Supper with an etymologist

It does not require much philological preparation to guess that supper is a word containing the root sup– and the suffix –er. Yet in the days of King Alfred and even much later, the inhabitants of Anglo-Saxon England had no such word. People spoke of the morning meal, midday meal, and evening meal. The word for “meal” was mete “meat,” whose ancient meaning “food; meal” is still heard in the idiom meat and drink, the compound sweetmeats “candies, etc.,” and the obsolete greenmeat “fodder.” As far as I can judge, sweetmeats is a dead word in American English (that is, no one even understands it), while greenmeat is so little remembered that even my computer does not recognize it. Be that as it may, supper exists (see the header!) and has been an English word since the thirteenth century. It was borrowed from French, but the root of the French noun is Germanic. This means that at one time the speakers of Old French took over the word sup from their neighbors, while later, those neighbors added a Romance suffix to it! Quite a journey, but such hybrids are not too rare.

Now, what is sup? Never mind sup for “what’s up.” Sup means “to sip,” and it seems to occur only in the context of imbibing alcohol. Yet it is an old “respectable” word with well-known cognates, for instance, Dutch zuipen, German saufen, and Icelandic súpa. Once we begin to wonder where sup– came from, we are sucked into a vortex of similar-sounding verbs. I used and even highlighted suck for a purpose: this verb is part of a sizable group of s-words, referring to liquids. All of them seem to be “obscurely related” to one another, as dictionaries characterize this situation.

Sup is not the same as sip, and neither is a synonym of suck, but the affinity is obvious. Let us first look at sap (from which we have sapling). The word is old and has cognates all over the Germanic-speaking world (for example, German Saft “juice”). Etymologists, naturally, reconstruct the most ancient form, common to several languages, and come up with the ancient noun sapam or sappam.

However, the sounds refuse to play the expected game, because we also remember Latin sapa “grape juice, boiled until it is thick” (Italian sapa or saba is the continuation of that word), obviously a member of the same family, but it too has p in the root, and it is well-known that Latin p should correspond to Germanic f (as happens in Latin pater versus English father). Another borrowing? Who borrowed what from whom? The most cautions sources admit that the origin of the word is unclear. Indeed, it seems that we have a group of words, either sound-imitative or somehow (how?) reflecting the words’ sense, that is, sound-symbolic. All of them refer to the way we deal with liquids: sip, sap, sup, and sop.

It pays off to have a look at those verbs individually. So far, we have examined only sup. Sip is a late fifteenth-century addition to English. Similar verbs exist elsewhere in Germanic. Etymologists seem to agree that sip, though “allied” to sup, is a weaker version of it. This verdict sounds convincing, because sip and sup do seem to be cognate in at least some way. Can seep throw light on this group? Not really. Old English sipian, along with its lookalikes with a long vowel in the root, have been recorded, but none of them would have become seep. Even if the progenitor of sip were found, we would still remain with the same group of similar-sounding verbs describing the movement of liquids.

There also is sop “a piece of bread dipped in liquid” (and compare milksop “a timid male, a pushover”!), which is universally recognized as a member of the family we are discussing, even though its ultimate origin is as obscure as of that of the verbs we have examined. Sip, seep, sop, sup…. Finally, what about sap “juice”? It has a secure German cognate Saft (the same meaning (f in Saft goes back to p, and final t was added to saf only in the fourteenth century). A good old word, but it is unable to solve our puzzle. We should resign ourselves to the conclusion made above: all the words belonging to the complex s-p with a vowel in the middle in some way imitate the noise made in the process of drinking.

Though we realize that multiplying the words belonging to this group will hardly result in a revelation, perhaps soup is worth mentioning here. Sop, we remember, was borrowed into English from French in the seventeenth century, and the story of soup sounds familiar: Latin suppa, the ancestor of soup, seems to be a word of Germanic origin! I am happy to report that so is soap.

Incidentally, Latin also had the word sapor “taste, flavor,” which (by way of French) ended up as English savor. To repeat: the words describing the “activity” of the mouth tend to depend on the complex sp– not only in Germanic but also outside it. The British scholar John Rupert Firth (1890-1960) was especially interested in such complexes (he called them prosodemes, a rather unfortunate label), but though he has, or at least had, a sizable following at home, he is little known in the US and elsewhere, which is a pity.

Once we become aware of the “mouthy prosodeme” sp-, we are beginning to wonder whether spit, spew, and even speak belong to our story. No doubt, sp- is at least partly sound-imitative, and once it established itself, it acquired a symbolic meaning, and many words, vaguely belonging to the same sphere, came into being. Since people spit and “sup” in the same way all over the world, it is no wonder that we have quite a few verbs sounding alike even in unrelated languages. A supper with an etymologist is rich but leaves you hungry. Sorry!

POSTSCRIPT: A question and a comment

QUESTION. What is known about the etymology of the word core?

The answer is: “Next to nothing.” The word surfaced in the early fifteenth century in the form we still have today. Its earliest recorded sense was also familiar: “the core of an apple”. The word has always been spelled with final e, which indicates that this sound was not mute. The French word for “heart” did not have this e. Core supplanted the dialectal (northern) word colk (the same meaning). But both core and colk also referred to what is today called coke, another dialectal word of unknown origin. One wonders who needed a special little-known word for the core of a fruit! Obviously, we are dealing with a regionalism, a technical term, whose origin we’ll probably never be able to discover. The fact that core sounded somewhat like French cœur “heart” may have contributed to its longevity (mere guessing). The verdict remains: “Of unknown origin,” and it is to be regretted that some dictionaries do not make this verdict sufficiently clear.

A Lover’s Complaint

A correspondent who is very particular about good usage was shocked to read a politician’s phrase less than fulsome information, in which fulsome means “full.” Many people like language history, but no one wants to be part of it. Fulsome did once mean “full,” but then “deteriorated” and stayed mainly as part of the phrase fulsome praise, that is, “excessive and insincere praise.” However, language has always changed under the influence of the uneducated, who don’t care whether what they say is correct or wrong from professors’ point of view. For many years, most of our young people have been reading only pulp fiction and one another’s emails. If troublesome means “full of trouble,” and if the main epithet for all situations is awesome, then fulsome obviously means “quite full.” This change has been going on for decades. Too bad! The same man dislikes the pronunciation gerrymandering with g, as in get. Incidentally Governor Elbridge Gerry did pronounce his last name with hard g. Thus, our “correct” pronunciation is wrong! Now those who have never heard the word mispronounce it, without knowing that Mr. Gerry would have been happy. Inscrutable are the ways of language. What is wrong is correct, and what is correct is wrong.

_{Featured image: Photograph by Lewis Hine. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.}

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Gender Justice in these times

I have long admired the example of the late Paul Farmer, MD and anthropologist. He founded Zanmi Lasante (Partners in Health), a global network of community health providers in areas of the world ravaged by social and natural disasters such as poverty, racial, class, gender-based inequality, underdeveloped or war-destroyed public infrastructure, and political violence. The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Tracy Kidder titled his 2003 biography of Farmer Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World (NY: Random House). The phrase “mountains beyond mountains” comes, according to Kidder, from a Haitian proverb, “dèyè mòn gen mòn“, translated as “beyond mountains there are mountains”. As a hiker during my graduate school days on the Central Coast of California, I know the feeling well of gutting out a long uphill switchback, hoping that this was the last leg of the climb, only to see before me another long uphill track—a mountain beyond the mountain I thought I had ascended.

Teaching, researching, and writing about gender—about what gender relations could be in a just world if we put the work into imagining that just world into existence—feels a lot like scrabbling uphill over dangerous terrain only to find mountains beyond the mountains we have already scaled. Especially now, in the current political climate featuring anti “gender ideology” sentiment—willful misunderstandings of what should by now, in the 21st century, be noncontroversial assertions of basic human dignity for women and gender-nonconforming persons of all races, classes, faiths, sexualities, and ethnicities—the paths upward seem strewn with careening boulders.

A decade ago, I wrote an essay comparing queer feminist scholarly endeavors to the task encountered by a feminine counterpart of Sisyphus, using the feminine ending Sisyphe to set her apart from her more famous brother. Sisyphe, unlike Camus’ stoic existentialist Sisyphus, is not happy. She is understandably angry about having to continually roll a rock, made up of the sediment of ages of conscious and unconscious injustices and indignities, up a hill while attending to the already difficult everyday tasks of living. The upshot of this effort, nevertheless, is that Sisyphe has very strong arms. She handles the rock with one hand while doing the bulk of the often-unacknowledged care work of generations with the other.

Ten years after writing about Sisyphe’s strong arms, I realize that my original analogy is underdeveloped. For starters, Sisyphe is not singular. She has many siblings of many genders who move those boulders with strength, resilience, and collective ingenuity. And the boulder of the Greek myth is too contained and controlled to fit the moment. The image of an all-powerful and punitive god manifesting a daily boulder to torture Sisyphus/Sisyphe is too staid, too dignified for what we are experiencing now. In place of the figure of Zeus, modern day Sisyphes must contend with dozens of chaotic, vengeful, and comically incompetent Wile E. Coyotes hurling rocks off cliffs scattershot. It doesn’t help that we can laugh at the bathetic antics of the ranting figure behind the rock. The boulders still do damage to those in their path.

That’s what researching, writing, and teaching about gender often feels like today. Consider the self-satirizing example of a professor in the U.S. being told that he can’t teach a canonical work by Plato in a philosophy class because to read Aristophanes’ speech from circa 400 BCE is to promote “gender ideology” in 2026 CE. The rocks are falling every which way, and it is going to take a large, global community to keep them from crushing the communities, institutions, and principles we cultivate in order to make a better, if not perfect world for ourselves and our global siblings.

Gender Justice, a new topic featured in Oxford Intersections, is one such gathering of Sisyphes—a community of scholars, thinkers, and practitioners who continue the work of rigorous inquiry and analysis of systems of power that derail the quest for livable lives, with dignity and purpose, for all persons across the globe regardless of gender, sexuality, nation, race, disability, social class, faith, and other social markers that are leveraged to produce inequality rather than just relations. Divided into twelve sections like the hours of (an analogue) clock or the months in a year, Gender Justice draws together experts and community-based knowledge workers to provide reasoned and researched work on gender from a wide range of disciplines and interdisciplines: from philosophy, technology studies, politics, law, environmental studies, economics, creative arts, health and mental health, family studies, comparative religion, and intersectional queer and feminist studies. The module is ambitious in its aims but curated carefully to provide readers, researchers, and scholars access to reliable, ethical, and intellectually rigorous insights into the complex and dynamic field of gender studies. We are not hubristic enough to believe that Gender Justice will change the world by mere fact of its publication in June 2026, but we do have hope—a virtue much needed in these times—that the resources it provides will prove useful to the multifaceted conglomeration of thinkers and dreamers who continue to do the work of striving for a world that is more livable, more humane, and more just for all. We’ve got the next mountain, together.

^{Featured image by hdbernd via Unsplash.}

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The kings of etymological rings

It is amazing how many words Indo-European languages have for “supreme ruler; potentate.” In English, the main one is king. But outside English, a host of others exist. Two of the best-known examples are Latin rex (which also meant “priest”; see a variation on this theme below!) and Hindi raja(h). Rex and raja(h) share an ancient root, but those two venerable titles are rather isolated in their royal splendor. Only Irish ríg belongs with them, even though the same root turns up in some other common words—for instance, English right (its cognates are, among others, Latin rēctus and German recht). English region is also related. According to a plausible explanation, the ancient REX traced out the line for cities (!), regiō “region” being the point reached out in a straight line. This explanation will come as a surprise to many.

Engl. rich also belongs to our story, and so does its German cognate reich (the same meaning). In both German and English, this adjective once meant “powerful, great”; hence “having abundant means.” (Power brings wealth, does it not?) The German noun Reich “empire, realm,” as in Hitler’s infamous Third Reich, meant to last a thousand years, returns us to the same root. As regards the names for rulers, we recall the English word basilica “church built on the model of a royal palace,” from Greek. Basileús is still another word for “king.”

