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By Anatoly Liberman

A Bibliography of English Etymology: An Aftermath
I would like to thank all those who congratulated me on the appearance of A Bibliography of English Etymology. In connection with this publication I have been asked two questions. 1) What practical results do I expect from it? The answer is obvious. Now everyone who is interested in the origin of an English word can at once begin reading the relevant literature. The same holds, though to a lesser extent, for the cognates of English words in other languages. My lists are not exhaustive (because no bibliographical list is) but sufficiently representative. Since all kinds of obscure periodicals have been looked through in the preparation of the volume, many titles may enjoy the light of day for the first time. However, this bibliography is not a pot from a fairy tale to which one has to say: “Little pot, cook,” for sweet porridge to begin flowing into the plate and even down the streets. I have copies of all the articles in my office, but no one else does. Obtaining them takes time. Also, one has to read everything written about the chosen word (another time consuming procedure), and this brings me to the second question. 2) How many articles featured in the bibliography contain trivial and even nonsensical information? Very many of them do. But I could not be choosy. I felt like the compiler of a telephone book. Some people use their telephone all the time but never say anything worth hearing, let alone repeating. (A lot should even have been left unsaid.) Some others use the telephone for plotting against their neighbors and the rest of the world, and still others have a telephone and do very well without it. Yet a telephone book cannot pass judgment on the character and habits of the company’s customers. Although a foolish article on etymology is not murderous, triviality and self-admiring ignorance are the curse of scholarship, and a bibliography cannot aspire to remedy this situation. I have been working on a new etymological dictionary of English for over twenty years, and if I had had such a bibliography in the mid-eighties, by now, instead of being “the proud author” of An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction, I would have had all the work behind me. This is the greatest justification of the bibliography now published I can think of.

Etymology as a Profession
I regularly receive questions from young people who would like to become etymologists but do not know how to go about it. I can only repeat what I have said before. Someone who is interested in the history of recent slang should try to discover the earliest known citations and meaning of the word in question (which is hard: compare buzzword, below) and find out who used the word and why. Such a project can probably be completed without formal linguistic training, though the lack of training is a great handicap even in this area. For all other purposes, one has to study the history of several languages (the more, the better) and the methods of linguistic reconstruction, that is, take special courses from knowledgeable teachers. Reading popular books about the “fascinating” history of words and being “passionate” about the subject won’t do.

Etymology
Husk. The word almost certainly contains the diminutive suffix -k, whereas the vowel of hus- goes back to u, as in put, and ultimately to “long u,” that is, the sound we now hear in hoo. Hus (with a long vowel) is the earlier form of house, so that the original meaning of husk emerges as “little house.” In some oth

Way back in October the OUPblog announced that in honor of the National Book Awards we were hosting a friendly contest, to see who could predict the most winners.

Well, now that the National Book Awards winners have been announced, and congratulations to all the winners, it’s time to share which lucky OUPblog readers will be getting free books in the mail!

In first place with five points was Shawn Miklaucic who gets the big prize, the Historical Thesaurus of the OED.

In second place with two points was Jilly Dybka who will receive a Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus.

In third place with one point was Christopher Elias who will get a copy of Garner’s Modern American Usage (3rd edition).

A great big thank you to everyone who participated and to all the fabulous authors who wrote books we enjoyed this year.  2009 was chock-full of great literature and we can’t wait to read what you publish next year!

Happy Friday to all.  It has been a crazy week, what with our Word of the Year announcement and all.  So sit back, relax, and procrastinate your Friday away.  You can tell your boss I said it was okay.

On growing up with Joan Didion.

Some books to look for in the upcoming months.

Undercover with a Michelin inspector.

Nine foods named after people.

Business versus academia, a cartoon.

A fast food flow chart (say that five times fast!)

Out to sea.

Water on the moon!

Illuminating the Lilliputian.

Junot Diaz on writing.

What Jason Epstein ate.

Do books need trailers?

By Anatoly Liberman

Much to my embarrassment, I am using a title of the type I ridiculed not too long ago, but the temptation was too strong, and I yielded to it. The idea (of this post, not of the title) occurred to me when I was reading a book on the history and archeology of Ancient Greece. The ultimate source of ocean in the European languages is Greek, but where the Greeks got their word is not known. Etymological conjectures on this score have not been too numerous. Some scholars compared okeanos with a Sanskrit verb and its Greek cognate meaning “to surround” (may I mention in parentheses that surround has nothing to do with round but everything with Latin superundare “rise in waves,” whose root is unda “wave”?); however, nowadays hardly anyone has trust in this connection. A Hebrew root, also meaning “surround,” holds out even less promise. Most likely, the Greeks borrowed the word from the non-Indo-European speakers of their islands.

The image of a mighty sea or river encircling the world is common in the beliefs of many Eastern peoples (the Babylonians, for instance), and it also occurs in the mythology of the Indo-Europeans. According to the most archaic Greek beliefs, the Ocean was a river, but later authors identified it with the Black Sea, and its single island with the entrance to Hades, the kingdom of the dead. Homer placed this entrance on the shore of the Ocean.

The history of the Germanic word sea presents a striking parallel to what has been said above about ocean. Its early form, recorded in fourth-century Gothic, is saiws, and, as far as we can judge, it designated, at least originally, a body of stagnant water. We know one of the Indo-European words for “sea” from Latin mare (compare such English borrowings from the Romance languages as marina, marine, marital, maritime, and marinade) and its cognates. The German for “sea” is still Meer, a synonym of See, but Engl. mere has little currency. At one time it meant “sea,” whereas today, in the rare instances it is used, it means “lake.” This puzzling confusion of words for a body of salt and of stagnant water goes back to the beginning of recorded Germanic. Thus, Grendel, the monster Beowulf killed, lived in a mere, and a detailed description of his uninviting habitat points to a swamp, but when Beowulf returned to fight Grendel’s mother, he plunged to the bottom of the sea. Yet mother and son were said to live together.

From Gothic we have an incomplete text of the Bible. The translator of the New Testament into Gothic (Wulfila) needed words for Greek limne “lake; sea” and thalassa “sea” (someone may have come across the English noun limnology “study of lakes” and the adjective thalassic “pertaining to the sea”). In addition to marei (an obvious cognate of Latin mare) and saiws, he had at his disposal a curious tautological compound marisaiws, that is, “sea-sea” or “lake-sea,” which he used to render the same limne (those interested in tautological compounds will find a special post on the subject in this blog). According to some indications, the protoform from which saiws and its cognates were derived sounded approximately like saikwi- (with the hyphen for an ending). This fact militates against the tempting comparison between saiws and Latin saevus “raging”; -k- is the problem. Probably saikwi- and its Indo-European ancestor soigwi- designated a body of stagnant water not prone to rage.

None of the other attempts to find a convincing etymology for sea has found universal recognition, and many word historians (many, not all!) tend to think that the speakers of the Germanic languages borrowed it from the former inhabitants of their homeland in northern Europe. The similarity between the search for the roots of sea and ocean is instructive. The Greeks were very well aware of the great expanse of water around their archipelago; yet the word Okeanos may be part of the pre-Greek substrate (substrate refers to a language of the indigenous population submerged in the language of the new settlers). Likewise, the isolated fact that sea has no obvious Germanic origin would prove nothing about the closeness of the first speakers of Germanic to any coast. But saiws forms part of a sizable group of words pertaining to sea and seafaring that have no convincing Indo-European etymology (sail, boat, ebb, storm, and others—they are listed on p. 277 of my book Word Origins…and How We Know Them), and in their entirety they pose the question about the home of Germanic-speakers and their familiarity with the sea. However interesting this question may be, it need not delay us here.

The Greeks, as noted, associated the Ocean with the kingdom of the dead. Germanic speakers also believed that life ends in the sea. The legendary Scyld Scefing, a king described in the opening pages of Beowulf, departs after being given a ship burial. Another ship burial was that of the Scandinavian god Baldr, the hero of a famous myth. The Gothic for “soul” is saiwala, and its etymology has been contested as vigorously as the etymology of saiws. Jacob Grimm, the elder of the two brothers of fairy tale fame, believed that saiws and saiwala are related. He may have been right. Indirect proof of his hypothesis can be seen in the proposals to connect both saiws and saiwala with either Latin saevus “raging” or Greek aiolos “rapid,” the latter familiar to us from Aeolus, the ruler of the ever-changeable winds; whence Aeolian harp.

I will take the liberty to finish this post with a personal remark about Jacob Grimm. Linguistics, literature, and history are unlike mathematics, physics, or music. One should beware of calling a language historian a genius. Yet at least three language students deserve this appellation. One of them is Jacob Grimm. The public knows him only because of the fairytales, but he was the founder of comparative Germanic philology and of several other areas of study. More important is the fact how often, though armed only with his prodigious memory and unerring intuition, rather than our dictionaries, manuals, and computers, he offered correct solutions. Every time I have a bright idea about the origin of a word, an old custom, or belief, I look up the relevant passage in the volumes of Jacob Grimm’s works. In most cases, it turns out that he anticipated my guess by at least 150 years. So I think his view of the derivation of the word soul (saiwala) is right, and I find some confirmation of it in the Greeks’ treatment of the Ocean. No doubt, Grimm knew all of it long before I was born.

