new posts in all blogs
Viewing: Blog Posts Tagged with: A-Featured, Most Recent at Top [Help]
Results 1 - 25 of 1,173
How to use this Page
You are viewing the most recent posts tagged with the words: A-Featured in the JacketFlap blog reader. What is a tag? Think of a tag as a keyword or category label. Tags can both help you find posts on JacketFlap.com as well as provide an easy way for you to "remember" and classify posts for later recall. Try adding a tag yourself by clicking "Add a tag" below a post's header. Scroll down through the list of Recent Posts in the left column and click on a post title that sounds interesting. You can view all posts from a specific blog by clicking the Blog name in the right column, or you can click a 'More Posts from this Blog' link in any individual post.
By: Lauren,
on 10/27/2010
Blog:
OUPblog
(
Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags:
A-Featured,
Oxford Etymologist,
Lexicography,
word origins,
anatoly liberman,
rum,
pay through the nose,
David Halberstam,
full nine yards,
pizzazz,
Add a tag
By Anatoly Liberman
Introduction. In 1984, old newspapers were regularly rewritten, to conform to the political demands of the day. With the Internet, the past is easy to alter. In a recent post, I mentioned C. Sweet, the man who discovered the origin of the word pedigree, and added (most imprudently) that I know nothing about this person and that he was no relative of the famous Henry Sweet. Stephen Goranson pointed out right away that in Skeat’s article devoted to the subject, C. was expanded to Charles and that Charles Sweet was Henry’s brother. I have the article in my office, which means I, too, at one time read it and knew who C. Sweet was. Grieved and embarrassed, I asked Lauren Appelwick, my kind OUP editor, to expunge the silly phrase. She doctored the text, and I was left holding the bag, but grateful to my friendly correspondent and to the volatility of digital means.
Words and Phrases
Pay through the nose. Stephen Goranson also had some doubts about the explanation of this idiom that I dug up in Notes and Queries and called my attention to an earlier publication. This time he did not catch me off guard. I have the previous note in the same (1898) volume of NQ and two more in my archive. A letter about the origin of pay through the nose appeared in the first issue of that once admirable periodical (1850, p. 421) and contained the following passage: “Paying through the noose gives the idea so exactly, that, as far as the etymology goes, it is explanatory enough. But whether that reading has an historical origin may be another question. It scarcely seems to need one.” Mr. C.W.H., the letter writer, was too optimistic. In October of the same year (p. 348-349), Janus Dousa took up the question and mentioned Odin and his tax. I suggested that the idea of connecting the English idiom with Odin’s tax on the Swedes goes back to Ynglinga saga, but Dousa quotes Jacob Grimm’s book on the legal documents in Old Germanic, which means that the information on the tax became known to the English from Grimm (which makes sense: more people could and still can read German than Old Icelandic). In 1898 (September 17, p. 231), J.H. MacMichael cited the 17th-century phrase bored through the nose “swindled in a transaction.” Bore did mean “cheat, gull” (the earliest citation in the OED is dated 1602; no records of pay through the nose prior to 1666 have been found). However, the connection between bore and nose does not seem to have been steady, and pay through the nose refers to exorbitant payment rather than a fraudulent deal. MacMichael thought that the English idiom “express[ed] payment transacted through an improper channel, as a ‘love’ child is said to come into the world through a side door.” I understand how someone can enter through a side door, but the nose is indeed a most improper channel for paying. The phrase needs a more concrete explanation, and I fail to detect a link between an occasional use of bored through the nose and the well-established combination pay through the nose. The full nine yards. The origin of this phrase has often been investigated. Numerous hypotheses exist, but none is fully convincing.
By: Kirsty,
on 10/27/2010
Blog:
OUPblog
(
Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags:
Victorian,
A-Featured,
A-Editor's Picks,
homeless,
Prose,
society,
OWC,
Early Bird,
streets,
henry mayhew,
london labour and the london poor,
robert douglas-fairhurst,
mayhew,
History,
Literature,
UK,
london,
Add a tag
By Robert Douglas-Fairhurst
It was an ordinary enough London winter’s evening: chilly, damp, and churning with crowds. I’d arranged to meet a friend at the Curzon Mayfair cinema, and after my packed tube had been held up between stations – ten sweaty minutes during which my fellow passengers had fumed silently, tutted audibly, and in one or two cases struck up tentative conversations with the person whose shopping was digging into their shins – I was late. Coming out of the entrance to the station, I nimbly side-stepped a beggar with a cardboard sign – sorry, bit of a rush, direct debit to Shelter, can’t stop – and hurried on my way to the cinema.
The film was Slumdog Millionaire: a nerve-shredding if ultimately cheering investigation into the hidden lives of the Indian slums. Coming out of the cinema, though, it was impossible to avoid the realiszation that equally vivid stories lay much closer to home. I retraced my steps to the tube station, and this time instead of brushing the beggar off I listened to what he had to say. It was a sadly familiar account of alcohol, a broken marriage, and homelessness, but as he told it the events took on a vividly personal colouring that was new and strange. He made me look again at what I thought I already knew.
The idea that what takes place under our noses can be hard to see clearly is hardly an original one; indeed, anyone who lives in a city soon learns to recognize the sensation of life being jolted out of its familiar routines, and assumptions being rearranged by new experiences. However, this idea took on a new resonance a few weeks later, when I was asked to edit a new selection of London Labour and the London Poor, Henry Mayhew’s mammoth set of interviews with the street-sellers, beggars, entertainers, prostitutes, thieves, and all the rest of the human flotsam and jetsam that had washed up in the capital during the 1840s and 1850s.
Ask most readers – and not a few critics – who Henry Mayhew was, and the result is likely to be at best a puzzled stare. Though his voice pops up occasionally in recent work, from Philip Larkin’s poem ‘Deceptions’ to novels such as Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White, for the most part he has become the Invisible Man of Victorian culture. And like H. G. Wells’s hero, usually he is detectable only by the movements of his surroundings, from Charles Kingsley’s jeremiad against the exploitation of cheap tailors in Alton Locke, to the strange echoes of his interview subjects in characters like Jo in Dickens’s Bleak House.
In some ways these literary aftershocks and offshoots of London Labour and the London Poor accurately reflect the work’s own generic hybridity. Opening Mayhew’s pages, it is hard to escape the feeling that you are encountering a writer who has one foot in the world of fact, one foot in the world of fiction, and hops between them with a curious mixture of uncertainty and glee. Sober tables of research are interrupted by facts of the strange-but-true variety: ‘Total quantity of rain falling yearly in the metropolis, 10,686,132,230,400 cubic inches’, or ‘The drainage of London is about equal in length to the diameter of the earth itself’. Even cigar-ends don’t escape his myth-making tendencies. Not content with calculating the number thrown away each week (30,000) and guessing at the proportion picked up by the
By: Lauren,
on 10/26/2010
Blog:
OUPblog
(
Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags:
Navajo,
tony hillerman,
hillerman,
front page teaser,
Jim Chee,
Joe Leaphorn,
new omnibus of crime,
rosemary herbert,
Literature,
writing process,
mystery,
crime,
A-Featured,
A-Editor's Picks,
anniversary,
Add a tag
Like most authors, when Rosemary Herbert speaks at book events about the mystery fiction anthologies she edited with Tony Hillerman, A New Omnibus of Crime and The Oxford Book of American Detective Stories and about her own new first novel, Front Page Teaser: A Liz Higgins Mystery, she always makes sure that she allows plenty of opportunity to for people to ask her questions. Lots of times authors become tired of the questions they are most frequently asked, but that it not true for Herbert, especially when the question is, “What was it like to work with Tony Hillerman?” Today – the second anniversary of Hillerman’s death – she reflects on this question.