Incidentally, the plant name basil goes back to an adjective meaning “royal” (because of its fragrance?), and the name of the fabulous reptile basilisk is a rendition of Greek basilískos. According to Pliny, the name is due to a crown-like spot on the reptile’s head. Since no one has ever seen the creature, we needn’t contest this explanation. By contrast, the lizard basilisk is quite real and in one respect exceptional: it can run on water (hence its other name the Jesus Christ lizard!). The proper name Basil and Slavic Vasily belong here too.

Usually, when the origin of an old Germanic word is discussed, the first form dictionaries cite is Gothic. This is natural, because the Gothic Bible (part of the New Testament) is the earliest long consecutive text we have in any Germanic language. But the Goths did not know the word king! The Gothic for Greek basileús was þiudans (þ has the value of th in Engl. thick). Other Germanic languages retained exact cognates of this noun. For instance, in Old English, it meant “ruler, lord” and even “God.”

Most probably, the Goths had no kings in the sense known later to the rest of the Germanic-speaking world. Þiudans is most often used about Jesus, though some earthly kings are also called thatin their text of the New Testament. It must have been the speakers of West Germanic (to which Old English belongs) that began to use the word kuningaz in the sense familiar to us today (that is, king).

To us king is “a sovereign ruler of the state,” but when this word and its synonyms were coined, the implication must have been approximately “tribal leader,” with the emphasis on tribal. King is, obviously, related to kin. At present, we are no longer aware of this connection. But when fifteen or sixteen centuries ago, people said cyning or still earlier kuningaz (the original form of king, mentioned above), that connection must have been clear to the speakers.

Several words for “kin; people” existed in Germanic. One of them was þeod– ~ þiud (to repeat, þ has the value of th in Engl thick). We can still detect it in the German word Deutsch “German,” originally, “related to the people” (its d goes back to þ). The Goths also had a cognate of English cyn “kin,” but in translating the Greek word for “king” chose its synonym (we cannot decide why).

In any case, the Gothic word for “tribal chief; king” (þiudans) had no analogs among the other Germanic tribes, while cyning sounded almost the same in Old Saxon (kuning; some such form became Modern Dutch koning), Old High German chuning (in German, this word died without issue), and Old Norse konungr. The Germanic forms spread far and wide. Finnish has kunningas, and Russian has kniaz’. The Russian form has changed almost beyond recognition, but it is undoubtedly of Germanic origin. Isn’t it curious that in the Russian phrase Kniaz’ Vasily “Pince Vasily” the first word is Germanic and the second is Greek! Beware of nationalism.

The derivation of king from kin seems obvious, and one wonders why so many researchers tried to find another etymology for this rather transparent word. The difficulty is not in the word but in the concept. The oldest Germanic speakers had no kings in the modern sense of this term. And we have seen that no one followed the Gothic choice (þiudans “king”). The northerners did have a cognate of king, namely konungr (borrowed from their neighbors?), but their main word for the person we would call “king” was dróttinn (drótt meant “the military chief’s bodyguard”). To give another example: those people knew the word Caesar but had no analog for it; hence German Kaiser, a borrowing.

The less known attempts to explain the origin of the word king are ingenious but sometimes fanciful. Konungr (the Scandinavian form) from kven-ungr (kvenna “woman,” ungr “young”)? Or indeed from kin (in its oldest form) but with reference to the king as one specially born, perhaps as a being of divine origin. Or perhaps –ing goes back to the name of an earth god as the progenitor of the human race? Old Norse konr “sexual partner” exists. Does king refer to it? With this word we are returned to the previous hypothesis.

Finally, think of the English word ken “knowledge,” for example, as it is used in the phrase “beyond one’s ken.” German kennen means “to know.” Is it possible that the root of king contains reference to this root and thus has nothing in common with kin? Germanic chiefs were supposed to be also priests and possess arcane knowledge. This etymology has an influential modern supporter. I find his approach unprofitable. A few more exotic conjectures along similar lines are hardly worth mentioning. All this being said, most probably, –ing is the suffix we find in words meaning “descended from,” while the root of king is the same as in kin.

The history of king is instructive in several ways. We have a word with multiple cognates in old texts, we seem to understand what it meant, but its meaning has changed in a subtle way from antiquity to the modern period, because the social milieu behind the word has changed. The king of today is not what the word designated two thousand or even fifteen hundred years ago. I have once referred to the theme “Words and Things” in etymology. The history of king is a good example of how the “thing” refuses to give a definite answer to the question about its earliest meaning of the word. Hence our uncertainty concerning its origin. Yet the simplest etymology is probably correct. Long live simplicity! Long live the king!

_{Featured image: Image by Alexey Komarov. CC-BY-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.}

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How can they do it when we can’t?

Everyone knows that many salamanders can regenerate legs and tails while mammals never can (Figs.1, 2). If you tell a layperson that you work on regeneration, they will inevitably ask, “How can they do it when we can’t?” For most of my career, I was obliged to answer, “We don’t know”, and reflect on the fact that the key questions of science really are those simple ones asked by lay people.

The great news of the last few years is that now we do know. At least, now we have some good ideas about how it works, although there are still many gaps to fill. The two key concepts are cell potency and positional information. Cell potency relates to the range of cell types that the cells of a regenerating structure are able to become. Positional information relates to a system of signals that vary with position within the regenerating structure and control what pathway of differentiation those cells adopt.

Let’s start with the cells and consider those cells making up the limb of a vertebrate animal. The skeletal structures and connective tissues of limbs arise in embryonic development from a limb bud—a structure consisting of a loose mass of cells wrapped up in an outer layer. The loose cells are multipotent, meaning that they can become any one of a series of connective tissue cell types: bone, cartilage, tendon, ligament, or dermis (the inner layer of the skin). The other principal structures of a limb: the muscles, nerves and blood vessels, are formed from separate cell populations that grow into the bud during limb development.

When an adult salamander limb is amputated, the connective tissue cells near the cut surface dedifferentiate and become a uniform population of multipotent cells very similar to those of the embryonic limb bud. This fact has only been discovered recently, and it relied on a very powerful modern technology: single-cell RNA sequencing, which enables individual cells to be analysed to find which genes are active and to what extent. This is not the case for the cells of frog tadpole legs, which show very limited regeneration. However, it has been shown that grafting of embryonic limb bud cells into the amputation sites of frogs can improve their regenerative ability. So, to achieve successful regeneration, one requirement is a mechanism to de-differentiate connective tissue cells into multipotent cells similar, or identical to, those of the embryonic limb bud.

But this is only half the story. To regenerate a complex structure like a limb, these cells need to re-differentiate into the various functional cell types arranged in a complex three-dimensional pattern. This is the role of positional information.

Positional information is a concept invented by Lewis Wolpert (1929–2021), a public intellectual well known both in developmental biology and in wider social circles. In the late 1960s, he proposed that developing or regenerating systems must have some kind of embedded information that varies with position, such that multipotent cells can look at the positional information in their locality and use it to decide into what cell type to differentiate. Wolpert postulated the existence of positional signals—for example, gradients of diffusible molecules, which set up the system; and positional values, which were a long-term stable representation of the positional information. This latter concept of positional value is particularly important in regeneration because the information is needed not just for embryonic development, but also to be available to control regeneration after maybe years of the animal’s life.

The identity of many positional signals was discovered between 1980 and 2000 through intensive studies of embryonic development in frogs, mice, fruit flies, and nematode worms. They are composed of small proteins secreted by cells, which are often called “growth factors” or “cytokines” in other contexts. They include molecules discovered by biochemists, like fibroblast growth factors, transforming growth factors, and bone morphogenetic proteins, and others discovered by geneticists with weird names like Wnt and Hedgehog. Most of these factors are active during limb development and again during regeneration. However, they do not persist during adult life. What does persist is the system of positional values, which were only discovered recently.

The key elements of positional value are the genes that define specific body regions during embryonic development. Such genes all encode transcription factors, which are proteins that control the expression of other genes. For example, in the limb, expression of a gene called shox defines the middle part of the limb and of another gene called hox-a13 defines the hand or foot. These genes are not expressed in the mature limb, but they are still “open for business” in the appropriate regions. For example, hox-a13 is permanently repressed in the upper arm by a specific modification of chromosomal proteins, while in the hand it is not repressed and so it can be re-expressed when exposed to the stimuli of regeneration. In other examples, there is very low-level expression of the relevant positional information genes in the adult, which can be upregulated in regeneration. There are also some cell adhesion molecules, regulated by the same genes, that keep the cell populations in appropriate groups as regeneration proceeds.

Although mammals use the same genes to specify positional information in embryonic development, these genes cannot be reactivated in the adult. Mammals have neither the appropriate multipotent cells nor the appropriate positional information to enable successful regeneration. This is why “they can do it and we can’t.” Whether these key elements can be rebuilt using the modern techniques of regenerative medicine remains a question for the future.

_{Featured image by Nomad Sabor on Unsplash.}

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And what of Eurovision’s future? The Eurovision Song Contest celebrates its 70th anniversary, Vienna

The neutrality and integrity of the Eurovision Song Contest is of paramount importance to the EBU, its Members, and all our audiences. It is essential that the fairness of the Contest is always protected. We are taking clear and decisive steps to ensure the Contest remains a celebration of music and unity.

—Martin Green, Director of the Eurovision Song Contest, November 21, 2025

Where better to affirm the Eurovision Song Contest’s commitment to political neutrality and musical integrity than Vienna, with its 2026 motto, “United by Music—In the Heart of Europe?” Throughout the Cold War and the contingent history of the Eurovision, Austria had pledged itself to neutrality. If any nation were to host the annual Grand Prix, it would surely be Austria: the year before, its entry JJ (Johannes Pietsch), an operatic countertenor, had placed first, singing in a vocal style cultivated for the Baroque and Classical opera stage. The myriad public musical events of Eurovision Week (May 10–16), fringe and public alike, bore witness to Austria as the most musical of nations, unifying Europe with both song and the Eurovision Song Contest for its seventieth anniversary.

The past was so very perfect! How could Eurovision 2026 fail to unify Europe by song? Fail it did, indeed, with the abandonment and violation of the core principles upon which the Eurovision prided itself since its founding at the height of the Cold War. Rather than affirming apolitical neutrality, in recent years the parent organization of the Eurovision, the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), had increasingly blurred the rules whereby political conflicts were kept away from the competition. Russia and Belarus were banned after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, but calls by EBU member states to mete out sanctions to Israel because of its war in Gaza were greeted by pronouncements such as that in the epigraph above. Unconvinced by such gestures, five nations—Iceland, Ireland, the Netherlands, Slovenia, and Spain—withdrew from Eurovision 2026.

The assault on neutrality also extended to integrity, that of the song competition itself, and again, Israel had unleashed the main controversy. Voting at the Eurovision Grand Finale is two-tiered, one set of votes from national juries, the other from the general public. It was the latter that Israel—the Ministry of Foreign Affairs—employed during recent years through various campaigns to manipulate the public voting. One week after the Grand Finale in Vienna, more national broadcasting agencies were discussing the possibility of stepping out of the Eurovision Song Contest. We are left asking, “And what of Eurovision’s future?”

Yes, only yes for these days
And a thousand more to come.
A simple yes.
Eternity is inside a single word.
It will be you and me forever.

                       —Sal da Vinci, “Per sempre sì” / “Forever Yes” (Italy’s Eurovision 2026 entry)

Many entries in Eurovision 2026 turned to the past seventy years in search of model Eurosongs. Power ballads were in abundance; an indebtedness to the ever-present French chanson remained true; the mixture of high camp and comic took full advantage of digital stage effects; pyrotechnics consumed all in its path. Taken together as a single show, the evening performance felt like a hodgepodge of breathless song and dance. I don’t mean to throw cold water on the fiery and frenetic acts; quite the opposite, because there was much to enjoy, onstage antics and nostalgia notwithstanding. Take Italy’s entry, Sal da Vinci crooning “Per sempre sì” (Forever Yes) against a backdrop of a high-energy mock wedding ceremony. One had to believe in da Vinci’s longing for a love that would last forever, borrowed from the Sanremo Song Festival, which annually sends the Italian winner to the Eurovision. Past or perfect, both or neither, the exuberance of “Per sempre sì” well deserved its fifth-place finish.