By Anatoly Liberman

As always, many thanks for comments, questions, additions, and corrections. I keep eating my way through a mountain of questions I have received since June, but something will be left over for October. My mail contains many traditional queries, that is, people ask the same questions over and over again. Let me refer our correspondents to this blog for some information on who versus whom, kitty/catty corner, and hunky-dory (separate posts were devoted to them). With regards to tomfoolery, see my book Word Origins…, in which the use of the proper name Tom is discussed at some length. However, I will return briefly to one old problem. Our correspondent writes that she hates hearing drive safe instead of drive safely. Some time in the past I wrote on “the death of the adverb,” and the essay provoked numerous comments, which I need not reproduce here. I only want to provide some comfort to the defenders of the beleaguered part of speech (and by the same token to myself, for I am one of them). My advice is to treat the change philosophically. The drive safe construction has been gaining ground for centuries, and in German it has won. For the benefit of English speakers here is a quotation from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 128. In this sonnet, the poet begrudges the luck the virginal of his beloved enjoys: the keys (“jacks”) of the musical instrument kiss her fingers, while his lips are not invited to do any work: “How oft…/ do I envy those jacks that nimble leap/ To kiss the tender inward of thy hand.…” Obviously, nimble here means nimbly, and what is good for Shakespeare is good enough for us. Right? No, but I promised to provide comfort, not a justification for safe driving under the influence (of the Bard).

Big questions. 1. How does one expand one’s vocabulary? The usual answer is: “By voracious reading.” The answer is correct but insufficient, especially if one wants to expand one’s active vocabulary. The only way to learn words is to learn them, that is, to treat one’s native language as one treats foreign languages. Read good books, write out the words new to you, look them up in a dictionary to make sure that you did not misunderstand their meaning, and learn them together with the context in which they occurred. One word a day will go a long way. 2. On several occasions I mentioned the fact that American English, being a colonial language, is more conservative than the language of the metropolis. How does this fact tally with the readiness of American English to adopt countless foreign words? Conservative refers to the phonetic and the grammatical structure of language. American English has retained the pronunciation and some forms that were current four and three centuries ago, while British English has often modified them.

Separate words. In (the) hospital. Why do British and American English differ in the use of the definite article? English-speakers who have not studied the history of their language (that is, 99, 999% of the population) believe that the use of articles is natural and stable. However, it is not and changes from century to century and from one part of the English speaking world to another. Note the vacillation even in Modern American English: in the future ~ in future (the second variant seems to be winning out; German has a similar alternation: in Zukunft ~ in der Zukunft). The definite article disappeared in such adverbial phrases as go to bed, at school, in prison, at work, and even in that time of year. In hospital marks the triumph of “adverbialization”; by contrast, in the hospital remains a free combination of a preposition and a noun. Aluminum versus aluminium. This pair is another famous example of the difference between American and British English, second perhaps only to fall ~ autumn, truck ~ lorry, and sidewalk ~ pavement. Sir Humphrey Davy called his invention (1812) aluminum, but in England i was later added to it on the analogy of chemical substances like sodium. American English preserves the earliest form. What is the origin of Sardoudledom? I am quoting from the OED, a most useful book for learning etymology: “[From] blend of the name Victorien Sardou (1831-1908). French dramatist + DOODLE + -DOM. A fanciful word used to describe well-wrought, but trivial or morally objectionable, plays considered collectively; the characteristic milieu in which such work is admired.”

Pleaded versus pled. Pled, which is being used more and more often, is an analogical form: plead ~ pled, as lead ~ led and read (infinitive) ~ read (preterit). How did savings end up being a singular form? I think most people avoid saying a savings of $20 (though a saving of $20 is not the most elegant phrase either), but his savings is will shock few. Words ending in -s, like digs, Boots (the name of a servant at a hotel), or Sniffers (the name of a guinea pig), often become singulars. We have means (a means to an end) and works “factory” (a chemical works is situated not far from where we live). In a relatively recent edition of Little Red Riding Hood, it is written that the girl lived near a woods. This usage seems odd to me (and to my spellchecker), but apparently, not to everybody. Thus, savings joined the words whose plural ending does not prevent them from being looked upon as singulars.

Sam Hill. My timid refusal to connect Hill with hell (unless it is a taboo form) impressed no one. I hasten to repeat that I have no clue to the origin of the idiom but would like to know where, regardless of Hill ~ hell, Sam came from. Hill, even if etymologized convincingly, is only half of the problem. Cottage cheese: Is it derived from ricotta? I am sure it is not. If it were, it would, most likely, not have been “folk etymologized” so drastically. Compare German Schmierkase (literally “smear cheese”), which in American English became smear-case! (See it in the OED.) Cottage cheese is also an “Americanism” and seems to mean what it says. The name of this dairy product often consists of two words: a noun meaning “cheese” and some attribute (so, for instance, in French: fromage blanc or fromage frais). The similarity between cottage and ricotta is coincidental. Ricotta means “recooked” (tt in -cotta goes back to ct: the Latin root of this word can be seen in Engl. concoct); compare Italian biscotto “twice cooked,” that is biscuit. Cottage cheese is often called in unpredictable ways. Curds is a word of unknown origin despite the existence of look-alikes in Celtic. German Quark is a borrowing from Slavic, where it means “product,” while Scandinavian ost has a respectable Indo-European descent.

What is the preferred spelling of czar? It is czar, though tsar (not czar) reflects the pronunciation of the Russian word much better. “The spelling cz-, which is non-Slavonic, is due to Herberstein, ‘Rerum Muscovitarum Commentarii’ [A Commentary on the Deeds of the Muscovites], 1549, the chief early authority on Russia in Western Europe” (The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology). What happened to -ce- in Worcestershire? It was shed, and not only in this place name. Compare Leicestershire and Gloucestershire, pronounced Lester-, Gloster-. Place names drop middle syllables with dire regularity. Worcester goes back to Old Engl. Wigraceaster (the second element -ceaster, like -caster in Lancaster, is the Latin word for “camp”). In today’s pronunciation only Wuster is left, though the archaic spelling has preserved some traces of the original form. American speakers should be warned not to rhyme -shire, when it occurs as the second part of place names, with hire, mire, wire: it should be a homophone of sheer.

As noted, I still have some unanswered questions on file. I’ll take care of them on the last Wednesday of October.

Happy Friday to everyone and “shana tova” for those of you celebrating this weekend.  Below are some serious procrastination-worthy links to keep you entertained until the end of the day.

Are there evolutionary advantages to depression?

What is your perfect city?

Book titles, if they were written today.

Can you do this?

I love Neil Patrick Harris.

This is one way to memorize your favorite recipe.

Can Malcolm Gladwell help us in the love department?

A great use of galley copies.

Facebook friends for sale.

Honey, I shrunk everyone.

The Huffington treatment on a sitcom?

Another sweltering week has passed and Friday is here again.  Lean back in your desk chair and check out the quality procrastination we have posted for you below.  Still have hours before the weekend begins?  Read this month’s posts on the OUPblog.  Have a great weekend!

Social Media is important, the video.

Read Dave Eggers story in this week’s New Yorker and then have a wild rumpus of your own.

100 Ivy-league classes you can take for free at home.

Why the best selling jazz album of all time is so great.

Would this campaign encourage you to pick up the book or pick another stall?

It is time to welcome the class of 2013, just remember they have never used a card catalog to find a book.

A crazy NYC population map.

Pluots versus plumcots.  Either way, they are delicious.

Jayson Blair has a surprising new career.

A disturbing domestic violence graph.

Thus spake Zora.

Novak on Novak.

Have you seen graphitti like this?

Happy Friday to all!  As it is getting really steamy outside I think it is a good idea to spend your Friday at a nice air-conditioned desk, perusing the OUPblog and our Friday link love.  Okay, okay, the beach would be great, but if you can’t pull it off today I suggest procrastination, OUPblog-style.

Maira Kalman on Benjamin Franklin.

Do you have a literary tattoo?

Edible haikus?

If you can’t get the rain to go away at least you can carry a sunny umbrella.

Goody-Goody Hormone Now Linked to Envy, Gloating

A new Sherman Alexie story.

Can you say “no” to divorce?

I rocked out to this ad.

Some University Press books worth paying attention to.

POTUS delivers cupcakes.

How do we spend our time?

Heading to the beach this weekend?  Can you make a sandcastle like one of these?

Happy Friday to all of you.  I hope you are enjoying the summer weather and have taken today off to have a picnic!  But if not, (some of us have to work) here are some links to help you procrastinate the day away.  Have a lovely weekend.

The Krugman Blues sung by Loudon Wainwright III.

OUP editor Matthew Gallaway on Corsican Mint!

Say what you want about kids and Facebook these days but the highest growing demographic is women over 55.

A step-by-step guide to getting Scott Schuman of Sartorialist fame to shoot you.

From Wilco, With Love.

A gloomy publishing industry survey.

Are you reading Infinite Jest this summer? Either way, check out this familiar insurance claim.

Ten useful twitter stats.

Remembering Apollo 11 on its 40th anniversary.

Since 2001, how many media leak investigations has the FBI conducted?

