Of Language

Psychopath or Sociopath?

2010-08-26T12:23:00.010+01:00

I was having a conversation on philosophy in a park in Birmingham the other day (yes I know, both random and pretentious!) and it somehow came to light that neither I nor my friend know the difference between a psychopath and a sociopath. If you are wondering what that has to do with philosophy I can't actually remember to be honest, but it's one of those things which I have always wondered and never bothered to find out. So I thought I would make the effort to actually do some research.

As always my starting point is the dictionary, I don't have access at the moment to my OED, however according to Merriam Webster online (which seems to be one of the more reliable of the online free dictionaries, albeit in American English so with different spellings) psychopathic behaviour is: of, related to or characterised by psychopathy or antisocial personality disorder (of which more later). For sociopathic meanwhile they have: of, relating to or characterised by asocial or antisocial behaviour or exhibiting antisocial personality disorder. So far so very similar.

The history of these words is brief at best. Psychopath is a back formation from psychopathic and is recorded from 1885, psychopathic dates from 1847 and is from the German psychopatisch from the Greek psykhe (mind) + pathos (suffering). Sociopath was coined in 1930 by a psychologist named G.E. Partridge on the model of psychopath. The socio part is from the Latin socius meaning companion or associate which is where we get all of our social and socio words from.

Antisocial Behaviour Disorder is a condition characterised by a persistent disregard for and violation of the feelings and rights of others that lasts into adulthood. This last is very important as reading the list of behaviours associated with the disorder is quite like reading a worst case scenario of teenage behaviour, this list includes failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviour; deceitfulness, lying or conning others; impulsive behaviour and failure to plan ahead; irritability and aggressiveness; disregard for the safety of others; consistent irresponsibility and lack of remorse for the above behaviours. In order to be diagnosed with ABD the individual must have displayed some form of delinquency prior to the age of 15 and three or more of the behaviours on the list, as I already said they must also be over 18 which is just as well as being a teenager is hard enough. It is interesting though how closely teenage behaviour can match the diagnosis of a psychopath, the power of hormones!

Other behaviours closely associated with psychopaths are an ability to smooth talk, charm or manipulate; a parasitic nature, living off of others and emotional poverty, an inability to form lasting relationships with other people.

Most of the definitions I found of sociopath were very similar to those of psychopath: inability to conform to society, lack of regard for others and it is also closely associated with ABD. When they are directly compared the main difference between psychopath and sociopath tends to be given as the ability for psychopaths to at least appear to fit into society, they tend to be more organised and able to socialise than sociopaths (and yes Rache, that is exactly the opposite of what I thought, you were totally right!), however there is no one definition of either out there and no checklist of the differences. Probably this is down to the inevitably unquantifiable nature of psychology, people are individuals and therefore people's psychological conditions are never going to be exactly the same making a precise definition of either psychopath or sociopath impossible.

All of this does rather beg the question of why we use the term sociopath at all? It seems a bit surplus to requirements given that we already have the terms psychopath and Antisocial Behavioural Disorder to describe people with these behaviours and characteristics.

The answer as to why may lie in sociology rather than psychology. From what I can find on the subject a sociologist would claim that there is no such thing as a psychopath, that people with ABD are sociopaths as they display behaviours resulting directly from their social experiences. People who, due to poor parenting, opportunity or lack of socialisation, have not been properly indoctrinated into our society and so act outside of social norms. So to sociologists we are all born with the potential for sociopathic behaviour and we have this potential socialised out of us if we are lucky and reinforced and exacerbated if we are not.

Psychopaths are not necessarily murderers despite the common associations between psychopathic personalities and, in particular, serial killers. They are always associated with delinquent behaviours and are often very manipulative people who are dangerous to know, but inevitably the most famous examples are always the serial killers. People like Charles Manson who manipulated his followers into murdering others, Aileen “Lee” Carol Wuornos who robbed and murdered truckers, and Ted Bundy who murdered 30 girls over a 4 year period. Interestingly all 3 of these could arguably fit the sociological definition of sociopathy as a result of societal neglect. They were all victims of childhood neglect and abuse and so it could be argued that they were all in fact sociopaths.

Just to add to the confusion on the subject, I have seen Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin being given as famous examples of sociopaths. Given the lack of a clear division between the two conditions (and my lack of any kind of qualification in the field) I can't say that they were not, but it seems to me that both of these men might have been more likely to be psychopaths given that they were able to manipulate, control and often to charm people while showing complete disregard for others. I wonder whether the fact that they controlled whole societies has something to do with the diagnosis of Sociopath.

As far as I can tell there is no handy definition for either psychopath or sociopath, and perhaps my initial surprise at this hints at overindulgence in TV cop dramas, but given the unquantifiable nature of the human mind this really shouldn't be a shock. In any case I think it is fair to say that these are not people you would wish to know, although given that some psychopaths can blend into society and avoid detection it is very possible that you do.

Photo by Bob Jagendorf

Pardon My French

2010-07-04T12:32:00.003+01:00

I should start with a warning for those of a sensitive disposition I suppose. There are a lot of potentially offensive words coming up, so if you don't like swearing or the subjects which swear words tend to represent (that is bodily functions, sex and sexual organs) then perhaps give this post a miss...

For those of a more robust constitution the reason for the title of this post is that I find it rather interesting that we English people use this expression. It seems strange that we insist upon foisting the blame for our foul language onto the French. Post 1066 the French language had a massive influence on English and a large proportion of our words come from French. One group of words which seem to have largely escaped this influence however are the words which we use when we wish to swear.

I suppose that sociologically this makes sense, if the French language was used by aristocracy and the upper classes then it would be more likely that the English words used by the poorer classes would acquire negative connotations and become taboo, however this is purely speculation on my part and is not based on any actual research.

The general consensus on why we use the expression is simple hostility towards the French and a basic desire amongst English speakers to palm off anything considered distasteful or rude onto them, as with french letters (condoms) and french leave (going AWOL). You can see a similarly xenophobic attitude toward other countries England has had regular wars with in the expressions dutch courage and to welsh on a deal.

So what of the words themselves? As I already mentioned, they are fairly easily categorised, to my previous list you could add blasphemous swear words. In English these tend to be considered relatively mild these days, words such as damn and hell are not likely to raise an eyebrow in most circumstances, although in the middle of a church related gathering they could still be considered a little inappropriate.

This leaves us with my previous list of sex, sexual organs and bodily functions. The BBC has a list of their top 25 taboo words which also includes words of discrimination which cause offence, such as spastic and nigger, but to my mind these are offensive insults not swear words. I am well aware that this is a random and personal division, but both language and blogging are fairly random and personal so I am not going to be discussing these words today.

Worst of the worst in terms of social acceptability is the word cunt. This is probably the only swear word which is still not used regularly on post watershed television. It is also the only one which has a genuine capacity to shock when used in public, although I think it is becoming more acceptable. Certainly it is a word which I hear used more regularly by my peers than I did 5 or 6 years ago. Cunt is a slang word for female genitalia, and it's origins are not entirely clear. One thing we can be fairly certain of though is that it is not French. It may have its origins in the Old Norse kunta, itself from the Proto - Germanic kunton, both of which also meant female genitalia. It is also possible that it has its origins in the Latin word cuneus meaning wedge.

The first known usages of cunt in English are from around 1230 in the name Gropecunt Lane: streets in both Oxford and London where prostitutes could be found. Given its appearance in both cities and the fact that the name seems to have been used as a form of advertising, or at the very least a very literal description of the services on offer, it would appear that the word had already been in common usage for a while at this point. Its use also points to the fact that this word had yet to acquire a taboo status, it would be unthinkable to intentionally insert the word cunt into a street name today. Cunt only started to be considered taboo in the 15th century when people began to avoid using it in public. By the 17th century it had acquired its status as an obscene word, and to the Victorians, for whom an ankle on show was too much like promiscuity, it came to be known as the monosyllable.

The monosyllabic nature of many English swear words is one of the great things about them. It makes it easy to spit them out vehemently, you can really mean them. Fuck! Shit! Crap! and Cunt! are all great examples. Although perhaps it's what you're used to, the French seem to do well with putain (whore) and the Polish with kurwah (also whore) still, I'm glad of the abundance of single syllable profanities in English.

Before I move on to another word, one interesting little swear word we have in English is berk. This is considered to be a mild and often affectionate insult roughly meaning idiot. Most people don't seem to realise (or choose to ignore) that it originated in the rhyming slang for cunt, Berkshire hunt.

Probably the most offensive of the male genitalia swear words is bollocks. This is from the Old English beallucas (testicles) and can be used to express frustration (bollocks!) or to dismiss something (that's a load of bollocks). The other contender is cock, the history of this word is fairly simple. It originates in the Old English word cocc which was used as a nickname for someone who strutted around like a cock (the bird) it was used in this sense up until the 1500's. Cock probably developed its usage as an insult from this usage and separately from its more recent meaning of penis which developed around 1610, although the word pillicock meaning penis is recorded from around 1300.

Over in sex category the f word is the clear winner in terms of offensive impact. Fuck is of uncertain origin probably because it has been considered a profanity from it's earliest use and so does not appear in very much published material. It is first recorded in 1503 in the form fukkit, while in its original form it first appears in a satirical poem of 1535. The most likely etymology seems to be from Scandinavia via Scotland as it is cognate with words in several Germanic languages including Norwegian dialectal fukka (copulate) and Swedish dialectal focka (copulate, strike, push) and fock (penis). There is a hint that the word fuck was once considered to be acceptable: there is a record from 1278 of a man with the name John Le Fucker, a bit of a worry given the fashion of the time to name people after their professions...

In the bodily functions camp the obvious winner is shit. Shit has a long history, it is from the Old English word scitan which itself is from the Proto - Germanic skit which meant split, divide or separate. Scitan was a verb and used in the sense of to separate, the noun scitte only took on its modern meaning of excrement around the 1580's and almost immediately became taboo. It was considered to be very offensive by the early 1600's Shakespeare who did on occasion use risque words never used shit and the word continued to be heavily censored right up until the 1970's when it was still being left out of some dictionaries (notably Websters).

While shit has its roots in Proto - Germanic, crap is from Latin, specifically crappa (chaff - as in the waste product of wheat) from this you get the Old French crappe (siftings) recorded in Middle English as crappe (grain that was trodden underfoot in a barn or chaff) around the mid 15th century. This meaning of waste product then attached itself to excrement. Finally one we can legitimately blame on the French!

Back with the list from the BBC I was surprised to see that their second most offensive word was motherfucker, partly because it's not the most common of swearwords here (too many syllables and sounds a bit awkward without an American accent) and partly because I would have expected shit and fuck to beat it. It is a word of African American origin and became well known in Europe during WWII as a result of its use by GIs. I have read that it originated with African slaves who used the term for slave owners who slept with their mothers, however this doesn't seem to be a well known theory.

As insults go the most commonly used swear words are probably bastard and bitch, these are used in a roughly similar way for the two genders but they have very different histories.

Bastard is the other word I found for which we can use the expression pardon my French. It is from the Old French word bastard (acknowledged child of a nobleman by a woman other than his wife) and is probably from fils de bast (a child conceived on a saddle - often used as an improvised bed while travelling). It wasn't always used as an insult, it could be advantageous to be a bastard child as it meant you were the child of a noble even if you didn't have a claim to a title. William the Conqueror was referred to in state documents as William the Bastard. The word has been used as a term of abuse for men since at least the 1830's but probably much earlier than this, as a swear word it was unlikely to have appeared much in print, but it is reasonable to assume that illegitimacy is something which could have been used as an insult from the earliest times, especially when used to suggest a noble didn't have the right to a title that he claimed.

Bitch meanwhile is from the Old English bicce (female dog) which is probably from the Old Norse bikkjuna (female dog, fox or wolf). It was applied to women as a word of contempt from the 1400's and as a development from this usage, as a sexually contemptuous term for men from the 1990's.

Swearing is a subject which could fill several books (and in fact has filled several books), I have only picked a few of the words which I consider to be the most useful in day to day life, there are plenty which I haven't mentioned not least the ones derived from religion and blasphemy. These words deserve a post to themselves, however I am mentioning them again as it is from the use of blasphemy as profanity that we derive the words we commonly associate with bad language.

The word profanity is from the idea of profaning the lord, from the Old Testament. Swear is from the Proto - Germanic swarjanan the root of which is the word swer (to speak or say). The Old English swerian (to take an oath) had by around 1430 developed the secondary meaning of using bad language, this meaning developed from the idea of swearing as invoking sacred names, presumably because people did so at inappropriate times. Curse is from the Old English verb cursian from which we get the late Old English curs (a prayer that evil or harm befalls someone). By the 1300's this meaning had developed to include language considered rude or offensive.

I am a big fan of swearing, Obviously there is a time and a place and it is always worth considering how other people are going to react, but to my mind a well timed swear word is a beautiful thing. We should reclaim our profanities from the French and be proud of them, they're fucking brilliant!

Photo by Ben Sutherland

ABC...

2010-06-14T20:23:00.004+01:00

Where does the alphabet come from then?

I know that's what you've all been wondering. Me too.

As with so much that is useful in modern life it comes from the Romans, who got it from the Greeks, who got it from the Egyptians.

The first recorded scripts (series of symbols for communicating ideas visually) existed around the 4th Millennium BCE/BC and were found in Mesopotamia and in Egypt. The Mesopotamian script, known as cuneiform, consisted of logophonetic signs, which are signs representing a single word or concept, consonantal alphabetic signs which represent a single consonant sound and syllabic signs which represent a syllable sound. The Egyptian hieroglyphs were generally logophonetic signs which could be interpreted as different words or symbols depending upon the context.

The first (consonantal) alphabetic system is recorded in Egypt around 1,850 BCE/BC and is believed to have been developed to represent the language of Semitic workers in Egypt. This alphabet consisted of 22 hieroglyphs each representing a single consonant, along with a 23rd symbol believed to have represented a vowel sound at the start or end of a word. Because this alphabet was adopted by the Phoenicians who used it extensively, and because they were merchants who traded with people all over the ancient civilised world, later versions of it became known as the Phoenician alphabet.