It would be wiser to get away from here,
But I’m still playing with fire.
How could I freeze the feelings?

                 —Pete Parkkonen and Linda Lampenius, “Liekinheitin”/”Flamethrower” (Finland’s Eurovision 2026 entry)

Among the most unexpected results of the Grand Finale on May 16 was the failure of many favorites to meet the expectations of their fans. No entry bore witness to that failure more than the overwhelming favorite going into Eurovision Week, the Finnish duo, Pete Parkkonen and Linda Lampenius, whose performance of “Liekinheitin” (Flamethrower) was taken dutifully from the Eurovision playbook for winning songs. After Parkkonen’s longing intro, “Liekinheitin” turned up the heat, musically to power-ballad temperatures and choreographically as Lampenius approached the burning cage that had paralyzed the singer-lover. The impact of these playbook elements seemed so well placed that EBU officials made an exception to the performance rules, allowing Lampenius to play the violin live on stage, adding a new dimension to Eurosong vocality. That new dimension had lost its luster by the time of the Grand Finale, dropping the pre-contest favorite to sixth place.

Lead me to the stars, to the shattered nests,
There where, amid screams, they send off soldiers.
Lead me to the stars far from all the gazes.

                                                            —Lelek, “Andromeda” (Croatia’s Eurovision 2026 entry)

If the geopolitics of war in Europe and beyond and a broader sense of moral responsibility for global crisis were largely absent from Eurovision 2026, the few exceptions were notable as a bridge between the Eurovision of the past and that of a future yet realized. The most striking of these exceptions was the Croatian entry, “Andromeda,” sung by the five-woman choral ensemble, Lelek. There was power in the paradox of a song that employed traditional Croatian folk-song style to speak to ethical issues stretching across national and musical borders. Singing together with an intimacy translated musically by melodic recitative and tight harmonic intervals, Lelek drew upon ecofeminism to address the horrors of war. The Croatian lyrics were rich in metaphor, and the listener recognized “Andromeda” as heir to the long tradition of women keening for the loss of humanity. The question I ask every year is whether a deeply moving and prescient ensemble like Lelek enters the Eurovision to place first. Each year, I take comfort in knowing that there are more important questions to ask of a song like “Andromeda.”

I’m a rebel, I’m a danger,
I’m a mover for freedom.
Let me light you, light you up, let me light you up….
I’m the bangarang—

                                                            —DARA, “Bangaranga” (Bulgaria’s Eurovision 2026 entry)

Were I to range across many of this year’s Eurovision entries to identify songs with potential to do well in the final voting, I would have little trouble making a case for at least half of the twenty-five nations competing in the Grand Finale. Over seventy years, there have been many winning formulae, and Eurovision songwriters have learned their lessons well. If 2026 is a measure of those lessons, nonetheless, they may have learned their lessons too well, producing a corpus of songs in Vienna unsurprising in its overall sameness. The song that would eventually win would need to distinguish itself by liberating itself from the sameness. The unsurprising would undergo translation to the surprising, a song that came from nowhere only to claim victory with the largest point margin in Eurovision’s seventy-year history (173 points). That is precisely what Bulgaria’s DARA did with “Bangaranga.” There was nothing profound about the lyrics of “Bangaranga,” though the Bulgarian team constantly teased questioners about the title’s apparently meaningful meaninglessness. The performance itself was brilliant because of its tight choreography and precise use of limited rather than limitless space. For the three minutes of fame on the stage of the Vienna Stadthalle, Bulgaria and “Bangaranga” provided one answer—one affirmative answer—to the questions seventy years had raised about the future of the Eurovision Song Contest.

_{Featured image by Julia Engel via Wikipedia Commons.}

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What does environmental change ask of societies?

Environmental change is no longer an abstract concern. It is encountered in daily life, in regional disruptions, and in global debates. Heat and cold, drought and flood, the loss of species, food insecurity, and widening inequality are not isolated phenomena; together they mark a shift in the conditions under which human societies operate. The paradox of the present moment is clear: crises are extensively diagnosed, risks are well communicated, and policy frameworks are proliferating—yet societies remain strikingly unready.

Not all change is equally visible. Some changes unfold rapidly, within days, seasons, or years; some accumulate slowly, almost without notice until thresholds are crossed. Understanding these different temporalities requires more than measuring physical processes. It demands attention to culture, institutions, economies, and systems of meaning. Environmental change and human resilience draw on all domains of knowledge—not only to establish what has happened, but to understand how it has been interpreted and how societies have responded, in the past, in the present, and for the future.

It is in this context that we introduce Environmental Change and Human Experience, a new topic in Oxford Intersections. As general editors, we conceived the topic as a deliberately interdisciplinary space, bringing together historians, geographers, literary scholars, anthropologists, and others to examine how human societies have interacted with changing environments over time.

The core questions are longstanding. They range from long-term environmental transformations to episodes of acute disruption, and they examine how societies—under different political, economic, and cultural conditions—have understood and managed change. What is new is the intensity of collaboration across disciplines. The expansion of the environmental humanities, advances in data and modelling, and the pressures associated with climate change are reshaping how scholars work—and the range of evidence that can be brought to bear to help us understand the changes, how they affect societies and how we might be better prepared for future change.

A central premise runs through the topic. Environmental change, whether gradual or sudden, has always tested the resilience and resourcefulness of human societies. The historical record is therefore not simply descriptive; it is analytical. It offers a series of grounded cases—real-world experiments in adaptation, failure, and innovation that allow us to identify patterns, constraints, and possibilities in how societies respond to environmental stress.

This perspective is particularly relevant today. Many challenges now framed as unprecedented—climate variability, food insecurity, water management, disease, inequality, ecological degradation—have deeper histories. Examining those histories does not provide simple solutions, but it does clarify the range of responses available and the conditions under which they succeed or fail. It expands the repertoire of adaptive strategies while sharpening our understanding of their limits.

The topic is structured in nine sections: Approaches, Climate, Construction, Disasters, Land, Water, Food, Animals, and New Frontiers. Together, these sections provide a framework for analysing how humans have shaped their environments, and how those environments, in turn, have shaped human experience.

Contributors approach environmental change from multiple angles: historical, geographical, literary, religious, social, cultural, political, ecological, and anthropological. The aim is not an encyclopaedic overview, but structured analysis based on new research. Environmental Change and Human Experience will be a resource for researchers, teachers, and students around the world who seek fresh perspectives and challenging comparisons.

^{Featured image ‘Forestry activities in Tasmania, Australia’ by Matt Palmer via Unsplash.}

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Binomial expressions

The term “binomial expression” sounds very math-like, and it is. It refers to a mathematical expression with two terms connected by an operator. So 3a + b is a binomial, as is 2x³ + 6x. In algebra, binomials are used to solve equations, often by converting more complex polynomial expressions to a binomial. For example, x² − 7x + 10 = 0 can be expressed as the binomial (x − 2)(x − 5) = 0, leading to the conclusion that either x = 5 or x = 2.

But enough math. Binomials also occur in language, and where they refer to expressions like chicken and egg, by and large, in and out, cut and dried, or peace and quiet. Often, and perhaps usually, such expressions occur in a fixed A and B order: we don’t hear egg and chicken, large and by, out and in, dried and cut, or quiet and peace. Those word orders should make your head hurt worse than the math did.

English has hundreds of such expressions, and the scholarly literature on them numbers dozens of articles. Modern interest in binomials goes back to the mid-twentieth-century work of linguists like Yakov Malkiel (in a 1959 article called “Studies in Irreversible Binomials”) and Dwight Bolinger (whose 1962 article, “Binomials and Pitch Accent,” looked at the metrical structure of binomials). Later work by William Cooper and John Robert Ross (in a 1975 paper called “Word Order”) proposed that the terms which occurred first tended to be those closer to a speaker’s experience (an idea they called the Me First Principle). They also stressed the relevance of phonological and semantic properties of words. Other scholars have proposed that word frequency plays a role, with more frequent words tending to be in the first position. For an excellent overview, consult Sarah Bunin Benor and Roger Levy’s 2006 article, “The Chicken or the Egg.”

Some fixed phrases may have idiosyncratic explanations: black and white, as in “it’s right there in black and white,” gets its order from the foregrounding of lettering on the backgrounded page. Come and go suggests a temporal precedence: you have to come before you can go, but what about stop and go?

In addition, many binomials can be reversed: beer and wine seems as likely as wine and beer, and peppers and onions as likely as onions and peppers. To me, left and right, on and off, and night and day seem fine in either order. But cheese and crackers does not work nearly as well as crackers and cheese, and a cheese and ham sandwich sounds downright odd. Tables and chairs seem natural if you are shopping for furniture, as in “We were looking at new tables and chairs” rather than “new chairs and tables.” But if you are writing a novel and describing a brawl, you might have a character step carefully among the overturned “chairs and tables.” And as Benor and Levy noted, even fixed binomials can be reversed, when necessary, as in the Billy Joel song “Piano Man,” with its barfly “making love to his tonic and gin.” The reversal of the libation completes the rhymes with “the regular crowd shuffles in.”

Reversal of a fixed binomial can also be a forensic tell. When the terrorist Theodore Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber, wrote his anti-technology manifesto in the 1990s, he used the outdated binomial expression “eat your cake and have it too” rather than the more common “have your cake and eat it too.” That idiosyncratic reversal was one of the clues that led to his identification and capture.

Some frozen binomials are best left alone.

_{Featured image by Ling App on Unsplash.}

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Brothers and sisters

The readers of this blog may have noticed that I usually try to stay away from the oldest words in English, those with ancient Indo-European roots. I do so, because, when it comes to such words, I seldom have any ideas worth sharing, that is, such as cannot be found in easily available sources. (Incidentally, considering the richness of the Internet, this is not always an easy task!) I feel more comfortable with baffle, pebble, and peevish (see the latest two posts about them) and among adzes, heifers, and pimps, all done to death in my etymological dictionary. But perhaps someone among our readers is especially interested in the hoary antiquities? If so, write me a note. In any case, today’s post is about the words brother and sister. Both are very old, really as old as the most ancient hills around us. The question is the same as always: Why do those words mean what they mean to us today? I wish they were sound-imitative, but unfortunately, they are not.

Brother is an especially amazing word, because its multiple cognates have practically the same form, the predictable phonetic differences notwithstanding, all over Indo-European: English brother, Latin frater, Russian brat, and so forth (an extremely rare case). The Indo-European protoform must have begun with bh-. We can state with confidence only one thing: namely, that brothers received their name not because they were the sons of the same parent(s). Rather, they were members of a certain unit, a fraternity, asit were. For instance, the Ancient Greek phrāter belonged to a phrātria, “a brotherhood,” a social, political, and religious group that had nothing to do with kinship. This is not surprising. In the remotest past, males were responsible for hunting and warding off enemies. Being the offspring of the same parents mattered less or not at all. Of course, such was no longer the situation in recorded history and in Greece, where boys did know their fathers, and the word for “brother” in our sense existed (Greek adelphós “from the same womb”; as regards the root of the word, think of Delphi, literally “womb,” the seat of Apollo’s famous temple in a gorge).

Ancient “brothers” must have belonged to a certain group. What group was it millennia ago? If we could discover the answer, the etymology of the word brother would have become clear. According to a very old suggestion, the root of brother is the same as in the verb bear. But brothers did not receive their name because they were the sons of the same parent. That’s the whole point. And reconstructing some root beginning with br– takes us nowhere.

Even the most detailed etymological dictionaries offer only lists of cognates for brother and state flatly: “Origin unknown.” Yet I might mention at least one hypothesis, to illustrate the state of the art. Jost Trier (1894-1970), a German linguist, believed that many words of Indo-European had been coined in the process of weaving, making fences, and so forth. In his time, Trier had an enthusiastic following. A few of his etymologies look plausible; others are fanciful. He reconstructed the ancient root bher “to weave, plait,” which he detected in numerous words, including brother and bride. To be sure, “connecting, binding” is a concept that underlies both kinship and marriage, but as always, it is the details that count. A bird’s eye view of kinship terms rarely pays off. The etymology of both bride and brother is enveloped in total obscurity, and comparing two words of unknown origin in an attempt to kill two evasive birds with one little stone (“pebble”) is a risky endeavor.

