full article “Testing for Altruism and Social Pressure in Charitable Giving” by Stefano DellaVigna, John A. List, and Ulrike Malmendier in The Quarterly Journal of Economics, please visit: http://www.oxfordjournals.org/page/4446/1.

To an etymologist ache is one of the most enigmatic words. Although it has been attested in Old English, its unquestionable cognates in other languages are few. Low (that is, northern) German dialects have äken “hurt, fester,” ake “finger inflammation; whitlow; secretion from the eye,” and the like. Bavarian acken “hurt” is isolated in the south, and its status in relation to Engl. ache is unclear. It has been suggested that Finnish äkä “hatred” is a borrowing from German. May Finnish linguists discuss this idea. We will content ourselves with saying that the “Germans” who colonized Britain brought the noun ak- and the verb aka- to their new home and preserved it.

This is what people failed to discover about the origin of ache: (1) Does the English-Low German word have congeners outside its restricted area? and (2) Did its meaning (today it is “dull, steady pain”) develop from an abstract notion referring to discomfort, or was its starting point the name of some painful symptom, as suggested by “fester” and “inflammation”? Etymological dictionaries either present dogmatic answers, without pointing out that the truth is hidden, or drown their ignorance (of which they need not be ashamed) in extraneous information. Following the OED, they often explain in excessive detail that ache, verb, and ache, noun, had different forms in Old English, that the noun was indeed pronounced with ch, that the immensely influential lexicographer Samuel Johnson was unaware of the true state of affairs, and that this is mainly the reason we have the preposterous spelling still used. But the OED does not have to offer etymologies when those are unknown, while special dictionaries are expected to say something definite on the subject, a temptation to which they often yield, though keeping silent is preferable to misleading or hoodwinking readers. Some dictionaries send us away with the verdict “origin uncertain,” which is correct but uninspiring. It seems that we are damned if we do and damned if we don’t. My task is easier: I will describe the situation and leave it at that.

The earliest English etymologists, from the seventeenth century on, believed that ache had been derived from Greek ákhos “grief, pain.” Today we know that English was not “derived” from Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Gothic, or German, but even juxtaposing ache and ákhos is hard, because Greek kh does not match Engl. k. Yet a bond between the two nouns can be imagined if we assume that both go back to some interjection like German ach! (that is, akh!). Although Old English ak ended in k rather than kh, interjections need not follow rigid phonetic rules. This etymology has been proposed by such different people as Hensleigh Wedgwood, a scholar who attempted to trace too many English words to sound imitation, and (tentatively) by Ferdinand Holthausen, a cautious researcher who never allowed fantasies to run away with him. All things considered, an exclamation is an unlikely source of ache, though akh!, okh!, ukh! can serve as the foundation of words for moaning, groaning, and the like. (Gothic auhjan “make a noise,” if pronounced as ohjan, is perhaps one of them.)

Since, outside Germanic, Engl. k corresponds to g, etymologists exploring the origin of ache looked for Indo-European words beginning with ag-. Greek had ágos “a great sin incurring a curse.” The Old Engl. for ache was æce (æ, as a in Modern Engl. man) ~ ece, and ágos is a tolerably good match for it, except that one expects Proto-Germanic ákis, not ákos (only i in the second syllable would have caused the change of a to e). This etymology occasionally turns up in modern dictionaries, though with some hedging. More about ákhos and ágos will be said below. Some of our most authoritative sources state that ache is related to Latin agere “drive,” with an unexplained change of meaning (via “impel, force”). The frequentative form of agere is agitare “agitate,” which seems to provide a link between “drive” and “pain”; a few moderately convincing Scandinavian and Finnish parallels of a similar semantic shift have been cited. Despite the near consensus on the agere-ache etymology among many distinguished scholars (note that the OED offers no proposal on the origin of ache!), I would risk a minority opinion. With respect to physical pain, and that is what ache seems to be about, we may remember the questions doctors ask when they want to find out what is wrong with us: “Will you describe your pain as burning, piercing, stabbing, or throbbing?” Some concrete notion like “burn” or “throb” would be a more acceptable basis for “ache” than “drive.”