Most modern alphabets appear to be descended from the Phoenicians'. The Aramaic alphabet which developed from it around the 7th century BCE/BC and was used throughout the Persian Empire is thought to be the ancestor of almost all modern Asian scripts including Hebrew and Arabic, although not Chinese and Japanese as they were already literate at this time and so they retain their logographic and syllabic scripts to this day.

Around the 8th century BCE/BC the Greeks started to adapt the Phoenician alphabet to represent their language. They were exposed to this system of writing because of trade with the Phoenicians, however the script didn't entirely suit the Greek language. The Phoenician alphabet was still a system which represented only consonant sounds. While this worked well for the the Phoenicians in order to be able to write clearly in Ancient Greek there had to be symbols which represented vowel sounds too.

The Greeks achieved this in the first instance by adapting the symbols which represented consonants that didn't exist in their language, such as the Phoenician letters 'alep and he which represented the glottal stop and the h sound. These became alpha (a) and epsilon (e). They were only able to adapt 6 of these symbols however, and as they needed 12 they invented digraphs.

A digraph is where two letters are combined to create a sound distinct from that of either individual letter, for example the ea sound in bread is not the sound for e followed by the one for a but rather a separate, distinct sound. Another good example is the sound created by the ch in child or the th in this, but there are many more, it is hard to write a sentence in English without using one.

Originally the Greeks wrote from right to left, by the time that the alphabet reached the Romans the direction had reversed, but not before going through an interesting phase known as boustrophedon in which writing runs from left to right and then back again so that when

eht ni etirw ot eunitnoc dna nrut uoy egap eht fo edis eno hcaer uoy

other direction.

If you think that is confusing they also reversed the direction of the letters so that every second line was in mirror writing. Unsurprisingly this didn't last for too long and it eventually settled into a left to right orientation.

The Greeks are also responsible for our dual case system of letters, lower case almost certainly developed from the effect of handwriting on letters. When we write quickly by hand the letters generally get rounder and tend to blend into one another, this informal handwritten variation of the alphabet gradually evolved into a distinct second case. The terms upper and lower case are a much later invention however and arrived during the 1400's with the advent of the printing press. Printers kept their letters in drawers in a case, and the lower case letters were literally kept in the lower case. The name stuck.

Although it is never a great idea to generalise it is fairly safe to say that two of the things that the Romans loved most of all were Greek culture and straight lines and in adapting the Greek and Etruscan alphabets to write in Latin they managed to improve one with the other. They took the alphabet and ordered it. Creating standards for letters and making straight lines and spacing a norm. Prior to the Romans writing had tended to be much harder to read both because of a tendency for the script to roam around the page and because of a lack of standardised lettering. The Romans in their usual efficient manner took the Greek/Etruscan alphabets and made it their own.

In fact the Romans did such a great job with it that there have been relatively few changes made to th alphabet in the 2000 or so years since they first got their hands on it. Obviously the sounds assigned to letters and digraphs vary greatly from language to language, but that is essentially irrelevant on the page. If you can understand what a word means it doesn't matter if you know how it sounds. The Latin alphabet is used world wide by speakers of many languages meaning that we have a global means of visual communication understood by the vast majority of literate people on earth, no small achievement and yet another example of the many ways in which the Roman Empire continues to affect our lives today.

But enough of my new obsession with classical history. There have been some changes. For example, the letter W is known as 'double U' because it developed from the Old English digraph uu. If you have ever wondered why it is that it is called 'double U' and not 'double V' then it is worth bearing in mind that V and U did not become distinctly separate letters with different sounds allocated to them until around the mid 1500's which is one reason why old writing can look very confusing. Another late addition was J which began life as a flourish at the bottom of the letter I and only became a letter in it's own right around the 1500's.

Even within English the sounds allocated to individual letters has changed a lot over time. We have also lost letters over the years. For example, the reason why ye gets used rather than the in those silly Ye Olde English pub names is that the Y actually represents a letter which no longer exists: þ or thorn was replaced by the digraph th around the 1600's, although as with most changes in language it was a gradual and natural one which occurred over time.

The word alphabet is from the names of the two first letters of the Phoenician alphabet: aleph or 'alp which was a pausal form of eleph meaning ox + bet meaning house. The letters had these meanings as they were thought to look like the objects they represented.

Our alphabet is incontestably one of the greatest ever human inventions and it is a tool which has survived for over 2,000 years with relatively few modifications and is still used daily by millions of people all over the world and to my mind that's pretty incredible.

Photo by Ky Olsen

Bread

2010-05-30T16:39:00.003+01:00

This is my final installment of my 'jars in the kitchen' series of posts, and this one is, as the title suggests, on bread.

It is probably not an exaggeration to say that bread is the main reason why humans were able to form civilisations and that without bread the world today would be a very different place.

Before farming humans were hunter-gatherers who lived in small groups of up to about 30 people. The cultivation of wheat was the main factor which allowed us to abandon this way of life and start farming, which in turn lead to larger groupings of people. As towns and then cities grew people developed social structures and hierarchies. The various beliefs which had developed in hunter-gatherer groups became more formal structured religions. The upper echelons of these societies now had a large amount of leisure time in which to develop systems of writing and numeracy. Depending on your perspective bread is either the food which has underpinned the great civilisations of history, or it has a lot to answer for.

Originally bread would have been formed from roasted, ground up cereal grains mixed with water. As a food stuff this type of flat bread dates back to the Neolithic era and can still be found as a staple of many diets to this day; pitta bread, naan, chapati, oatcakes and tortillas are all examples of this kind of bread.

Leavened bread (bread with a substance added to it, usually yeast, which makes it rise) also dates back to prehistory. It was probably an accidental discovery as yeast spores exist naturally almost everywhere including on the surface of grains so that any dough that was left to rest for a time would probably become leavened without anything being added. The result would be a lighter, bigger loaf of bread.

In ancient history some societies added to their bread dough grains which had been steeped in wine and allowed to start fermenting. The Roman auther and natural philosopher Pliny the Elder reported that the Gauls and Iberians added the foam from their beer to bread in order to make it lighter. The most common method of creating leavened bread though would have been to use a sourdough starter, this involves saving a piece of dough from a previous batch of bread to add to the next and is a method still used regularly today.

In medieval Europe bread was used as part of the table setting, it was standard to use a large slice of, often stale, bread as a plate on which the rest of the meal was placed, this would soak up the juices from the meat and was eaten at the end, or the more wealthy might give them to their dogs or to the poor. These bread plates were known as trenchers, and the name was retained for the wooden trenchers which replaced the bread in the 1600's.

It is possible that bread was the culprit in one of the most infamous events in American history: the Salem witch trials. For anyone not familiar with the story, in 1692 in the village of Salem, Massachusetts, Betty Parris, aged 9, and her 11 year old cousin Abigail Williams, started to have fits. These were beyond what might have been explained by something like epilepsy and closer to a scene from The Exorcist, as the girls contorted, crawled under furniture, screamed and complained of being pinched and pricked with needles. The doctor called to examine them could find nothing physically wrong with either of them. Over the next few days two more young girls became affected.

Initially 3 women were accused of performing witchcraft and causing the girls harm, however the situation quickly escalated, and over the 15 months from February 1692 to May 1693 150 people were arrested and imprisoned with at least 26 people being tried, all of whom were convicted. It has never been conclusively proven what it was that caused the fits in the little girls of Salem, however one of the most plausible theories is that it might have been the effects of ergot poisoning. This can be caused by the fungus Claviceps purpurea which grows on grains. The symptoms of ergot poisoning include seizures and hallucinations similar to those caused by LSD.

In Old English the word bread meant bit, crumb and morsel as well as having the meaning we use today. It may well come from the Proto-Germanic word brautham, the same root as the word brew, and refer to the leavening process, or it could be from the Proto-Germanic broudsmon meaning fragments or bits, as in pieces of food. In either case by 1200 it had replaced the earlier Old English word, hlaf (from which we derive our word loaf) to be the usual word for leavened and unleavened bread.

So bread, or the cultivation and farming of wheat for bread, directly led to society as we know it, science, religion, politics, art and philosophy amongst many other things. But there may be a twist in this tale. It is possible that the wheat was originally cultivated not for bread but for beer.

Apparently hunting, gathering and living in small groups enabled most people to have quite large amounts of leisure time, and so the desire to farm in order to produce food may not have been enough to drastically change social structures. However in order to be able to reliably produce alcoholic beverages on a regular basis you need to have a steady supply of the ingredients and it is quite likely that this was the real inspiration behind the shift towards farming and larger social groupings.

In other words all of modern society as we know it is based upon the prehistoric urge for a pint.

Photo by Rexipe.

Nadders and Juncture Loss

2010-05-21T19:35:00.001+01:00

Writing the post on articles reminded me of a linguistic phenomenon I came across a while back known as juncture loss, this is a one form of a process known as rebracketing.

Rebracketing occurs when a word (or words) in a language alter in emphasis or meaning due to being broken or bracketed into different factors. As an example of what I mean by factors, the word teaching can be broken down into two distinct parts teach+ing this makes sense teach meaning to impart knowledge + ing, a suffix denoting verbal action. If it was broken down any differently, for example as tea+ching you have tea, a hot drink made by infusing dried leaves in boiling water + ching, an abrupt high pitched ringing noise, it no longer makes any sense at all.

Rebracketing occurs when there is a shift in the way the factors in a word or words interact. An example of this which is regularly used is our English word for a meat patty: burger. This is from a German word which has become rebracketed in English. It was initially broken into the factors of (ham+burg)+er and came from a ground meat dish apparently popular in the Hamburg area of Germany. On it's introduction to America the word quickly became rebracketed as ham+(burg+er) so that today we have the strange situation where we can (hopefully) expect a chicken burger to contain chicken, a cheese burger to have cheese in it and a beef burger to come from a cow but a hamburger has never contained ham.

The form of rebracketing which I was reminded of when writing about articles is known as juncture loss. This can happen in two ways: either the n from the start of a noun transfers itself onto the end of the a form of the indefinite article (if for example a neighbour became an eighbour) or the other way round (an apple became a napple).

One real example of this process is the word orange. Orange has its roots in the Arabic word naranj (from the Persian narang, from Sanskrit naranga meaning orange tree). In Old French this became arenge as the n was absorbed into the indefinite article and une narange became une arrange, so the word came into English without its original n, interestingly it was originally recorded in English as a surname (around 1296) only later appearing as the word for the fruit in about 1380.

Another word in which this process occurred is apron, which in Middle English was known as a napron (from the Old French naperon, itself from the Latin mappa meaning napkin, mappa is also the root of the word map as maps were originally drawn on cloths). Between 1450 and 1485 the n travelled from the start of the word napron to the end of the indefinite article a so that a napron became an apron.

One more example of the n attaching itself to the article, because this one always makes me smile is the only venomous snake found in the UK, the adder. When I was a kid I often wondered why a snake would be given a name which implies that it might be good at mathematics. Turns out that it wasn't. The snake was actually known in Old English as a naedre (around 950) as far as I can tell this simply meant a snake, and it originates in the Indo-European base sne meaning to wind, thread or weave which if you think about the way a snake moves makes a lot of sense. The n attached itself to the article between 1300-1400, and I think this is a good thing, snake venom is serious stuff and it is hard to take a creature called a nadder seriously.

My example of the n attaching itself to a noun is one which explains a confusing word. Without knowing about juncture loss the etymology of the word nickname isn't at all apparent, what is a nick? It isn't anything. The word was originally written a neke name, and an eke name was quite literally an extra name, the word eke was Middle English, meaning extra or additional and is still used today in the sense of making something go further than it should, to eke out.

Juncture loss is a process which often seems to occur when words are borrowed from other languages, presumably as it makes it much harder for the speaker to automatically hear where they are making a mistake. For example the word umpire is originally from the Old French nonper, meaning odd or not even (in reference to an umpire being an extra person), this came into English as a noumper around 1350 and in Middle English (around 1440) it became an oumpere.

Rebracketing and juncture loss are forms of folk etymology, or historical etymology, whereby a change evolves naturally in language and it is a process which most often occurs in societies in which communication is largely oral. It is less likely to happen in English today at least not as it is used in literate societies where a lot of communication is written, even so it is inevitable that languages do evolve so perhaps in the future we will use a ni-pod and play on an intedo wii.

Photo by Chris Cant

Writing wrongs

2010-05-12T16:38:00.010+01:00

Yes, I know, very punny.

In the course of the last few weeks I have come across a two random subjects which I thought were quite interesting but don't really warrant an entire blog entry to themselves. Whether or not I am right about that remains to be seen, but this post is sort of a bubble and squeak of blog.

Firstly, in the coursework I have been doing recently I have been learning about some philosophical approaches to leisure including that of the Ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus. The only way in which I had encountered him before was in the English words epicure and Epicurean which are derived from his name.

I had always understood these words to mean gluttonous or hedonistic, and so I was surprised by his theory on leisure which can be briefly (and inexpertly) summarised as follows: as humans are essentially a collection of random atoms they have no specific higher purpose; as we have no specific purpose our main goal in life should be to avoid bodily pain and mental anguish; the state which we achieve when we successfully avoid these things is pleasure; this pleasure is best derived from simple things and good, wholesome food in moderation, partially to avoid becoming dependent upon potentially transient luxury, partially because health and freedom from bodily pain are not achieved through gluttony and excess; he also advocated study, philosophy and exercise as routes to pleasure. This seems to be almost the opposite of what the words associated with his name have come to mean, although this misinterpretation seems to have been something which he suffered from even during his lifetime.

The OED defines epicure as: a person who takes pleasure in fine food and drink. The word had acquired negative connotations by 1556, as a description for someone who gives themselves up to sensual pleasure, in particular a glutton. By around 1586 it had also come to be a word for a gourmet, which while not exactly in line with Epicurus' actual philosophy is perhaps a step in the right direction. By around the late 1700's the word had lost it's more negative meaning and the sense of gluttony attached itself to the word Epicurean instead.