Such then is the sad end of the first part of today’s essay. By this time, it must have become clear why I choose to stay away from the depths of Indo-European. As a pearl-diver, I don’t like to come to the surface empty-handed.

Despite numerous disagreements among scholars, the etymology of the word sister seems to be less opaque. Before citing the solution that one can find in all recent dictionaries, I may mention a curious detail. We seem to be wandering in darkness, and yet some ancient kin terms are amusingly transparent. For instance, Old Norse (that is, Old Icelandic) lifri is one of several words for “brother,” and it means “of the same liver.” Also, in Old Icelandic, we find blóði, literally “blood brother,” hlýri “brother, (!) friend,” literally, “of the same cheek.” The already cited Greek adelphós means “of the same womb” (no connection with Adolph, despite its misleading ph at the end: Adolph is a German name meaning “old wolf”), and the Sanskrit word for “brother” had the same inner form. But as we have seen, brother did NOT mean “of the same womb,” and we are at a loss to decipher it.

We can assume that millennia ago, people coined words that were fully transparent to the speakers, but with time those words changed beyond recognition, and we are hard put to reconstruct the original form. Or the association that was once clear to everybody has been lost. The Germanic designations of “sister” are similarly all over the map: Gothic swistar, Old English sweostor, and so forth. (Gothic, it will be remembered, has come down to us in a fourth-century translation of the New Testament from Greek. Later Gothic is all but unknown.)

It is now usually believed that the oldest Indo-European word for “sister” was a compound containing the elements swe- “one’s own” and sōr “woman,” the reference being to the woman of one’s own extended family, in contrast to such terms of kinship as Latin uxor “woman from outside the extended family.” The competing etymology, explaining sister as “being of one’s own blood,” has been rejected or ignored by most specialists in Indo-European kinship terminology.

Old Germanic was full of words designating various family groups. For instance, in the Gothic translation of the New Testament, we find the noun broþrahans. It renders the usual Greek plural of the word for “brother” but presumably meant “those dealing with one another in a brotherly manner.” To us the text in Mark XII: 20 hardly suggests such a nuance (“Now there were seven brethren; and the first took a wife, and dying left no seed”). Be that as it may, the odd-looking suffix has secure counterparts in Icelandic and elsewhere.

To repeat: few words are harder to interpret than the terms of kinship in the languages of the world. The Modern English system is simplicity itself: grandmother, brother, sister, cousin, uncle, in-laws, and so forth, but even we have monsters like cousin twice removed. The old system was intricate and to us mind-boggling. So let us stay with moms and dads and make merry.

Editor’s note: for administrative reasons, The Oxford Etymologist’s column will not appear next week, July 29. The next post will be on August 5.

_{Featured image: Image by Jason Hu via Pexels. Public domain.}

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How to create visual (graphical) and video abstracts

Although the concept of visual abstracts began even before the widespread use of the internet, with journals like Angewandte Chemie and Tetrahedron Letters featuring graphical abstracts in the late 20^th century, it wasn’t widely used across all journals until the surge in scholarly papers and information overload. Given that almost 3 million scientific papers were indexed by Scopus and Web of Science alone in 2022, it isn’t surprising that it takes 17 years for research evidence to reach clinical practice. Therefore, for research to influence clinical practice, it must be effectively communicated to key audiences such as policymakers, healthcare professionals, and patients.

Since 2016, Dr Andrew Ibrahim has helped popularize the use of visual abstracts on social media. His studies have shown that presenting research findings in a visual way promises to improve audience reach and drive change, as visual abstracts make use of our ability to rapidly process and retain visual over textual information.

Planning your visual abstract

Paediatrics & Child Health encourages authors to submit visual or video abstracts with their manuscripts. While visual (or graphical) abstracts provide a succinct, pictorial summary of the paper, video abstracts are short, engaging audio-visual recordings. These abstracts give readers a quick, visual overview of an article’s main findings and information briefly. The purpose of visual abstract isn’t to divulge all the details of a study or to replace the full text, but to provide busy readers with an efficient way to find articles of interest. However, as the addition of visual abstracts on social media is relatively new (since 2016), there is a need for more quantitative studies to fully understand how effective visual abstracts are in communicating research. Preliminary data suggest that visual abstracts do increase text abstract views and enhance Altmetric attention scores of papers.

Follow these tips to create effective visual or video abstracts.

1. First, wrap up your paper: Develop your abstract after fully writing your manuscript. This will help you to fully understand your research story and highlight the key aspects of your paper. Ask yourself these questions:
   • Why did I decide to do this research?
   • What is the problem/knowledge gap my work addresses?
   • How do my key findings compare with what has been done previously?
   • And how does it matter to my peers and the public?
     
2. Create a plan: Plan out your ideas and organize your abstract in a logical way, so that readers can take a quick glance and easily follow. You can use SmartArt Graphics on Microsoft PowerPoint (process, cycle, list, matrix etc.) or search for similar elements on Canva.
   
3. Learn about your audience: It is important to understand your audience’s level of expertise when choosing the visual elements for your graphical abstract.
   
4. Less is more: Select key points from each section of your paper. This will keep your abstract succinct. Adding too many details can overwhelm the readers. The purpose of a visual or a video abstract isn’t to replace full-text articles but to pique the interest of the reader.
   
5. What to keep in mind: Learn what sizes and formats are allowed. For Paediatrics & Child Health, for example, graphical abstracts should be one panel, 1200 pixels (width) x 900 pixels (height) at 300 ppi (which corresponds to 4 inches/10 cm x 3 inches/7.5 cm at 300 ppi). You can submit your graphical abstract as TIFF, PDF or JPG file and video abstracts as AVI or MP4 files. Other journals or societies may have different requirements.
   
6. Get feedback before you submit: Send your visual or video abstracts to folks not only within your profession but also outside it, to see if they understand your paper just by looking at your visual or video abstract.
   

Technical tips for creating your visual abstract

There are technical elements to creating a visual abstract. Here are some tips for how to approach the process. For graphical abstracts:

• Choose a design program you are comfortable with such as Microsoft PowerPoint, Adobe Creative Cloud, Canva, etc.
• Select a colour palette (≤5 colours) and a font size (12- to 16-point UNICODE) to ensure legibility.
• Use simple and clear visual elements/icons to communicate your research. For general graphical elements, you can use PowerPoint, Canva, Draw.io, and Adobe Illustrator. However, for more specific visual elements, you can use software such as:
  
  1. BioRender for creating professional, scientific figures. It is best for life sciences, medicine, and biology papers.
  2. Mind the Graph for creating compelling infographics from scratch. This tool is best for health professionals, scientists, and academicians.
  3. ChemDraw to draw out chemical reactions or biomolecules e.g., drawing out the structures of essential amino acid or adenosine diphosphate in your manuscript.
  4. If pictograms/images won’t help communicate your research work, you can always include data or charts. For information on different chart types and their uses, try The Data Visualisation Catalogue.

Once you have created your graphical abstract, proofread and revise if necessary.

If a video abstract best suits your paper:

• It is good practice to begin your video with a hook to catch the attention of your viewers. Start the video with an interesting question or revealing key findings of your study.
• To make your video, create a storyboard to identify potential issues using free software like Canva storyboards or Wonder Unit Storyboarder.
• Select your mode of delivery:
  1. Talking head: You can record yourself talking about your study, creating a human connection between you and your audience.
  2. Presentation style: If you are looking for a free, beginner-friendly way to record your video abstract, you can create simple visuals on Microsoft PowerPoint or Canva and record the presentation.
  3. Whiteboard animation: You can make a video abstract by drawing out the key findings of your paper on an actual whiteboard (or using a whiteboard tool online). This method is effective but might need some prior sketching practice. To make it more creative and add motion to your drawing, you can create animated videos using Canva, Powtoon, Microsoft PowerPoint or other paid software.
• Record your audio-visual: If you opt to create a talking head video, you can use a mobile phone or a digital camera using the highest quality to record your video. For recording the script, select a quiet room and, if possible, use a plug-in microphone. Ensure your voice is audible and clear, and your tone resonates with your intended audience. You can also add free music to your video (check license and copyrights).
• End your video with a call to action e.g., you can say something like “now that you’ve watched this video, don’t forget to read and share this paper” to the audience to increase the chances of a viewer taking action.
• Lastly, use any editing software (e.g., Canva Pro, PowerPoint, iMovie, descript) to put together your final video abstract.

Conclusion

Visual and video abstracts are effective ways to increase visibility, reach, and engagement of your research work. For example, the papers published in Paediatrics & Child Health accompanied by visual abstracts, some of which were recently shared on the journal’s LinkedIn page, received higher engagement and article views on both platforms.

For more information about submitting your manuscript to Paediatrics & Child Health, please visit our website or email us at journal@cps.ca.

^{Featured image by Luke Miller via Unsplash.}

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Pen to Paper with Alexander Mikaberidze

In his most recent work, historian and OUP author Alexander Mikaberidze turns his expansive, globally minded lens to one of the most familiar episodes in American history—the Louisiana Purchase—and reveals just how far its story reaches beyond a simple land deal. Best known for his work on the Napoleonic Wars, Mikaberidze brings the same cross-border, deeply archival approach to this project, tracing the Purchase through the tangled currents of empire, revolution, and political ambition that connected Europe, the Caribbean, and North America. Here, he reflects on the enduring pull of Napoleonic history, the serendipity of research, and why the Louisiana Purchase still has urgent meaning today.

1. You’ve spent much of your career immersed in the world of the Napoleonic Wars. What was the moment when this period first caught your imagination—and what keeps pulling you back to it?

As a kid, I was very susceptible to the romance of the past. The decisive moment came at the start of middle school when I stumbled across a biography of Napoleon Bonaparte. I was, quite simply, swept away. Here was this improbable figure—a provincial outsider from a small island—who seemed to bend an entire continent to his will. It read like a romantic saga, the kind that makes you forget about your own problems (and in the turbulent 1990s, there were many problems in the former Soviet republics!). The Napoleonic legend has a way of doing that, as it doesn’t just inform; it recruits. And I responded.

What keeps me returning is the complexity of the past. The closer you get, the more it fractures into competing perspectives, new narratives, and additional layers. It’s an inexhaustible subject, and after over two decades studying the Napoleonic Era, I am only just starting to get a good grasp of it.

2. Your work often crosses borders, languages, and archives. When you’re deep in research, what does a good working day actually look like for you—and where do you most often get pleasantly stuck?

A good research day begins, as all respectable obsessions do, with a cup of coffee and a false sense of control. When I’m in the archives, I arrive with a plan—a list of dossiers to order, documents to peruse, and old leads to follow up—and within an hour that plan is usually in ruins. Some obscure document opens onto a new set of questions, which leads to a detour into entirely unfamiliar territory. At home, my working day is really a working night. Once lectures are finished, papers graded, and family attended to, I turn to reading and writing, usually well after ten o’clock. So, I tend to work past midnight, when everything has gone quiet and the world, for a few hours at least, stops making demands. I surround myself with piles of books and documents and slowly read through them all, taking notes and creating outlines. I’ve always had a particular fondness for tracing details, especially those included in footnotes. More often than not, those are the threads that unravel something larger. I recall one such instance when an innocent inquiry into a single footnote sent me chasing leads across European archives and auction houses. The trail eventually led me to the Lilly Library, where I found a rare Georgian illuminated manuscript long thought lost.

3. How different did it feel to write about the Louisiana Purchase compared with Napoleon’s Europe? Were there habits you had to unlearn—or new ones you picked up along the way?

In some ways, it felt less like a departure than a continuation under a different name. The story of the Louisiana Purchase is so closely intertwined with subjects I had already spent years studying—European colonial empires, the Haitian Revolution, and, of course, Napoleon—that the transition was more seamless than I initially expected. If anything, the shift was one of emphasis rather than method. My earlier focus of tracing connections across borders—which led to the writing of The Napoleonic Wars: A Global History—proved just as essential here. The Purchase only really makes sense when placed within those overlapping imperial and revolutionary contexts; taken in isolation, it risks losing a lot of important details.