I just love it when people ask me what it was like to work with Tony Hillerman. That’s because I never tire of remembering and sharing moments spent in his company. I always begin my answer to this question by keeping my promise to Tony. As he was reaching the end of his life, he told me two things. One was that he trusted me to make any future decisions about our two books. The other was that I should always remember to thank people who gather anywhere to hear me talk about our books. No matter how famous he became, Tony always appreciated each and every person who took an interest in his work. Hence, on behalf of Tony – and for my part, too – I thank readers of this piece for their interest in what I have to say here.
Two things leap to mind when I recall working with Tony Hillerman. The first is an image of this large, fatherly man standing in the doorway of his home near Albuquerque, New Mexico, greeting me warmly when I first arrived there to interview him for my 1994 book, The Fatal Art of Entertainment: Interviews with Mystery Writers. During an extended interview, Tony revealed much about his modest boyhood beginnings – and about his warm sense of humor – as he told me about the unusual manner in which he discovered the work of a writer who would exert a profound influence on his own work:
“Well, in Sacred Heart, Oklahoma, where I grew up, there was no library,” Tony told me. “The only way to get books was to order them from the mimeographed catalog of the state library. I’ve often said this was a guaranteed way to get a broad education. You would order all kinds of adventure stories, like Captain Blood and the Tom Swift stories, and Treasure Island. And then, weeks later, a package would arrive, and in it you would find exciting material like History of the Masonic Order in Oklahoma! But on rare occasions you would get something about the Foreign Legion or a novel about a half-breed, Australian aborigine policeman who solved crimes in the Outback. That was my introduction to Arthur Upfield.”
Just as Upfield’s sleuth, the half-aboriginal Detective Inspector Napolean Bonaparte is torn between the different worlds represented by his parentage — and uses his knowledge of both to advantage in solving crimes – Tony’s Navajo Tribal Policemen Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee solve mysteries by understanding the uneasy intersection of contemporary Am
By: Elvin Lim,
on 10/26/2010
Blog:
OUPblog
(
Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags:
muslims,
Elvin Lim,
anti-intellectual presidency,
discomfort,
fired,
Juan Williams,
O'Reilly Factor,
Vivian Schiller,
juan,
garb,
pedagogical,
illegitimacy,
emotions,
williams,
npr,
A-Featured,
Media,
Add a tag
By Elvin Lim
If NPR values public deliberation as the highest virtue of a democratic polity, it did its own ideals a disservice last week when it fired Juan Williams without offering a plausible justification why it did so. On October 20, Williams had uttered these fateful words on the O’ Reilly Factor:
“…when I get on a plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they’re identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.”
Anxiety and worry make for poor public reasons. Quite often discomfort is a façade for prejudice – an emotion that knows no reasonable defense. Some men feel uncomfortable when women speak up in the corporate board room. Some straight men and women feel uncomfortable that they are serving with gays in the military. And some black men feel uncomfortable when they see people dressed up in Muslim garb on airplanes.
Perhaps there is a case that Juan Williams should have been fired because he allegedly harbored xenophobic sentiments, but that was not the official reason why he was let go. Williams was fired because he articulated his discomfort, not because he felt said discomfort.
According to NPR CEO Vivian Schiller, Williams had repeated fallen short of NPR’s standards that their news analysts should “avoid expressing strong personal opinions on controversial subjects in public settings.”
Notice that nothing was said about either the legitimacy or illegitimacy of Williams’ emotional opinions. And so the emotions, though felt, were not addressed, and a learning moment was missed. NPR was indeed being politically correct, but what has not been noted is that its political correctness played to both sides of the ideological spectrum: in censoring Williams’ speech, it played to the Left, but in censoring its real reasons for doing so, it played to the Right. As a result NPR’s action impressed no one.
Discomfort is an emotion. And emotions are just manifestations of reasons not yet expressed. Sometimes, when these reasons are legitimate, so are the emotions that come attached to them. Righteous anger, for example. But other times, when these reasons are illegitimate, then the emotions attached to them are necessarily illegitimate. Xenophobia, for example. But if we don’t talk about the reasons behind the emotions – which NPR has elected to do – then a learning moment was missed. No doubt, NPR found it difficult to publicly articulate the claim that feeling anxious in the presence of someone in Muslim garb may be a natural, but not a reasonable reaction, because most Americans probably feel such a reflex.
Ironically, that was exactly what Juan Williams was trying to explore in first admitting his emotions. This is because seconds after his emotional confession, Williams returned to reason when responding to O’Reilly’s claim that “Muslims attacked us on 9/11,” by saying, “Wait, hold on because if you say, wait, Timothy McVeigh, the Atlanta bomber, these people who are protesting against homosexuality at military funerals, very obnoxious, you don’t say first and foremost we’ve got a problem with Christians. That’s crazy.” (See full transcript here.)
“I revealed my fears to set up the case for not making rash judgments about people of any faith,” Williams wrote in a statement released by Fox News. This was
By: Lauren,
on 10/25/2010
Blog:
OUPblog
(
Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags:
A-Featured,
drugs,
marijuana,
weed,
pot,
cannabis,
get high,
marcello pennacchio,
medical marijuana,
pharmaceuticals,
Health,
Law,
Politics,
Add a tag
By Marcello Pennacchio
Few plants have generated as much debate and controversy as cannabis (Cannabis sativa). Throughout the ages, it has been labelled both a dangerous drug and potent medicine. Where the former is concerned, law-enforcement agents and governments spend millions of dollars fighting what many consider to be a losing battle, while fortunes are being pocketed by those who sell it illegally. This is in spite of the fact that cannabis produces a number of natural pharmacologically-active substances, the medicinal potential of which were recognized thousands of years ago. Chinese Emperor, Shên Nung, for example, prescribed cannabis elixirs for a variety of illnesses as early as 3000 BC. It was equally prized as a medicine in other ancient civilisations, including India, Egypt, Assyria, Palestine, Judea and Rome and may have been instrumental in helping Ancient Greece’s Delphian Oracle during her divinations.
While its more common contemporary uses are mostly recreational, cannabis continues to enjoy widespread use as a medicine. It is smoked to ease glaucoma, to help with the degenerative loss of condition and body mass associated with diseases such as HIV/AIDS, and it helps to ease chronic pain in people suffering from terminal cancers and other debilitating illnesses. It has been used for treating malaria, gout, multiple sclerosis, eating disorders, promoting euphoria, as well as for dispelling grief and sorrow. A number of serious side effects have also been linked to its use, however. These include heart problems, immune system suppression, cancer, depression, reduced cognitive function and poor fetal development. It can lead to a variety of psychological problems, too, such as psychosis and schizophrenia, as well as to addiction to this and other drugs. Then there is the added danger of inhaling dangerous chemicals generated during the combustion of organic matter. Chief among these are carbon monoxide and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.
With so many pros and cons, it’s easy to see why the issue of cannabis has so significantly polarized sentiment around the world. Those in favour of its use want it legalized, with perhaps its most vocal advocates being in San Francisco. This is where one of the world’s first universities dedicated solely to cannabis, is located. Founded in 2007 by Richard Lee, Oaksterdam University was inspired by a similar college in Amsterdam and has since spread to include campuses elsewhere in California and in Michigan. So passionate are its founders and students about cannabis that they have taken the debate of legalizing it all the way to California’s November 2, 2010, ballot, a move that has since made world headlines. Many had hoped a similar proposal in Florida, known as the Medical Marijuana Initiative, would have made it into that state’s ballot, too, but the petition failed to gather the 700, 000 signatures required for it to qualify. Florida’s four-year rolling petition system means, however, that it may qualify for the 2012 ballot.