Two circumstances may be relevant to our search. In the Germanic languages, we find a group of similar-sounding words referring to unpleasant sensations. Such are German Ekel “nausea; disgust,” which at one time competed with a synonym having r in the middle (erken ~ erkeln “to abhor, loathe”), Dutch akel “grief” (the common word is the adjective akelig “dismal; nasty”), German heikel “tricky, delicate” (said about a situation; known only since the sixteenth century), Old Icelandic eikinn “raving mad,” corresponding to Old Engl. acol (with long a) “frightened,” and ekla “lack.” Also, there is no shortage of analogous ag- words: for instance, Gothic aglo “anguish; affliction” (its English cognate is ail) and agis “fear” (here the English cognate is awe). Old Engl. ag-læc ~ ag-lac (both vowels were long) meant “grief, distress”; aglæca “monster” is familiar to the readers of Beowulf in the original. With other vowels we find Old Icelandic uggr “fear” (the root of Engl. ugly); in Norwegian and Swedish agg “anger” corresponds to it. In Icelandic, agg means “squabble, quarrel,” and one can easily imagine the character of the Icelander who once had the nickname Aggi. Incidentally, the Indo-European root ak- meant “sharp,” and its reflexes are many, for example, Latin acutus “acute” (from which English has, via French, ague). It is as though all over Europe, from Greece to Scandinavia, ag- ~ ug- and ak - ~ aik- ~ eik ~ ek- ~ (?) heik were at one time the favorite syllables for designating things causing pain, arousing fear, loathsome, and “icky,” those about which we say yuck.

The second consideration is this. In Indo-European, the vowel a occurs with some regularity in words denoting lack and physical defects. This has been noticed by Ferdinand de Saussure, a great language historian and one of the founders of structuralism, though most of his examples are not from Germanic. Such observations are too general to furnish a clue to individual solutions, but it is characteristic that hardly any word mentioned above has an established etymology. The same can be said about words for “illness,” including smart, sick, and especially ill (Engl. ill is a borrowing from Scandinavian). In this area, taboo must have been rampant: don’t call an ailment by its name, and the spirit controlling it will be kept at bay.

So what is the conclusion? Ache is of course a word “of uncertain etymology,” and such it will remain for all times. It might be a symbolic coinage of sorts, with the vowel a playing some role in its early history, and it might be part of a sizable group of words beginning with ag-, ak-, -aik, all of them referring to guilt, fear, suffering, and disgust. If so, Greek ákhos and ágos belong with it in a loose way, but neither can be called its cognate. (A conclusion along these lines must have appealed even to such a serious scholar as Jan de Vries, who compared Old Icelandic ögurr, allegedly “pain,” and Greek ákhos.) I would dissociate ache from Latin agere ~ agitare and advise lexicographers not to give this etymology as proven. Other than that, ache is ache.

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears here, each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of blog@oup.com; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”

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I’ve decided to feature a brief excerpt from The Reactionary Mind from chapter six, “Affirmative Action Baby,” which profiles the thought and theory of US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. Many think of Scalia as either a social conservative or fussy originalist. I argue that he’s neither. He’s something far stranger, more wild: one part Nietzschean, one part Social Darwinist, one part post-modernist, and two parts crazy.

Next to Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia is the most conservative justice on the Supreme Court. He also loves the television show 24. “Boy, those early seasons,” he tells his biographer, “I’d be up to two o’clock, because you’re at the end of one [episode], and you’d say, ‘No, I’ve got to see the next.’” Scalia is especially taken with Jack Bauer, the show’s fictional hero played by Kiefer Sutherland. Bauer is a government agent at a Los Angeles counterterrorism unit who foils mass-murder plots by torturing suspects, kidnapping innocents, and executing colleagues. Refusing to be bound by the law, he fights a two-front war against terrorism and the Constitution. And whenever he bends a rule or breaks a bone, Scalia swoons.

Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles . . . . He saved hundreds of thousands of lives . . . . Are you going to convict Jack Bauer? Say that criminal law is against him? You have the right to a jury trial? Is any jury going to convict Jack Bauer? I don’t think so. So the question is whether we really believe in these absolutes. And ought we to believe in these absolutes?

Yet Scalia has spent the better part of his career as a lawyer, professor, and jurist telling us that the Constitution is an absolute, in which we must believe, even when—particularly when—it tells us something we do not want to hear. Scalia’s Constitution is not a warming statement of benevolent purpose, easily adapted to our changing needs. His Constitution is cold and dead, its prohibitions and injunctions frozen in time. Phrases like “cruel and unusual punishment” mean what they meant when they were written into the Constitution. If that produces objectionable results—say, the execution of children and the mentally retarded—too bad. “I do not think,” Scalia writes in Nixon v. Missouri Municipal League, that “the avoidance of unhappy consequences is adequate basis for interpreting a text.”