4. After years of writing big, interconnected histories, what part of the process do you enjoy most now—and what part still gives you pause every time you start a new book?

What I enjoy most is the moment when the material begins to “talk back.” After years of research, there comes a point when the documents stop feeling like scattered fragments and begin to form a kind of chorus. Shaping that into a cohesive story feels less like construction and more like listening closely enough to catch the underlying rhythm. What still gives me pause is the beginning… There’s a particular sense of terror of realizing the depth of the subject that you will have to explore and then staring at the blank page knowing how many lives and complexities you’re bound to compress into prose. It’s a useful anxiety, though—it keeps you honest about the challenge, and more importantly, keeps you striving for a deeper understanding of what actually transpired.

5. If readers take away one big idea from The Louisiana Purchase that reframes how they think about global history, what do you hope it will be?

If there’s one idea, I’d hope readers carry away, it’s that the Louisiana Purchase was not a neat bilateral transaction—the familiar “greatest real estate deal,” measured out in a few cents per acre. It was (and in many ways, remains) a hinge in a much larger story of imperial rivalry and global entanglement, stretching across both space and time. It is a story that continues to ask something of us—serving as a striking historical precedent, for instance, when the United States recently revisited the idea of acquiring Greenland. I hope the Louisiana Purchase would compel readers to confront the past with candor and to reckon with the tangled complexities of our national story.

I think all historians, whether they admit it or not, are engaged in an ongoing conversation, sometimes amicable, sometimes argumentative. In approaching the Louisiana Purchase as a longue durée history, I found myself naturally echoing Fernand Braudel, with his expansive sense of time and structure. He has a way of reminding you that events are only ever the visible surface of much deeper currents. At the same time, scholars like William Dalrymple, Simon Schama, Gordon Wood, and Alan Taylor bring a narrative vitality that makes you want to match their energy, if not quite their eloquence. This book also owes a great deal to recent Louisiana Purchase studies, too many to mention all, but I will highlight a few: to Robert Lee on long-term consequences; to Mark Edward Hay and Larry Neal, whose economic histories of the Purchase have helped shape my own thinking; and to Peter J. Kastor, whose scholarship on the Purchase’s impact on the American identity has influenced many of my conclusions.

Featured image by Digital Content Writers India via Unsplash

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A few etymological pebbles

The readers of this blog must have noticed how often I suggest solutions connected with sound imitation. Time and again I say that a certain noun or verb owes its origin to onomatopoeia. In the previous post (July 8, 2026), I used this approach while discussing the verb baffle. Today we’ll encounter a similar situation.

Etymological solutions are often intelligent guessing. Many of our readers will remember that a special branch of linguistics deals with iconicity. It studies the ways in which the form of words in some way mirrors their meaning. Barf-barf, oink-oink, and bonkers (boinkers, as it were) are the most obvious examples of iconicity (the header features a picture of our iconic idol), but iconicity goes far beyond sound imitation. Consider the compounds tip-top, wishy–washy, ping-pong, and phrases like tit for tat. They always begin with short i. Top-tip and washy-wishy are unthinkable, because we instinctively begin the enumeration with something small, and short i as in ping and tip indeed suggests smallness. This is not a law: the adjective big has a “wrong” vowel, but consider the phrase big bang.

When we learn the meaning of the words jerk, jig, and jog, we almost sense that they mean what they are expected to mean. Last week, I tried to show that baffle is a sound-imitating (iconic) word. Now think of another situation. A stone falls into a river, we watch it go down and say “plop.” This is non-controversial, but when we are told that Latin plumber, as in Engl. plumb, has a similar origin (suggested by the great linguist Otto Jespersen), doubts arise. Really, is this possible? Latin plumbum?! Why not? Plop  ~ plum(b) goes a piece of lead. After all, plumbum is a word “of obscure origin.”

Consider the noun pebble, recorded in a great number of forms: popple, pipple, pyppel, and puble, among others. It also resembles bubble, whose imitative origin no one doubts. Is pebble from Old English papol a sound-imitative word, like Jespersen’s plumbum? You throw a small stone into water, and it goes pipley ~ papol ~ pebble ~ pipley. Boulder may be sound-imitative (see the post for February 22, 2017), and so may pebble. The problem is that nothing can be proved once we leave the safe haven of oink-oink and flip–flop. Serious etymologists recognize iconicity but treat it with caution.

The origin of pebble does not interest me too much (though I suspect that the word is indeed sound-imitative). I cited it as an introduction to the story of peevish. This adjective surfaced in English at the beginning of the seventeenth century, and like, for example, pawky “cunning, shrewd” (of Scandinavian origin?), it was probably slang. The meaning of peevish has changed over the centuries. We cannot decide what exactly the word meant in the early sentences at our disposal. Here is a shortened succession of glosses (from 1400 to 1669) in the original OED: “silly, senseless, foolish; malignant; spiteful.” The 1963 Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology lists “spiteful, malignant; perverse, obstinate; querulous, fretful.” Most of those senses are obsolete. The OED online begins with “perverse, obstinate, skittish.”

Apparently, the exact connotations of peevish in those sentences are not quite clear to us (just something bad or unpleasant). Peevish is still “unpleasant” but no longer “repugnant,” because today, people who are peevish are grumpy and fretful, rather than perverse or malignant. This change is called the amelioration of meaning (as opposed to the deterioration).

The OED online gives Latin perversus as the etymon, that is, as the ultimate source of peevish. This may be correct. However, the way from perversus to peevish via Old French is not smooth. The French adjective had two quite audible r’s, while peevish has neither. Ernest Weekley (in his etymological dictionary) also derived peevish from perversus but did not discuss the phonetic details. The adjective perverse emerged in English at almost the same time as did peevish. Was the French adjective borrowed twice, once by the uneducated and some time later by those who could pronounce French, without mutilating it?

There is another suggestion about the etymology of peevish. Walter W. Skeat: “The leading idea seems to be whining, making a plaintive cry,” with reference to the bird name pewet, peewit. From the phonetic point of view, the match is perfect (the bird makes a high-pitched wailing pee-wee sound, from which it received its name and which I find rather disturbing), and indeed, peevish resembles an onomatopoeic word. Yet it is far from clear whether the earliest senses of peevish refer to that whining sound. Skeat’s glosses are “fretful, whimpering.” I agree with the OED: “Origin uncertain.” But I would add Skeat’s hypothesis in a note. It has some merit. It may even be correct.

And now, as promised last week, a short biography of Frank Chance, compiled by Dr. Stephen Goranson. I would be happy if this brilliant nineteenth-century researcher had at last re-emerged in our etymological studies from his undeserved obscurity.

Frank Chance was born at Highgate, the fourth son of Robert Lucas Chance, a Birmingham glass manufacturer. After two years in his father’s factory, he studied chemistry for a year at King’s College, London, and for two further years at Paris and Berlin. He went up to Trinity, Cambridge, in 1850, and thence, having taken his B.A. in 1854, to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital for his clinical training, graduating as M.B. in 1854. While at Cambridge he gained the Tyrwhitt Hebrew scholarship, and the study of languages became the chief interest of his life. He translated Virchow’s Cellular Pathology, at the author’s request, in 1863, and edited H. H. Bernard’s Commentary on the Book of Job in 1864. A year later he retired from practice. From 1875 to 1884 he was a member of the committee for the Revised Version of the Old Testament. He was a fluent linguist in German, French and Italian, and familiar with several other languages. He married in 1857 Jane Susan Katharine, daughter of James Brewster of Huntingdon, and had one daughter. He died at Nice.

_{Featured image: Image by Brett Sayles via Pexels. Public domain.}

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The level of our expertise: the perplexing verb <em>baffle</em>

Once again, my thanks are to Dr. Goranson. He succeeded in putting together a short biography of Frank Chance, my hero, whom I discovered many years ago (and learned to admire), while working on my bibliography of English etymology. His almost total obscurity today struck me as an incomprehensible slight. Dr. Goranson’s letter will be appended to the post next week. I also received a query from a reader about kayfabe. Alas, though I know something about the etymology of box/boxing (see the post “In and out of the box”), I cannot say the same about kayfabe; not a single publication on this word appears in my database. I should repeat what I have said more than once: my expertise depends on the huge database I have amassed, and when I draw blank, I appear as ignorant as any non-specialist. I know about kayfabe only what anyone can find online.

This post is about a related subject. What does it mean when a dictionary says: “Origin unknown”? We will soon see that the concept of “unknown” has several levels. The verb baffle, the subject of today’s post, has been investigated in an exemplary way in dictionaries and in both old and recent publications. Yet the OED’s latest verdict, despite the helpful notes, remains unchanged: “Origin unknown.” If so, let us look at what is known. Can everything be enveloped in impenetrable obscurity, like what you can see in the header, with a man lost in a forest?

Baffle turned up in English texts toward the middle of the sixteenth century, and rather probably, it was coined or borrowed around that time or a hundred year earlier. At that time, its recorded senses were “hoodwink, confound.” Scotch bauchle, which predates baffle, meant “to disgrace,” and it remains unclear whether we are dealing with several senses of the same word or with two different verbs. This detail of its history will indeed remain unknown or at least uncertain forever, though it is more probable that, regardless of the chronology, the same sound complex suggested to speakers several different negative associations.

The earliest English etymologists searched for the Greek originof baffle or tried to isolate the prefix be– in it. In 1766, Samuel Johnson thought of the French origin of this verb but went no further (etymology was in general not his forte). Almost a century later, Hensleigh Wedgwood, Skeat’s predecessor in the field of English etymology, wrote a paper that contained a well-informed section on baffle (the earliest attestations and Romance cognates or lookalikes) and came to the following conclusion (his spelling is retained): “The origin of the Sc[otch] bauch, bauchle is, I believe, the interjection Fauch! Baw! Pah! Pooh!, Fr[ench] Bah! Pouah!, Spanish] Baf! all of which are representations of the strong exspiration accompanied by a projection of the lips, by which we instinctively defend ourselves against a bad smell, and are consequently in the first instance expressive of physical disgust, and then of contempt. ‘Buffa, the despising blast of the mouth that we call shirping.’ Thomas. A.D. 1548… Hence also Port[uguese] bafo, breath; Prov[encial] O[ld] Spa[nish] bafa, mockery jest; Sp[anish] befar, It[alian] beffare, to jeer; Fr[ench] baffler, to mock. From the notion of mocking to that of frustrating the effort of any one, in which the En[glish] baffle is now used, is an easy transition….” A few more examples follow.

Wedgwood, an excellent observer of speech, ruined his otherwise useful etymological dictionary of English (the above quotation is not from that dictionary) by relying too heavily on the similarity of words from various languages and ignoring sound correspondences. Yet many of his conclusions still stand, and what he said about baffle sounds convincing, as also shown by the opinions of the Romance scholars who dealt with the items Wedgwood mentioned.

In Romance, numerous words beginning with baf have a very wide range of meanings: they denote “to breathe,” “full stomach,” “puff up, bloat,” and so forth. Its “relative” is buff (buffo “comic actor” and its twin buffoon belong here). According to a unanimous agreement, such words are sound-imitative: biff, baff, buff…. Baffle rather obviously belongs here. The best proof of the onomatopoeic origin of the root we are discussing is the existence of Middle High German beffen “to bark.” Beff-beff (older German), gav-gav (Russian), or woof-woof (English)—the result is the same! Dictionaries also cite Dutch baffen, Modern German baffen and bäfzen, alongside Danish bjæffe and Swedish bjebba “to bark.” By the way, Engl. baffy is a kind of golf club, while Scotch baff means “to strike.” In blind-man’s buff, buff means “blow, stroke,” and in Russian, a gun goes pif-paf.

What then is “unknown” about baffle? The answer is clear. The same or nearly the same sound complex has been recorded all over Western Europe, more importantly (as far as we are concerned) in French. The unanswerable question is whether baffle is native or borrowed. Similar questions recur again and again, especially with regard to slang, expressive words, and the names of popular tools.

In the sixteenth century, wars never ended in Europe (surprise, surprise!). Mercenaries, native and foreign, were everywhere, and so were prostitutes and vagabonds, following the troops. Despite the unrest, merchants and artisans traveled all over the continent. Foreign words were adopted (and often distorted), sometimes forgotten, and sometimes retained. A few of them survived only in regional speech, others managed to stay and even infiltrated the language of the educated.