Surprisingly, the push to legalize cannabis includes former judges, politicians and other high-profile people, many of who themselves don’t use cannabis (including this author). They believe that penalizing and incarcerating its users is far more detrimental to them than smoking its parts are. They further contend that legalizing and taxing cannabis would raise significant revenue for governments. It would also alleviate the enormous drain of cash reserves needed to police its illegal use and, in the process, eliminate the criminal syndicates that sell it. Furthermore, they claim it would ensure that the quality of the product meets stringent regulations.
These are all convincing arguments, but it is difficult for many of us to get around the fact that smoking cannabis, a
By: Lauren,
on 10/22/2010
Blog:
OUPblog
(
Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags:
New Yorker,
weed,
lite,
the room,
pot,
linked up,
willow smith,
cannabis,
lite brite,
brites,
aidan,
hypebeast,
sirmitchell,
flavorwire,
Blogs,
A-Featured,
etsy,
Add a tag
I have set a new record! Latest-in-the-day Linked Up ever!
(I think I need some new personal goals…so if anyone has recommendations…)
5-year-old Aidan is amazing. But he has leukemia and is selling his art to help pay for treatment. Buy his art on Etsy. [tip from SirMitchell]
Are any of you fans of “The Room?” If so, you’re welcome. [The Daily What]
I wish there was a way to make drinking coffee even easier OH WAIT THERE IS! [Yanko]
This cartoon is just…amazing. [New Yorker]
I love stop-motion film. I love Lite-Brites. So. This. [Flavorwire]
Will Smith’s daughter has a recommendation for you. Careful, this will be stuck in your head for days. [Willow]
Snakes on a plane? How ’bout a crocodile? [News AU]
Shameless self-promotional plug of the week…
Dear friends from middle-school, I will probably be buying these shoes and you can’t stop me. [hypebeast]
I just discovered that there is a University dedicated to providing “the highest quality training for the cannabis industry.” So, more on that Monday… [Oaksterdam]
By: Lauren,
on 10/22/2010
Blog:
OUPblog
(
Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags:
New York Times,
Literature,
Sociology,
American History,
Theater,
A-Featured,
A-Editor's Picks,
faulkner,
broadway,
f. scott fitzgerald,
gatsby,
hemingway,
bloomberg,
great gatsby,
new york daily news,
new york post,
city college,
gatz,
gun and the pen,
Keith Gandal,
public theater,
theatremania,
gandal,
fitzgerald’s,
Add a tag
By Keith Gandal
Want a quick, but apparently reliable measure of how elitist you are? Go see the 7-hour production of Gatz, in which all 47,000 words of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby are, in the course of the play, enunciated on stage. (If you dare and can afford to.) If you love every minute of it and find time flying by, you’re probably, well, an arts snob; if you find your reaction mixed, your mind drifting in and out, and your body just plain giving out, well, you’re likely more of a populist.
Consider the following small, statistically meaningless, but provocative sample of reviews you instantly encounter on the web: the New York Times, Bloomberg, and Theatremania all give the play rave reviews, while the New York Post and the New York Daily News both give it 2½ stars (out of 4 and 5 respectively). Ben Brantley of the New York Times describes the play as “work of singular imagination and intelligence.” Jeremy Gerard of Bloomberg calls it “remarkable,” “as powerful a piece of stagecraft as you may ever see.” David Finkle of Theatremania finds the play “mesmerizing” and declares, “the lengthy production goes by in what seems like a blink of an eye.” Meanwhile, Elisabeth Vincentelli of the New York Post gives it a mixed review, asserting that the director “has come up with an inspired concept” and that Gatz is “great, but [it] also grates.” “There are the deadly boring stretches. Very long ones.” She concludes: “It’s as maddeningly tedious as it is brilliant. By the end, my mind was as numb as my butt.” And Joe Dziemianowicz of the New York Daily News recommends the play, but also calls it a “fanny-numbing readathon.”
In other words, this small sample of reviews breaks down across class lines. Higher-brow papers or websites are raving, and the lower-brow papers have mixed feelings, including uncomfortable feelings in their behinds.
But is this breakdown really surprising? A 7-hour production at a cost of $140 seems to demand of its audience members that they have a lot of time and money to spare. This is at the Public by the way, which was presumably once more public than it is now. In fact, one thing the play Gatz does quite effectively is to restore Fitzgerald’s now very accessible novel to the inaccessibility, along class lines, that it would have had back in the 1920s.
I want to make clear that I haven’t seen the play and, thus, that my perceptions of its length, its cost, and its reviews are not colored by my having sat through it. I’m actually quite curious to see it – I’m teaching the novel this term at City College, and I’ve written a recent book that devotes the longest chapter to Fitzgerald’s novel. Well-meaning colleagues and friends have even suggested I take my class to see the play, given that some reviewers are calling it a major theatrical event, but with regular tickets starting at $140, who c
By: Lauren,
on 10/22/2010
Blog:
OUPblog
(
Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags:
energy,
terrorists,
greenhouse,
asteroid,
mayan calendar,
2030,
bram vermeer,
electric cars,
moore's law,
robots,
Technology,
A-Featured,
future,
Add a tag
By Bram Vermeer
Overoptimism and overpessimism sells. But let’s face reality. Here are 10 things we won’t have by 2030:
1. Asteroid bomb
Asteroids with a diameter of more than 100 m (109 yd) reach our planet once every 2000 years. Distressing as that may be, their impact remains local. Bad luck if this asteroid hits Washington DC, but humankind as a whole will be able to survive that. The likelihood of a collision that has a real global impact is still 1000 times smaller. So we’d better prepare for more likely catastrophes, like flu pandemics and water shortages.
2. Moore’s law
The incredible miniaturization of microelectronics will inevitably come to a halt. Extrapolating the current pace, we will reach components of atomic sizes by 2020. But long before that, we will have given up the endeavor of making electronics smaller. We face tremendous technical difficulties in the next steps of miniaturization. Even if we succeed, the costs would be staggering. The speed of single processors already stalled at a few gigahertz. We would be better off investing in connecting processors with sensors and small motors, which would make clever devices that interact with us better.
3. Population stabilization
In many countries, birth and death rates are declining, but not at the same pace. It would require careful tuning of the number of babies to achieve demographic stabilization. There is no such stabilization in natural ecosystems, and we won’t see it in human society either. So be prepared for population growth, population decline, and an uneven age distribution in societies. All of these are concerning.
4. Singularity
Will machines outwit humans and take over our civilization? For robots to procreate, they would have to take possession of mines, material plants, microelectronics foundries, assembling sites, and probably some military facilities as well. The collective power of 8 billion human minds will certainly prevent that in the next decades and defeat any machine “gone wild”. And what about our PCs, brain aids, and other appliances becoming increasingly part of us? I think we already crossed that boundary when we started to use cells. We live in a symbiotic relationship with technology, which means that we continuously have to nurture it. Technological evolution is about mastering science, not about submission to it.
5. The greenhouse flood
I live below sea level, as do many people in the Netherlands. The water authorities are already raising the dikes in preparation for climate change. By 2030 the sea level will have risen by only 4 cm (1.6″). So I needn’t be afraid for my house. Climate change is slow compared to the length of a human life. Precisely that makes it difficult for us to act. Also, counteractions only take effect slowly. But I am worried for the generations to come. The last time the earth saw a CO2 level comparable to what we are experiencing now, seas were 70 m (77 yd) higher. Long after 2030, we’ll probably have to give up the lowest parts of my home country. The same is probably true for cities like New Orleans.