Scalia takes special pleasure in unhappy consequences. He relishes difficulty and dislikes anyone who would diminish or deny it. In Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, a plurality of the Court took what Scalia thought was a squishy position on executive power during wartime. The Court ruled that the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, passed by Congress after 9/11, empowered the president to detain U.S. citizens indefinitely as “illegal enemy combatants” without trying them in a court of law. It also ruled, however, that such citizens were entitled to due process and could challenge their detention before some kind of tribunal.

Scalia was livid. Writing against the plurality—as well as the Bush administration and fellow conservatives on the Court—he insisted that a government at war, even one as unconventional as the war on terror, had two, and only two, ways to hold a citizen: try him in a court of law, or have Congress suspend the writ of habeas corpus. Live by the rules of due process, in other words, or suspend them. Take a stand, make a choice.

But the Court weaseled out of that choice, making life easier for the government and itself. Congress and the president could act as if habeas corpus were suspended, without having to suspend it, and the Court could act as if the writ hadn’t been suspended thanks to a faux due process of military tribunals. More than coloring outside the lines of the Constitution, it was the Court’s “Mr. Fix-It Mentality,” in Scalia’s words, its “mission to Make Everything Come Out Right,” that enraged him.

Scalia’s mission, by contrast, is to make everything come out wrong. A Scalia opinion, to borrow a phrase from New Yorker writer Margaret Talbot, is “the jurisprudential equivalent of smashing a guitar on stage.” Scalia may have once declared the rule of law the law of rules—leading some to mistake him for a stereotypical conservative—but rules and laws have a particular frisson for him. Where others look to them for stabilizing checks or reassuring supports, Scalia looks for exhilarating impediments and vertiginous barriers. Where others seek security, Scalia seeks sublimity. Rules and laws make life harder, and harder is everything. “Being tough and traditional is a heavy cross to bear,” he tells one reporter. “Duresse oblige.”

That, and not fidelity to the text or conservatism as it is conventionally understood, is the idée fixe of Scalia’s jurisprudence—and the source of his apparent man-crush on Jack Bauer. Bauer never makes things easy for himself; indeed, he goes out of his way to make things as hard as possible. He volunteers for a suicide mission when someone else would do (and probably do it better); he turns himself into a junkie as part of an impossibly baroque plan to stop an act of bioterrorism; he puts his wife and daughter at risk, not once but many times, and then beats himself up for doing so. He loathes what he does but does it anyway. That is his nobility—some might say masochism—and why he warms Scalia’s heart.

It means something, of course, that Scalia identifies the path of most resistance in fidelity to an ancient text, while Bauer finds it in betrayal of that text. But not as much as one might think: as we’ve come to learn from the marriages of our right-wing preachers and politicians, fidelity is often another word for betrayal.

Corey Robin teaches political science at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center, and is the author of The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin. He blogs at coreyrobin.com.

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James Boswell was talking here about his friend Samuel Johnson’s melancholia, a condition we now consider to be similar to, if not the same as, modern-day depression. Boswell’s Life of Johnson in 1791 set the modern trend for biographies to reveal the realities of their subjects’ lives, warts and all: Johnson’s mental and physical maladies provided plenty of grist to the biographer’s mill, not least because Boswell himself was a sufferer of Johnson’s illness. The general nature of depression, and the question of whether its causes are physical or psychological, still “eludes minute enquiry” today despite the medical and psychological advances made since the eighteenth century. Yet that “general sensation of gloomy wretchedness” is unmistakable as a marker of something, whether it be termed depression, melancholy, spleen, vapours, acedia, neurasthenia or one of the plethora of other names given to depressive conditions through the ages.

But how can authors, literary or medical, imagine something as unimaginable, or represent something as unrepresentable, as depression? Is there a common thread that links the way we think about depression over time, or are the images we conjure for depression conditioned by our own particular historical moment?

The answer, perhaps annoyingly, is yes and no. Throughout all periods, images of darkness, fog, and gloom seem to feature consistently. Johnson referred, as Winston Churchill did later, to his “black dog” of melancholy. In ancient times, melancholia was a “black sun”, while the melancholy poet and priest John Donne complained: “But what have I done, either to breed, or to breathe these vapors? They tell me it is my Melancholy”. (John Donne: The Major Works). Even in the fashionable melancholy of the Renaissance, both on stage and in real life, the Hamlet-esque young men would wander around dressed in black, gazing downwards like the Goths and Emos of present-day pop culture. Romantic poet John Keats described “Veil’d Melancholy” in his Ode on Melancholy (Major Works). And even in the East, the early modern Japanese character for depression (‘utsusho’) resembles a dense, dark and seemingly impenetrable thicket of strokes that symbolise the barrier between depressives and their grasp of hope and happiness: 鬱.