Purdy, Director of Publicity

A recent study out of Harvard confirms Twitter is all vanity. This is not a big surprise to the dictionary team at Oxford University Press. OUP lexicographers have been monitoring more than 1.5 million random tweets Since January 2009 and have noticed any number of interesting facts about the impact of Twitter on language usage. For example the 500 words most frequently used words on Twitter are significantly different from the top 500 words in general English text. At the very top, there are many of the usual suspects: “the”, “to”, “as”, “and”, “in”… though “I” is right up at number 2, whereas for general text it is only at number 10. No doubt this reflects on the intrinsically solipsistic nature of Twitter. The most common word is “the”, which is the same in general English.

Since January OUP’s dictionary team has sorted through many random tweets.  Here are the basic numbers:
Total tweets = 1,496,981
Total sentences = 2,098,630
Total words = 22,431,033
Average words per tweet = 14.98
Average sentences per tweet = 1.40
Average words per sentence in Twitter= 10.69
Average words per sentence in general usage = 22.09

Other interesting tidbits include:

Verbs are much more common in their gerund form in Twitter than in general text. “Going”, “getting” and “watching” all appear in the top 100 words or so.

“Watching”, “trying”, “listening”, “reading” and “eating” are all in the top 100 first words, revealing just how often people use Twitter to report on whatever they are experiencing (or consuming) at the time.

Evidence of greater informality than general English: “ok” is much more common, and so is “f***”.

And that is how we roll here at OUP, monitoring new social media and the changes in the English language up to the minute.  Tweet on.

Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he looks at Supreme Court Judge politics. Read his previous OUPblogs here.

That the selection of Supreme Court Justices has become a deeply politicized process was one of the most invidious legacies of Franklin Roosevelt, who once tried to “pack” the Court with liberal justices sympathetic to the New Deal.

In trying to extricate himself from this legacy, President Obama has gone out of his way to nominate (what he deems to be) one of the least controversial candidates out there. It is in his interest to, because it would be unwise for him to squander political capital when the potential gain is limited. The most he can achieve in the present nomination iteration is to maintain, rather than alter, the ideological balance of the Court.

That the president has partly succeeded in preempting controversy can be seen in the fact that conservatives have not yet decided if Sonia Sotomayor is worth opposing. Moderate Republicans are especially afraid that a concerted attack on Sotomayor will alienate their party from Hispanic voters. The debate is about whether or not to have a debate; the controversy is whether or not Sotomayor is controversial. Barring a startling new revelation about Sotomayor’s past, this is about as good as it gets for any modern Supreme Court nominee.

Yet the fact that there is nevertheless a controversy about whether or not Sotomayor is controversial is poignant enough, a reflection of our thirst for politics and our confusion of politics as the end rather than the means for achieving nobler ends.

What is often missed is that the more intense our debate about the suitability of a particular nominee for the Court, the more we imply that Justices are incorrigibly nepotistic, and all we can do is to select someone on our side. If Justice Sandra Day O’Connor once marveled at the majesty of the law, our nomination wranglings reflect our burlesquing of the Court. Here is the paradox: even if partisans and lobbyists succeed in sending their favorite to the Court, they would also have deprived the new justice of a measure of legitimacy s/he would have had if s/he had been admitted to the bench without their advocacy.

Perhaps the stakes are too high, as fans and enemies of every new nominee contend. But piecemeal and short-term gains can come at a great institutional and long-term costs. Supreme Court justices are no longer perceived to be women and men capable of setting aside their personal opinions or transcending their ideological biases. In politicizing the Court, we are disrupting the constitutional balance of respect, and contributing to the tyranny of the elected branches and in particular the president, who, let the record reflect, doesn’t only execute the law (as the commensurate expectation ought to be if we insist judges should not make law) but also makes it in the form of executive orders and in the veto power (which is a legislative power, enumerated with Congress’s powers in Article 1 of the Constitution).

So it should come as no surprise that the first president who seriously tried to politicize the court, Franklin Roosevelt, was also one intent on his particular interpretation of the constitution and having his legislative way. Kudos to any president and any citizen with the foresight and restraint to treat a co-equal branch of government as a bulwark of our constitution and not another political playpen.

Happy Friday to all.  I’ve started to get ready for Book Expo America and I wanted to throw a call out to see who is attending this year.  So bloggers, authors, publicists, publishing people everywhere, drop me a line (rebecca.ford(at)oup.com) I would love to meet up with you.  Have a lovely weekend and enjoy the links below.

Obama and Kennedy play hide and seek.

Help Kickstart a project.

Finding Swine Flu with heat scanners.

Hobbits are real!

An interview with Ishiguro.

For the love of “Maddy“.

May it please the court.

Are there as many professional bloggers as lawyers?

It may be time for me to re-read The Sheltering Sky.

On hair.

Art.

By Anatoly Liberman

Heavy petting. The beauty of a blog is that one can always correct one’s mistakes. In my post on the etymology of pet, I suggested (on the basis of my reading) that, contrary to what is said in dictionaries, pet had come to English from Celtic, rather than the other way around. Unfortunately, I forgot to consult the OED online (the so-called 3rd edition of the OED), and a correspondent pointed out that there I would have found the same solution, which is true. But my oversight, embarrassing as it may be, will allow me to touch on an important aspect of etymological lexicography.

Among other things, I said that nowadays two streams—of books and articles on the origin of words and of English dictionaries (to the extent that they deal with etymology)—seldom meet and explained why this happens: the huge amount of work lexicographers face increases manifold because of the obscurity of countless publications in numerous languages. I became aware of a persuasive etymology of pet because I have a reasonably complete database, and two articles on this word (by O’Rahilly and Vendryes) turned up in it. At Oxford they undoubtedly have their own bibliographical resources; this case their information probably came from Vendryes’s etymological dictionary of Old Irish. The volume with the letter p was published in 1983. In the entry petta, Vendryes referred to O’Rahilly’s but not to his own 1927 article, which contained the same reconstruction he gave in the dictionary 56 years later. The etymologists at OED, quite naturally, consulted the dictionary, read O’Rahilly’s article and, like me, agreed with him. I am glad that our opinions coincided. But they went further than I did and tentatively accepted Vendryes’s distant etymology of the Irish word, and this is a point I would like to discuss.

English absorbed more foreign words than perhaps any other European language. However, an English etymologist is at best a specialist in Indo-European linguistics, and more often only in Germanic. Let us have no illusions about it. The field is vast. Even the history of one language (in our case, English) is so full of esoteric details that some people call themselves experts in Old English, others in Middle English, and still others in early Modern English, to say nothing of the latest period. It is unrealistic to expect that this person, who (for example) has spent years mastering every sound change and every semantic twist of Middle English will feel even half as comfortable in the history of Frisian, Dutch, German, Danish, and so forth. But English etymologists also deal with French, Latin, Greek, and Celtic. Borrowings from Finnish and Russian (as long as we stay in Europe), Native American, African, and Asian languages also occupy them. Obviously, they cannot have an informed opinion about such a mass of disparate material and depend on the works of specialists, who argue over the origin of “their” words, just as English etymologists argue over the derivation of English vocabulary. Copying their verdicts is fraught with danger. I can add that Skeat and James Murray boldly attacked Latin words in their dictionaries and often did not see eye to eye. Their suggestions are invariably clever, for their command of two classical languages left nothing to be desired (Skeat’s education was in Latin and Greek, and Murray seems to have mastered every old and new language), but I still think that they should have left Latin to people like Alois Walde. It is enough to compare the subsequent editions of his dictionary to see what a minefield Latin etymology is.

In 1927 Vendryes offered what he thought to be a good etymology of Old Irish petta, but the entry in his dictionary is short and rather dogmatic. O’Rahilly’s article but not his conjecture is mentioned. Historians of English are usually not in a position to agree or disagree with a distinguished Celtologist on the origin of an Old Irish word. I could afford the luxury of contradicting Vendryes because I was the author of an evanescent post and realized that, if I was wrong, the fault would be only mine and do no one any harm. The idea of tracing Old Irish petta to an ancient Indo-European root seemed unfounded to me, for petta looks like an example of early European slang (pet ~ put “small”), while Latin suesco “to get used” (the cognate suggested by Vendryes; sue- in it is from the historical perspective a prefix) and other related forms have little to do with pampered people and home animals.

By contrast, a semi-anonymous dictionary does not enjoy the freedom of an individual contributor. The OED is especially vulnerable, because most of its users take its pronouncements for absolute truth. The same holds for Webster and some other “thick” dictionaries. My advice to the editors is disappointing. I believe that bold hypotheses should be either discussed in them with the attention they deserve or avoided altogether. Research into the history of pet has reached a stage at which an expert in the area of English can say “from Scottish Gaelic” without fear. The origin of the Gaelic word is somebody else’s business. Etymological dictionaries of French cite the Latin etymons but never discuss them, and I think they are right. It is enough to read the old reviews of Kluge-Mitzka (a German etymological dictionary) with titles like “Slavic Words in KM” and “French Words in KM,” to see how hard it was for Mitzka to deal with the material he did not know in detail. Even discussion of the Frisian element in the latest etymological dictionary of Dutch fills one with dismay, though Frisian is much closer to Dutch than English is to Gaelic.