6. Clean electric cars
Even in the most optimistic of scenarios, only 10 percent of all cars in Western societies will be electric by 2030. And even these cars won’t really be clean as they depend on fuels burnt in power plants. Worldwide we are still building two new coal-fired power plants a week; the pace of installing renewable power is much, much slower. Moving away from fossil energy is a huge task that requires more than adjustments. We have to prepare for a transformation that touches all aspects of society. Probably we’ll have to rethink the very concept of moving by car.
7. Invasion of nanobots<
By: Lauren,
on 10/21/2010
Blog:
OUPblog
(
Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags:
poodle,
mark peters,
hound,
Nobel Prize,
malcolm gladwell,
nip/tuck,
terrier,
pooches,
terriers,
fx,
james wolcott,
joely richardson,
ocean's eleven,
the sheild,
tv,
Film,
A-Featured,
Lexicography,
Add a tag
By Mark Peters
My newest obsession is Terriers, an FX show created by Ted Griffin (who wrote Ocean’s Eleven) and Shawn Ryan (creator of The Shield, the best TV show ever). This show has deliciously Seinfeldian dialogue, effortless and charming acting, plus plots that are unpredictable and fresh. It’s even heart-wrenching at times, and I didn’t know I had a heart to wrench. This show is wonderful. Of course, no one is watching it.
One reason for the low ratings—suggested by everyone and their schnauzer—is that the title Terriers reveals nothing of what the show is actually about: a former cop and former criminal who have split the difference to become private investigators. That’s true. You won’t find any Wheaton terriers, Jack Russell terriers, or Yorkshire terriers—though a bulldog named Winston is a regular character. But terrier has been describing people as well as pooches for a long time, just like Doberman, pit bull, hound, and especially poodle. As quick as people are to anthropomorphize their dogs, we’re just as fond of poochopomorphizing ourselves. In honor of Terriers, here’s a look at words that have been transmitted from pooches to people.
As for terrier itself, it’s been used literally since the 1400’s and figuratively since the 1500’s. As the owner of a rat terrier, I can vouch for the OED’s definition: “A small, active, intelligent variety of dog, which pursues its quarry (the fox, badger, etc.) into its burrow or earth.” Believe me, if my dog were on the case, I would not want to be a rat, mouse, bunny, Smurf, or mole man. Metaphorical uses from 1622 (“Bonds and bills are but tarriers to catch fools.”) and 1779 (“Hunted…by the terriers of the law.”) show that the title of my new favorite show isn’t breaking any new ground. Terrier-osity, whether found in a dude or dog, is characterized by relentless determination that’s almost creepy: think of a Jack Russell who doesn’t seem aware there’s a world beyond his tennis ball.
As for a dog that is as well-established in language as it is horrible-reputation’d in general, you can’t beat the pit bull. Sarah Palin is synonymous with this breed, but she sure didn’t invent the comparison. A 1987 OED example involved a political hero of Palin’s: “President Reagan accused his Democratic critics in Congress Monday of practicing [sic] ‘pit bull economics’ that would ‘tear America’s future apart’ with reckless fiscal and trade policies.” Later citations mention “pit bull management” and “pit-bull intensity.” FYI, since I am a dog-lover, I have to share this article from Malcolm Gladwell on why pit bulls aren’t as deserving as demonization as you think. As with most dog problems, an idiotic owner is the key ingredient.
The word poodle has been prolific as poodles themselves, who seem to breed with anything that chases a squirrel, and maybe even squirrels themselves. There’s poodle-faker (an old term for a dandy, which feels like an old term itself), poodle parlor (a dog grooming business), and poodle skirt (an unfortunate fad in the fifties). Tony Blair was often described as George W. Bush’s poodle—that meaning of “poodle” is about a hundred years old, and it’s first found here in 1907: “The House of Lords consented… It is the right hon. Gentleman’s poodle. It fetches and carries for him. It barks for him. It bites anybody that he sets it on to.” A similar shade of meaning is used in th
By: Lauren,
on 10/20/2010
Blog:
OUPblog
(
Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags:
History,
ethics,
copyright,
A-Featured,
guidelines,
ethical,
oral history,
interviewers,
best practices,
John Neuenschwander,
guide to oral history and the law,
oral history association,
oral,
interviewer,
practices,
neuenschwander,
Add a tag
By John A. Neuenschwander
Last fall the Oral History Association approved a new set of ethical guidelines. The goal of the task force that prepared the new General Principles for Oral History and Best Practices for Oral History was to provide a more condensed and usable set of guidelines. The leadership of the Association stressed that the new ethical guidelines would be reviewed periodically to determine if they needed to be amended and/or expanded. To that end President Michael Frisch recently invited oral historians to join in an online dialogue via the Social Network which can be found on the OHA website. There will also be a session on the new Principles and Best Practices at the annual meeting of the Association in Atlanta on Saturday, October 30th from 12:00 p.m. to 1:15 p.m. in Room CR 123.
The new Principles and Best Practices like ethic codes of most academic disciplines or fields are intended to help practitioners avoid unprofessional conduct and more indirectly the legal difficulties than can arise from serious ethical lapses. Some of the suggested practices and procedures in the new Principles and Best Practices are clearly law based while others are derived solely from ethical considerations. The focus of this is blog is not any specific section of the new code but rather on the absence of any guidelines on the legal standing of interviewers.
From a legal standpoint, there is clearly no seminal court case or specific section of the Copyright Act that designates an interviewer as a joint author. Despite the absence of any black letter law, there are a number of impressive sources that point to the very real possibility that interviewers are in fact joint authors. The most telling support for this position comes from the U.S. Copyright Office. According to their policy manual, Compendium II, “A work consisting of an interview often contains copyrightable authorship by the person interviewed and the interviewer. Each owns the expression the absence of an agreement to the contrary.” There is also at least one lower court decision and several copyright experts who support the position of the Copyright Office.
The point of all this is that the new guidelines should include some reference to the possible copyright interest of interviewers for both ethical and legal reasons. Perhaps the best was to do this would be to add a new Principle: Interviewers may also hold a copyright interest in the interviews that they conduct and should always be so informed by the program or archive for which they work or volunteer of their potential rights. Programs and archives who utilized interviewers who are not full-time employees must insure that such interviewers understand the extent of their rights to the interview before they are asked to sign a release. Interviewers should also receive appropriate acknowledgement for their work in all forms of citation and usage.
John A. Neuenschwander is professor emeritus of history at Carthage College and a municipal judge for the City of Kenosha, Wisconsin. He is the author of A Guide to Oral History and the Law and lectures nationwide on the legal aspects of oral history.
0 Comments on A Reflection on the OHA’s New Code of Ethics as of 1/1/1900
By: Lauren,
on 10/20/2010
Blog:
OUPblog
(
Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags:
word histories,
brisket,
sandahl,
brjósk,
brechet,
Food and Drink,
Breast,
A-Featured,
Oxford Etymologist,
Lexicography,
word origins,
etymology,
dessert,
anatoly liberman,
sweetbread,
Add a tag
By Anatoly Liberman
It seems reasonable that brisket should in some way be related to breast: after all, brisket is the breast of an animal. But the path leading from one word to the other is neither straight nor narrow. Most probably, it does not even exist. In what follows I am greatly indebted to the Swedish scholar Bertil Sandahl, who published an article on brisket and its cognates in 1964. The Oxford English Dictionary has no citations of brisket prior to 1450, but Sandahl discovered bresket in a document written in 1328-1329, and if his interpretation is correct, the date should be pushed back quite considerably. Before 1535, the favored (possibly, the only) form in English was bruchet(te).