Baffle, a word of unquestionably imitative origin (and thus, an expressive word), may be native or borrowed. Seven centuries ago, it probably belonged to the common language of the lower classes. Germanic speakers recognized it as their own (when we speak, we don’t think about the etymology of the words we use!), and so did the speakers of the Romance languages. Baffle and its lookalikes may have been native in both English and French (!), or perhaps they were migratory words (Wanderwörter, as they are called in German), part of international slang (see my blog for August 22, 2012, on ajar and migratory words). It is an important detail of the verb’s history and the only one that is beyond reconstruction. From this (and only from this) point of view is baffle a word of unknown origin.

I believe that verdicts in dictionaries should be more nuanced. (In this case: “Baffle. Sound-imitative. In the early Modern period, similar sound complexes were current all over Western Europe, and it is impossible to decide which words of this type are native and which are borrowed.”) Some words are indeed so obscure that nothing at all is known about their prehistory. Baffle does not belong to this group of etymologically impenetrable words.

_{Featured image: Image by Joe from Pixabay.}

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VSI 800: A history in eleven titles

Short. Sharp. Inspiring.

These are the words that have guided the Very Short Introduction series for over thirty years. With over ten million copies sold worldwide, it’s become a universally accessible way to gain new knowledge (ChatGPT, eat your heart out).

To celebrate the publication of our 800^thVery Short Introduction, we’ve put together a timeline featuring our series milestones, from our first Introduction co-authored by famed classicist Mary Beard, all the way to our upcoming introduction to rock ‘n’ roll.

Check out our interactive timeline below!

^{Featured image: Oxford University Press.}

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Clinical Legal Education, Theory and Practice

Legal education, at least in the Anglosphere, has been undergoing a quiet but very recognisable transformation. The case study method, developed by Christopher Columbus Langdell at Harvard in the 1870s, is steadily giving way to ‘authentic’, ‘real life’ or ‘experiential’ learning, wherein theory and practice are intermeshed. Law is now often studied ‘in context’ (consequences, remedies, and enforcement are discussed); the gap between ‘law in theory’ and ‘law in action’ is investigated; and the ‘theory of the practice’ is incorporated into the curriculum.

Clinical legal education (CLE) takes this pedagogical approach to its logical conclusion. In CLE, law students learn through the practical application of law by providing legal services to the public and by reflecting on this experience to develop their understanding of law and legal theory. In light of the above, it is unsurprising that CLE has seen a rapid growth in the UK in the past decade. In addition to the aforementioned pedagogical shift, another driving force for this growth has been the hollowing out of public services by years of austerity politics, manifested in significant cuts in the provision of free legal services, both from the voluntary sector and from private law firms with legal contracts. These two factors combined to create a growing demand from the general public for free legal services and a growing demand from law students for some practical experience to form part of their law studies. This expansion in university law clinics has also seen a gradual move away from the law clinic inhabiting a small extra-curricular space populated by a handful of keen volunteers to larger, permanently staffed spaces where the clinic is incorporated into the curriculum, forming an assessed and credit bearing part of both undergraduate and postgraduate law programmes.

Clinical legal education is now very much a part of the twenty-first century legal education landscape, with an estimated 80% of law schools in the UK offering some form of provision. Against this background, it is somewhat surprising that there are very few textbooks available for students. It seems likely that one reason for this is that each university law clinic is unique in its offering and there is no common substantive law uniting them. A law clinic may provide advice services in one or more of the following: family law, housing, employment, criminal law, welfare benefits, special educational needs, small businesses, immigration and asylum, small claims disputes. Those services may be supervised by law school staff or by external agencies working in partnership. When you come to consider the incredible variety of models of delivery along with the range of legal topics needed, the lack of standard core textbooks becomes less surprising, as it is hard to imagine how one book might serve quite so many needs.

In addition to the incredible range of substantive law that can be found in university law clinics, the rationale for and underpinning values of law clinics are highly contested. Is the university law clinic a vehicle for developing deep critical thinking about values, power and justice in an unjust world, a vehicle for developing employability skills for budding lawyers, a way for law schools to help meet the legal needs of local communities, or can it be all of the above?

Undaunted by this landscape, we decided to rise to the challenge of creating a text that unites the theory and the practice of clinical legal education—and in doing so set out our own vision of what clinical legal education is and can be. We seek to champion a vision of clinical legal education that is radical and transformative for students and the communities they serve whilst also positioning ourselves on the side of promoting social justice through legal practice.

We explore the ways in which experiential learning can enrich the student experience, not only by developing key employability skills but also by creating a space in which theory can be applied and become meaningful.

Our proposition is that there are 6 features to clinical legal education:

1. Active participation: this is the defining feature, and thus the foundation of clinical legal education. There is no room in a clinic for students to passively absorb knowledge handed to them by a lecturer. They are active participants in their own learning experience.
   
2. Interaction in role: students play an active part in interviewing, advising, or otherwise working for a client by adopting a professional role.[CA3]  By taking on such a role, students learn how to interact with others as they would in legal practice.
   
3. The dynamic nature of the problem: in legal education, we often design neatly packaged problems for students that will draw out their knowledge and understanding of a particular point of law or practice. In clinical legal education, the problem cannot be packaged, and the solution may not be clear, which pushes the students to think creatively to apply their skills and knowledge.
   
4. Part of a planned curriculum: this does not necessarily mean that the clinic needs to form part of an assessed programme, but to move from beyond experience to education, a clear learning goal needs to be identified for students and educators. Education requires theorising, extrapolating experiences, conceptualising and framing them, understanding them as part of a general structure, and trying again on the basis of that understanding.
   
5. Reflection: learning how to reflect allows students to make sense of their experience and learn from that experience.
   
6. Access to justice: this feature is present in many, but not all, clinics. Teaching students about access to justice is central to our own approaches to clinical education and is therefore also central to the book.

We live in very uncertain times, and our students come to us anxious about jobs and their futures. Many of our universities in the UK are located in cities and regions where poverty, inequality, and injustice are part of the everyday landscape. Law students are hoping to enter a world of work that is changing so fast that neither practicing lawyers nor legal academics have a clear picture of what that world will look like. It is tempting, therefore, for the legal academy to collectively put our heads down and carry on with what we have always done: give lectures, teach the black letter law, expect students to read books and judgments and sit exams at the end of the year. We hope that this book and our vision of law as a site of injustice as well as justice, clinics as a site of theory and practice, and legal practice as a form of communication and connection between people will serve to inspire and support new generations of law students and their teachers.

^{Featured image by Sasun Bughdaryan via Unsplash.}

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Seeing red

As I expected, Dr. Goranson did dig up some information about the mysterious F. (Frank?) Adams, celebrated in the previous post (see the comment following it). Yet we still don’t know where this man acquired his vast and accurate knowledge of etymology. He was an amateur, but such a learned one! It is amazing how much nonsense people have written and keep writing about word origins. In this case we are not dealing with a professional linguist, but his observations deserve nothing but praise. By the way, Frank Chance, whom I also mentioned last week, was a medical doctor. My attempts to learn something about him produced almost no results. James A. H. Murray and Walter W. Skeat treated him as their equal!

I also received a letter in connection with my last week’s note on the regional word rowen “aftermath.” Is the tree name rowan “mountain ash” related? No. Rowan was borrowed from Scandinavian. By the way, the tree is famous in Old Scandinavian mythology (it saved the god Thor from drowning) and elsewhere, because of its red berries in winter, and the word rowan may provide a clue to the mysterious curse aroint thee in King Lear and Macbeth. See my post for February 20, 2013. The OED online has no trust in this or any other etymology of the obscure phrase. Yet this derivation of the curse may not be so bad. Finally, a long letter came that I’ll answer next time.

And now back to business. The history of color names presents countless problems, and the literature on the subject is enormous. Today’s post is only about some curious uses of the word red in English. One of them (in the phrase red gold) I discussed in the essay for October 26, 2022. But first, some notes on the etymology of red may not be out of place.

Word historians encounter two difficulties: either the facts at their disposal are too few, or they are too numerous. This trouble (paucity versus excess) is of course familiar to all researchers. The cognates of red are ubiquitous in the Indo-European world, but the sought-for ancient root emerges in too many forms. The word sometimes ends not only in d/t/th (which is fine) but also in b, f, and s. Also, the vowels alternate rather wildly. Given some finagling, there is of course a possibility to reconstruct a common protoroot, but one wonders whether such a root, valid for the entire language group, existed. It has therefore been suggested that we are dealing not only with a group of related forms but also with a so-called migratory word, a word that travels from language to language and changes its shape along the way. We’ll never know the truth.

To complicate matters, references to the color do not aways match: some of the words, seemingly related to red, mean “light brown.” The history of color words is, in principle, complicated, because at one time, people visualized a spectrum, partly different from ours. Homer’s wine-colored sea is perhaps the most often cited example. Nor is the modern picture of the spectrum quite uniform. For instance, English has to do with the phrases dark blue and light blue, while Slavic uses two different adjectives for them. Likewise, English has a most confusing adjective bleak, not related to black. Though red is the color of fire, its root seems to be the same as in rust.

However, my story today is not about the ancient root of red. While looking through some comments on my old posts, I noticed that the most enthusiastic of them were devoted to idioms and mysterious compounds. Hence a few notes on the word redneck. The first note at my disposal, by Sterling Eisiminger, is from the periodical American Speech 59, 1984, p. 284. The reference is to pellagra. The OED online refers to the same source, so that I’ll reproduce only one sentence: “…in the 1930s pellagra was still common in the southern United States among low-income groups whose diets consisted mainly of pork fat and hominy grits.” Hence perhaps the reference to the skin color of the neck.

But redneck also meant “union member,” especially so in the twenties and the thirties in the coal-producing regions of West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, western Pennsylvania, and southern Illinois and Indiana. Here my source is the same periodical, but volume 69, 1994, pp. 106-11(the author of the article is Patrick H. Huber). Though this source is also known to the OED, I will supply a few details, because the OED online is not open access. We read that the origins of redneck “union man” remain uncertain, but that the word dates back to at least the turn of the twentieth century. It may be an analog of words like cracker (an offensive term for a poor white, etc.) and hillbilly (on hillbilly see my post for March 11, 2026).

The derisive term redneck was also applied to the members of a popular trade union (red, “Communist,” etc.) and, as we are told, with a side shot to the members’ poor, rural-South backgrounds, since so many Kentucky and West Virginia miners were failed farmers and former sharecroppers and agricultural laborers from the outlying rural areas, particularly from the Appalachians.

Especially important is the fact that the term referred not so much to the people’s red sunburned necks as to the red handkerchiefs they wore around their necks. Bandanas, traditionally worn as a form of protection for railroad men, miners, and others, became a badge of honor. Here are the opening lines of the once immensely popular song: “Red Necks, keep them scabs away,/ Red Necks, fight them every day.” The term Redneck became “a badge of working-class solidarity and pride.”

This story does not mean that redneck has “multiple etymologies” (one can often find reference to this phantom). Words, like most rivers, have single sources, though later, tributaries may enrich their content. This probably happened to redneck: first, a literal sense (now forgotten), then figurative accretions. Here is the final statement by the author of the article on redneck: “…the United States labor movement’s adaption of the term redneck speaks powerfully to the fluidity and multiple meanings of language and to how those meanings are socially constructed and interpreted differently by people whose class positions differ.” Red seldom occurs in English idioms. The most interesting of them are to be in the red and to draw a red herring across the path. The curious phrase thin red line originated from the Battle of Balaclava, during the Crimean War on October 25, 1854. However, the original dispatch, as Elizabeth Knowles pointed out, mentioned streak, not line. Red, White and Blue probably needs no comment.