For Epicurean the OED has 4 definitions, all of which relate either to followers or students of Epicurus, or to epicures (in the sense of gourmet), what it doesn't have is any mention of the idea of Epicurean meaning gluttonous, which is strange because among the synonyms my thesaurus has listed for Epicurean are: hedonist, sensualist, pleasure-seeker, gourmet, gastronome; and for the adjective: decadent, unrestrained, immoderate, gluttonous. So it seems that there is not always agreement about what this word means, and it depends on whether your guide is the philosophy from which it derives or the history of the meaning which it has acquired.

While I can't say I agree with (or even know about) everything Epicurus said about leisure and pleasure I can't help feeling that linguistic history has done him a disservice. Regardless of whether you agree with the route he takes to arrive at his conclusions his advice on life, to avoid stress, eat moderately and to take exercise for the body and for the brain are all rather familiar, as they are still echoed in the health advice we are given today, and are about as far from gluttony and hedonism as it is possible to get.

Next up, sinister. I was listening to an interesting and informative podcast the other day, I can't remember what it was called nor what it was about, but I do remember one of the people involved in this podcast mentioned that the word sinister was originally a word meaning left handed, and because there was so much stigma attached to being a southpaw it came to have it's modern meaning: suggestive of evil or harm (thank you OED). I thought this was rather interesting but I wasn't totally convinced it was true and so I did a little digging (by turning to the s section of my various reference books), and it turns out to be kind of right, but only kind of.

The word sinister was first recorded in English in 1411 as sinistre meaning deceptive, false or dishonest, by 1474 it was being used to mean evil or corrupt. Given the spelling it is clear that the word comes to English from French; in Old French sinistre meant contrary, unfavourable, on the left or, directly from it's Latin root, left. But not left handed. It is just possible that sinister acquired it's negative connotations via distrust of left handed people, sinisteros in Latin meant left or on the left and was the opposite of dexteros meaning right or on the right from which we get our modern word dexterity (skillfulness) which almost certainly did get its meaning from its association with right handedness, however despite the fact that this seems like an obvious root it is not the widely accepted explanation.

That would be far too easy.

The Romans got their word sinister from the Sanskrit saniyan (more profitable, more advantageous), this word was cognate with the Doric Greek word anumes (we were reaching) ultimately from the same Indo-European root word seneu (achieve). So clearly the root words have fairly positive connotations. The Latin word sinister was used at one point to mean lucky, favourable, and its link with the direction left is assumed to come from the ancient Roman practice of facing south during the practice of observing omens, this meant that the person's left side was facing east and this was considered to be a fortunate quarter, so that omens coming from the east (such as birds) were on the persons left.

At this stage I should point out that I don't know very much about Roman practices so I am not clear on who would have been looking for omens and how the practice worked. But it is clear that, to start with, in line with the idea of profit and achievement sinister had the meaning of lucky and that it gained the further meaning of left from these rituals. The Romans though were heavily influenced by the Greeks and the Greeks faced north when observing omens, this lead to the word acquiring a negative meaning of inauspicious and unfavorable, as the left side when facing north is the west which was presumably a less lucky quarter. So the evolution of sinister seems to be from a word which meant lucky it gained the additional meaning of left, then when Roman practices changed it shed its original meaning and kept the association with the direction and then gained new, negative associations from the direction change leading to it's modern meaning.

So I guess that the podcasters weren't entirely wrong, as the word is certainly heavily associated with the left hand side, however I think we can use the word in it's modern sense without fear of seriously offending any lefty's out there, which is good because it's a lovely word.

So there you have my random blog offering, normal service (whatever that may be) will resume again soon, just as soon as I finish my final assignment for my current course.

Picture by Isaac Joo

Articles for my Friend

2010-05-06T16:44:00.005+01:00

I am feeling blogger guilt as I haven't managed to post for a while, this has nothing to do with will and everything to do with time. Still, I'm here now.

So, articles. For native English speakers these little words (a, an and the) are generally taken for granted. Those who approach English as a second language tend to fall into two categories: people who's first language also has articles generally don't struggle to get to grips with them; while people who's first language doesn't use them often find the concept can be quite confusing, especially as knowing the rules of a language and actually putting them into practice are two very different things.

I have a friend who is rather brilliant, generally, has spoken English fluently, and studied (other subjects) in it for many years. But their first language is Polish, which is a language without articles, and this is the one area of English with which they still struggle. I said I would try and help, so that is the reason for today's post, but I'm not sure that I have anything new to add, I shall try.

As I already mentioned there are three words defined as articles in English. This is the simplest explanation, and I will go into the more complicated one later on, but to start off: a, an and the. The is the definite article, while a and an are indefinite articles. An is used before words which start with a vowel or with a silent 'h' as in an hour, a is used before consonants.

An article is a word that combines with a noun in order to indicate the type of reference being made by the noun. This is not as complicated as it sounds, I promise. Articles express the grammatical definiteness of the noun, also less complicated than it sounds.

All this really means is that in English when you use a singular common noun (in the simplest terms a noun which is not capitalised) in a sentence you must indicate the definiteness of the noun, either it is a cat (just a cat, any cat), or it is the cat (that cat there, the cat we already discussed). So the indefinite articles indicate that a noun is less definite (a coat, an anorak, whatever) and the definite article indicates that the noun is a specific item (the coat, definitely). A or an is often used when the noun is first introduced, and once an item has been identified the can then be used, for example: I dropped a book on my toe: my foot really hurts, but the book is fine. This is pretty simple and generally most people could probably learn these rules and very quickly be able to identify the correct usage. The problem is that when we speak or write we don't generally stop to dissect each sentence, identify the noun and work out just how definite it needs to be.

I don't know if it is helpful to know the etymology of a, an and the but I like etymology, and it helped me when I was trying to work out how to explain how articles work. So over to my dictionary.

I will start with an. An originated in Old English as an unstressed form of the numeral an (one). A is a reduced form of an. The n was slowly dropped for words beginning with a consonant, starting in the midland dialect in England around 1150. The southern dialect held on a lot longer; as late as 1340 an could still be used before a consonant. For words that start with a w,y or an h it was even later, with an woman found in the 1400's, and an hundred as late as the 1600's, in fact this usage of an before an h in a stressed syllable can still be found occasionally to this day, I have heard an hotel before. This development of an a/an pattern is something which has developed in South German dialects and in Yiddish without any influence from English; in both cases this was also as a development from the word for one. In both the distribution is the same, with a before a consonant word and an before a vowel sound.

So a and an essentially mean one, which might be a helpful way to work out if it's a or the, since one denotes an amount but does not point to a specific item.

The is also from Old English. Before about 950 the words se (masculine), seo (feminine), and thaet (neuter) were used as demonstrative pronouns (roughly meaning the, the, that). The neuter form became our modern word that. Around 950 the masculine and feminine forms changed from s to th, influenced by the neuter, so that the masculine became the.

To recap: articles go before common nouns to distinguish if the item in question is one of it's type (a ball could be a basketball, football or bouncy ball) or if it is a specific item to which you are referring (the ball is a specific ball which has already been identified or is apparent to everyone, for example if you are playing football the ball is going to be the football)

To complicate things a little there are exceptions to this.

The first and most obvious in English is the zero article, this is where no article is used before a noun, and in English the zero article is used with all plurals and mass nouns. So while you would sing a song, you would sing songs.

The English language doesn't technically have partitive articles, these are articles which are used with a mass noun to indicate an indeterminate quantity, so while in French I would bois du cafe in English I just drink coffee, what we can do in English though is to substitute the French du with the English determiner some. While this word is not technically an article it does a pretty similar job to a partitive article and is the best we have, so a usual translation of bois du cafe would actually be drink some coffee.

Finally we have the negative article, this is a word which specifies none of the noun, and in English it is no, although it should be noted that some linguists consider this to be a determiner rather than an article.

To recap:

Definite article: The glass of water
Indefinite article: A glass of water
Zero article: Water
(Acting) Partitive article: Some water
Negative article: No water

Clearly this is not a perfect example as the definite and indefinite articles refer to the glass while the following three refer to the water, however I think it will do to illustrate.

English students actually don't have it too bad when it comes to articles. In English there are just three choices, and of course we don't have the masculine/feminine distinction. Pity the students of German who must learn the definite articles: der, die, das and die; as well as the indefinite: ein, eine and ein and where and when it is appropriate to use them. Or worse (and this is one that is daunting me as I face the task of renewing my acquaintance with the language this summer) French where you have definite: le, la, l' and les; the indefinite: un, une and des; then there is also the partitive: du, de la and des. In contrast to French, or the even more complicated Italian (il, lo, la, l'i, gli,le, un, uno, una, un', dell, dello, della, dell' dei, degli, degl' delle - I will leave you to work out which is what and why) suddenly the English articles look a little more attractive.

Having said that articles are almost exclusively a feature of Indo-European and Semitic languages and even then by no means all of them. Latin doesn't have articles, nor do the Baltic languages, or most of the Slavic languages while Arabic and Hebrew only have definite articles. So if you really want to avoid the whole tricky subject it might be worth learning Japanese or maybe Hindi, Malay or Russian all of which are article free.

There are various resources online for testing your knowledge of articles, including these quizzes on the BBC website, but they are usually pretty basic. Unfortunately for the most part, as with every element of learning a language, once you know the rule you just have to keep practicing.

Photo by Brenda Clarke

Spice

2010-04-24T20:50:00.002+01:00

Time to add the spice rack to my collection of kitchen blog posts on coffee, sugar and tea.

The OED defines spice as: an aromatic or pungent vegetable substance used to flavour food I find this definition slightly surprising as it could also be applied to herbs. To be fair to the OED for a long time the name spice would have been applied to any substance that could be used to flavour food, especially if it could be traded and wasn't very perishable, it also applied to the trade of substances such as opium, sugar and tea . To me though a spice would be an aromatic or pungent dried fruit, seed, bark or root of a plant, as opposed to a herb which is generally the vegetation and is often usable in both fresh and dried form. This is a loose definition, an obvious exception would be curry leaves which most people would agree are a spice rather than a herb. For the purpose of this post the word spice will pretty much mean whatever it meant to the people involved at the time, so perhaps it's best not to try to define it too specifically.

Humans appear to have been using spices for as long as we have been cooking, which is perhaps not so surprising considering that we've only really nailed refrigeration over the last fifty years or so. For most of human history spices have been valued as strong flavours to mask the taste of food which wasn't fresh. They were so valuable that the spice trade, and the struggle to control it, can probably be credited with shaping the world as we know it without risking hyperbole.

Juniper berries and mustard have been found in neolithic burial sites, so we can be sure that we have been using spices in some capacity for a very long time. The wide variety of spices that we use today mostly originated in India, South East Asia an the Americas. How long spices have been used as flavourings in food and drink is unclear, but the best bet seems to be a really long time. The Assyrians had a myth, recorded around 3000 BC/BCE of the gods drinking wine flavoured with sesame on the night that they created the world so it seems safe to bet that we have been using some spices for at least 5000 years. Other recorded instances of ancient civilisations using spices include the Egyptians, who are known to have used them as flavourings for food from at least 2600 BC/BCE and recorded using cassia, cinnamon, anise, marjoram and cumin in medical and embalming processes in 1550 BC/BCE. This is also evidence of an early spice trade as cinnamon and cassia are native to the spice islands of Indonesia.

The people who had the most control of the spice trade for the longest period of time were the Arabs, whose geographical location at a sort of gateway between China, India and Europe put them at a distinct advantage. By 950 BC/BCE there is evidence of the Arabs using donkey and camel caravans to create a Spice Road, much like the already established Silk Road. This was a system of individual traders who would cover part of the journey before selling the spices to the next trader, inevitably each transaction increased the cost of the spices, so that by the time they reached Western Europe they were very valuable and expensive to buy, and so were the preserve of the very rich.

Unlike the Silk Road the Spice Road was not a particularly fixed route as initially the Arabs traded with the Greeks, in doing this they needed to avoid the Persians who, as you will know if you read my blog posts on sugar and tea, were not always too friendly towards the Greeks. To facilitate this the spice road was generally wherever it was safest to travel and trade overland or, increasingly, by sea.

By the 5th century BC/BCE the spice trade was almost entirely maritime and the Arabs had a monopoly. They did everything they could to protect this including spinning amazing stories to the Europeans of the exotic and inhospitable places they had to endure in order to collect the spices and of the wild and magical beasts which would attack them or attempt to thwart their efforts. This helped to discourage competition and to justify the high prices that they charged and the stories were for a long time widely believed in Europe.

The spice trade at this time was so lucrative that, despite the Arab monopoly the city of Alexandria, in Egypt, grew rich almost exclusively from the trade, levying taxes as a way of making money on any of the spices that passed through the city, which was most of them as Alexandria was a convenient port city from which to send the spices to Europe.

The Romans also loved spices, using huge amounts in their food, as a result many Romans were concerned about the amount of money which was being spent on this, Pliny the Elder wrote about his concern at the quantities of gold that flowed east from the Roman empire to the spice producing lands. This widespread concern coupled with their love of controlling all facets of the empire led to the Romans finding their own maritime route and breaking the Arab monopoly. Spices were still expensive though, so much so that wages and tributes could be paid in peppercorns in ancient Rome.

With the fall of the Roman empire the spice trade was increasingly a free for all, by the 6th century AD/CE Arab, African and Jewish merchants were all trading in spices.

The resurgence of Arab control is closely linked to the spread of Islam. In fact the prophet Muhammad's wife was the widow of a spice trader and her wealth and the prestige gained from this helped to contribute to his standing and success. As Islam and it's influence spread the Muslim Arabs took control of many of the towns that were vital to the spice trade and in doing this they were able to easily move the spices along the route and to control the trade completely. Along with the spices they also exported their religion and their culture.

In 641 the Arabs cut all trade ties with Western Europe, this prevented all spices coming into Europe and although we have no real records of what was eaten there during the 400 or so years for which this blockade existed it may be safe to assume that it was pretty bland in comparison to Ancient Greek or Roman cuisine.

By the 10th century Venice and Genoa had become incredibly rich cities, this wealth was too tempting for the Arabs to resist and so they began trading again, in particular with Venice, through which most of the spices which found their way into Europe travelled. Clearly there was still a huge market for spice. During the first crusade (1095-1099) many crusaders brought back not gold or silver, but spices which they had taken from the Arabs. In any case the spread of spices through Europe and into common usage was quick, by 1180 there was a pepperers guild in London. This guild quickly became a spicers guild and its members were the forerunners of apothecaries as spices became a very important component of medieval medicine.