Last week, my post was devoted to the origin of race. Here I think we are in a better situation than with pet. Contini’s reconstruction is not an “opinion,” not an attempt to connect a Romance word with a hypothetical root; it is based on evidence. Von Wartburg, the great compiler of a multivolume etymological dictionary of French, challenged Contini’s colleagues to boost the derivation of race from Old French haras “stud” (he preferred to trace race to ratio), and this is exactly what they did. In the entry race, the online edition of the OED is cautious: it lists two other conjectures and mentions Contini’s idea (though the reference is to dictionaries). Here I think we may be less circumspect. Just as we now know that Engl. pet is a borrowing from Celtic, we know that race did not come to French from Italian, but since French etymology is not what the OED (or any English dictionary) is expected to elucidate, had the editors said “from French” and stopped, they would have been justified. If some users of the OED are curious about the history of razza ~ race in the Romance languages, they are welcome to find out. Even the great OED is not a clearing house of world etymology. No dictionary is.

Small fry. 1) Generic they. In my old polemical notes on the pronouns they and their being used with reference to a single person, I should have made it clear that this usage (the price we pay for purging English of gender-specific words when gender-neutral ones are expected), apart from being inelegant and often silly, leads to people’s stultification, for the simplest sentences begin to verge on self-parody. Here are two such sentences from a local (University of Minnesota) student newspaper. “As someone who has been pro-life all their life, I believe life begins at the point of conception.” The letter writer did not dare to use my, with I being the antecedent; their seemed to be safer. “Can someone in Dateopia tell me [the correspondence was addressed to Dr. Date, a collective expert on “relationships,” loss of virginity, and unrequited love] why it is that we have so many brooding male writers out there? … I am struck by the feeling that the writer has spent a lot of time thinking about their situation in an academic sense….” A male surely has their problems. Don’t all of us?

2) Ghetto. Those interested in the origin of the word ghetto should pay special attention to the comment by Anonymous (I happen to know the identity of the commentator but see no reason to make it public.) He is a proponent of the borghetto etymology defended by such outstanding experts as Alfredo Prati and Leo Spitzer. Unfortunately, etymologies cannot be proved (even disproving a palpably wrong etymology is sometimes hard.) I thought that the meaning of the clipped form ghetto was too general for naming the newly established Jewish quarter in Venice, but “street” (gata) is not much better, except that Jewish quarters were called “street” all over Eastern Europe, whereas ghetto did not mean “street.” My extremely modest goal was to enliven the discussion by offering what I though was a novel idea. I will take refutation in stride, even gratefully. As for why I cited the Gothic and the Swedish form rather than those from Danish (gade) and Norwegian (gate), the question has been answered by our correspondent Paul Peterson: gade and gate show traces of later sound changes; gata is more archaic. 3) Latin pax ~ English fair, Engl. war ~ French guerre. I mentioned these cognates in my post on “Peace and War.” Our correspondent wonders how -ax (in pax) and -air (in fair), as well as war and guerre, are connected. Pax is pak-s; its root is pak-. The early history of fair becomes clear from its Old Icelandic cognate fag-r (-r is part of an ancient suffix). Latin p corresponds to Germanic f, and k corresponds to h, but there is a rule by which voiceless spirants may, depending on the ancient place of stress, become voiced; hence g in fagr. In certain positions, Old Engl. g was pronounced like y in Modern Engl. yes, and this is how fair acquired its pronunciation. Romance speaking people borrowed a word meaning “strife” with the Germanic root wer-, but, since the sound w was alien to them, they replaced it with gv (spelled gu). In Old Northern French (the dialect of William the Conqueror), the pronunciation was evidently werre (without g-), so that the French noun returned to English in almost the same shape in which it at one time had existed. Yet war is not a direct continuation of the Germanic form.

4) Engl. pet and German Petze “female dog.” Those are most probably unrelated. Several similar-sounding words for “female dog” have been recorded in old and later European languages: Engl. bitch, Old Icelandic bikkja (from which, I think we have the verb bicker), as well as baka (in greybaka), and German Petze. Petze surfaced only in the 15th century. It is anybody’s guess how those words are related (if at all). One can go even further and cite Russian sobaka “dog” (stress on the second syllable), an irritatingly obscure word that has a history of its own. A similar common European litter accompanies us the moment we whistle to a tyke. Perhaps some of the names mentioned above imitate the bark. Neither sounds like bow-wow, barf-barf, or yap-yap, but there was an Old English word tife “bitch,” and one of the Russian words for “bow-wow” is tiaf-tiaf! Dogs, as I understand, were domesticated to guard herds, rather than as pets. 5) Caius of Cambridge. In discussing the origin of the word key, I mentioned John Caius, the founder of a college at Cambridge. The question was about the man and the pronunciation of his name (which is keez). All the eminent bearers of the names Kayes and Keys seem to have Latinized their name as Caius. The Oxford man was also Caius (keez). Googling for the biography of both produces several worthwhile results. As for the pronunciation, I consulted the book Laut und Leben. Englische Lautgeschichte der neueren Zeit by Wilhelm Horn and Martin Lehnert. Berlin: Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften, 1954, p. 288. (I am indebted to this book for many of my posts on spelling.)

6) Acronyms. I said in connection with the etymology of tip “gratuity” that all attempts to explain common words as acronyms are usually wrong. Our correspondent cited NABISCO and others. But those are not “common words”: they were coined as acronyms and never concealed their origin. Of such formations we have hundreds. 7) Shed light. There is little to say about the origin of this phrase. Light can be shed, thrown, or cast. According to the OED, the figurative use of shed light (that is, to illuminate some matter) does not antedate the middle of the 19th century. 8 ) I was pleased to get support of my views on Shakespeare. Somebody wrote his plays. This person was probably William Shakespeare.

Whew! It’s Friday, finally!  Why does Friday always seem so hard to reach when we have Monday off?  Not that I am complaining about the nice long weekend.  Below are some links to help you get through the day.  See you Monday.

“Should parents go to jail for believing so devoutly in faith healing that they don’t seek lifesaving medical treatment for their children?”

The White House has a blog!

The Metropolitan Opera faces serious challenges.

Israel’s actions and the world’s reactions.

Vote in the Tournament of Books “Zombie Poll”.

What happened to Sheila.

I miss Calvin and Hobbes.

On Lasantha Wickrematunge, the newspaper editor who was assassinated in Colombo on January 8.

“What if the mightiest word is love, love beyond marital, filial, national. Love that casts a widening pool of light. Love with no need to preempt grievance.”

By Nikita as dictated to Betsy DeJesu, Publicity Manager

My name is Nikita. I’m a 6-year old tabby who lives in New York City with my owner, Betsy. We don’t have a lot of space in our apartment, but what we do have a lot of is books. And that is just fine with me because I love to read. I just rocked your world a little bit, didn’t I? You didn’t know that cats could read, did you? Sure, we do lots of things that you usually associate with cats – jumping onto tables that we’re not supposed to be on, taking long naps, giving death stares to the birds outside our windows, punching plastic bags, chasing pieces of string, taking naps, spazzing out over cat nip, being totally adorable, taking more naps….But we can also read. I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t let this get out, though. If anyone else finds out, it will only be a matter of time before I’m on Letterman doing “Stupid Pet Tricks” or a video of me reading War and Peace on Youtube gets forwarded to you like those weird videos of the sleeping puppies. I prefer to fly under the radar on this one and preserve my privacy, if you don’t mind.

Anyway, where was I? Oh, right. Reading. Elizabeth Hardwick once said, “The greatest gift is a passion for reading.” Another very smart person, Dr. Seuss, said “The more you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.” Both were right about the importance of reading, and I learned that at a very young age. I started reading when I was just a little kitten. I would read the labels on cans of wet food, the directions on the back of the box of kitty litter, and those menus that mysteriously shoot through the bottom crack of your front door in New York. After that I was hooked, and I read anything I could get my paws on. I might be an indoor cat, but when I read I can go anywhere in the world or anywhere throughout time. I’ve been to fabulous parties with flappers in The Great Gatsby, to imperial Russia to visit the last Tsar in Nicholas and Alexandra, and I watched Scarlett make a snappy dress out of curtains in Gone With the Wind. I learned why World War I started in The Guns of August, how to help stop poverty in The Bottom Billion, and what happens when you take a lot of drugs in Helter Skelter. The classics are great – Frankenstein, The Lord of the Flies, Little Women – and so are fantasies like Wicked and biographies of glamorous ladies like Bette Davis and Marilyn Monroe (I really enjoyed Bette Davis: A Biography and Marilyn: Her Life in Her Own Words: Marilyn Monroe’s Revealing Last Words and Photographs has beautiful pictures). Without books I would probably get to take even more naps, but to be honest, I would be pretty bored and life would seem a little dull. That reminds me of another great quote: “A day without cracking open a good book is like a day without chicken and salmon flavored wet food.” If you like to read, you know just what I mean (even if you don’t like wet food, I’m sure you get the general idea).

Well, I could go on forever about reading, but there’s a piece of string peeking out from the under the couch that I need to pounce on and then – you guessed it – I have a nap scheduled. So I better get going – happy reading and happy holidays!

Happy Friday to all.  The good news is you have almost made it to the Thanksgiving gorge-fest.  The bad news is that it is freezing out there.  So spend your lunch-hour inside, sip some soup, and procrastinate with these links.  See you Monday!