The English word is surrounded with many look-alikes from several languages: Middle French bruchet, brichet, brechet (Modern French bréchet ~ brechet “breastbone”; in French dialects, one often finds -q- instead of -ch-), Breton bruch ~ brusk ~ bresk “breast (of a horse),” along with bruched “breast,” Modern Welsh brysced (later brwysged ~ brysged), and Irish Gaelic brisgein “cartilage (as of the nose).” Then there are German Bries ~ Briesel ~ Brieschen ~ Bröschen “the breast gland of a calf,” Old Norse brjósk “cartilage, gristle,” and several words from the modern Scandinavian languages for “sweetbread” (Swedish bräs, Norwegian bris, and Danish brissel), which, as it seems, belong here too (sweetbread is, of course, not bread: it is the pancreas or thymus, especially of a calf, used as food; -bread in sweetbread is believed to go back to an old word for “flesh”). Many words for “breast” in the languages of the world begin with the grating sound groups br- ~ gr- ~ -khr-, as though to remind us of our breakable, brittle, fragile bones (fraction, fragile, and fragment, all going back to the same Latin root, once began with bhr).
At first blush, brisket, with its pseudo-diminutive suffix, looks like a borrowing from French. But there is a good rule: a word is native in a language in which it has recognizable cognates. To be sure, sometimes no cognates are to be seen or good candidates present themselves in more languages than one, but etymology is not an exact science, and researchers should be thankful for even approximate signposts along the way. In French, bréchet is isolated (and nothing similar has been found in other Romance languages), while in Germanic, brjósk, bris, bräs, and others (see them above) suggest kinship with brisket. Therefore, the opinion prevails that brisket is of Germanic origin. Émile Littré, the author of a great, perennially useful French dictionary, thought that the French word had been borrowed from English during the Hundred Year War (1337-1453), and most modern etymologists tend to agree with him. Then the Celtic words would also be from English (for they too are isolated in their languages), and the etymon of brisket would be either Low (that is, northern) German bröske “sweetbread” or Old Norse brjósk, allied to Old Engl. breosan “break.” The original meaning of brisket may have been “something (easily breakable?) in the breast of a (young?) animal.” If so, contrary to expectation, brisket is not related to breast, for breast appears to have been coined with the sense “capable of swelling,” r
By: Kirsty,
on 10/20/2010
Blog:
OUPblog
(
Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags:
gucci,
shoes,
bags,
schwarz,
slim,
ulinka rublack,
rublack,
ulinka,
braids,
History,
UK,
fashion,
renaissance,
A-Featured,
clothes,
italy,
Early Bird,
dressing up,
Add a tag
By Ulinka Rublack
I will never forget the day when a friend’s husband returned home to Paris from one of his business trips. She and I were having coffee in the huge sun-light living-room overlooking the Seine. We heard his key turn the big iron door. Next a pair of beautiful, shiny black shoes flew through the long corridor with its beautiful parquet floor. Finally the man himself appeared. “My feet are killing me!”, he exclaimed with a veritable sense of pain. The shoes were by Gucci.
We might think that these are the modern follies of fashion, which only now beset men as much as women. My friend too valued herself partly in terms of the wardrobe she had assembled and her accessories of bags, sunglasses, stilettos and shoes. She had modest breast implants and a slim, sportive body. They were moving to Dubai. In odd hours when she was not looking after children, going shopping, walking the dog, or jogging, she would write poems and cry.
Yet, surprisingly, neither my friend nor her husband would seem very much out of place at around 1450. Men wore long pointed Gothic shoes then, which hardly look comfortable and made walking down stairs a special skill. In a German village, a wandering preacher once got men to cut off their shoulder-long hair and slashed the tips of the pointed shoes. Men and women aspired to an elongated, delicate and slim silhouette. Very small people seemed deformed and were given the role of grotesque fools. Italians already wrote medical books on cosmetic surgery.
We therefore need to unlock an important historical problem: How and why have looks become more deeply embedded in how people feel about themselves or others? I see the Renaissance as a turning point. Tailoring was transformed by new materials, cutting, and sewing techniques. Clever merchants created wide markets for such new materials, innovations, and chic accessories, such as hats, bags, gloves, or hairpieces, ranging from beards to long braids. At the same time, Renaissance art depicted humans on an unprecedented scale. This means that many more people were involved in the very act of self-imaging. New media – medals, portraits, woodcuts, genre scenes – as well as the diffusion of mirrors enticed more people into trying to imagine what they looked like to others. New consumer and visual worlds conditioned new emotional cultures. A young accountant of a big business firm, called Matthäus Schwarz, for instance, could commission an image of himself as fashionably slim and precisely note his waist measures. Schwarz worried about gaining weight, which to him would be a sign of ageing and diminished attractiveness. While he was engaged in courtship, he wore heart-shaped leather bags as accessory. They were green, the colour of hope. Hence the meaning of dress could already become intensely emotionalized. The material expression of such new emotional worlds – heart-shaped bags for men, artificial braids for women, or red silk stockings for young boys – may strike us as odd. Yet their messages are all familiar still, to do with self-esteem, erotic appeal, or social advancement, as are their effects, which ranged from delight in wonderful crafting to worries that you had not achieved a look, or that someone just deceived you with their look. In these parts of our lives the Renaissance becomes a mirror which leads us back in time to disturb the notion that the world we live in was made in a modern age.
Ever since the Renaissance, we have had to deal with clever marketing as well as the vexing questions of what images want, and what we want from images, as well as whether clothes wear us or we wear them.
Ulinka Rublack is Senior Lecturer in early modern European history at Cambridge University and a Fellow of St John’s College. Her latest
By: Lauren,
on 10/19/2010
Blog:
OUPblog
(
Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags:
Music,
theatre,
Theater,
A-Featured,
tickets,
South Pacific,
pacific,
musical theater,
Hammerstein,
The Oxford Comment,
oxford comment,
bloody bloody andrew jackson,
georg buchner,
james lovensheimer,
norm hirschy,
toy box theatre company,
woyzeck,
bloody,
leonce,
georg,
lovensheimer,
rewritten,
Add a tag
This time around, Lauren and Michelle deal with drama! They talk with the Toy Box Theatre Company, learn about politics in musical theater, and go behind-the-scenes on the set of Bloody, Bloody Andrew Jackson. ALSO: You have a chance to win* free tickets to Woyzeck or a copy of Danton’s Death, Leonce and Lena, and Woyzeck by Georg Büchner!
Subscribe and review this podcast on iTunes!
*To enter to win free tickets or a copy of Georg Büchner’s theatrical works, send an email to [email protected] with the subject line “Toy Box” by 5pm ET on October 26. Two tickets will be awarded at random to the October 31, 3pm showing of Woyzeck (at the Choicirciati Cultural Center in New York City). Admission includes a champagne toast and talkback with the cast and crew. A second lucky entrant will win a copy of the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Danton’s Death, Leonce and Lena, and Woyzeck.
Featured in this Podcast:
TOY BOX THEATRE COMPANY
(About this Production of Woyzeck)
Thanks to Jonathan Barsness, Ryan Colwell, David Michael Holmes, Sarah Hankins, Elisabeth Motley, James Sparber, and Colonna Sonora
Norm Hirschy, Associate Editor for Theater & Music
James Lovensheimer
Assistant Professor in Music, History and Literature at Vanterbilt University
Author of South Pacific, Paradise Rewritten
0 Comments on The Oxford Comment: Episode 3 – DRAMA! as of 1/1/1900
By Elvin Lim
For the third election in a row, voters will be throwing incumbents out of office. In 2006, the national wave against Bush and the Bush wars gave Democrats control of both houses of Congress. In 2008, the same wave swept Obama into the White House. In 2010, incumbents are yet again in trouble. At least some of them will be expelled from Washington, and if so, the vicious cycle of perpetual personnel turnover and ensuing cynicism in Washington will continue. This is what happens when we become a government of men.