During the middle ages (approximately 1000s-1400s) highly spiced foods were eaten throughout Europe, if you would like an idea of what they ate there are some interesting medieval recipes here. Venice had a pretty much exclusive deal with the Arab traders with the spices generally travelling by sea via Alexandria. This was in no small part due to the fact that from the 1160's onwards, thanks to Ghengis Khan, the Mongols controlled the Silk Road and the surrounding routes between China and Europe effectively closing them to Arab and European traders.

Along with the Silk Road the Spice Road was probably to blame for the quick spread of the Black Death which decimated the population of the world between 1347 and 1351. It is estimated that between 25 and 50 million people died in Europe of this disease in those four years, this is anywhere between 30% and 60% of the total population and it had major social consequences for all of Europe. The Mongol dominance of the Silk Road was broken and there were different factions fighting for control and frequent raids along the whole route making overland transportation of spices unsafe. By 1453 with the rise of the Ottoman Empire the final overland route into Europe was closed to spice traders meaning that all spices were transported over sea and giving Alexandria and Venice a monopoly.

The Venetian traders kept the price of spices artificially high and this was not popular with the rest of Europe. The Venetian monopoly caused the quest to find an alternative route to the spice lands of India and South East Asia. This desire to be able to import their own spices seems to have been particularly strong in Spain and Portugal and it kick started what is known as the age of exploration.

In 1492 Christopher Columbus set out to sail to the Indies (which is what South and East Asia was then called by the Europeans) via the 'Ocean Sea' (the Atlantic). Columbus was trying to find a new spice route, and he believed that this route would work, at least partially because he thought the circumference of the world was 25,255km (it is actually 69,800km). He didn't find his route to the Indies, but he did find the Bahama Islands, and brought back chillies. It is due to Columbus and his confusion over where he actually was, that natives of the Americas became known as 'Indians' and that chillies became known as red pepper, or chilly peppers (as this is what Columbus believed them to be). In 1493 on another voyage he also 'discovered' spices in the West Indies (again the confusion, this was the Carribean) including allspice which was an instant hit in Europe and is named to reflect the similarity in flavour the spice has to a variety of others, such as cloves, pepper cinnamon and nutmeg.

The man who actually found an alternative route to the Indies was Vasco da Gama who managed to sail around the Cape of Good Hope and reached India (via Mozambique) on the 20th May 1498. He made a triumphant return to Portugal, although he was empty handed as he hadn't brought goods to trade with. He made the journey again in 1502 this time returning with spices and effectively shattering the Egyptian/Venetian monopoly with one voyage.

Throughout the 16th century Spain and Portugal vied to control the trade of cloves, Portugal had managed to corner the market in everything else, this competition ended in 1580 when Spain conquered Portugal and took control of the spice trade in its entirety. Spain's monopoly once again caused problems for the rest of Europe. England and France responded with privateers (essentially state endorsed pirates) who would roam the seas looking for Spanish spice ships to plunder.

England's most famous privateer was Sir Frances Drake (such a successful pirate they knighted him!) who in 1577 circumnavigated the globe returning with treasures which included spices. It was also Drake who helped to put a nail in the coffin of Spain's maritime power by seeing off the Armada they sent to England in 1588, as you can imagine Drake was not as popular with the Spanish as he was in England.

On the 31st of December 1600 Queen Elizabeth I created the East India Company (you may remember the EIC and their good works (ahem!) if you read my post on tea) she created the company to try and wrestle as much control of the spice trade in the Americas as possible. The Dutch also created an East India Company, called Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie and generally known as the VOC. This company was the most successful of the European companies vying for a piece of the new spice trade in the Americas, and as a result of their successful business plan thousands of the native peoples of these new spice islands were tortured, murdered, or kicked off their lands, as an example: within 15 years of the VOP arriving on the nutmeg islands of Banda the population had fallen 17 fold to just 600. Still, you could argue that the VOC got some karmic comeuppance, as it was they who sold the island of New Amsterdam to the British who promptly renamed it New York.

The VOC had pretty much gained control of the spice market by the end of the 17th century but their timing was off. By the 1700's fashions in food were changing in Europe and simpler and less heavily spiced foods were being eaten. By 1730 the VOC were actually burning their own spice stocks in order to artificially inflate prices. In 1799 the company went bankrupt.

By the start of the 1800s there was no longer one company or country able to take control of the spice trade, spices were being grown all over the world and often far from their country of origin. This, along with the new methods of transportation which developed over the following two centuries, made it impossible for complete control to be gained over the trade of any one spice.

Today India still produces far more tonnes of spices each year than any other country, followed by China, Bangladesh and Pakistan. In Europe and indeed worldwide, with the rise in popularity of world cuisines over the past 50 or so years there is plenty of demand today, and spices are so readily available that it seems strange to think that their sale has been linked to everything from the spread of a major world religion to the European discovery of the New World and the subsequent annihilation of the indigenous peoples who happened to be living there. Without the spice trade our world would be a very different place.

But what would this blog be without a touch of etymology to brighten the day? The word spice was probably in use in English before 1200. It is borrowed from the Old French espice which was borrowed from the Late Latin species (a plural), this word meant spices, goods or wares and developed these meanings from it's original one of kind or sort, this is also the route of the word species. I am seriously considering a campaign to revive the verb to spicen (to spice) because it is brilliant, and I urge anyone reading this to spicen their food from now on, it will definitely taste better as a result of decent spicening. This verb was out of use by 1325, for no good reason that I can think of. Spicy was first recorded in 1562 and in it's figurative sense of something a little racy it was first recorded in 1844.

I'm off to cook a nicely spicened curry now, with a new found appreciation for the ingredients.

Photo by Sudhamshu Hebbar

Half, Marathon

2010-04-16T08:42:00.002+01:00

Yes those words are supposed to be separated by a comma.

At the moment I am training to run a half marathon in July. As the story behind the word marathon is a good one, and also plays into my current vague interest in Ancient Greece and Rome, I thought it would be a good blog post. As I am 'only' running 13.1 miles I thought it would be dishonest to leave out the word half.

So, marathon. In it's modern usage, meaning a running race of 26.2 miles, the word has been around since 1896 when the Olympic games were revived. The race was introduced to commemorate the story of the runner who died after delivering the news of victory at the battle of Marathon to Athens.

This runner is popularly believed to have been a herald named Pheidippides. The battle and the legend of Pheidippides, and so the road race, all started with the Persians, and our old friend Darius (who you may remember if you read the post I wrote on sugar). By 499BC/BCE the Persians had extended their empire to include parts of India and Egypt and were also ruling the Ionian Greeks, these were people who counted themselves as Greek, living in modern day Turkey. They lived in a very similar way to the Greeks, often running their own affairs and making decisions about city administration independently, so they were unimpressed by the rule of this self proclaimed King of Kings. Between 499 and 493 BC/BCE they kicked the Persians out in what is known as the Ionian revolt, in this they were supported by the Athenians who sent ships and troops.

Darius did not like this. He swiftly reconquered the Ionians, but he was still furious with the Athenians. He was so keen to get his revenge on them for their assistance in the revolt that he is supposed to have appointed a slave to remind him of the Athenians three times at every meal. Darius sent his son in law with thousands of troops to conquer Athens, but their ships encountered violent storms and harassment from the Thracians and so was unsuccessful.

In 490BC/BCE he tried again, this time sending around 70,000 men to Greece under the leadership of an admiral named Datis. This was roughly equal to the entire population of Athens at this time. They dropped anchor near Athens at a place called Marathon. With an army of only 10,000 the Greeks were outnumbered 7 to 1, but they did have some advantages. The Greek military leader in this battle, Miltiades, had spent time living amongst the Persians and knew a lot of their military tactics. The Athenians were also fighting for their families and their city, the consequences of a loss for them were much higher than for the Persians. So they formed ranks and they won. The Persians retreated to their ships.

This is when the run took place. I have often wondered on hearing the story of Pheidippides why he was in such a hurry to inform the Athenians of the victory. The reason is that as the Persians set sail Miltiades noticed that, rather than heading in the direction in which they had come, Datis and his troops turned in the direction of Athens. So in fact, Pheidippides was running not only to inform Athens of the Greek victory but also to warn them of the impending arrival of some very angry Persian troops.

In the meantime the Athenian troops had started to march, as fast as they could, back towards Athens. In this luck was on their side as the land distance between Marathon and Athens was far shorter than the distance which the Persians had to navigate at sea. When the Persian army came over the horizon they were met by the entire Athenian army lined up in front of their city, the sight of the victors seems to have made them loose their nerve as they turned and headed home.

This was not the end of the wars between Persia and Greece, but it is the end of the story of Marathon as, for a while at least, the Athenian army saved not only Athens but the whole of Greece from becoming a Persian colony, and presumably ruined Darius' dinners for some time. Perhaps I will find some space on here for the rest of the war at a later date.

One thing to note about this first Marathon run is that it was not 26.2 miles but about 25. Although people do occasionally die running a marathon it is pretty unusual and Pheidippides was supposedly a professional long distance runner so it is unlikely that this distance would have killed him no matter how fast he ran to warn his city. The reason for his death is that when the Persians landed at Marathon Pheidippides had run to Sparta in order to request their help. He ran 150 miles in 2 days, presumably in a fairly stressed state, and then immediately had to run the 25 miles. The result was death, and the birth of a road race.

So why the, seemingly arbitrary, distance of 26.2? For this we get to thank the British royal family (no really).

In the first modern Olympic games, held in Greece in 1896, the legend of Pheidippides was honored by a 24.85 mile run from Marathon Bridge to Olympic stadium in Athens. In 1908 the fourth games were held in London and the race was extended to 26.2 miles in order to cover the distance from Windsor Castle to White City Stadium, with the extra mileage added on so the race could finish in front of royal family's viewing box.

Today almost every major city seems to have its own marathon and marathon running is one of the most popular amateur endurance sports in the world.

However, I am not running a marathon, I am running a half marathon, so here is the etymology of the word half. It is found in English around 1123 as half, and comes from the Old English halb, later healf (half in West Saxon), meaning side. This is cognate with many of the Germanic languages at the time, Old Saxon halba, Middle High German halbe and Old Icelandic halfa. In all of these languages the earliest sense of the word is that of side. Not too exciting that one, but I felt that to leave out the half might be a little dishonest, and 13.1 is quite enough mileage to be getting on with.

Photo by Randy Lemoine

Days of the week

2010-04-12T17:35:00.000+01:00

Aside from Sunday, it is not immediately obvious where the names we use for the days of the week in English originated. Is Friday a day for frying? Why is Wednesday spelled so strangely? Did someone used to spend all of Saturday on a chair? I intend to get to the bottom of these questions (and to stop making very weak jokes) and to that end I am turning to my etymological dictionary.

So Sunday, since it seems obvious. In concept its roots are in ancient Greece, they called the day ημέρα Ηλίου which, using the roman alphabet, is heméra Heliou meaning Helios' day, Helios being the god of the sun. This idea was borrowed, as with so much of Greek culture, by the Romans who translated it as dies Solis, Sol being their sun god. From the Latin we get the Old Saxon sunnundag, the Old High German sunnun tag, and in Old English sunnandaeg, literally sunnan (sun)+daeg (day). This had developed into sunedai by around 1250. Interestingly despite the heavy influence of French on the language at this time the English stuck to the the sun+day formula, rather than the Lords day version of the Romance languages, from the Latin dies Dominica (Day of God), from which we get the French Dimanche and Spanish and Portuguese Domingo. So Sunday is the day of the sun.

Just for balance Monday is the day of the moon. This we also get from the Greeks via a similar path. They called the day ημέρα Σελήνης or heméra Selénes, Selene was their goddess of the moon.This was translated into Latin as dies lunae (day of the moon), from which the French get their word, Lundi. This was translated from the Latin into Old English as monandaeg or mondaeg, again moon+day. By around 1200 this had become monedaei and from here developed into the word we use today.

So Sun and Moon down, and a solar system to go. Tuesday however takes an unexpected turn, coming to us not from the Romans or the Greeks but from the Vikings. Tiwaz was the Proto-Germanic name for a one handed god, possibly the son of Odin, who was the god of single combat, victory and heroic glory in Norse mythology. In Old English he became Tiw, so Tuesday was Tiw+daeg, Tiwesdaeg (Tiw's day) recorded around 1050. This became tywesdaei by 1122, and tisdai around 1200 before developing its modern spelling. Tiwesdaeg and it's Germanic contemporaries were a loan translation from Latin, so there is a link here with the seemingly unrelated Latin language words for Tuesday, for example the Italian Martedi or the Catalan Dimarts. These derive from the Latin dies Martis (Mars' day) and Mars was the god which the Romans associated with Tiwaz (the Romans liked to borrow and adapt gods from all over the place adding or incorporating many Greek, Norse and Egyptian gods, among others, into their religion). So Tuesday is the day of the Norse god of single combat (or if you need a planet, Mars).

Wednesday is Woden's day. Woden (or Odin) was another Viking influenced god. Odin was the chief god of Norse mythology, he was known as a leader of souls and he is also associated with the origins of Santa Claus. Wodin was his Anglo Saxon incarnation as the chief god of English paganism. The name Woden is from the Proto-Germanic Wodenanaz, and the god is closely associated with another Roman god, this time Mercury who was the Roman god of trade, profit and commerce from whose name we get both the English word mercurial (an adjective meaning subject to sudden changes of mood or mind) and the French Mercredi (Wednesday). Mercury was a messenger god and he was also known to be a leader of souls. Again there is a German/Latin divide when it comes to the naming of the day, with the Germanic languages taking the Woden/Odin route, eg. Dutch Woensdag (Wednesday), and the Latin languages developing their words from the Latin dies Mercurii (day of Mercury). Wednesday in Old English was Wodnesdaeg, around 950 it was recorded as Wodnesdei and by 1200 as Wednesdai. So Wednesday belongs to Wodin and Mercury.