Take classes at Oxford University from the comfort of your home.

The magic of makeup and lighting.

Michelle Obama’s butt?

Please save my subway.

Dylan is a blur.

Best holiday gift: a screaming chicken!

A visual case for recycling.

Find new authors you may like.

A poem to lift your financial blues.

Free music.

True story or not, this is a great spider.

(I received many questions. They will be answered next week.)

Unisex English and generic they. My objections to the use of generic they aroused a good deal of interest, and after Andrew Sullivan reproduced part of my essay, it traveled widely through the media and blogosphere. Responses were also rather numerous. I’ll try to reduce my comments to a minimum. To begin with, it is advisable not to politicize the problem. My dislike of they in this role does not make me a reactionary; nor does my opponents’ defense of it turn them into freedom fighters. Also, the fact that I oppose generic they does not mean that I plead for the return of generic he. As for generic she, I find it to be unacceptable for two reasons. First, substituting the politically correct she for the condemned he is no remedy at all (if he is wrong, why is she right?). Second, she is very strongly “marked.” Centuries of use have made he at least partly neutral, but she inevitably makes us think of a woman. Saying something like when a criminal is sentenced, she should go to prison or when a professor walks into the auditorium, she always greets the students cannot be recommended.

Nowadays they is widely used in such contexts. Those who were born in the late sixties have been taught to say and write so and wonder what the fuss is about. The others have either conformed to this usage or avoid it. I was not out to fight generic they. To quote Fowler, who said so on another occasion, in the examples I used generic they is not wrong, it is merely repugnant. My goal was different. I took two sentences—“When a student comes to see me, I never make them wait” and “If a tenant is evicted, it does not mean they are a bad tenant”—and suggested that people had adopted this usage as a result of a deliberate attempt to cleanse English of sexism, but that in doing so, they had swallowed a medicine more dangerous than the disease. Consequently, the argument was not over the usage but over its origin. One authority after another declares that generic they has existed from time immemorial and that sentences like they were not a bad tenant or if your friend calls, I’ll tell them that you will call them back (you know their number, don’t you?) go back to early Modern or even Middle English and have been hallowed by the authority of “our best authors.” In my opinion, such sentences appeared only after some people, whose path to unisex English (a path paved, to be sure, by laudable intentions) enforced them on our contemporaries.

Specialists in the history of English are those who have read and analyzed hundreds (thousands) of pages written before roughly 1800. Those people never asserted that generic they had occurred in the old periods. The most passionate defenders of they did not study the history of English in any detail: at best, they read something about it and looked at a few samples. Their sources of inspiration are the OED and surveys derivative of it. The names of Shakespeare, Fielding, Thackeray, and a few others regularly circulate in the discussion. It is easy to see why. In the OED, the first famous author who is quoted as using they after an indefinite pronoun is Fielding. Let us now open Fowler’s Modern English Usage (the entry they, them, their, the first part). Naturally, he too speaks only about they referring to indefinite pronouns (someone, etc.) and words like individual, person, and each: “Undoubtedly, grammar rebels against their,” but “the OED quotes examples from Fielding, Goldsmith, Sydney Smith, Thackeray, and Bernard Shaw.” He reproduces the examples, which I have left out, and adds one of his own from Ruskin. It is this list, with occasional additions (Shakespeare, Scott, Shelley, Dickens), that is being constantly recycled. Every now and then, Samuel Johnson joins Fielding and others, but no confirmation of a wide use of generic they can be found in his dictionary. The research purporting to prove the antiquity of they were not a bad tenant resolves itself into copying a few lines from the OED and Fowler and finding other examples of the same type: they, them, their after someone, everyone, person, and so forth.

An irate correspondent deplores my meanness and lack of perspicuity and says that, according to the OED, nouns, not only pronouns, occur as the antecedents of they. It is a good idea to read the entire entry, rather than picking out one word from it. “Often used after a singular noun made universal by every, any, no, etc., or applicable to one of either sex” (= ‘he or she’).” The last part (“or applicable to one of either sex”) is unclear, but person, individual, and their ilk are meant, not tenant, student, or friend, because every animate noun, with the exception of boy, girl, man, woman, their close and distant synonyms, and words with a clear morphological structure (heroine, actress) are ambiguous as far as their referents are concerned: driver, artillerist, speculator—all of them, including boxer, wrestler, and soldier, can, at least nowadays, refer to both males and females.

The grandmother of another correspondent, a native of Texas, reportedly uses they in the constructions I mocked. The possibility that such usage might be widespread in dialects occurred to me, and that is why I consulted Joseph Wright’s The English Dialect Dictionary (the entry they: see the end of my original post) but found only examples like those given in the OED. It would be useful to know the old lady’s age, her parents’ dialect, and so on. Perhaps she simply repeats what she has been hearing for about 40 years. Anyway, no one believes that generic they came to Standard English from dialects. Still another correspondent remarks that even if generic they was introduced artificially, there may nothing wrong about it. I agree.

The situation is the same as with organic foods. Poisonous mushrooms are organic, but this fact does not increase their attractiveness, while homegrown champions may be tasty, even when not organic. Likewise, some natural changes in language are deplorable. A student who failed to submit her paper when it was due explained to me that its text was inaccessible to her because she had typed it up on her boyfriend’s computer, and “he, like, moved to Wisconsin, you know.” I know nothing about the young man and don’t like papers that disappear for such reasons, but this is not the point. No one taught that student to fill her speech with junk; she does it naturally. Conversely, in the 19th century, some Norwegians decided that their language was affected by Danish to such an extent that a new language going back to its rural roots is needed. They produced such a language. It was first called “country speech,” as opposed to “book speech,” and is now called New Norwegian. Today the Norwegians use their relatively limited resources translating books from one Norwegian to the other. This is a classic case of language planning. Some people bewail the results, others support them. Regardless of their attitudes, two Norwegian languages are here to stay. No one instructed the speakers of American English to change the rule of agreement and say the problem with your proposals are twofold and the information on whom will pay for this measure is absent. This is “natural” usage, and editors’ efforts to eradicate it will bring no fruit. I insist that generic they, unlike the problem… are and whom will pay (“wrong” but natural) was the product of language planning, while my opponents want to represent it as the outcome of language evolution. They want the construction I’ll speak to your friend when they call to have respectable ancestors. This privilege should be denied them.

So here is a challenge. Those who declare that generic they has evolved naturally are invited to send examples of the when a student comes to see me, I never make them wait and they are not a bad tenant type to this website. If they (real they) are specialists, they know the methods of linguistic research: find the earliest examples (Middle English, and so on), state in what area and social milieu they arose, explain how the phenomenon spread, and state when it was finally adopted by the speaking community. If pre-1970 examples (preferably, in respectable numbers) turn up, I will be the first to rejoice and concede defeat, but if the answer to my challenge happens to be silence, I will assume that such examples do not exist.

Gratuitous splitting. Comments on my blog devoted to the split infinitive, fortunately, lacked the militant spirit that informed the controversy over generic they. Several people defended splitting. Nor did I object to it, but I find thrusting to between not and the verb a bad idea (hence the title of my essay: “To Be or To Not Be”). I wondered where and why the splitting fad originated, but no one offered suggestions on this point. I keep thinking that infinitives should be split only when this operation is needed. In … the framework expected to easily pass in a referendum, the phrase to pass easily in a referendum would mean the same as to easily pass but “flow” better (or so it seems to me). The same is true of the youngest person to ever hold the U.S. Treasurer post (= the youngest person ever to hold), and especially of a decision… to not have political speakers of any persuasion (= not to have). The last two sentences occurred in the same article in a student newspaper. It matters little that, as a general rule, our young journalists are moderately literate and poorly educated, for theirs is the kingdom of the future. They were quick to jump on the splitting bandwagon. Soon they will grow up, and splitting will become the norm. It is up to our descendants to decide whether they will choose to have such a norm or to not have it, if I am allowed to put it this way.

English and the Indo-European family. Our regular correspondent and my frequent critic found fault with my statement (see the previous blog) that English has lost some of the most essential features of the Indo-European languages and is on the way of severing its ties with its family. He remarks that Indo-European is a genetic, rather than typological marker. To put it differently, once Indo-European, always Indo-European. By origin English is a Germanic and hence an Indo-European language. (How and when it became Indo-European is a special question.) But languages can also be classified from the point of view of their present day structure, and if we look at English, we will easily notice how far it has veered from its archetype. More than sixty years ago, N.S. Trubetzkoy, one of the greatest linguists of the 20th century, suggested that language families may emerge both because they happen to be offspring of protolanguages and as a result of long coexistence, as evidenced by a so-called language union in the Balkans (other language unions also exist). He applied his reasoning to Indo-European and arrived at nontrivial conclusions, but found few supporters. Yet his idea is fruitful and should not be dismissed out of hand. Other than that, I am not sure I understand how black children can be born to white Irish parents. As regards the ambiguity of phrases like small animal farm (a small farm or a farm for small animals?), compare free pregnancy test versus free trade test.

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Happy Friday to all.  It finally feels like fall outside, the election is almost here, Halloween is a week away and despite all this- we are all at work.  So it goes.  Take some pleasure in the links below, in the fact that it is Friday and in the changing colors of the leaves outside.  Have a great weekend!