We need only look to the last anti-incumbent election, 2008, for lessons. The Republicans and the Tea Party Movement are running the risk of doing what Barack Obama did in 2008. They are promising change in the campaign, but they do not realize how difficult, by design, change is in Washington. But politicians aren’t usually in the habit of thinking about the election after the one right before them.
Should Republicans take over the House in 2011, they will quickly learn, as Obama has learned, that change does not come via elections in American politics. Elections only change the publicly visible personnel at the top; at best they open the door to potential change. The permanent government persists, the political parties survive, the interests endure. Most important, the constitution and its precise method for law-making remains. The political candidate who promises wholesale change makes a promise that cannot usually be delivered in a few years, and s/he runs the risk of becoming the victim of a new political outsider, a Beowulf who will promise to slay Grendel, but who shall soon find out that with Grendel dead, a dragon still remains to be slayed.
Watch the triumphant Republicans who sweep into office in January 2011. They will be filled with as much hubris as Obama was. Fresh from the winds of the campaign trail, they will think the world their oyster. How could they feel otherwise? The applause and rallies which flatter every politician confirm in their own minds that they are kings and celebrities, the invincible crusaders swept in by a tide of popular love.
Then government begins. And boy did the tough job of governing begin in 2009, Obama might now recall. When the tough sail of real governing fails to catch wind the way a campaign slogan did in the year before, a politician stands humbled. Befuddled, to be sure, but ultimately humbled. Worse still, a people sit dismayed. Tricked again, we withdraw into our private lives. Disgusted at government, resentful that we allowed our hopes to go up, furious that we believed the boy who cried wolf thrice. All signs point to this happening again in 2011, especially if there is divided party control of government and the Constitution is activated to do what it does best: check and balance, and thereby ensure gridlock. Then the cycle begins anew. With both sides disillusioned, the question will then become, which side will be less disillusioned to believe in a new anti-incumbent politician who shall cry wolf a fourth time?
This is a vicious cycle, and the only way to stop it is for every citizen to take a civic lesson or two in American government. Our Founders believed only in incremental change, in hard choices, in the give-and-take of inter-branch negotiation. The system of checks and balances was biased against seismic chances by design. No one, and certainly no branch monopolizes the truth, and no truth can be told ahead of time (i.e. as they are in campaigns) until all branches agree. Despite the message of the get-the-vote-out armies of either party, there are no messiahs, no crusaders in the system the Founders invented. The heroes we have constructed in modern campaigns are just demagogues exploiting the impatience of the frightened or the unemployed. There are no quick and easy solutions, and politicians know it, but they only want our votes for rig
By Dennis Baron
Apple’s latest iPhone app will clean up your text messages and force you to brush up your French, or Spanish, or Japanese, all at the same time.
This week the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office approved patent 7,814,163, an Apple invention that can censor obscene or offensive words in text messages whie doubling as a foreign-language tutor with the power to require, for example, “that a certain number of Spanish words per day be included in e-mails for a child learning Spanish.”
Parents are sure to love this multitasker, which puts an end to teen-age sexting while also checking homework. In the spirit of the Supreme Court’s 1978 ban on George Carlin’s “Seven Dirty Words You Can’t Say on TV,” Apple’s app will shrink their children’s stock of English expletives—or at least render them unprintable—while setting the kids on the path toward bilingualism, or at least a passing grade in French. This new invention from Apple is two things in one: Mary Poppins and the Rosetta Stone, or, for those parents of a certain age, it’s a floor wax and a dessert topping.
Of course, when Apple closes one door, it opens another. Apple may cut off access to bad words in English, but it then redirects that lexical energy in the profitable direction of foreign-language learning. Teens may find their texting vocabulary circumscribed, but if children’s grades go down, Apple’s iPhone censor lets parents activate a tool that “can require a user . . . to send messages in a foreign language, to include certain vocabulary words, or to use proper spelling, grammar and/or punctuation based on the user’s defined skill level. This could aide [sic] the user in more quickly improving his or her fluency of a language.”
As if Steve Jobs wasn’t already intruding enough into people’s wallets and their private lives, the iPhone device will not only watch your language, it will require you to correct your mistakes and rat you out if you screw up. The app doesn’t just make you do your homework, it even tells you when to do it. According to the Apple patent,
The control application may require a user during specified time periods to send messages in a designated foreign language, to include certain designated vocabulary words, or to use proper designated spelling, designated grammar and designated punctuation and like designated language forms based on the user’s defined skill level and/or designated language skill rating. If the text-based communication fails to include the required language or format, the control application may alert the user and/or the administrator/parent of the absence of such text.
The control application may require the user to rewrite the text-based communication in the required language, to include the required vocabulary words and/or to correct spelling and punctuation errors. The control application may require the user to locate the error. If the user cannot correct the error, the control application may provide hints as to the location of the error by first indicating the paragraph, then, the line and, finally, the exact location.
As figure 10 from Apple’s patent application shows (see below), writers of objectionable texts
By Roberta Bivins
As a historian who writes about the controversial topic of ‘alternative medicine’, I get a lot of questions about whether this or that therapy ‘works’. Sometimes, these questions are a test of my objectivity as a researcher. My questioners want to know whether I am ‘believer’, or a fan of alternative medicine, or have any stake in promoting or disdaining a given medical system. Other people are asking simply for advice: is it worth trying acupuncture, say, or homeopathy for a particular condition? From either angle, such questions ask me to take a stand on whether homeopathy is quackery, or whether I believe in acupuncture channels, or chiropractic manipulation.
My instinctive – if perhaps unhelpful – response to such questions is, more or less, to shrug my shoulders and reply that I don’t really care: the issue of therapeutic efficacy isn’t at the heart of my research on this fascinating subject. Instead, I want to know what lies behind the enduring popularity of alternative medicine, what is (or is not) really ‘alternative’ about it, and why so many of biomedicine’s current crop of ‘alternatives’ have been imported from very different global medical cultures. These are questions that a historian can answer. They are also questions that shed more light on the persistence of alternative medicine than would a yes or no answer about the efficacy of any given technique. After all, we know that once-respected mainstream therapies like bloodletting and purging enjoyed centuries of popularity despite being uncomfortable, potentially dangerous and (in light of today’s medical knowledge) ineffective. Even today, patients prescribed antibiotics for a nasty cold often report feeling better after taking them – despite knowing that most colds are actually caused by viruses, and thus immune to antibiotic therapy.
My position has not always been popular with my fellow authors writing on the topic. They are often passionately committed supporters or opponents of alternative therapies, and demand that I become one or the other as well. But history studies the interplay of light and shadow, not the boundaries between black and white. So I am happy to let the healers fight it out in the battle to prove or disprove the efficacy of their chosen treatments. My job as a historian is to remind them — and to remind us all as consumers — that even the most objective evidence remains historically contingent: no medical experiment can escape from its social milieu, since both its designers and its subjects are shaped by their own historical and cultural context and beliefs.