Thursday is the day of the Norse god Thor. Thor was the god of thunder and is associated with the Roman god Jupiter, their chief god, who used his thunderbolt to hold on to his power. From the Latin dies Jovis (Jupiter's day) you get the Spanish Jueves, and the Romanian Joi, while from the Germanic route we get the Dutch Donderdag and German Donerstag. The Old English was Thurresdaeg, recorded around 1000 which was probably a contraction of Thunresdaeg (literally Thor's day) which may have been influenced by the Old Icelandic Thorsdagr (Thursday), this became Thursdei by 1250. So Thursday is Thor's or perhaps Jupiter's depending on who you ask.

Friday is Frigga's, and if you don't know who she is you have clearly not been studying your Norse mythology. Frigga (or Frigg) was Odin's wife and she was considered to be the most important Norse goddess, she is associated with Venus, the Roman goddess of love. For the Romans Friday was dies Veneris (Venus' day), this they got from the Greeks for whom the day belonged to Aphrodite, another goddess of love. From the Latin you have the French Vendredi, and the Italian Venerdi, and from the Germanic translation we get the Danish, Norweigan and Swedish Fredag, and the Dutch Vrijdag. The English route is from Old English Frigadaeg (literally Frigga's day) before 1000, and by 1137 it became Fridaei. So sadly nothing to do with frying, but happily everything to do with love, or at least with the goddesses who represented it: Venus, Aphrodite and the oft overlooked Frigga.

Finally, Saturday. This is a day the Greeks called ημέρα Κρόνου or heméra Krónou, day of Cronus, who was the leader of the gods until he was overthrown and imprisoned by his sons Zeus, Hades and Poseidon (who split up the world between them, Zeus ruling the sky, Poseidon the seas and Hades the underworld) . Cronus was identified with the Roman god Saturn who was the god of agriculture justice and strength. Perhaps there was no Norse equivalent, as Saturday comes to us from the Latin dies Saturni (Saturn's day) which was translated from the Greek. From the Latin we get, before 899, the Old English Saeterdaeg, which developed to Saetterdaei around 1200, and to Saturday by 1300. This is the same route as both the Spanish Sabado, and the German Samstag as both the Latin and the Germanic languages developed from the Latin in this case. So the final day of this week belongs to Saturn.

The days of the week in English, and most other Western European languages, amount to a crash course in Greek, Roman and Norse mythology which is pretty cool. I particularly like the unfortunately named Frigga (and this Anglicisation of the Norse Frigg did her name a favour in my opinion, poor girl!), her name may well be the route of the Old English freogan, to love, from which we derive our modern word friend, which is rather nice.

In many other languages and language groups the names of the days are derived from numbering them, this is true of most of the Slavic languages including Russian, Polish and Czech, the same applies to Hebrew. There are also other systems based on gods and planets, like Hindu and Urdu. But there are so many variations that it would take a book rather than a blog entry to explore them all. So for now you will have to make do with the English.

Puns

2010-04-09T16:28:00.001+01:00

A pun is a play on words. The OED gives this definition: a joke exploiting the different meanings of a word or the fact that there are words of the same sound and different meanings. This is not a particularly snappy definition because there are so many different kinds of puns.

One of the most common types is the homographic pun. This is a pun which plays off the multiple meanings that one word may have, as an example the old, and terrible, joke: Q. Why did the hedgehog cross the road? A. He wanted to see his flat mate.

Similar to the homographic pun is the homophonic pun. These are puns which exploit homophones, that is words which mean different things and are spelled differently but sound the same, eg. hours and ours . These work better as spoken puns but are usually still effective when written down, an example of a homophonic pun would be seven days without laughter makes one weak.

Then there is the heteronymic pun, where the words are spelled the same but they have different meanings and are pronounced differently, as with the second sentence of Douglas Adam's compound pun "You can tune a guitar, but you can't tuna fish. Unless of course, you play bass."

A large number of puns are double sound puns, here words which sound similar to something else are inserted into a sentence, usually to create a joke: I decided that becoming a vegetarian was a missed steak.

Puns don't always have the best reputation, Samuel Johnson called them the lowest form of humour and a very common response to a pun is a groan. But puns have been valued in the past. During the Elizabethan era (1558-1603) puns, and wordplay in general, were considered to be an important part of literature and Shakespeare is famous for his use of puns in both comic and serious works. A good example of one of his less humorous puns is from Romeo and Juliet, when Mercutio, after being stabbed in Act 3, says "ask for me tomorrow, and you shall find me a grave man". But you don't usually need to go more than a few lines in any of Shakespeare's plays to find a pun, he seems to have delighted in them, and in particular used them as a way of inserting bawdy humour and sexual jokes into his work.

The etymology of the word pun isn't totally clear, it was probably clipped from a longer word during the late 1600's as this seems to have been a fashionable way of creating slang at the time. It is quite possibly from pundigrion which would suggest that pun may have come from puntiglio, an Italian word meaning equivocation, trivial objection or small or fine point. It is also possible that it came from punnet, however it may be that punnet was a diminutive of pun.

It seems that in general when puns elicit groans it is because they are off the cuff and perhaps not very well thought out. But puns are everywhere. In the bad pun camp there cannot be worse offenders than the tabloid headline writers with new examples of terrible puns appearing every day. Occasionally they do good though, as with this fabulous headline from The Sun in February '08: Super Caley Go Ballistic, Celtic Are Atrocious, (if you don't understand this then you may be lacking a basic knowledge of either Scottish football teams or 1960's musicals) in my opinion a brilliant pun. Unfortunately it is rare to find quality puns in tabloid headlines.

Another group of people who seem to delight in bad puns are small business owners, in particular hairdressers and barbers (A Close Shave, Cissors Palace, Head Quarters etc etc etc) and chip shops (The Codfather anyone?), some examples of better business name puns include A Salt and Battery (fish and chip shop) and Shammy Davis Junior (window cleaners). There is a brilliant list of pun based businesses here on the website for Dave Gorman's radio show, and as they are his pick of the best (real) pun based business names they are frequently funny and well worth a look.

In researching this post I did manage to come across some genuinely funny, clever and well thought out puns: Why can a man never starve in the Great Desert? Because he can eat the sand which is there. But what brought the sandwiches there? Why, Noah sent Ham, and his descendants mustered and bred (from Richard Whately Archbishop of Dublin (1787-1863), who was apparently an enthusiastic punner). Another great one was from Lady Margot Asquith, it may be apocryphal and more bitchy than clever but it made me laugh. When Asquith was introduced to the 1930's starlet Jean Harlow the film star made the mistake of pronouncing the 't' at the end of her name, rhyming Margot with not. Lady Asquith quickly corrected her saying “My dear, the ‘t’ is silent, as in Harlow".

Puns may not be the highest form of wit, but they don't need to be. The joy of a pun is in the fact that anyone can come up with one, usually on the spur of the moment. They may frequently be terrible but there is enjoyment even in the worst of puns and something quite satisfying about coming up with a particularly bad one.

Van photo by Dan Taylor
Sign photo by get directly down
Shop front photo by Rachel H

Tea

2010-04-06T08:54:00.003+01:00

I am finally getting around to the next installment of my kitchen jar blog posts today. So far I have covered sugar and coffee and today is the turn of tea.

Tea has a long and international history, and for the most part this is going to be a pretty English story, because I am English, but also because the history of tea does have a lot to do with England. This is necessarily a brief history of as I think you could quiet easily fill a few books with all the information that is out there.

Tea originated in China, legend has it that it's possibilities as a drink were discovered when in 2737 BC/BCE leaves from a Camellia sinensis tree blew into some water which was being boiled for the Emperor Shen Nung by his servant. Shen Nung, a renowned herbalist, decided to taste the water and see what happened, the result was the first cup of tea.

Whether or not this is true tea was certainly being drunk in China by the time of the Han dynasty (206 BC/BCE-220 AD/CE). It was popularised there during the Tang dynasty (618AD/CE- 906) when it became established as the national drink of China. So much so in fact that, during the late 8th century a man called Lu Yu wrote a book called the Ch'a Ching (Tea Classic) in which he outlined the precise utensils (24 in total), methods and rituals required to make tea, this was an immediate hit and was very influential in China.

He was also big in Japan. Tea was first introduced there, by Buddhist monks who had studied in China, at around the same time that Lu Yu published the Ch'a Ching, and the ritual of the Japanese tea ceremony is thought to be a combination of Zen Buddhist ritual and the teachings of this book which raised the preparation and drinking of tea to an almost religious ritual. Tea ceremonies are still performed in Japan today, based on these same rituals.

Tea reached Europe in 1606 when the Dutch started to ship it to Holland from China, via their trading post of Java. This was a decade before they managed to start growing coffee, but strangely in England, today a country swimming in tea, coffee caught on first. Coffee houses first opened in England around 1650 but it wasn't until 1658 that there was first mention of tea being served in one. To begin with tea was considered to be a bit of a novelty, it only really began to get popular in England after the King, Charles II married a Portuguese princess, Catherine of Braganza, who just happened to be a tea addict. She did much to popularise the drink at court, and from there it became a fashionable drink among the wealthy.

The East India Company capitalised on this, placing the first order for 100lbs of China tea to be shipped from Java in 1664. Tea remained very much a drink for the wealthy as almost as soon as it began to be imported to England the government started to levy taxes on it. The first tax in 1689 was 25 pence in the pound, this was so high that it almost stopped sales altogether, it was lowered to 5 pence by 1692. This was enough to encourage sales, but it was still too high to make tea an everyday item.

As a result of taxation there was a very profitable black market for tea which, in its heyday in the late 18th century, accounted for approximately 60% of the tea that was sold in England each year. The tea smuggling also led to some pretty nasty substances being sold as tea, with anything from random plant leaves to used, dried tea leaves being added to the mix, often with sheep's dung or copper carbonate (a poisonous substance) used to create a more convincing colour, in many ways it's amazing that English people drank tea at all. But it was still popular, and people were willing to risk the dodgy black market to get their cup of tea. The tea smuggling came to a stop almost overnight when William Pitt the Younger, the Prime Minister at the time, cut the tax on tea from 119% to 12.5% in 1784.

It wasn't just in England where tea taxation caused problems. It was the issue that sparked the American War of Independence. This came about because, during the 18th century all tea shipped to America had to come from Britain, and all tea going to Britain was shipped by the East India Company, however they were not allowed to ship to America directly. During the 1770's, largely due to the volume of tea being smuggled into Britain, the East India Company ran into financial difficulties and asked the British government for permission to ship directly to the states. The company owed the government about a million pounds at the time and so the government, not wishing to see it go bankrupt, gave its permission.

These imports were to be taxed at 3d (old English pence) per lb, this actually represented a lower price of tea than the Americans had previously been paying, however the dislike of being taxed by a government which did not represent the American people was vastly underestimated by the government in London. In 1773 an amendment to the tea act also gave the East India Company a monopoly on distribution in America, putting American tea distributors out of business.

This was the final straw for many, and when, in November of 1773 the East India Company sent four tea clippers to the port of Boston the people there resolved not to allow it on shore while it had to be taxed. Unfortunately the captains (of three of the ships, the fourth had run aground on the journey) had filled out paperwork on their arrival which made it illegal for them to return to England with the tea and so for them to leave the harbour meant risking the ships being confiscated or even sunk by the Navy. So the ships sat in the harbour in a deadlock with the people of Boston. Finally, on the evening of the 16th of December a band of men, many disguised as Mohawk American Indians, boarded the ships and spent three hours splitting the tea chests and dumping the contents into the sea. This was an otherwise peaceful protest, with nobody getting hurt and no damage to the actual ships. The Boston Tea Party, as the occasion became known, sparked protests in other cities in America kicking off the events that led to the War of Independence.

The East India Company was responsible for much that was wrong with the British Empire. A good example of this is that much of the money used to buy tea from China was raised by trading opium with China. This was illegal in China and so the company traded it via India, where it was grown for them. They were so effective at this that opium caused wide spread social problems in China and the trade eventually led to the Opium Wars of 1839-42 and 1856-60, these resulted in China being forced, by the British government to trade tea for opium.

The East India Company's monopoly on the tea trade in Britain ended in 1834, up to this point the vast majority of the tea they traded had come from China. The free for all that started after the monopoly ended prompted them to look into growing tea in India and Sri Lanka (then Ceylon). This was very successful for them, and the tea and opium businesses they had in India led to the acquisition of India as a colony and all the misery that entailed. The East India Company was removed from administrative power in India in 1858 after their particularly shameful response to the First Indian War of Independence (or The Great Mutiny as it was known to the British), during which the East India Company which at that point was more of a state than a company, massacred whole towns and cities in retaliation for the uprising, although it did continue to trade until 1873 when it was formally dissolved.

Today tea is a drink which is popular all over the world. In the UK and Ireland most of the tea drunk is black, usually with milk and often sugar, but other teas, including green, white and oolong teas are also gaining in popularity. Green tea is still the most popular tea in Japan, although black tea with milk or lemon is often served in restaurants. In continental Europe tea is most often served black, often with lemon. In the United States iced tea is so popular that the distinction has to be made if you are referring to hot tea. In India, which is the worlds largest tea producer today, most of the tea consumed is Indian black tea, often served with milk, sugar and spices as a chai. In China loose tea served in earthenware is generally the norm, although in the birthplace of tea, as you would expect, there are many variations in type and method to be found. In fact there are at least as many different ways of drinking tea as there are countries that consume it.

The word tea originates, of course, from Chinese. It is from the Mandarin t'e, via the Malay teh, and the Portuguese cha. It was first recorded in English as chaa in 1598, and by 1655 as tay (the English also use the slang term cuppa char, which seems to be from either the Indian chai, or from the Chinese tcha). This is basically the same etymology as most European languages and there is very little variation between European forms, from the French thé or the German tee to the Russian chai the history of the word is visible.

So there you have my potted history of tea. The subject is vast, and so entwined with the history of many countries that I could have written for a few days on this, however my hands are getting sore from typing, so I shall stop.

Photo by Yomi Yomi

April Fools Day

2010-04-01T20:06:00.005+01:00

This is not going to be a clever hoax post as I am quite interested in the subject, sorry.