In Defense of Piracy

Mock campaign ads from familiar directors.

Substance over style? Maureen Dowd’s other approach.

Flikr photos by color.  I played with this for over an hour!

Inappropriate book cover swap.

The Muppets go noir.

Explore the Dubai boom.

My favorite building in NYC.

What is your hue IQ?

The vanishing night.

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Ashley- Intern Extraordinaire

It is estimated that 1-3% of young adult women and one tenth that number of men suffer from the eating disorder bulimia nervosa, which involves binge eating followed by purging and feelings of guilt and shame. The goal of treatment is to unearth the factors that trigger such a disorder. The Treatments That Work series offers effective ways to combat various medical issues, and in Overcoming Your Eating Disorder: Workbook, by Robin F. Apple and W. Stewart Agras, patients are presented with ways to conquer bulimia nervosa and binge-eating disorders. The following excerpt talks about keeping a Daily Food Record, a method that allows patients to connect what they eat with how they feel.

Common Concerns About Keeping Records

Despite the value and usefulness of keeping food records, it is not uncommon to be somewhat hesitant about self-monitoring.

Perhaps you have used food records previously and were unsuccessful. Even if prior attempts to record your eating were ineffective, we encourage you to give record keeping another chance! We expect that you will find food records helpful when used as part of this treatment…

Maybe you think that closer examination of your eating problems will only make matters worse. You may feel that you already spend too much time thinking about eating anyway. But there are many reasons for becoming even more vigilant about your eating, particularly when your goal is to improve it. As explained, the process of keeping track of your eating, and also the product of record keeping (a long-term food diary) can bring substantial benefits. When you monitor your own eating behavior, you become more ware of the context in which your eating problems occur, particularly the thoughts, feelings, and situations that place you at “high risk” for binge eating and purging. By noting the association between these types of factors and the occurrence of binge-eating episodes, you will be better able to identify and anticipate these difficult, triggering situations and to work out strategies for avoiding or responding differently to them. Retrospectively, you will be able to learn from past problems and successes with your eating by reviewing the contexts in which these types of eating episodes tended to occur and the coping strategies you attempted to implement. Noting long-term patterns will help you view your eating problems as more predictable and controllable…

The Importance of Timely Recording

Many individuals with bulimia or binge-eating disorder often acknowledge having a poor memory for the details of their binge episodes. They commonly describe “spacing out” while eating; even those who remain “aware” tend to reconstruct their eating patterns in a manner that reflects a global, overly negative, and black-and-white thinking style (e.g., overestimating the amount of food consumed, exaggerating its effect on their body weight and shape, viewing any departure from rigid rules about what should and should not be eaten as gross violations, and interpreting a small overindulgence as having “ruined” the whole day). For these reasons, we recommend that the most effective strategy for recording food intake is to do so at the time of or as soon as possible after eating. The advantages to this are considerable. First, the information obtained is most accurate and least vulnerable to distortion or poor memory. Second, the food record, when used in this fashion, can serve as a tool for planning meals and snacks in advance. When used in this way, the Daily Food Record can actually prevent or reduce the extent of overeating and purging by fostering a sense of commitment to sticking with a regular eating pattern and healthy food selections. Third, looking back over your records can help correct the types of perceptual distortions just described (e.g., the sense that you overate or “blew it,” without actual data to support that feeling or impression). Reviewing your food record daily may help you stay focused on the positive, reminding you that you are still on track, even when you are ready to give up. Likewise, an accumulation of food records over time will provide data about your rate of progress and level of improvement during the course of treatment.

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As much as we love spending all day reading the OUPBlog we recognize that there is other great content out there.  For example the Ryder Cup Greats on the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.  From the 19th to 21st of September golfers from the United States and Europe battle it out for the Ryder Cup, the sport’s most prestigious team competition. The cup is named after Samuel Ryder, an English seed merchant and passionate amateur player, who funded an international match between British and American professionals in 1926 and sponsored a regular tournament from the following year.

To mark this year’s contest the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography has picked two teams of Ryder Cup greats active from the 1930s to the present day, and drawn from the Oxford DNB, American National Biography, and Who’s Who.  Check it out!

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To Lead the World: American Strategy after the Bush Doctrine edited by Melvyn P. Leffler and Jeffrey W. Legro brings together America’s most esteemed writers and thinkers to offer concrete, historically grounded suggestions for how America can regain its standing in the world and use its power more wisely than it has during the Bush years. In the excerpt from the introduction to To Lead the World below, Leffler and Legro explain exactly what the Bush doctrine is, a short lesson that could have benefited Sarah Palin last week when she was interviewed by Charlie Gibson.

The administration of George W. Bush published two national strategy statements. The first statement, issued in September 2002, aroused enormous controversy, and the second did not flinch from its predecessor’s most controversial propositions. The strategy appeared to be a radical departure from the policies that had defined America’s approach to world affairs throughout the cold war and beyond. Seemingly abandoning containment, deterrence, and a reliance on collective action, the Bush strategy called for a policy of unilateral action and preventive war: “Given the goals of rogue states and terrorists, the United States can no longer rely on a reactive posture as we have in the past. The inability to deter a potential attacker, the immediacy of today’s threats, and the magnitude of potential harm that could be caused by our adversaries’ choice of weapons, do not permit that option. We cannot permit our enemies to strike first.”

The emphasis on a unilateral, preemptive initiative shaped the administration’s reactions to the terrorist attacks of 9/11. President Bush and his advisers decided to destroy the Taliban government in Afghanistan, which had provided shelter to the al Qaeda movement, and to overthrow the government of Saddam Hussein in Iraq for supposedly developing weapons of mass destruction and conspiring with terrorists to attack the United States and its allies. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq form the core of the war on terror. They have consumed thousands of American lives, probably hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan lives, and vast sums of money, likely to exceed a trillion dollars by the end of the decade. They are worth the cost, says President George W. Bush, if they will contribute to a safer, more peaceful world, conducive to the spread of freedom and democracy.

More than any president in recent history, President Bush has defined the nation’s security in terms of the promotion of freedom around the world. All people, he stresses, want freedom. And freedom everywhere, he claims, is essential for the safety of the United States. “The survival of liberty in our land,” he stated in his second inaugural address, “increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.” America’s principles, according to Bush, should shape U.S. decisions on international cooperation, foreign assistance, and the allocation of resources.

Bush’s strategy statements contain much more than platitudes about the value of human freedom and dignity. They outline policies that go far beyond the emphasis on unilateral, preemptive military action. Focusing considerable attention on the advantages of an open international economy, they espouse the importance of global economic growth through free markets and free trade. They stress the importance of disseminating the rule of law, promoting sound fiscal, tax, and financial policies, and nurturing investments in health and education. They state that fighting poverty is a “moral imperative,” and they envision doubling the size of the world’s poorest economies within a decade. Fighting disease, they acknowledge, is as important as fighting poverty; indeed, it is a key to fighting poverty. And notwithstanding the emphasis placed on anticipatory unilateral action, the administration’s strategy statements acknowledge the importance of strengthening ties with partners, energizing alliances in Asia, and building and expanding NATO.

However comprehensive the strategy statements have been, the war on terror and the struggles in Iraq and Afghanistan have consumed the attention of the administration and its critics. In the past few years, book after book has appeared discussing the shortsightedness and ineptitude of the administration’s actions in Iraq. So vast is this literature and so focused has been the administration’s defense of its actions in Iraq that most of us have lost sight of the larger issues of national security. Yet the larger context is essential for evaluating the merits of the case in Iraq. Probing questions have arisen about the centrality of that conflict for the war on terror in general. And even more fundamental inquiries have arisen about the logic of a war on terror when some commentators maintain that the threat has been hugely exaggerated, that the concept itself—a war on terror—unwisely conflates terrorist groups, and that it makes little sense because terror is a tactic, not an adversary. And in its second term, the Bush administration itself appears to have backed away in practice from the defining traits of its doctrine such as preventive action, unilateralism, and aggressive democratization. The puzzle that faces America is: what should come next?

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Following from Thomas Dixon’s previous very popular post for OUPblog, he has very kindly agreed to write another article for us. Here he reflects on the recent interviews conducted with the two Presidential hopefuls at the Saddleback ‘Civil Forum on the Presidency’ in terms of Christianity as an altruistic or individualistic faith. Thomas Dixon is Senior Lecturer in History at Queen Mary, University of London, and is the author of Science and Religion: A Very Short Introduction and The Invention of Altruism.

There has been an outbreak of altruism in the race for US President. During interviews with the influential evangelical pastor Rick Warren at the Saddleback ‘Civil Forum on the Presidency’, Barack Obama and John McCain spoke about their selfless motives for seeking to become the most powerful man on earth. Both Presidential candidates had done their homework. They knew what their interviewer and his congregation wanted to hear. Warren’s multi-million-selling book, The Purpose Driven Life, begins with the words, ‘This is not about you.’

Whether Christianity is in fact a religion of altruism, rather than individualism, is an interesting question. Historically both believers and skeptics have recognized the self-interested character of Christian teaching. When Jesus told the rich young man to sell all he had and give it to the poor, this was for the good of the young man – so that he would have ‘riches in heaven’ – rather than for the good of the poor. Oscar Wilde approvingly described Jesus as ‘the first individualist in history’. And Obama and McCain both told Rick Warren that being a Christian meant that they were, as individuals, saved from their sins, forgiven, redeemed. But the keynote of the Saddleback Forum, reflecting Warren’s own interpretation of Christianity, was self-denial rather than self-fulfillment, sacrifice rather than salvation.