For example, in contemporary biomedicine, it is conventional to separate the mind and the body when designing a medical experiment: hence the rise of the double-blinded random controlled trial as medicine’s ‘gold-standard’ of proof. Yet physicians and researchers simultaneously acknowledge the impact of the mind on bodily processes. They call it the ‘placebo effect’. As understandings of the mind-body relationship become more sophisticated, it is possible that the blinded RCT will fall from favour, as a limited test of therapeutic activity which obscures an important variable. Such changes have happened in the past, as evidenced by the shifting balance between deductive and inductive reasoning in scientific experimentation since the Scientific Revolution, or the changing status of ‘empiricism’ in western medicine since the 18th century. Then again, it may not: history is not a predictive science! My point is that today’s objective truths are neither value-free nor future-proof.
More practically, it is also my task to point out that the arguments used on either side — for instance, ‘homeopathy is bunk; no trace of the medicinal substance remains in a homeopathic dilution’, or ‘biomedicine reduces h
By Elvin Lim
The Obama White House has announced a series of personnel changes in recent weeks, ahead of the November elections. The aim is to push the reset button, but not to time it as if the button was plunged at the same time that voters signal their repudiation on election day. But the headline is the same as that of the Carter cabinet reshuffle in 1979: there is a crisis of confidence in the Oval Office.
The process this year has been more gradual but equally insistent. Two weeks ago, White House Senior Advisor David Axelrod announced his plan to leave the White House in early 2011. Last week, Rahm Emmanuel stepped down as Chief of Staff to pursue his political ambitions in the mayorship of Chicago. This week, we learned that National Security Advisor James Jones would be stepping down and replaced by his deputy, Tom Donilon. (Earlier this summer, Robert Gates had already registered his intention to leave in 2011.)
The biggest reshuffle has occurred for the economic advisors. Before year’s end, chief economic advisor Lawrence Summers will be out. Meanwhile, White House budget director Peter Orszag and White House Council of Economic Advisers chairwoman Christina Romer have already left the administration. That means three of the top four economic advisors will be out by the end of the year, registering perhaps, the president’s general sense that he really needs to up his game on managing the economy and his particular desire to mend fences with (and via a few strategic appointments from) Wall Street.
There is much truth, then, to the Republican taunt that this is an administration in turmoil. This is a lot more change we are seeing compared to the Bush White House two years in. Chief of Staff Andrew Card stayed on for 6 grueling years; Condi Rice stayed on as national security advisor till 2005 before she moved to State; and even the highly unpopular Donald Rumsfeld lasted till 2006 despite constant calls for his resignation.
The contrast between this and the last White House highlights two profiles in presidential confidence. Bush may have been populist in style, but he stuck to his guns, whether it came to war in Iraq or his management of the White House. The irony is that while Bush was unapologetic about Iraq and Rumsfeld until at least 2006, Obama is already practically apologizing about stimulus spending and health-care reform.
Doubt is a good thing in the classroom, but it does not work in a boardroom or in the White House. If Barack Obama does not believe that government spending will stimulate the economy, then it won’t. Consider the Keynesian multiplier – the idea that every dollar spent by the government becomes income to some consumer who then spends a portion of it. This, in return, becomes income to another consumer who again spends a portion of it. This process is reiterated several times, and the sum of its effects is called the Keynesian multiplier.
Why hasn’t stimulus spending worked, as some argued it did during the Great Depression? Well, maybe Keynes and Hicks were just wrong. Or maybe, according to George Akerlof and Robert Shiller, the missing link this time is the “confidence multiplier” (or the fact that “stimulus spending” have become foul words.) Consumers hold back spending if they are not sure if government spending (i.e. deficits) can continue indefinitely, and even if they wanted to spend, banks are withholding credit because they are not sure if government would be in a position to bail them out when creditors default. Yes, confidence is grounded in real-world conditions such as the size of the US public debt. But confidence is also grounded in raw animal spirits. Myths as real or unreal as the dreams of our presidents.
If Obama lacks faith in his advisors, it must be because he lacks faith, ultimately, in himself. His faith in
By Dennis Baron
A computer at Carnegie Mellon University is reading the internet and learning from it in much the same way that humans learn language and acquire knowledge, by soaking it all up and figuring it out in our heads.
People’s brains work better some days than others, and eventually we will all run out of steam, but the creators of NELL, the Never Ending Language Learner, want it to run forever, getting better every day in every way, until it becomes the largest repository imaginable of all that’s e’er been thought or writ.
Since the first “electronic brains” began to appear in the late 1940s, it has been the goal of computer engineers and the occasional mad scientist to fashion machines that think and learn like people do. Or at least machines that perform functions analogous to some aspects of human thought, and which also self-correct by analyzing their mistakes and doing better next time around.
Setting out to create an infinite and immortal database is a big task: there’s a lot for NELL to learn in cyberspace, and a whole lot more that has yet to be digitized. But since NELL was activated a few months ago it has learned over 440,000 separate things with an accuracy of 74% which, to put it in terms that any Carnegie Mellon undergraduate can understand, is a C. In contrast, I have no idea how to count what I’ve learned since my own brain went on line, and no idea how many of the things that I know are actually correct, which suggests that all I’ve got on my cerebral transcript is an Incomplete.
NELL’s programmers seeded it with some facts and relations so that it had something to start with, then set it loose on the internet to look for more. NELL sorts what it finds into categories like mountains, scientists, writers, reptiles, universities, web sites, or sports teams, and relations like “teamPlaysSport, bookWriter, companyProducesProduct.”
NELL also judges the facts it finds, promoting some of them to the higher category of “beliefs” if they come from a single trusted source, or if they come from multiple sources that are less reliable. According to the researchers, “More than half of the beliefs were promoted based on evidence from multiple [i.e., less reliable] sources,” making NELL more of a rumor mill than a trusted source. And once NELL promotes a fact to a belief, it stays a belief: “In our current implementation, once a candidate fact is promoted as a belief, it is never demoted,” a process that sounds more like religion than science.
Sometimes NELL makes mistakes: the computer incorrectly labeled “right posterior” as a body part. NELL proved smart enough to call ketchup a condiment, not a vegetable, a mislabeling that we owe to the “great communicator,” Ronald Regan. But its human handlers had to tell NELL that Klingon is not an ethnic group, despite the fact that many earthlings think it is. Alex Trebek would be happy to know that, unlike Sean Connery, NELL has no trouble classifying therapists as a “profession,” but the computer trips up on the rapists, which it thinks could possibly be “awardtrophytournament” (confidence level, 50%).
NELL knows that cookies are a “baked good,” but that caused the computer to assume that persistent cookies and internet cookies are also baked goods. But that’s not surprising, since it still hasn’t learned what metaphors are—NELL is only 87.5% confident that metaphors are “tools” (plus, according to NELL, there’s a 50-50 chance that metaphors are actually “book writers”).
Told by its programmers that Risk is a board game, NELL predicts w
By Gordon Thompson
On 9 October, many in the world will remember John Winston Ono Lennon, born on this date in 1940. He, of course, would have been amused, although part of him (the part that self-identified as “genius”) would have anticipated the attention. However, he might also have questioned why the Beatles and their music, and this Beatle in particular, would remain so current in our cultural thinking. When Lennon described the Beatles as just a band that made it very, very big, why did we doubt him?
Today, the music of the Beatles remains popular, perhaps because it helped define a musical genre that continues to flourish, leading some to speculate that these songs and recordings express inherent transcendental qualities. Nevertheless, no graphed demonstration of harmonic relationships and melodic development and no semiotic divination of their lyrics can explain what these individuals and their music have meant to Western civilization. Those born in the aftermath of the Second World War harbor the most obvious explanations. A plurality of the children who came of age during the sixties continues to hold the Beatles as an ideal expression of that decade’s emphasis on self-determination and optimism.