April 1st is a day when people all over Europe traditionally hoax others in the hope of making them an April Fool. Hoax, meaning humorous or malicious deception (thank you OED), is probably an alteration of hocus, shortened from hocus pocus, this was used as a formula in performing magic tricks and was recorded in 1632, it was also applied to any magician or juggler and it may be from this usage that we get hoax. Hocus Pocus was possibly originally sham Latin and is very likely a perversion of the phrase from the Latin Mass Hoc est corpus meum (this is my body). Fool has a lovely etymology, it first appears as as fol around 1200, and had become fool by around 1375 when Chaucer used it in his Canterbury Tales. It is from the Old French fol, from the Latin follis meaning bellows or leather bag, so a fool is in fact a windbag and it was used in this sense in late Vulgar Latin.

The media in particular delight in April Fools day hoaxes, revelling in the chance to pull one over on the (not particularly) unsuspecting public. This year is no exception. Here is small (UK-centric) selection of today's best offerings: The Guardian, in my opinion, were the outright winner with this hilarious story of Labours new UK election campaign. Online, Wikipedia put a lot of time and effort into trying to convince us of all sorts of nonsense, and the Telegraph wins the prize for the most inventive story of the day , but none of this, however fun, explains why we mark the first of April in this way.

The answer, it seems, is we don't know. The most plausible explanation that we have is that it may have originated in France when, in 1564 their calendar was reformed, moving the start of the year from the end of March to January the 1st. Supposedly this was not a popular move with everyone, and some people stuck stubbornly to the old dates of celebration. Those who continued to celebrate New Year between March 25th and the 1st of April were routinely ridiculed and had tricks played on them, the most popular being the practice of pinning a paper fish to their back. The victims of this prank became known as Poisson d'Avril (April Fish), and this name has stuck in France to this day. However, the story doesn't really stand up to scrutiny as the changeover in France was actually a gradual process that lasted about a century, and for a long time both systems were used side by side so it seems unlikely that people celebrating in April would have been ridiculed.

The theory of calendar change actually fits better with what occurred in Britain where April 1st was the last day of an eight day festival to celebrate the new year, however the calendar changed in Britain in 1752, by which time the custom of April Fools day was well established throughout Europe. There is a possible but much disputed reference to the custom in Chaucer's Nun’s Priest’s Tale (written around 1392), but the first definite reference is in a comical poem which was published in 1539 by a Flemish writer called Eduard De Dene, in which a noble man sends his servant on a series of fools errands on the 1st of April, this story further rubbishes the French theory as it also predates their changeover.

Whenever and wherever it originated The custom of fooling others on the 1st of April is a well established one in many European countries as well as in Canada and Australia, but it is always an amusing diversion, and the cleverest hoaxes are always the ones which manage to sound just plausible enough to suck people in. Possibly the best ever example of an April fools hoax is the BBC's Panorama report in 1957 on Switzerland's spaghetti harvest which was widely believed by the British public. In their defence, I should just point out that pasta was still a pretty exotic food in Britain at the time, and this was the most respected factual presenter of the day on a serious show on the BBC, it wouldn't have occurred to most people that it was possible they were being tricked, it is well worth a watch even today. Other great examples, including the colon shaped island of San Serriffe from The Guardian in 1977 and the news, in The April 1998 issue of the New Mexicans for Science and Reason newsletter, that the state of Alabama had voted to change the value of Pi are to be found here, check it out there are some great historical hoaxes.

I hope you managed to get through this April 1st unscathed and remember, if you are already planning next years fooling, that you must play your tricks before noon, or else the joke is on you (no idea why!).

Picture from http://www.guardian.co.uk/

Filibuster, Buccaneer, Freebooter

2010-03-28T09:25:00.007+01:00

Filibuster comes under the heading of words that I think are so wonderfully ridiculous that they must have an interesting history, and I was right. Filibuster led to buccaneer and freebooter so I thought I would include them too.

The OED has filibuster as 'prolonged speaking or other action which obstructs progress in a legislative assembly while not technically contravening the required procedures'. It also mentions that historically it referred to 'a person engaging in unauthorised warfare against a foreign state'. Filibuster is American English and in its modern usage has been in around since at least 1890 when it appeared in the Congressional Record, prior to this it was used to mean a legislator who prolongs debate, this usage was first recorded in 1853 but by 1855 had been replaced by filibusterer.

Filibuster was originally used in American English to refer to any American who engaged in uprisings in Latin America in particular in Cuba, and later Mexico and Nicaragua. It is borrowed from the Spanish filibustero (freebooter), and from French fibustier. However it was recorded earlier in English as fibutor (pirate or adventurer) which was borrowed from the Dutch vrijbuiter (freebooter) and it is unclear which language the word originated in. It is possible that the French is borrowed from the original English, which then borrowed it back again, or perhaps the English came from the French, or Spanish to begin with, we don't know.

Whatever the origins fibutor referred to pirates and adventurers (a fine line) in particular those active in the region around the Caribbean and was used up until about 1587. As I said there was a fine line between the activities of pirates and adventurers in those days, and also between legitimate sailors and pirates- Sir Francis Drake, considered a hero of English history was considered a pirate by the Spanish as he was a privateer who spent much of his career single mindedly wrecking their interests in the New World. The word buccaneer comes from this era.

Originally buccaneers were French settlers employed by the Spanish authorities to hunt wild oxen on the Spanish coast of America. The word was first recorded in 1661 and came from the French boucanier, one who dries and smokes meat on a boucan . A boucan was a wooden frame, and this manner of smoking meat came from the native peoples of the Caribbean area so the word may have developed from one of their languages, possibly from Tupi mocaem. By around1630 the French buccaneers were being driven off these lands by the Spanish, and many turned to pirating as an alternative source of income. By 1690 this had resulted in the word being used to refer to any French or English pirates operating in the Caribbean area, and by the 1800's it referred to pirates and sea rovers everywhere, and had generally replaced the earlier filibuster.

Finally, freebooter. This is the doublet of filibuster and means pirate. It was recorded in English in 1570 as frebetter and is borrowed from the Dutch vrijbuiter from buiter (to exchange or plunder). This comes from Middle Dutch buten which is related to the Middle Low German bute meaning exchange.

By the way, the reason why filibuster came up in the first place is that I was listening to my ipod on random and Birdhouse in Your Soul by They Might Be Giants came up.

Jolly Roger picture by Kate Andrews

Seasons

2010-03-24T18:46:00.003Z

Today it felt like spring. The sun was shining, and the daffodils were out, all that was missing was a few bouncy lambs. In Ireland the seasons aren't very well defined and spring is usually the transition between the time that the bitingly cold winds stop and the time that the rain (also known as summer) starts, but climate bitterness aside, it set me to wondering where the names of the seasons come from, my findings are below.

Spring is pretty much as obvious as it seems, it is the time when nature springs back into life. It seems likely that the season was originally known as spring of the leaf, recorded in 1538 (although it may have originated much earlier, springtime was recorded before 1398). In any case by 1547 it had been shortened to spring.

The word spring meaning to move suddenly or rapidly probably dates back as far as 1200, before this the word would have been springen (move suddenly, leap, jump) this developed from the Old English springan which was recorded around 725 in Beowulf. This word is from the Proto-Germanic sprenzanan and from the same route as the Greek sperchesthai (be in haste) and the Sanskrit sprhayati (is eager). This route is the Indo-European spergh/sprgh.

Spring has been used in English as the word for the source of a stream or river, well spring, since around 816, and in this usage is related to springan. It has been used to mean a stream of water flowing up from the ground, mineral spring, since around 1125. In the sense of the act of springing up since about 1450, and a spring (as in a sofa or mattress spring) was first recorded in 1428.

Summer has a less obvious history, before 1121 it was written as sumer, and is from the Old English sumor. This word (from the same route as the German sommer and the Dutch zomer) is from the Proto-Germanic sumer, however the word goes back further as cognates with it are found outside of Germanic languages; in the Old Irish sam (summer),the Armenian amarn (summer), and the Sanskrit sama (half year/year/season). The reason why we call summer summer is linked to this Sanskrit meaning, the word that these words are from is the Indo-European semer, which had much the same meaning as the Sanskrit. So, before we had spring to muddle the issue, summer lasted for half the year, which sounds like a great idea to me, 6 months of summer? Sign me up.

Autumn is a newer word than summer. It first appears in English around 1380 as autumpne, this was in a translation of Boethius' De Consolatione Philosophiae by Chaucer, and was from the Old French autompne. The word appeared as autumne in Taming of the Shrew, but until the 1500's the season would have been referred to as harvest. Whether the displacement of this word by autumn reflected an increasingly urbanised population is unclear but it is an interesting idea.

The Old French is from a Latin route autumnus and this word is of uncertain origin. It seems likely that there isn't one Indo-European route word for autumn. The Latin languages tend to share the Latin route as in the Italian autunno and the Portuguese outono, but other languages use words derived from the colour of fallen leaves like the Lithuanian ruduo (autumn) from rudas (reddish) and many of them have words meaning end of summer or harvest. So it is not certain why autumn. If this makes you uncomfortable you could try the more descriptive name they use in the USA: fall. Fall for autumn actually originated in England, first recorded in John Evelyn's Silva, and in an echo of spring it was shortened from the earlier fall of the leaf.

Winter has a specific route word with a specific meaning, and it says a lot about the English climate. The word winter hasn't changed in spelling in well over a thousand years, it was recorded in Beowulf in 725. It is from the Proto-Germanic wentruz, the same word that gives German it's winter and Norwegian vetr. This route is the Indo-European wed, which inevitably enough means to be wet, this seems apt for England, less so for Germany and Norway where I would imagine that cold would be the first issue that springs to mind in vetr. Wed is also the route of the words wet and water.

That's it, I am off to pick daffodils and hunt lambs.
Or something.

Lambs photo by sea the sea
Ice cream photo by Sarah G
Trees photo by Per Ola Wiberg
Snow photo by Liz West

Limericks

2010-03-20T14:26:00.003Z

There was an Old Man of Quebec,
A beetle ran over his neck;
But he cried, "With a needle,
I'll slay you, O beadle!"
That angry Old Man of Quebec.

Edward Lear

A limerick is a poem consisting of 5 lines with an AABBA rhyming pattern. In most poetry written in English a foot is the basic building block of a line of poetry. It consists of a certain number of syllables that make up part of the line and is described by the character and number of syllables it contains. In the case of the limerick the lines 1,2 &5 are usually each made up of three feet which each have three syllables, usually da da DUM, da da DUM, da da DUM, although the middle syllable can also be stressed da DUM da, da DUM da, da DUM da, and to my mind the first or the last foot of these lines can also be of two syllables one stressed and one not, as in da DUM, da da DUM, da da DUM. Lines 3&4 are usually made up of two feet each with the same options of rhythm. Confused? I wasn't aware that these amusing little rhymes were so complicated, but it seems that they are.

A diner, whilst dining in Crewe,
Found a very large mouse in his stew;
Said the waiter "don't shout,
Or wave it about
Or the rest will be wanting one too"

Limericks have an uncertain history, they seem to be related to bawdy poems told in English pubs in the 14th century, however these would not have been called limericks and it is unlikely that they would have had the distinctive patterns of rhyme and rhythm that a modern limerick has. The form has also been used in nursery rhymes, which were often related to bawdy pub songs in any case. A good example of this would be Hickory Dickory Dock which was first recorded around 1744 but may have originated much earlier in the counting rhymes of shepherds. If this poem isn't a Limerick then it's pretty close:

Hickory Dickory Dock,
The mouse ran up the clock,
The clock struck one
The mouse ran down,
Hickory Dickory Dock

The form has certainly been in use for a long time, often as a humorous rhyme even if these poems weren't referred to as limericks:

"And let me the canakin clink, clink;
And let me the canakin clink
A soldier's a man;
A life's but a span;
Why, then, let a soldier drink."

From Othello, Act II Scene III by William Shakespeare

The most widely told story of how limericks got their name is that it originated in a pub or party game which involved each drinker in turn improvising a humorous rhyme followed by the line "Will you come up to Limerick?", this seems to be the best guess however largely due to the verbal nature of this game there is no conclusive proof that this is the case. Another theory which I have only come across once is that it is from Learic from Edward Lear.

Edward Lear is the name most closely associated with limericks, and he can be credited with making the form a socially acceptable one. Prior to his A Book of Nonsense in 1845 these rhymes were very much associated with drinking games and were often crude. Lear's limericks were mostly nonsense rhymes and met the extreme moral codes of Victorian England. Lear used a lot of wordplay in his poems, and his inventive love of language deserves a blog post all to himself which I may well do sometime. One of the defining features of his limericks is that the 5th line ends with the same word as the 1st, this was the usual custom at the time. Interestingly while he stuck closely to the rhyming pattern of the limerick he didn't call his poems that, either because the name was not yet associated with the poems, or perhaps to avoid the stigma attached to the word.

There was an Old Man of Aôsta,
Who possessed a large Cow, but he lost her;
But they said, 'Don't you see,
She has rushed up a tree?
You invidious Old Man of Aôsta!'

Edward Lear

Limericks remain popular today, partially as they are reasonably easy for anybody to write and, I suspect, partially as they are still often rude or funny. To my mind the funniest limericks are anti-limericks which subvert the usual form to comic effect, so here are a few of the anti-limericks that I came across today:

There was a young man from Japan
Whose limericks never would scan.
When asked why this was,
He replied "It's because I always try to fit as many syllables into the last line as ever possibly I can."

There was a young lad of Honolulu
Whose limericks stopped at line two.

A decrepit old gas man named Peter,
While hunting around for the meter,
Touched a leak with his light.
He arose out of sight,
And, as anyone can see by reading this, he also destroyed the meter.

And this one, attributed to W.S. Gilbert, which is a parody of Lear:

There was an old man of St. Bees,
Who was stung in the arm by a wasp;
When they asked, "Does it hurt?"
He replied, "No, it doesn't,
But I thought all the while 't was a Hornet."

One last thing, the name of the place Limerick (a County and City in Ireland) comes from the Irish word Liumneach meaning bare ground, from lom meaning bare or thin.

Leprechaun

2010-03-17T09:40:00.004Z

The history of the Leprechaun is a fascinating one. They first appear in writing in Medieval times, however they have been around much longer than this.