So, how do the two candidates’ versions of Christian altruism compare? John McCain, whose sacrifices in Vietnam are well known, stated he wanted to ‘inspire a generation of Americans to serve a cause greater than their self-interest’. He wants Americans to ‘put their country first’. He also suggested that throughout their history ‘Americans have gone to all four corners of the world and shed blood in defense of someone else’s freedom’, and contrasted this with Russia’s allegedly self-interested pursuit of energy through its campaign in Georgia. This is implausible. American and Russian foreign policy are both clearly driven by national self-interest, and by the need to secure access to energy.

In fact, McCain’s ideology is a classic example of what scientists call ‘in-group altruism’ combined with ‘out-group hostility’. McCain’s Christian love does not extend to America’s enemies: ‘If I have to follow him to the gates of hell, I will get bin Laden and bring him to justice.’ His criterion for risking American troops is not actually the defense of someone else’s freedom, but ‘when American national security interests are threatened’. And even in terms of domestic policy, McCain has not forgotten about individual self-interest altogether: ‘I want everyone to get rich. I don’t believe in class warfare or redistribution of the wealth.’

Obama, in contrast, favors higher taxes for the wealthy and empathy with the poor. His mother had always told him, he said, when he had been mean to anyone, to ‘imagine standing in their shoes, imagine looking through their eyes.’ This principle of empathy, he said, was what had ‘made America special’. ‘I think about my grandparents’ generation’, he went on, ‘coming out of the Depression, fighting World War Two. They were confronted with some challenges we can’t even imagine. If they were willing to make sacrifices on our behalf’, he concluded, ‘we should be able to make some sacrifices on behalf of the next generation.’

While McCain envisaged Americans exchanging self-interest for national interest, Obama seemed to be thinking of something a little broader – the responsibility of the current generation of humanity to the next. Obama’s echoing of the gospel precept, ‘whatever you do for the least of my brothers you do for me’, also had a different ring from McCain’s wish for everyone to get richer.

The advice Obama got from his mother immediately reminded me of one of the humorist Jack Handey’s aphorisms: ‘Before you criticize someone’, Handey said, ‘you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you do criticize them, you’ll be a mile away and you’ll have their shoes.’ Handey’s surrealism hints at a serious point – altruism and empathy are often little more than an attractive veneer for low cunning and self-interest. Altruism is a favorite topic with scientists too. Whether they worry about the fact that we are driven by ‘selfish genes’ against which we need to rebel, as Richard Dawkins suggested in the 1970s, or think that altruism is in fact a ‘blessed misfiring’ that is built into those genes, as Richard Dawkins now maintains, no-one doubts that we all have evolved the ability to do good both for others and for ourselves. What is less obvious is whether it is better, overall, for me to pursue my own interest, on the theory that my health and happiness will be indirectly good for others too, or better for me to pursue the good of those others directly. The former is McCain’s favored approach, the latter Obama’s.

Although Presidential candidates’ paeans to self-sacrifice and altruism may ring hollow, perhaps politicians are simply telling us what we want to hear – that we, like them, are motivated by a humanitarian love of others, not a selfish love of lower taxes or cheaper energy. Voters may be happy to accept this sort of flattery but I think they should pause when they hear politicians celebrating self-sacrifice – whether in the alleged interest of America or of the wider world – and ask themselves what price they and others are really being asked to pay, and for whose ultimate good. It is because it sounds so wholesome that altruism can be such a dangerous ideology.

You can read a full transcript of Rick Warren’s interviews with Barack Obama and John McCain, which took place on 16 August 2008, on the CNN website.

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Today every English-speaker probably knows pinkie “little finger,” but it is amazing how little is said about it in the OED. The word appears in the entry pinkie “anything small, specifically little finger,” with the first example going back to 1808. The Century Dictionary (an American product) does not feature it at all, and this is even more surprising. Yet pinkie was discussed in Notes and Queries in 1872-1873, recurred there in 1916, made its way into dialectal and slang dictionaries, and in the thirties of the 20^th century prompted Frank H. Vizetelly, the editor of the rubric “The Lexicographer’s Easy Chair” in The Literary Digest (I wrote about him about two years ago; sometimes he called his rubric “The Lexicographer’s Uneasy Chair”) answer questions about its origin at least twice. Those who dealt with pinkie invariably noted that it had come to English from the Netherlands and that in a new home it settled in Scotland and the United States. The word’s provenance has never been called into question; yet there is more to it than meets the eye. The meaning of the allusion to the eye will be revealed below.

Pink and pinky ~ pinkie designate all kinds of diminutive things. Among others, there is a fishing boat called this, but whether the reference is to the vessel’s small size is a matter of debate. The verb pink means “pierce” (the other senses are extensions of the main one), and the idea of piercing and pricking (whence small holes and narrow slits) seems to underlie most of the words spelled pink and their neighbors on the dictionary page. Dutch has the verb pinken “to blink, wink,” and in Standard English the adjective pink “half-shut” was common not too long ago, as follows from the song in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra II: 7, 121: “Come, thou monarch of the vine,/ Plumpy Bacchus, with pink eyne!” (eyne “eyes”). Engl. dialectal pink-eyed “having narrow or half-closed eyes” corresponds to late Middle Dutch pinck oogen “small eyes.”

We find an assortment of short and sharp things called pink in both Dutch and Frisian, for instance, little finger, a sausage, gut, and penis. Old Engl. pynca (pinca) meant “point,” and it has been suggested that the flower pink owes its name to the delicately cut, or pinked, edges of the petals. If so, the color pink would be a derivative of that name. Pinch, punch, pin, and pen are of Romance origin, but all of them resemble pink. Those interested in the Romance part of the story will find many interesting things in etymological entries on puncheon, pungent, punctual (punctilio, punctuate, etc.), and point, as well as on Italian pinco “a small fishing boat,” “penis.” The sound complex pink seems to suggest a jabbing movement and the impression it makes on the ear. Old Engl. pyncan had the doublet pyngan, and Modern Engl. ping expresses an abrupt ringing sound, whereas the verb pink imitates the note of the chaffinch. Such words can be expected to emerge anywhere at any time, and this circumstance makes it hard to decide how they are related across the Germanic-Romance border. To exacerbate matters (as highbrows like to say), Indo-European makes wide use of the so-called infix n. Pink looks like a “nasalized” variant of pick, a twin of French piquet. Since a pick is a pointed tool, and to pick means “to probe with a pointed instrument,” from an etymological perspective the difference between pick and pink almost disappears. The relation between pick- and pink- is the same as between dick- (as in dicky bird) and dink- (as in dinky ~ dinkey). Even for “penis” we find pink (see above) alongside Engl. dick. The d- words also mean “something small.”

Pinkie “a small sharp thing” contrasts nicely with thumb, whose root is the same as in thousand and tumor (“to swell”); thus, “a thick, swollen object.” As is well-known, p in Latin and other Indo-European non-Germanic languages corresponds to f in Germanic (the anthologized example is Latin pater ~ Engl. father). Strange things happen in the closest surroundings of pinkie. The Proto-Indo-European form of the numeral five is usually reconstructed as penkwe. Its resemblance to pinkie is striking, and pinkie is indeed the fifth finger, if the counting begins with the thumb. But, given the correspondence p ~ f, pinkie should have become finkie!

Europe has not been inhabited by the Indo-Europeans forever. The most ancient languages of those who lived in the country we today call the Netherlands are lost, but their remnants in Modern Dutch (and, by implication, perhaps in Frisian) could have survived, and scholars vie with one another in trying to unearth them. The language that existed before it was submerged by that of the newcomers is called substrate. Substrate words may give themselves away by not conforming to regular sound correspondences. If pinkie is one of them, its initial p- finds an explanation. However, it would be rash to ascribe great antiquity to pinkie, which, after all, may be a sound symbolic word nurtured by North Germanic soil.

A near doublet of the nonexistent finkie is finger. Is finger related to that ghost? Finger, though recorded in all the Old Germanic languages, has doubtful antecedents. I doubt that it is allied to German fangen “catch, seize, grasp,” for nothing can be grabbed by one finger. Its kinship with the reconstructed penque should not be dismissed out of hand, so to speak. Yet here too one wonders why the word for an individual finger should have been associated with “five.” (An unquestionable congener of five is fist, which once had n after the vowel, and this connection makes sense.) Fingers are for fingering, and I find realistic the suggestion that in the Germanic word we have a nasalized variant of the root present in German ficken (that is, a form with the infix n, as above), a cognate of the Engl. F-word, whose initial meaning is “to move back and forth.” Be that as it may, pinkie does not seem to be related to either the numeral five or the noun finger. One thing is clear: pinkie is a loan from Dutch, originally a provincialism, now part of the standard language. In Dutch it is, in all probability, an expressive word, like many others of a similar phonetic shape in Germanic and Romance.