_{Featured image: Little Red Riding Hood c. 1862 by Gustave Doré. Photo by Chris Olszewski. CC-BY-SA-4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.}

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Learn about telic and atelic predicates

Recently, I went to a talk on telicity in verbs. If the term is unfamiliar to you, you are not alone. It comes from the Greek “telos,” meaning “end goal,” which is also the root of the philosophical concept teleology. The terms telic and atelic were first applied to French verbs by a scholar named Howard Garey in a 1957 article in the journal Language. Telic refers to verbs that are directed toward an endpoint or goal, while atelic refers to verbs that are actions without goals. So, if you were to say Emily read The Handmaid’s Tale, you are implying that she finished it: there is an endpoint—that last page of the book. Similarly, if you say Emily walked home, the verb is also telic, the endpoint being home. However, if you say Emily read in front of the fire or Emily walked after dinner, the actions are atelic—there is no specific goal expressed and no endpoint to the reading or walking.

The distinction between telic and atelic can be made somewhat sharper if we add in some prepositional phrases to express timeframes and time spans. Saying Emily read War and Peace for an hour suggests that she did not complete the book, perhaps giving it up or pausing to do something else. However, if you say Emily read War and Peace in an hour, the verb is telic, expressing formidable speed-reading. Generally, atelic verbs stress some activity, while telic verbs stress an accomplishment. To play chess is atelic—an activity. To win a chess match is telic—an accomplishment.

Notice that, unlike the familiar verbal aspects of English, telicity is not marked on the verbs. In English, there is no auxiliary verb or suffix signaling telicity. And while there are some verbs—such as arrive, crash, disappear, or find—that are always telic, and some verbs that are always atelic—such as ponder, chat, loaf, or wander—the nature of the verb’s object plays a crucial part in whether a goal is expressed. Telicity is thus usually a property of verb phrases and the actions or states they express, rather than being a property of verbs themselves. 

Telicity is inherently interesting to linguists, of course, and there is a growing scholarly literature on ways to model the semantics of telic verbs and on some of the puzzles surrounding their interpretation. What, for example, are we to say about verbs that express actions that occur by degree, such as cool in The soup cooled? Is there an end state or not?

Telicity is of interest to writers as well, despite its esoteric nature. Being aware that some verb phrases imply end results provides a perspective on sentences such as these:

I’d like to dialog with you about your behavior.

I’d like to have a conversation about your behavior.

I’d like to explain the consequences of your behavior.

In the first, the verb dialog suggests talking with no endpoint in mind just a lot of back-and-forth talking. In the second, have a conversation implies that the conversation will not last indefinitely and will hopefully resolve something. In the third, the telicity is even more apparent: the explanation is the end goal. 

Or consider a bit of culinary advice like Cook the meat versus Cook the meat until the internal temperature is 165 degrees. There is a goal and end point in the second, and less room for guesswork.

And finally, if you are enumerating your goals for the upcoming year, you might say I will continue working on my book about Milton or I will finish chapters 3 and 4 of my book on Milton. Your dean will prefer the telic version, but you might want to leave some wiggle room with the atelic one.

Understanding telic and atelic predicates is a good goal for writers to have.

_{Featured image by Brett Jordan via Unsplash.}

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<i>Aftermath</i> and its kin

First, two notes in the aftermath of the previous post. 1) My thanks are due to Stephen Goranson, who, as I expected, did find out everything about Thomas Bee, the gentleman, mentioned in last week’s essay on boxing. Mr. Bee discovered the origin of the phrase to box the compass. As usual, I wonder how my old friend Stephen Goranson manages to ferret out all kinds of information, because I also try to do some research along those lines and invariably fail. 2) I am equally grateful to Mr. Gavin Wraith, who asked me why I had not discussed Greek pyx “fist” in connection with box. This connection was noticed long ago. The problem, as James A. H. Murray already knew, is a late attestation of the English word box. As a cognate of box, pyx does not look promising either. Perhaps box indeed originated in university slang (from Greek to English), but this hypothesis is hard to substantiate.

My story today is about several words referring to aftermath. All of them have a rather confusing sound shape. Thus, aftermath is transparent to an etymologist but not to a modern speaker of English. The component –math goes back to a noun meaning “mowing; crop mown.” This noun still exists in modern British dialects, with the suffix –th being the same as in growth and truth. The correct explanation of –math can be found in all detailed dictionaries of English and online. Usually, the root, followed by –th, is changed beyond recognition, as in birth, filth, and death (here, the roots are easy to see in (to) bear, foul, and die). A synonym of aftermath is British regional yeomath. The prefix yeo– means “additional.” I was probably the first to recognize this prefix in yeoman (see the post for June 17, 2009). The OED online seems to concur.

As I said, for some reason, English words for “aftermath” are usually obscure from the etymological point of view. Such is also the case in Russian. For those who know Russian, consider the dialectal words shutyom, probably meaning “an empty space,” and otava “a place left to rest.” Both nouns are stressed on the second syllable, and the origin of both is opaque to modern speakers. I have mentioned Russian for a reason. One Russian word for “fallow land” may, as I believe, throw light on its English synonym. I made this point in the post for November 9, 2016, and would like to repeat my idea here. English fog is, most probably (and such is the common opinion), of Scandinavian origin, even though it surfaced in English only in the middle of the sixteenth century. But we now know that this chronology is not unusual. The Scandinavian invasion happened in the epoch of the Vikings (King Alfred fought the “Danes”). Yet it took some northern words, which flooded dialects, hundreds of years to emerge in written and printed texts.

Another fog, which can be very broadly glossed as “aftermath,” has been known from books since 1400. No doubt, we are dealing with the same word as fog “mist.” Or perhaps some doubt exists, because the senses seem incompatible? Yet the common denominator of both words is “moisture,” and here one Russian phrase comes in most useful. An unsown field is said to be “under vapor” (pod parom). Fog is, most probably, related to German feucht “wet.” By the way, old etymologists, who liked to trace words to their ancient Indo-European roots, reconstructed the root of fog as bhu, a typical sound-imitative complex (an onomatopoeia for a puff of air). English fog “aftermath” means “under vapor, wet.” Even the best historical linguists cannot know all languages in detail. Not unexpectedly, English, German, and Scandinavian etymologists never came across the Russian phrase pod parom, because otherwise, they would have detected the connection, so obvious to me, long ago and would have used it to substantiate the idea that fog “heavy mist” and fog “aftermath” are indeed two senses of the same noun.

Why, I may repeat, do people keep coining such hard words for “aftermath”? Here is one more example: eddish “aftergrowth, stubble.” The root of this noun seems to mean “again,” as, for instance, in eddy. I would probably have left this gallery of etymological riddles in peace if among my folders I had not discovered one, devoted to the word rowen. Here is a note by a man from Madison, Wisconsin (Notes and Queries, 9/VII, June 8, 1901, p. 453): “Aftermath, or second mowing, was not used by New England farmers in the last century. Rowen was their term, derived, doubtless, from those eastern counties where their forefathers lived. Nor has rowen been yet displaced.” Does anyone among our readers know this word? My computer fails to recognize it.

A lively discussion of rowen preceded that note, but I have brought it to light because of the letter printed on the same page. Its author, Mr. F. Adams, did not only debunk a “ridiculous” derivation of the word, given in a respectable English dictionary, and referred to several foreign dictionaries and scholarly publications: he cited the correct date of the first occurrence of the word in English texts and proposed the etymology that still stands, namely, from a word, related to French regain. It “had filtered into our language through a French dialect, w for hard g being common in the north-east of France.”

Who was F. Adams? He sent numerous excellent letters on word origins to NQ between 1892 and 1903 and does not seem to have contributed to any other periodicals. At that time, an English-speaking specialist in word origins could not wish for better exposure: “everybody” read NQ. The great Walter W. Skeat appeared there hundreds of times. But soon after the First World War, its popularity waned. The journal did not die (it still exists) but became more specialized and less “popular.” In this blog, I have often referred to Frank Chance, an outstanding etymologist, who, like F. Adams, never sought another venue for his ideas in addition to NQ and as a result is now almost forgotten. Those who have read my review of a recent book on Webster Unabridged (April 8, 2026) will see that the otherwise well-informed author called NQ an obscure provincial periodical.

At one time, NQ was a famous outlet, and I hope that Dr. Goranson will enlighten us on the career of F. Adams (what a terrible idea it was and still is to use only the first initials in the signature! In references, I have often seen female authors taken for males and namesakes confused). This is the end of my today’s travel through fields left to rest. Along the way, we have encountered many forgotten words and observed once again how rich the English language is and what problems etymologists face. A good aftermath indeed, if you ask me.

_{Featured image: Fallow land near Dale Farm by Bill Broaden. CC-BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.}

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Unbuttoned: an interactive history of the suit

To the modern eye, this man in his dark suit probably looks perfectly normal—perhaps even boring. But what if this ubiquitous uniform is actually one of the most powerful and heavily engineered political institutions in Western history?

Before the nineteenth century, elite men across the Western world dressed in vibrant silks, rich velvets, and sparkling embroidery, using fashion to display their social rank just as much as women did. However, in the wake of the American Revolution, a massive cultural shift occurred—the “Sartorial Revolution.” Between the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, men renounced decorative fashion in favor of plain, dark, woolen suits.

The Founding Fathers used clothing to enact a new political reality. Men like George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson purposefully adopted sober, unadorned suits to visually reject aristocratic luxury and the tyranny of European monarchies. Their new uniform was designed to reflect republican ideals of democracy, equality, and industry. But this equality was an illusion. The suit functioned as a visual boundary that granted civic authority and political power exclusively to white men, while using the language of fashion to cast women, Indigenous men, and Black men as feminine, primitive, or uncivilized, and therefore unfit for political power.

Click on the different elements of the suit below to uncover the hidden histories woven into its fabric. From the exploitation of land and labor required to produce its dark dyes and crisp white linens, to the mathematical tailoring that secretly sculpted an idealized male body, you will see how these seemingly mundane garments served as tools of social control. The history of the suit is the history of power, democracy, and the fashioning of modern men.

Perhaps the most striking thing about the modern suit is how boring it seems. That is exactly its power. By the mid-19th century, the suit became so plain, uniform, and ubiquitous that it practically turned invisible. It functioned as a “civic uniform” that united white men in a visual brotherhood of democratic equality. But this uniformity was exclusive. By defining serious, rational masculinity through the dark suit, society simultaneously codified anyone who didn’t wear it—women, Indigenous men, and Black men—as frivolous, savage, or unfit for political power. The suit didn’t just reflect social hierarchies; it actively enforced them.

_{Featured image: Thomas Sully, Joseph Dugan, 1810 (detail). National Gallery of Art, Washington.} 

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Interdisciplinary horizons in human–animal studies

Over the last few decades, scholarship in the arts has undergone a significant shift towards questions and topics related to animals and our relationships with them. Referred to as ‘the animal turn’, this movement has involved various disciplines working together to critically analyse the conceptual construction and material treatment of non-human animals (and ‘nature’ more generally) in human cultures, histories, discourses, and practices. These studies focusing on human-animal relations have been interdisciplinary from the outset, since they have required communication amongst theories and methods derived from the humanities, creative arts, and social sciences—and increasingly the biological and environmental sciences as well. Accordingly, the range of approaches that has come to be called human-animal studies (or sometimes just animal studies) has tended, even before the development of explicitly ‘intersectional’ theory, to focus on fundamentally intersectional topics, seeking to analyse, measure, and account for the inter-implicated fates and interests of specific human societies as they relate to particular animal species, populations, and individuals. These dynamics are, in turn, shaped by relevant cultural and political structures and practices.

In the context of the more politicised fields of human-animal studies (HAS), such as feminist animal studies or critical animal studies (CAS), intersectional theory often explicitly underpins interrogations of power and control in human relationships with non-human species. Importantly, in these overtly political strands of HAS, intersectional theory is extended from its original anthropocentric form to now include an examination of marginalisation, discrimination, and oppression affecting all living beings, not only humans. Speciesism refers to the ideology that prioritises humans over other animals (otherwise called human exceptionalism or human supremacy) and also favours certain animal species—such as dogs—over others, such as rats (this latter aspect of speciesism is obviously affected by cultural differences). The deliberately anti-speciesist form of intersectional theory is associated with ecofeminism, which emerged in the 1960s and ’70s, alongside other counter-cultural political movements of this era, including second-wave animal rights, environmentalism, LGBTQIA+, Indigenous, civil, and disability rights.