Beyond the commonalities in representations of depression over the centuries, there are also key cultural shifts which intervene to frame a very different basic understanding of depression. Take Elizabeth’s Wurtzel’s period-defining memoir of depression, Prozac Nation (1994). Wurtzel is intelligent enough to see beyond the ‘magic bullet’ solution to mental illness and its complexities, and instead uses the computer age as a metaphor for depression: “Slowly, over the years, the data will accumulate in your heart and mind, a computer program for total negativity will build into your system, making life feel more and more unbearable.” Only secondary to this, later in the same paragraph, does Wurtzel invoke the older imagery of darkness: “one day you realize that your entire life is just awful, not worth living, a horror and a black blot on the white terrain of human existence.”

Wurtzel’s modern metaphor juxtaposes strongly with the rationale and imagery of times past: Galen’s classical explanation (AD 30-90) of the malfunctioning humour of the black bile, burning in the spleen and sending black vapours up to the brain, persisted in the popular imagination for a very long time indeed. As late as the increasingly mechanistic eighteenth century, Dr Johnson recommended distraction to dispel “the black fumes which rise in your mind”. In his poem Know Yourself, written just after he had completed the monumental Dictionary, he described how “Care grows on care, and o’er my aching brain / Black melancholy pours her morbid train” (Samuel Johnson: The Major Works). Yet again we have the imagery of darkness, but an entirely different understanding of how depression is caused. In fact, Johnson was using imagery based on outdated humoural theories as, by the age of the Enlightenment, depression had come to be thought of as a disease of the mechanical body which could be seen as a system of pipes through which blood circulated. By this time, it was thought that if the necessary blood flows were blocked for some reason, then stagnant blood could affect the brain and bring on depression, or the “English Malady”, as society doctor George Cheyne called it. Popular images of the body (or old wives’ tales as we might call them) have a tendency to persist for a long time after the demise of the theories which underpin them.

As we can glean from the myriad of fluid depictions of depression in literature throughout the ages, depression is not the stable entity we might conjure up from the contemporary image projected by the drug companies peddling Prozac as an instant cure – not that I am saying drugs are useless, of course. But history shows us how different societies generate diseases in their own image: especially psychological maladies, and especially depression.

Clark Lawlor is Reader in English Literature at Northumbria University, and is especially interested in the cultural history of disease. He has been publishing work on the history and representation of depression recently, partly as a result of his co-Directorship of Before Depression, a Leverhulme Trust-funded project on the nature of depression in the eighteenth century. His latest work, From Melancholia to Prozac: a history of depression, which publishes next month. He previously published Consumption and Literature: The Making of the Romantic Disease (2006).

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Did America really start a “holy war”?

Just like today, a lot of Americans in the early nineteenth century thought God had a plan for the United States; they saw how the U.S. won the Revolution against all odds, and they understood it as the will of God—as providence. And at that time, there were a number of politicians who said, we have a providential destiny to bring our citizens more liberty—to spread our civilization across the continent. That’s what led to a war against Canada and the Native Americans, the War of 1812, which almost destroyed the country

This was a war against one religion in particular, wasn’t it?

There was a holy man of the Shawnee nation, who took the name Tenskwatawa, which roughly means “The Open Door.” After 1804, he carries a message to the Native Americans across the frontier, but especially in the Ohio Valley. And his message is that the Master of Life, the great being who had created the world and made all the peoples of the Americas, had returned to guide his people on a new path towards independence and self-sufficiency.

Why did American leaders fear this religion?

American officials worry about this religion because Tenskwatawa provides an alternative leadership for Native Americans; he refuses to sell land and he refuses to accept the perfidy of the Americans. Tenskwatawa teaches that the Master of Life wanted all Indians to live and worship together; there would no longer be any more individual tribes or clans. This is a divine warrant for a new kind of political organization, and the Shawnee Prophet actually sets up two independent cities to prove his point, first in Ohio and then in Indiana.

In some ways, the Americans helped Tenskwatawa out.