A good deal of folklore is connected with pinkies almost all over Europe. In the Midland counties of England boys link their little fingers and say: “Ring finger, blue bell, / Tell a lie, go to hell,” after which, if either failed to perform, the little finger would be sure to divulge (recorded in 1873). This incantation has many variants, for instance: “Pinky, pinky bow bell,/ Whosoever tells a lie/ Will sink down to the bad place/ And never rise up again.” In Russia, only girls interlock the little finger of each other’s right hand and repeat: “Peace, peace forever/ Quarrel, quarrel never.” Unfortunately, even the most powerful charm will not help us guess the exact origin of pinkie.

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There was a recent story about a government agency trying to balance protection of a heard of wild horses with protection of lots of other things these horses eat and step on as they roam around between Montana and California.

One of the management measures being considered is to cull the herd; there are tens of thousands of them out there.

In the article I saw the following sentence appeared:

[for some] euthanasia as a solution remains anathema.

As a word anathema is one that I’ve never fully taken onboard.  I hear people use it, and I know it means “something bad” but somehow I don’t feel like I know the word well enough to actually use it myself.

I mean is it really anathema or is it an athema?

Should I be saying “kicking the dog is an anathema” or “kicking the dog is anathema”?

No one tells you these things, it’s like you have to figure them out for yourself.

So in preparing for this episode I thought I’d do a public service in finding answers to these burning questions.

I peeked into a couple of English usage texts and got no help. So I resorted to looking at examples.

In an English corpus database I use I found that 10% of usage was an anathema.  The remaining 90% said kicking the dog was anathema—well, not exactly but you know what I mean.

As far as breaking anathema into two words an athema well, nobody does that; I must be the only one dumb enough to think it might have been that way.

So now that I’ve educated myself, here’s the etymology.

A long long time ago the roots of this word were Indo-European and meant “to put,” or “to put up” or even “to hang up.”

As time went on important things were put up, and in trying to please the gods it was critical to offer up things of value.  This is where the word roots emerged in ancient Greek.

So back there at first anathema was a good thing. It was something worshiped or venerated and offered to the gods.

The Oxford English Dictionary has the original Greek translated as “a thing devoted.”

But all too often the things being given in offering to the gods were sheep and goats and the like.

Maybe just like people now don’t want those horses killed, somewhere back in pre-Roman Greek times people started thinking dead animals, and death in particular wasn’t such a good thing.

So anathema, that had been good, started to be bad.

And so it passed into Latin and then much later into English in the 1500s.

Because the 1500s was a time when intellectuals thought Greek and Latin were “the greatest” both the good and the bad meanings were adopted by different English intellectuals (the OED has citations for both).

The “bad” more specifically relate to excommunication and being cursed and that’s the one that stuck.

A 2007 OED draft addition to the entry on anathema gives as the current definition “loathsome” and “repugnant.”

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Paul R. Abramson is one of the world’s most eminent scientists in the field of human sexuality. He is Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles and a former editor of the Journal of Sex Research . He has been a technical advisor to the World Health Organization’s Global Program on AIDS and is the author of six books, including Sexual Nature, Sexual Culture and Sarah: A Sexual Biography . Steven D. Pinkerton recently received a doctorate in psychology from the University of California, Los Angeles. Dr. Pinkerton has written extensively in the areas of human sexuality and AIDS prevention and is presently pursuing a broad research agenda in psychology and the behavioral sciences as a post-doctoral fellow at UCLA. Together they are the authors of With Pleasure: Thoughts on the Nature of Human Sexuality which argues that human sexuality cannot be understood if its significance is limited to reproduction alone. The authors posit that in humans reproduction itself occurs as a byproduct of pleasure–not the other way around–and that it is the strong drive for pleasure that makes people overcome many obstacles–and even life-threatening dangers such as AIDS–to have sex. In the excerpt below we learn how “sexual pleasure” is defined.

What is sexual pleasure? Unfortunately, the concept denoted here by “sexual pleasure” is a rather slippery creature, weighted down by considerable pop psychological baggage, and subject to cross-cultural and
cross-historical variation. Nevertheless, it is desirable to have some definition of this concept, however inexact, to provide an anchor for subsequent discussions. With this in mind, we offer the following very simple (and regrettably vague) definition: Sexual pleasure consists of those positively valued feelings induced by sexual stimuli. Notice that this conceptualization encompasses a broad range of sexual pleasures, from the soothing sensations of sensual massage, to the explosion of feeling that accompanies orgasm.

Although the positive sensations we are calling sexual pleasure can be evoked, to some extent, by erotic thoughts, fantasies, and direct neural stimulation, we assume here for the sake of simplicity that stimulation of the genitals, breasts, or other relevant body parts (i.e., the erogenous zones) is necessary to initiate these feelings. According to this simplified model, the experience of sexual pleasure begins when the skin receptors in one or more erogenous zones are stimulated, and ends with a positive evaluation within the brain that the sensations experienced are indeed both pleasurable and sexual in nature. The interpretive function of the brain in the experience of sexual pleasure cannot be overemphasized. The sensory signals arriving at the brain following stimulation of an erogenous zone are not inherently pleasurable, or even inherently sexual. Instead, interpretation of these signals by the brain is required for the impinging sensations to be recognized as sexually pleasurable. It is this interpretive stage that admits the profound influences of culture and context in the experience of sexual pleasure. With regard to context, it is often claimed that sex isn’t really sex for a prostitute plying her trade; sex with a lover, however, is an entirely different matter.

A rather extreme example of the pervasive influence of culture is provided by the Manus, a pre-World War II society in Papua New Guinea. Among the sex-negative Manus: Intercourse between husband and wife was considered to be sinful or degrading, and was undertaken only in strict secrecy. Women considered coitus to be an abomination which they had to endure, even painfully, until they produced a child.

Unfortunately, the definition of sexual pleasure provided here neglects several of its more salient aspects, including the pleasure of giving pleasure. For example, in the butch/femme lesbian culture of the 1940s and 1950s, the butch partner often derived her greatest erotic satisfaction from pleasuring her femme counterpart, “if I could give her satisfaction to the highest, that’s what gave me satisfaction”; in such stereotyped role playing it was neither expected nor desired that the femme should reciprocate. This does not mean, however, that the butch’s pleasure necessarily lacked a physical component. According to Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline Davis: Many butches were and remain spontaneously orgasmic. Their excitement level peaks to orgasm when they make love orally or digitally to a woman. The nature of this orgasm is unclear. Some describe it as physical, while others think it is mental.

The popular 1993 film, The Crying Game,18 can be used to illustrate one of the main aspects of our conception of sexual pleasure—namely, the interpretive role of the mind. Politics and mayhem notwithstanding, this Academy Award-winning film’s plot follows the basic modern love story, up to a point. Thus, boy meets girl, boy falls in love with girl, boy and girl decide to have sex. But then, in the pivotal sex scene, the boy discovers—much to his dismay—that the girl is really a guy, penis and all. The boy responds by vomiting uncontrollably. Why? Wasn’t the boy in love (or at least in lust)? And wasn’t he also highly aroused sexually? So what triggered his disgust? Presumably, his reaction sprang from his brain rather than his heart. Despite his intense attraction and physiological arousal, this encounter was no longer interpreted as heterosex, but was instead homosex. Even with love and lust, the circumstances were no longer acceptable, and, therefore, no longer arousing to him.

As conceptualized here, sexual pleasure encompasses a loosely defined collection of physiological and psychological responses. Physiologically, it appears that the capacity for sexual pleasure is “hardwired” in the sense that it constitutes an innate and universal aspect of human sexual anatomy. However, like any intrinsic characteristic, sexual pleasure is moderated by and unfolds within a particular physical and cultural milieu. It is therefore subject to the cultural vagaries of permissibility and restriction that influence both the overt expression and subjective experience of sexual pleasure.

Even if the capacity for sexual pleasure is innate, and in some sense “basic” for the human species, one might argue that pleasure is secondary to procreation (or reproduction). This is certainly true for the
“lower” species of mammals, which, if they experience pleasure at all, are nonetheless restricted sexually to the reproductively fertile estrus periods of the female. For these animals, sexual pleasure (if it exists) is clearly subservient to reproduction. With the primates, however, one begins to see a bifurcation in the functional meaning of sex. Although the reproductive cycle of many nonhuman primates remains at least
partially bound to hormones, sexuality is no longer entirely restricted by the female cycle.

In humans the divergence of the reproductive and the nonreproductive is even more striking. Essentially free of the hormonal regulation of sexual desire, women can—and do—engage in sex at any time in their cycle, irrespective of fertility status. For men and women, pleasure is not dependent on fecundity. Sexual desire is evident in postmenopausal women and in prepubescent children of both sexes. Furthermore, human sexual anatomy is specialized for pleasure no less than procreation. The sole function of the clitoris, for example, is the generation of pleasure. Pleasure, not reproduction, also provides the most parsimonious explanation of the presence of numerous nonobvious erogenous zones, such as ears, toes, and the backs of kneecaps. Similarly, the wide variation in sexual practices observed across cultures, and even within cultures, is largely inexplicable within a reproductively oriented explanatory framework. Psychologically, pleasure drives the human desire for sex, and also provides the foundation for ancillary sexual functions, such as emotional bonding. In sum, the evidence suggests that the pleasurable and procreative aspects of human sexuality are conceptually, anatomically, and psychologically distinct.

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