Specifically, feminist and critical animal studies approaches interrogate the ways in which speciesism manifests in ideological discourses as well as cultural constructions and practices. Anti-speciesist intersectional theory is also concerned with analysing and disrupting the various ways in which forms of human-to-human oppression (such as colonisation) map onto, shape, and are in turn shaped by forms of human-to-animal oppression (e.g., processes of species translocation and ecological transformation). Thus, while more human-centric forms of intersectional research have concentrated on the compounded experiences of marginalisation felt by people affected by racism, heterosexism, transphobia, ableism, and classism, it is only when we embed speciesism in intersectional understandings of oppression that we get a clearer picture of how all oppressions—of humans, animals, and environments—are intricately linked, and how humancentric constructions of ‘animality’ (or animal difference) have been used in the dehumanisation of certain peoples and in the exploitation of and cruelty towards certain animals. Intersectional feminist and critical animal studies approaches are also more likely to pair with activist or advocacy outcomes with the aim of improving the lives of animals—both human and non-human ones.

In the field of CAS, the use of multiple disciplinary perspectives and approaches in combination with anti-speciesist theory has resulted in timely and potentially transformative new knowledge of human-animal relations and human-animal-environment connections. Ongoing areas of research include:

• The employment of novel historiographies to account for the role of animal agency in historical change;
• Feminist, critical race, disability studies, and CAS theories coming together to examine the constitutive links between discourses of animal agriculture and animal breeding and human experiences of disability, exploitation, and incarceration;
• Marxist and other political theories explicating the connections between capitalism, industrialised farming, and slaughter, and the exploitation of human and animal labour;
• Indigenous critiques of environmental colonisation and the marginalisation of Indigenous human–animal knowledge systems;
• CAS and ecofeminist theories scrutinising the gendered components of dairy, meat, and egg farming and the ways that carnism, meat culture, and advertising of animal products rely on certain constructions of gender, class, sexuality, and ethnicity;
• CAS and environmental theories examining the interrelationship between animal agriculture, environmental degradation, climate change, biodiversity loss, and species extinctions;
• CAS and queer ecologies subverting mainstream environmental discourse, binary configurations of culture/nature, masculine/feminine and human/animal, and the dominance of evolutionary theory;
• Critical race and Indigenous theorists decolonising western food practices and historicising plant-based Indigenous foods;
• Various disciplines and scholar-activists are developing intersectional veganism in theory and practice.

Many of the articles in the forthcoming “Animals” section of Oxford Intersections: Environmental Change and Human Experience employ interdisciplinary, anti-speciesist, intersectional theories in their explorations of human-animal-environment entanglements, thereby offering nuanced, in-depth critical analysis of various domains of privilege, power, and control. Contributions range from theoretical, textual, thematic, and visual analyses through to empirical interviews and digital algorithm statistics. Authors utilise diverse approaches influenced by critical race, Indigenous and decolonial, queer, posthumanist, ecofeminist, ethological, social justice, cultural history, animalist, disability rights, Marxist, trans-species intersectional, and environmental justice perspectives. Those writing from Indigenous or decolonial perspectives prioritise deep relational connections with environments and non-human species.

Several exciting emerging trends in interdisciplinary HAS and CAS research are represented in articles appearing in the “Animals” section. One important trend is represented by scholars here who offer cutting-edge contemporary critiques of the animal—industrial complex, drawing on both the vast scientific evidence connecting animal agriculture to environmental degradation, diversity loss, and species extinction, and the ubiquity of cruel practices associated with breeding and farming animals for consumption. A second trend involves the scrutiny of anthropocentric environmental theories and mainstream conservation practices, demonstrating the ways in which they construct disrespect or deliberate disregard for the sentience and suffering of animals constructed as “unwanted”, such as so-called “pests,” as well as introduced and feral animals. For the most part, the authors in “Animals” are critiquing western cultural constructions and practices since these are closely connected to global animal and environmental exploitation, and because of their links to western capitalism, industrialism, and colonialism.

If you’re interested in getting involved in Oxford Intersections: Environmental Change and Human Experience, let us know.

^{Featured image by Jorge Maya via Unsplash.}

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Over 500 open access books: shaped by experience, strengthened by learning

When a collection passes 500 titles, it’s tempting to focus on the milestone. But what’s more interesting is the story behind the number, the years of collaboration between authors, editors, institutions, funders, and readers who share a commitment to making scholarship easier to discover, read, teach, and build upon.

Over 500 open access books are now available on Oxford Academic. Each new open access title brings insights shaped by research and experience. Each download, citation, classroom discussion, and cross-disciplinary connection strengthens the wider academic conversation. Behind each title is a simple idea: research should travel as far as it can, reaching anyone who might benefit from it.

But what does open access look like in practice, once a book is out in the world? Across disciplines, authors describe a common theme: reach.

Timmons Roberts, Ittleson Professor of Environmental Studies and Sociology at the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society, Brown University, has seen how open access can amplify timely research:

“Open Access allowed us to publicize our two assessment volumes on obstruction of climate action broadly and quickly, and to make it available all over the world at once.”

For David Thorstad, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University, the motivation was equally clear:

“We wanted to reach a broad public audience and remove cost barriers to access.”

Editors also point to how open access can shape the longer arc of scholarship. Steven C. van den Heuvel, Professor of Systematic Theology at Evangelische Theologische Faculteit, Leuven, shared an early sign of impact for The Oxford Compendium of Hope:

“Quantitatively, we can see that, despite it has been out only for a few months, it was already downloaded close to 8,000 times.”

For Yujin Nagasawa, Kingfisher College Chair of the Philosophy of Religion and Ethics and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oklahoma, open access connects directly to being read and engaged with worldwide:

“Publishing my books with OUP as open-access titles has, in many ways, made that dream a reality.”

Taken together, these experiences point to a clear set of learnings. Open access helps scholarship travel further, faster. It supports discovery across borders and disciplines, and it makes it easier for books to find their way into classrooms, conversations, and new areas of research. It enables teaching and learning in a wider range of contexts. It also creates new opportunities for connection between authors and readers.

With over 500 open access books now available, the collection continues to grow. Each new title adds to a shared body of knowledge, made more powerful by being open.

If you’re curious, you can explore the full collection, or share the list with colleagues and students to help extend their reach even further.

^{Featured image by simon on Unsplash.}

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In and out of the box

Today’s story is about boxing (that is, about the word box). I cannot offer a new solution and will support the etymology cautiously given in the OED online. Yet sometimes the way to the truth and chance byways are more exciting than the result, obtained at the end of the search. It will also be fair to mention the paper by the German linguist Hermann Flasdieck in the periodical Anglia (Volume 70,1951-1952, pp. 295-307), the best historical study of the word box in linguistic literature.

The earliest citation of box “to beat, bash, strike” in the OED online goes back to 1390, but we have to wait until 1519 until the next one. Even some time later, the word’s occurrences in print were rare. Apparently, box was not a word one chose to use in books. This fact confirms the origin (see it below), proposed tentatively by the OED’s first editor James A. H. Murray and now accepted with some caution by the revisers of the OED and other sources.

In the United States, boxing, a sport whose land of origin is England, became immensely popular. Those who have read Jack London’s short stories “The Mexican” and “A Piece of Steak” will agree. German tourists must have picked up the word box in America, because they brought it home in the forms boxen and baxen. A great difference exists between the way a word like box sounds in most of England and in the United States. Foreigners living and traveling in America often mistake box, not, and their likes for bucks and nut. German boxen ~ baxen tell us that long ago, the word box sounded in America as it does today.

One wonders whether box (the verb and the noun) has anything to do with its best-known homonym. The history of box, as in Christmas box, may not be entirely clear, but that box already occurred in Old English and is a borrowing from Latin. Nothing in the sport, as we know it, suggests its connection with any receptacle. Theater boxes and box offices return us to containers and throw no light on boxing either.

Along the way, we find the phrase to box a compass “to repeat the points of the compass in order and backwards.” Though also unconnected with boxing, the story is worth telling. Walter W. Skeat referred to the OED, but the OED had nothing to say about the etymology of this phrase. Nor did the 1914 edition of The Century Dictionary. The OED online refers us to the verb box (and that is what the original OED did). My surprise came when I consulted The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (1966). This work seldom deviates from its great model. Yet, surprisingly, it contains a special entry on box the compass: “Probably from Spanish bojar (boxar) ‘sail round’.” Next, we find two examples and the statement that other nautical terms from Spanish also exist in English. Such are allegedly buoyant (which may be from Spanish or Old French!) and capsize (this is Skeat’s suggestion; elsewhere, including the OED online, we find the familiar verdict “of uncertain origin”).

References to authorities in the original OED and in Skeat are rather regular but not generous. In the 1966 dictionary, they never appear. What then was the source of the new entry? Perhaps I can provide the answer (of course, known to the Oxford team but not to the rest of the world, eager for an explanation). In the periodical Notes and Queries XII/1, March 18, 1916, p. 226, H. J. B. Clemens published part of a letter, written in 1836 by Thomas Bee, a native of South Carolina, who was at Oriel College, Oxford, from 1783 to 1789. Here is the relevant part: “You know I had always a smattering of etymology, but never indulged so much in it as since I have become a great reader of Spanish […]. I was principally gratified with the origin of the phrase ‘to box the compass’, which has puzzled me from a boy […]. Boxar (or as it is more modernly written, bojar—with the same pronunciation) signifies circumire, to go round: boxar el mundo, to go round the world; boxar la isla to sail round the island. To box the compass is, therefore, to go round the several divisions from north to south, and from south to north.” I could find no information on H. J. B. Clemens and do not know why he had access to Thomas Bee’s private correspondence. His etymology of the English phrase looks promising.

The 1966 dictionary cites the same two Spanish phrases, which clinches my belief that this note was indeed the source of the entry. Finding the true origin of a difficult word is “a big deal” in the uneventful life of dictionary makers, and the name of an occasional pathfinder should not be forgotten. Obviously, the Spanish verb throws no light on the word box that interests us, but let me repeat my idea that in a convoluted romance, digressions are sometimes more exciting than the main story.

Back to boxing. The Century Dictionary says, “supposed to be of Scandinavian origin”; doubts the relevance of the Scandinavian sources, because baste “to cudgel” and the noun bash “blow” are already known as the legitimate reflexes of those sources; mentions Dutch beuk “a blow” and Middle High German bochen “to strike,” but concludes that the most probable origin should be sought for in box “to place in a box.” The conclusion is not persuasive. The origin of bash is as obscure as the origin of box, and in principle, nothing prevents one etymon (source) from producing two or more reflexes (“offspring”). Reference to box “receptacle” leaves us nowhere. However, German bochen, known to the speakers of Modern German in the form pochen, and Dutch beuk may provide a clue to box.

If we look for the many variants, older forms, and cognates of pochen ~ bochen, we’ll find puchen, puggen, pukken, boka, buka, and (!) Engl. poke (verb). In the present context, it matters little whether poke is borrowed or native. More important is the fact that we are, rather obviously, dealing with sound-imitative verbs (the reference is to the sound heard in striking), like English kick, jab, dab, cuff, bang, boom, bash, Russian bukh (a word reproducing a loud noise, with cognates elsewhere in Slavic), and puk “fart.”

Murray, whom I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, already supposed that box is an onomatopoeia. In all probability, he was right, and one cannot but admire his intuition. “Origin unknown,” so lavishly added to such verbs in dictionaries, is an unhelpful label. The OED online has no citations of box between 1390 and 1519. We may be dealing with two independent coinages: the same verb was perhaps invented or borrowed twice, with about a century and a half between those events. Such words travel widely from language to language, and it is hard to decide whether we see loans or independent coinages.

Such then is a rather probable history of the sound-imitative verb box. Origin unknown? Not quite. Uncertain? Of course! What else could one expect?

Postscript

My thanks are due to the two readers who commented on the previous post on the evils of Spelling Bee.

_{Featured image: By Natalya from Pixabay. Public domain.}

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Spelling bee is back. So am I

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Restive people never rest

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Old Idiom

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

Postscript

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

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

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Is there an L in both?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My grandmother would approve.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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