The composer of “A Hard Day’s Night,” “If I Fell,” “Help!,” “Nowhere Man,” “In My Life,” “Strawberry Fields Forever,” “I Am the Walrus,” “Across the Universe,” “Imagine,” and other classics of the modern Western canon left an indelible mark on our notions of music and expression. Where Paul McCartney searched for polite answers to reassure adults, Lennon often seemed to taunt reporters, to the delight of adolescents and the adolescent at heart. When Lennon got into trouble (as he did when American Christians took umbrage at his comparison of fan reaction to the Beatles and to Jesus), we apprehended our own image in the mirror of his discomfort. Moreover, when he shed the conventions of adolescence for the complicated independence of adulthood, we followed his example, albeit usually with less flair and more humility.
In many ways, John Lennon represented a twentieth-century Everyman: someone in whom we could see ourselves re-imagined in extraordinary circumstances with a quicker wit and more charisma. His assassination thirty years ago in December 1980 consequently left an indelible mark on us, standing as one of those moments stained in memory and time. That he had recently emerged from a well-earned domestic sabbatical with renewed possibilities, which both he and his fans recognized, made his death all the more tragic.
Just as the Fab Four had helped to define adolescent identities, perhaps these same baby boomers recognized in Lennon’s death the fragility of our own existence writ large on the wall. And, as the writing hand moved on, we contemplated one last indisputable truth that this most poetic Beatle had bequeathed: the passion play of his life, career, and death had provided us with a sand mandala of our own impermanent individual selves.
Pop culture by definition presents a fleeting expression of our consciousness, which we perpetually construct and reconstruct; but we sometimes forget that the currents of culture have lasting effects on the swimmers. Lennon, Harrison, McCartney, and Starr may have only been musicians that made it very, very big; but, in their roles as ritual players on the altar of the sixties, they played out an extraordinary version of everyday universal lives.
Gordon Thompson is Professor of Music at Skidmore College. His book, Please Please Me: Sixties Br
By Anatoly Liberman
The idea of this post, as of several others before it, has been suggested by a query from a correspondent. A detailed answer would have exceeded the space permitted for the entire set of monthly gleanings, so here comes an essay on the word rum, written on the first rather than the last Wednesday of October. But before I get to the point, I would like to make a remark on the amnesia that afflicts students of word origins. Etymology is perhaps the only completely anonymous branch of linguistics. When people look up a word, they hardly ever ask who reconstructed its history. Surround seems to be related to round, but it is not. On the other hand, soot does not make us think of sit; yet the two are allied. Obviously, neither conclusion is trivial. Even specialists rarely know the names of the discoverers (for those are hard to trace). Unlike Ohm’s Law or Newton’s laws, etymological knowledge easily becomes faceless common property, a plateau without a single hill to obstruct the view. To be sure, we have great authorities, such as the OED and Skeat, but Murray, Bradley (the OED’s first great editors) and Skeat authored only some of the statements they made. In many cases they depended on the findings of their predecessors. What then was their input? All is either forgotten or falsely ascribed to them. Murray could defend his authorship very well. Skeat, too, in countless letters to the editor, strove (strived: take your pick) for recognition and kept rubbing in the fact that he, rather than somebody else, had elucidated the derivation of this or that word. Rarely, very rarely do dictionaries celebrate individual discovery. Thus, pedigree (which French “lent” to English) means “foot of a crane,” from a three-line mark, like the broad arrow used in denoting succession in pedigrees. This was explained by C. Sweet (no relative of Henry Sweet, the famous philologist and the prototype of Dr. Higgins; I could not find any information on him), and Skeat gave the exact reference to his publication. Something similar, though less spectacular (because the conclusion is still debatable), happened when language historians began to research the history of the noun rum.
The most universal law of etymology is that we cannot explain the origin of a word unless we have a reasonably good idea of what the thing designated by the word means. For quite some time people pointed to India as the land in which rum was first consumed and did not realize that in other European languages rum was a borrowing from English. The misleading French spelling rhum suggested a connection with Greek rheum “stream, flow” (as in rheumatism). According to other old conjectures, rum is derived from aroma or saccharum. India led researchers to Sanskrit roma “water” as the word’s etymon, and this is what many otherwise solid 19th-century dictionaries said. Webster gave the vague, even meaningless reference “American,” but on the whole, the choice appeared to be between East and West Indies. Skeat, in the first edition of his dictionary (1882), suggested Malayan origins (from beram “alcoholic drink,” with the loss of the first syllable) and used his habitual eloquence to boost this hypothesis.
Then The Academy, a periodical that enjoyed well-deserved popularity throughout the forty years of its existence (1869-1910), published the following paragraph. (The Imperial Dictionary [not A Universal Dictionary of the English Language, as Spitzer says] gives it in full, but I suspe
By Jonathan Bate
My last three books have been a 670 page life of the agricultural labouring poet John Clare, a two and half thousand page edition of the complete works of Shakespeare, and a 500 page “intellectual biography” of Shakespeare in the context of his age. So how could I resist an invitation from OUP to write a VERY SHORT book! Mind you, it was a ludicrous proposition to introduce a subject the size of English Literature in a mere 50,000 words (I pushed them up from the standard 40k limit for the series by cunningly asking for 60k and splitting the difference…). But the series guidelines were very helpful: “The text should not read like an encyclopedia entry or a textbook; depending on the topic, it may be more comprehensive or more idiosyncratic in its coverage. Don’t be afraid to express a point of view or to inject some style into the prose. Focus on issues, details, and context that make the subject interesting; you should draw your reader in with examples and quotations. Give the reader a sense both of your subject’s contours and of the debates that shape it.” Good principles, which have made for a great series – so many people have said how much they like these little books.
So how did I set about the task? Being a Literary History Man, I began by looking for literary historical precedent.
In 1877 a chaplain to Queen Victoria called the Reverend Stopford A. Brooke published a primer for students and general readers called English Literature. By the time of his death, half a million copies were in print. 160 pages long and produced in handy pocket format, it is the Victorian equivalent of a VSI. Brooke surveyed a vast terrain, from Beowulf and Caedmon to Charlotte Brontë and Alfred Tennyson, with admirable tenacity and vigour, if a little too much patriotic uplift and Anglo-Saxon prejudice for modern taste. But his even-paced chronological march and his desire to give at least a name-check to every author he considered significant meant that his little book too often reduced itself to a parade of the greatest (and not so great) hits of English literature. Faced with a similar task to Brooke’s, and more than one hundred further years’ literary production to cover, I adopted a more varied and selective approach. I made no attempt to offer a historical survey of English poets, novelists, playwrights and non-fiction writers. Frequently I skip over generations in a step; I loop forward and back in time as I identify key themes.
I devote a good deal of attention to questions of origin. From where do we get the idea of literature as a special kind of writing? What could justifiably be described as the first work of English literature and when did the conception of a body of national literature emerge? Which practising novelist wrote the first self-conscious defence of the art of the novel? These are some of the questions I have tried to answer.
Sometimes, I slow the pace and tighten the focus, exploring, for example, a scene from Shakespeare’s King Lear, an instance of the technique of “free indirect discourse” in Jane Austen’s Emma, a poignant stanza of nonsense by Edward Lear, a compositional change of mind on the part of Wilfred Owen, and Seamus Heaney’s preoccupation with prehistoric bodies excavated from Danish peat bogs. I make no apology for these moments of “close reading”: if the study of English Literature is to be true to its object, it must attend to particular words and phrases, verse lines and sentences, movements of thought and structures of writing. My sampling of passages, works, and forms of attention is eclectic – deliberately so, for there is no other body of writing upon earth more varied and inexhaustible than English Literature. That thought makes any attempt to write a “very short introduction” to the subject both deeply