Yes—William Henry Harrison, the governor of Indiana, dismissed Tenskwatawa’s religious power, and sent him a very demeaning letter asking him to perform a miracle. And a few days later, Tenskwatawa made the sun go dark in the afternoon.

Was that really a miracle, or was it just an eclipse?

Well, that’s sort of like asking whether Jesus Christ really rose from the dead—people who don’t believe in the religion are going to find ways to explain it away. But even when people explain it away, it doesn’t stop Christians from believing in it, or from acting on that belief. In the same way, many Native Americans believed Tenskwatawa had caused the sun to go dark, and they followed him because they believed.

What kind of a leader was Tenskwatawa? How successful was he?

He’s quite successful—and he does what almost no other Native American leader at the time does, which is to negotiate with the Americans without signing away land. But it’s also true that Tenskwatawa had plenty of enemies, in part because he actually presided over witchcraft trials.

How was this war also a war about witchcraft?

In 1806, some Delaware Indians came to believe there were sorcerers in their midst, who poisoned people and caused bad luck. They contacted the Shawnee Prophet, a holy man, to tell them where this evil magic had come from. And Tenskwatawa identifies several Delawares as witches, and they are executed.

So Salem in 1692 was not the last witch trial in America?

No. Witch trials are rare, but, a lot of Americans at that time still believe in witchcraft; there are cases in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Maine where mobs lynched women they thought were witches.

Most of us only know William Henry Harrison as the guy who died after only being president for thirty days. Tell us more about him.

This all takes place thirty years before Harrison becomes president; in 1800, he was the governor of Indiana Territory, which he turned into his personal fiefdom. It’s probably the least democratic place in the U.S. He appointed his own Senate; he exploited loopholes to make sure that his friends got elected, and he basically disenfranchised voters he thought were not going to vote for his handpicked candidates. And on top of that, he expands slavery in Indiana. And he’s constantly reminding people that his way of doing things is the providential way; it’s what freedom is and it’s what God wants.

Did Harrison start this war?

I think so. Harrison sees Tenskwatawa as his opposite number; Tenskwatawa is a “savage” and he’s not Christian, so at the time of the witch trials, Harrison starts a drum beat for war. And it takes about five years, because people in Washington do not want a war because they’re not sure they can win. And finally in 1811, Harrison gets permission to strike at Tenskwatawa’s holy city in Indiana. Harrison marches his troops there, and it’s a disaster.

What happened at the Battle of Tippecanoe?

A lot of pain for not much gain. Harrison’s forces get trapped in an early morning skirmish outside the Prophet’s city. There was a prolonged firefight, and Harrison’s troops took the heavier losses, but eventually the Prophet’s soldiers withdrew and abandoned their city. Harrison burns the city to the ground—but he immediately retreats, because he didn’t bring enough troops or materiel to secure the victory. And Tenskwatawa reoccupies the position and rebuilds the town.

Did the Battle of Tippecanoe cause the War of 1812?

In part: Harrison was immediately censured by political enemies in Indiana and in Washington, DC, for starting an unnecessary war. He’s even investigated by Congress—but he saves himself by joining this push for a broader war against all the Northwest Indians and Canada.

How did the war go for Tenskwatawa?

For the first year, incredibly well. He reoccupies his city, and Tecumseh and the Canadian British actually capture all of Michigan. Tenskwatawa and his allies are striking American forts inside U.S. territory. In 1813, Oliver Hazard Perry wins a very close battle on Lake Erie, which means the British navy can’t resupply the Indian and Canadian forces in Michigan, and that ultimately forces a retreat into Canada and then end of the Prophet’s movement. But if Perry had lost, Tenskwatawa and Tecumseh would have kept control of Michigan and central Indiana, and given how badly America handled the rest of war—the British burned Washington, remember—they could possibly have won a formal independence from the U.S.

Most Americans know almost nothing about the War of 1812? Why is that? What should we remember about it?

I think we don’t remember it because we lost. But in some ways, it’s more important to remember because this was a war that politicians claimed was divine and would be easy to win. That’s a cautionary tale. And I think it’s important to remember as an example of the ways in which religious zealotry and political power can interact, on both sides of this conflict, and that’s another cautionary tale.

Adam Jortner teaches history at Auburn University and is the author of The Gods of Prophetstown: The Battle of Tippecanoe and the Holy War for the American Frontier. His essays have appeared in The Journal of the Early Republic and Early American Studies.

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