They are descended from the same sprites as the common European pixie, however after the last ice age when Ireland was separated from the rest of Europe they began to evolve separately into a species distinct from any other known fairy. The distinguishing feature of a little beard (common to both sexes) came about quite early, presumably evolved to combat the harsh weather on the West coast of Ireland where many of the leprechaun communities were based.

Pre 4th century Leprechauns existed in Ireland in small numbers with very little variation in the population. Historians don't always agree on what this number was but between 1,000 and 1,750 Leprechauns seems a reasonable estimate. Leprechauns have always tended to adapt their diet depending on what food is available, however they have never been hunter gatherers or farmers preferring to steal or barter (and later to buy) their food from humans. Initially their ability to produce gold was merely a sort of party trick used to amuse their young. Leprechauns were at one point very talented shoemakers and when it was too much trouble to simply steal their food the leprechauns would barter with these shoes. Once they realised the value of gold in human society however it quickly replaced shoes as their currency of choice. Today the ability to produce high quality footwear has largely been lost, as Adidas found to their cost when their Leprechaun brand trainers had to be recalled in 2005, resulting in a very embarrassing scandal about the low wages paid to the Leprechauns in their Antrim factory.

In the mid 5th century AD Saint Patrick famously drove the snakes out of Ireland (less famously he also drove out all of the dormice, his motives for this action have never been entirely clear). This had the unfortunate effect of driving up the leprechaun population as, aside from humans, snakes were their only natural predators, without this danger there was a population explosion (comparable in human terms perhaps to the baby boom post WWII).

After the 5th century the population expansion slowed somewhat but continued steadily until, by 1121 when it is reported that there were up to 10 leprechauns per square mile on the island of Ireland, that's more than 325,000 leprechauns. This massive population wreaked havoc across the country, raiding homes and farms for their food as the people of Ireland had by this time become familiar with the properties of leprechaun gold, namely it's habit of vanishing shortly after coming into human possession. All of this resulted in the great leprechaun purges of the 1120's, in Ireland still commemorated in legends and song to this day (although the human legends tend to have a different spin on them to those of the Leprechauns).

This massive program of slaughter brought the populations under control again, however it also resulted in a more clever and wary breed of leprechaun as those who had lived passed their survival tips on to the next generation and the population immediately began to rise again. Fortunately for the human population by the late 1100's there was an alternative method of controlling the leprechaun population in the invention of whiskey. Whiskey was an immediate hit with both the human and the leprechaun population, the difference being that because of their small stature leprechauns needed far less whiskey in order to become blind drunk, and they loved it. This love for whiskey helped to keep the population under control and out of mischief for nearly a millennia.

There was an uneasy status quo between the human and leprechaun populations for the 800 years between the 12th and 20th centuries as the leprechauns were subdued by their whiskey and tended to stay under the human radar. So successful was their whiskey addiction in quieting the leprechaun population that over time they actually started to be considered by the uneducated as mythical creatures. This started to change in the mid 20th century with the introduction of Alcoholics Anonymous. For many years prior to this small, sober, groups of leprechauns had been campaigning for leprechaun sobriety but in AA there was finally a tool with which to achieve this goal. Of course it wasn't always successful but today there is a 65% sobriety rate amongst leprechauns compared to just 7% in 1910.

This new found sobriety led many leprechauns to question what their role would be in modern Irish society (leprechaun hunting was outlawed in 1965 after a long campaign by the ISPCL). This role has mostly been found within the tourist industry with many leprechauns taking up posts in other countries to help promote Ireland and Irish culture. This has not always been popular, many people in modern Ireland feel that the 'culture' promoted by leprechaun ambassadors abroad and at home is not the culture of the people of Ireland, however it is enormously popular with people across the world and looks to be here to stay. These days Leprechaun populations are kept under control in much the same way that human populations are, through education and birth control.

So that is the history of the leprechaun for you on St Patrick's day (he is of course a hero to leprechauns as well as the patron saint of Ireland), have a good one!

p.s. The etymology of leprechaun (truthfully): recorded in English in 1604 as lubrican, this was borrowed from the Irish lupracan which was altered from Old Irish luchorpan (lu meaning little and corpan a diminutive of corp, meaning body from the Latin corpus- also where we get the word corpse from).

Photo by Ignacio Leonardi

Sugar

2010-03-16T09:35:00.004Z

OED: A sweet crystalline substance obtained especially from sugar cane and sugar beet consisting essentially of sucrose and used as a sweetener in food and drink.

There are other definitions, but this is the type of sugar I am going to talk about. Sugar in various different forms can be derived from any number of sources, from fructose in fruits to lactose in milk or glucose/dextrose in corn. But I am going to look at sucrose, specifically sucrose refined from sugar cane.

Unlike coffee, which is a relatively new human discovery, people have been consuming crystallised sugar for about 2000 years and were probably chewing on sugar cane long before that. Sugar cane is thought to have first been cultivated by Polynesians. From there it spread to India where, in around 350 AD/CE, people discovered that by grinding down the cane to extract the juice and then drying it in the sun they could produce solids which were easy to transport. Up until this point sugar had been relatively unimportant as a crop, although that is not to say that it wasn't used. In 510 BC/BCE the Persian Emperor Darius invaded India and discovered what he called ' the reed which gives honey without bees' (this is the father of the Emperor Xerxes who featured in the film 300, unfortunately it seems that his apperance as an 8ft giant with massive pupils for eyes may not have been a strictly accurate representation of the historical figure). Anyway, once sugar could easily be transported it could be traded. Because we got sugar from India we got our word for the substance from the Sanskrit word sarkara meaning ground or candied sugar but originally meaning gravel or grit. Thanks to Darius this developed into the Persian word shakar.

In 642 AD/CE The Persian Empire was invaded by Arabs who learnt how to grow and make sugar. As they invaded other lands they took this knowledge with them and sugar started to be grown throughout the Arab empire including North Africa and Spain. The Arabs also developed the name to sukkar, taking it from the Persian shakar. Sugar was discovered by Western Europe for the first time during the crusades. They clearly took to this 'new spice' or 'sweet salt'; the first crusade began in 1095 and by 1099 sugar had reached England. The production of sugar for the European market was largely taken on by the Venetians, who acquired land for growing sugar cane first at Tyre and then later moved their operations to Cyprus.

Crushing sugar cane was backbreaking work and as the people of Cyprus spent much of their time growing their own food most of them refused to work in sugar production, in fact generally Europeans refused to do any work in sugar production below a supervisory role. The solution to this problem was slaves. To begin with there wasn't a huge demand for sugar and so the number of slaves used was relatively low, however as demand increased so did the number of slaves working to produce it, first in Cyprus and then later in Sicily, the Canaries, Madeira and the Cape Verde Islands during the 1440's. The combination of these low labour costs and a highly valued product made sugar a very valuable substance.

And it was expensive. Sugar was very much a luxury item, the cost of a pound of sugar in England during the 1300's would have been several months wages for the average labourer. Because of this price sugar was often considered to have medicinal powers. It was also used by powerful people as a status symbol, to afford to have sugar sculptures at a banquette you needed to be very wealthy. At this time the word for sugar had come via the Arabic sukkar, through Medieval Latin, succarum, and Old French sucre, sukere into English as sucre (recorded around 1325), from here it developed into sugure (in 1381), and sugre (1393). Most European languages have words for sugar which developed from the Arabic in one way or another, for example Spanish azucar or the Polish cukier.

In 1493 Columbus took sugar to the Caribbean and it thrived, sadly this drove the slave trade to new heights as more and more people were required to grow and refine the cane sugar. Many Caribbean islands were completely deforested in order to make room for the new crop including Barbados and Antigua. Sugar was big business. By 1750 there were 120 sugar refineries in operation in Britain, however it was still a luxury item, sometimes being referred to as white gold. Sugar was heavily taxed by governments eager to share in the vast profits available. This kept sugar prices high until the late 1800's when most European governments tried to bring the cost into line with the budgets of their poorer citizens (and it could be argued that in doing so they laid the foundations of today's obesity problems in Western society).

So there you have it, today we produce so much sugar in the world that we have surpluses in Europe. The EU, Brazil and India are the top producers of sugar. The purchase of sugar is also used as a form of overseas aid with both the EU and the USA importing raw sugar cane from third world countries. I can't help wondering what would happen to the average Western diet if governments were to start heavily taxing sugar again though, it could be quite interesting.

Sugar cane photo by Zeetz Jones

Debunk

2010-03-15T09:49:00.008Z

Since I began my course last October I find myself regularly consulting a dictionary. Either because I've come across a word and I don't know what it means, or because when writing an essay I use a word and then want to double check that it does in fact mean what I thought it did. I am now trying to get into the habit of writing these words down as I think that it helps me to remember them, and also so that when I run out of topics for my blog I have a handy list of interesting words to explore.

Debunk falls into the second category, although it also rather exposes my paranoia of misusing words as I knew perfectly well that I used it in the correct context, but I checked it anyway. In any case it was the first word on my list so I decided to check it in my etymological dictionary, and it wasn't there. Now perhaps this should have discouraged me but I haven't been doing much coursework lately and debunk was not only the first word on my list but also the only word, so I persevered. Etymology online came to my rescue by explaining to me what should really have been patently obvious: de is a prefix so I should really be looking for the meaning of bunk in order to understand why we de it. The website did have a little information on the word debunk however; it is American English and was first used in 1923 by the U.S. novelist William Woodward and it's meaning of course is to take the bunk out of something. Just in case you are interested, I googled William Woodward and he seems to have been most famous for this coining, his name doesn't come up without a mention of debunk, I'm not sure that would have been his preferred legacy but since I can't find much information on the man who knows? Maybe he would have been overjoyed by the association.

So then, bunk. The OED simply says that it is an informal word for nonsense originating in the 20th century, and that it is a shortened form of bunkum. My etymological dictionary is nearly as brief, it says it means nonsense or humbug and that it was first recorded in 1900 in the writings of George Ade. It also says it is shortened from bunkum, or at a distance from bunco.

Bunkum, which has the same meaning as bunk, has a rather charming story behind it. During the 16th Congress (1819-21), in the USA a congressman man called Felix Walker gave a long and dull, irrelevant speech despite the fact that his colleagues protested and called for him to cut it short. Felix Walker was the congressman for North Carolina and part of his district included Buncombe County. His explanation for this behaviour was that he needed to make a speech which would appear in newspapers back home in order to prove that he was on the job, and that he was making the speech for Buncombe. The word has been in use ever since.

Bunco is an American English slang word meaning swindle. It dates from 1872 and was taken from the name of a dice and card game which appears to have been adapted from an American Spanish card game banca, banco.

So there you go. I thought I was going to investigate one word but it turned out to be four. That is why I love etymology, it takes you to random places.

Finally if you have read this far wondering what on earth the picture attached to this post has to do with anything, to be honest it doesn't. But it made me laugh. So it stays because I can't think of an obvious way to visually represent debunk.

Photo by Ardyiii

Mother's Day

2010-03-13T18:59:00.005Z

I thought since tomorrow is Mother's day, in the UK and Ireland, that I would look at the word mother and the history of mother's day.

Etymologically speaking mother comes from the same Germanic route as the Dutch moeder and the German mutter, the Germanic group seem to have acquired the word via the same Indo-European route as many other language families which means that the words for mother in many languages is reasonably similar and easily recognised. In Old English the word used for mother was modor, this developed into moder around 1125, and from there to mother probably before 1425. This is a parallel development to the word father which also would have used a der ending prior to the 1500's.

The history of mothers day varies depending on where you are celebrating it, however nowhere is it a Hallmark invention which is nice to know. There have been festivals to celebrate mothers all over the world in all periods of recorded history. In ancient Egypt the goddess Isis was worshipped as the embodiment of Egyptian motherhood. In Ancient Greece there was an annual spring festival dedicated to the goddess Rhea, the mother of many of their deities, and in Ancient Rome there was Hilaria a notorious festival celebrating the mother goddess Cybele in March which apparently led to Cybele's followers eventually being banished from Rome!

In the UK and Ireland Mothers Day is celebrated on the fourth Sunday of Lent, and to Christians is properly known as Mothering Sunday. This day is also known as Refreshment Sunday, Laetare Sunday and Mid-Lent Sunday and during the 1500's it was the day that people returned to their mother church for a service which honoured the Virgin Mary. This practice was rather charmingly referred to as going a-mothering. Later this was a day when domestic servants were traditionally allowed to visit their families. By the early 20th century however Mothering Sunday was no longer really being celebrated.

In the USA the idea of a mother's day was started by a woman called Ann Jarvis, she was a pacifist and political activist in West Virginia, she came up with the idea after the American Civil War as a way of emphasising the causes of pacifism and social justice through mothers. She died in May 1905 and in 1907 her daughter, Anna Jarvis, held a memorial on the anniversary of her death and embarked on a campaign for an official Mother's Day in her memory. She succeeded in this in 1914 when the second Sunday in May officially became Mother's Day in the USA. Unfortunately Anna Jarvis later became embittered by what she felt was the commercialisation of the day, in particular she objected to, what she saw as, the laziness of sending a greetings card.

During WWII American servicemen stationed in the UK helped to revive the tradition of Mothering Sunday, the date of which was kept. Today in the UK Mothers Day serves as both a religious and a secular holiday, church services are still held specifically for the day in some churches, while the American idea of a day on which to give your mother gifts and cards has also become attached to the date.

In some ways I can sympathise with poor Anna Jarvis. I was actually slightly surprised that it wasn't a Hallmark invention. That's not to say that the idea of a day on which to celebrate mothers isn't a fantastic one but it has become indelibly linked to commercialism with whole shelves of card shops dedicated to the day and supermarkets marking up their flowers by about 600% (not exaggerating). But it is possible to reclaim this festival from commercialism if you really object to the greetings card industry; there are plenty of ways to celebrate your mum without going near a Clinton Cards. I like the idea of a letter instead of a card, or making her a cake, or just saying thank you, none of which lines the pockets of greedy corporations, that being said I also quite like a tastefully designed greetings card...

Whatever you do and however you choose to celebrate, have a fantastic Mother's Day.

Photo by John Morgan

Coffee

2010-03-11T11:32:00.004Z

My sister bought some new storage jars for the kitchen the other day, they are very tasteful and sit in a neat row with Tea, Coffee, Sugar and Bread written on them. While making a cup of tea the other day and absent mindedly staring at these jars it occurred to me that you could probably tell the history of the world with these foods (especially if you added to the story the new spice rack that she bought on the same shopping trip). It also occurred to me that I have no idea where any of these words come from, so I thought I would find out. As each of these substances has a long and intricate history I thought I might make it an occasional series rather than try to cover all the jars at once. With that in mind, and seeing as it has kept me in employment for most of my adult life, I give you coffee.

Coffee is not a particularly ancient beverage, it was certainly being cultivated in Yemen in the 1400's but it's exact origins are unknown. There is a story which is often told about a 9th century Ethiopian goatherd who noticed that after eating the berries of a certain tree his goats would act in a particularly lively fashion, however this story didn't appear in writing until the 1670's so it seems likely that this is legend rather than fact.

The history of the word coffee reflects the beverages origins. Coffee is from the Arabic qahwah (meaning coffee, but originally meaning wine) possibly via the Turkish kahveh. The word arrived in Europe in two forms, the first with an a resulting in the Latin language's café and caffè, from which English derived it's name for a coffee shop, the German kaffee and in Danish, Norwegian and Swedish kaffe. The other form was with an o from which we get the Dutch koffie and Russian kofe. The English is obviously from the o form and started out as chaoua (recorded in 1598) and quickly developed through coffe (1601), coffa (1603-30) to our modern coffee.

Coffee and politics have always gone hand in hand. Originally Yemen had a monopoly on coffee as they had strict rules on not allowing fertile coffee out of the country (if you take the bean out of it's berry it is no longer possible to grow the seed). Yemen traded coffee from the port of Mocha, a name which is now attached to a hot drink combining coffee and hot chocolate. Mocha was the main port for the one sea route to Mecca at this time (1500's) and the first coffee houses, called kava kanes which opened in Mecca were hugely popular and quickly spread to the rest of the Arab world. These were lively and luxurious places unlike anything which had previously existed and were used for gossiping, chess, music and dancing. Very quickly though they became hotbeds for political unrest and activism and ended up being suppressed. They were regularly revived and banned until the clever idea of taxing both the coffee and the coffee house was hit upon after which they were allowed to operate.

The idea of a coffee house as a place for communities of men to meet and exchange ideas, either artistic, scientific or political, was one that was exported to Europe along with the coffee. The Dutch finally managed to get their hands on their own, fertile, coffee trees in 1616. In England the first coffee house opened (probably) in Oxford in (probably) 1650, and more quickly followed. They were often known as penny universities due to the large number of intellectual conversations carried on in them. However these were men only affairs, in most European countries women were banned doing their coffee drinking at home if they could afford it.

The coffee house came about during a time when knowledge in a vast array of subjects was quickly expanding and it was the ideal place to discuss these subjects as unlike alcohol caffeine doesn't make you drunk. That being said if you drink too much coffee you can start to go a little crazy so it is interesting to speculate the extent to which leaps forward in science or industry might have been due to the enthusiasm of somebody under the influence of a large dose of coffee. The same was true of politics, the Boston Tea Party was planned in a coffee house called The Green Dragon. A lot of current financial institutions started in coffee houses as well, including Lloyd's of London, the New York Stock Exchange and the Bank of New York.

There is a charming story of how the first coffee tree reached the Americas, apparently Gabriel Mathieu de Clieu, a French naval officer serving in Martinique went to Paris on leave in 1720 and somehow acquired a coffee tree (not easy to do at the time). Having achieved this he must have thought the hard part was over. He set up the tree in a glass case on the deck in order to protect it from the sea air and they set sail. Over the course of the journey they got attacked by Tunisian pirates who they managed to fight off, then a violent storm so that the plant had to be tied down onto the deck, then a fellow sailor became jealous of de Clieu and tried to sabotage the plant, during a violent struggle a branch got pulled off but it still managed to survive. Finally the ship was becalmed meaning that water supplies had to be rationed, de Clieu did the right thing and gave most of his water to the coffee tree. Eventually, they both somehow reached Martinique still alive and the coffee tree was replanted in Preebear, surrounded by a thorn hedge and watched over at all times by slaves. All this effort payed off as by 1777, there were between 18 and 19 million coffee trees on Martinique and today coffee is a huge part of the economy of many central and south American countries.

Since Starbucks was founded in 1971 the way we drink coffee has changed, today we have a mind boggling range of choices in cafes and coffee shops on every corner in every city. However coffee is still political. The rise of the fair trade movement has highlighted how badly the people who produce coffee beans are treated. There are also environmental impacts as rainforest is cleared to make room for more coffee. However these agendas have been highlighted enough by campaigners, the media and consumers that today things are starting to change. It is perfectly possible to drink great coffee which has been produced responsibly. Many of the chains have a fair trade option although this is sometimes only for drip coffee or is charged at a higher price -shame on you Costa. The best way to find out if the making of your cup of coffee has caused either communities or the environment harm is to ask, the more people who ask the more companies will pay attention and change all their products to fair trade, as Marks and Spencer have done. In this many smaller non chain cafes and coffee shops seem to be leading the way, seek them out.

Coffee is a huge subject and I have barley scratched the surface. It has been linked to the way people live their lives from being a morning wake up to influencing politics and innovation for over 400 years so I have tried to give the edited highlights but it is an interesting story so look it up, I recommend this site for the history of coffee, and this one for the history of coffee houses.

Finally in my opinion, and I have some experience in these matters, if you want a decent cup of coffee stay as far away from the dishwater that they serve at Starbucks as you possibly can, you can get much better coffee for much less money wherever you are. Enjoy!

Photo by journeyscoffee

Why English speakers are more polite than French

2010-03-10T15:22:00.006Z

No really! Kind off...

In French there is a two tiered system of second person pronouns, in other words if you are addressing somebody of equal or lower status you would use the word tu (you), while for a person of higher status or as a mark of respect you would use the word vous (also you). As my translations demonstrate in English we use you regardless of the relative status of the person being addressed. Having formal and informal forms of you is common to many of the Indo-European languages (this includes languages such as Spanish, Hindi, Portuguese, Russian German and Urdu among several hundred others) so in having only one form English is pretty unusual.

None of this however means that English is any more polite than French, or any of it's other Indo-European stablemates. Just having one form could be considered in a way to be less polite as there is no linguistic indicator of respect. But English did originally have two forms of you. If you read Shakespeare or Chaucer, or many of the poets of the early to mid nineteenth century you will quickly come across thou and thee meaning you (and thine-yours, and thy-your).

Glamis thou art, and Cawdor, and shalt be
What thou art promis'd. Yet do I fear thy nature,
It is too full o' th' milk of human kindness
To catch the nearest way.

Macbeth Act 1, scene 5

In Middle English (spoken between the 1000's and the 1400's) thou and thee were the singular second person pronouns, while you and ye were the plural (although before 1325 you was written as yow). In other words thou and thee referred to you: John, while you and ye referred to you: John and his family, or John and his friends, or John and that bloke he is standing next to. These usages had developed from Old English, thou from thu (from the same Indo-European rood as the French, Italian and Portuguese tu, themselves from Latin. Variants of this word are found in hundreds of languages including Old Irish, Lithuanian and Old Persian), while you was from eow, itself from Proto-West Germanic (so there are versions of this word in Dutch: u, and Old High German: iu).

Between 1300 and 1400 you started to replace ye which died out completely by about 1700, although ye is still used today as part of some regional dialects, certainly I have heard it used in West Cork in Ireland, while in the southern United States y'all is used as a plural of you. Also around the 1300's thou and you began to indicate the relative status of the person being addressed so that thou was the informal (equivalent to French tu) and you the formal (vous). This usage seems to have been common until the 1500's when you started to be used for those of equal as well as higher status and thou was kept simply to mark out social inferiority. Rather wonderfully this usage led to the verb To Thou (as in: you can't thou me, I come from a good family).

By the mid 1700's this usage of thou had also been dropped and you was the only form used in normal speech, however poets continued to use it, usually as an indicator of intimacy and romance or familiarity, at least into the 1860's.

O blackbird! sing me something well:
While all the neighbours shoot thee round,
I keep smooth plats of fruitful ground,
Where thou mayst warble, eat and dwell.

From The Blackbird
Alfred Lord Tennyson
1842

Today thou is only found in places like the theatre or the church where it's use reflects unbroken traditions either in the language used in a script or in the translations of religious texts and hymns. The Quakers also held onto thou and thee for much longer than the rest of the English speaking world. When they formed in 1652 they adopted the policy of only using thou to address others in part to give everyone equal status, it is somewhat ironic that the usage quickly marked them out as different as within a century thou had fallen out of use in general society, however they continued to use it well into the 1800's.

So over the course of about 400 years English got rid of it's informal thou and, it could be argued, that by holding on to only the more formal you made itself the most polite of Indo European languages. Of course this is a silly argument but it gave me an excuse to break out my brand new dictionary of etymology which I am in love with. It is also not my argument, I can't be certain but I think I came across the idea on QI once. In any case it is curious to me that no other European languages have dropped this two tiered form of address.

Photo by Tony the Misfit

Picnic Sandwiches

2010-03-09T11:20:00.015Z

Guess what I'm up to today. I'll give you a clue, it doesn't involve finishing the essay I'm supposed to be writing. Now on to today's blog post (where do I get my ideas from?)

A picnic according to the OED is 'a packed meal eaten outdoors' or 'an occasion on which such a meal is eaten'. It was recorded in 1748 in Chesterfield's "Letters" but is rarely mentioned as an activity in English before 1800. It is from the French piquenique (picnic) which may be from piquer-to pick or peck and nique - worthless thing, however this is speculation and the actual origin is unknown.

Historically picnics were not necessarily eaten outside, the original picnic had more to do with everyone bringing a dish to a meal or, in France, bringing your own bottle of wine to a restaurant. Today's version of outdoor picnics originated in the late 1700's in France, after the Royal parks opened up to the public for the first time, and by the early 1800's was popular in England.

The traditional food for a picnic is the sandwich and the history of the sandwich is pretty cool if you ask me. Back to the OED. A sandwich is 'an item of food consisting of two pieces of bread with a filling between them'. As a definition this is correct but a bit boring and doesn't exactly capture the wealth of possibilities open to anyone wishing to create an exciting lunch.

The story goes that John Montague, the fourth Earl of Sandwich (1718-1792), was a very keen gambler, he loved cribbage so much that rather than leave the table when he needed to eat he would instead order meat between two slices of bread, he favoured this food as it was easy to pick up and eat while he played and the bread stopped his fingers from getting greasy. The Earl of Sandwich was by no means the first person to eat this food, in fact you could argue that the trencher bread of the middle ages (a sort of edible plate on which the meal was served usually at a banquette) was an early form of the sandwich.

The reason that we associate the food with the Earl of Sandwich is supposedly because his fellow card players would often order 'the same as Sandwich'. This account of the naming of the sandwich dates back to 1770 but is not necessarily true, it has been suggested that as Sandwich had heavy commitments to the navy, politics and the arts he may have been more likely to have consumed this food at his desk than at a gambling table. In any case there is no doubt that it is John Montague for whom the sandwich is named.

Sandwich the place is a town in Kent in England, it is an old town which was an important port for hundreds of years. These days it is two miles inland due to the settling of Protestant refugees from the Netherlands after 1560 who built a series of drainage dykes. The name Sandwich is from Old English Sandwicae meaning literally sandy harbour, but it can also mean trading centre, both of which would have been applicable in the case of the Town.

So there you have it, I am off to eat an English tradition on a French institution, or something...

Teddybear's picnic photo by Amber Wallace
Tuna sandwich photo by Daniel Duchon
Picture of The Fourth Earl of Sandwich by Thomas Gainsborough; National Maritime Museum, London
Pictures of Sandwich, Kent from discoversandwich.co.uk

Sticks and Stones May Break my Bones...

2010-03-08T11:40:00.007Z

For those who don't know, the saying is 'sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me'. It is usually used by children if someone calls them a name, and outside of the Tooth Fairy and Santa it may be one of the biggest lies we teach them.

Obviously I think words are important. This blog is all about words and language (mostly) but today I wanted to write about the importance of language in ensuring equality. Today, for those who don't know, is International Women's Day, and to mark the occasion the Gender Across Borders Blog has set the task for participating bloggers to write on two subjects: firstly, what does equal rights for all mean to you? and secondly, to describe a particular organisation, person, or moment in history that helped to mobilise a meaningful change in equal rights for all.

The first question is relatively easy to me. Equal rights for all means everybody, worldwide should have access to the same opportunities and basic human rights. Everyone should have food, shelter, a community, access to education, and, as long as they aren't hurting anyone else, the right to live in any way they damn well please! I really appreciate how lucky I am to have grown up in a place and time where I have a legal right not to be discriminated against on grounds of how I look, who I am or what I believe.

It's not perfect, in the UK (where I am from) and Ireland (where I live) there is still racism, ageism and sexism, however at least you cannot be imprisoned for life because you are homosexual, or as a woman have to acquire permission from a man in order to travel. I would love to think that there will be a point in the future when we achieve the goal of equality for everyone. There is an argument that human nature is to oppress, that slavery and tiered societies are the norm and that there will always be injustice. But I am an optimist and I prefer to look upon the huge progress made in enshrining the right to equality in laws over the last 100 years, particularly in the West, as evidence that regardless of human nature (and lets face it most of us don't lead very 'natural' lives these days) we as societies are progressing to the point where choice is a more dominant force than nature when it comes to equality.

As I said I think words are important, so to answer the second part of the question I wanted to find a shining example of a person, law or event that had a radical impact on the language of equality, and I looked for it I really did. What I found was that, rather than one big event, there has instead been a slow steady drip of change in equality of language in the West over the last 50 years. You could cite the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in the US, or the Sex Discrimination Act of 1975 and the Race Relations Act of 1976 in the UK, or even the Universal Declaration of Human Rights way back in 1948. But none of these acts, or their equivalents in other countries has individually been THE bill or act or declaration that changed the way that people think or act in the real world. They, and many other acts, polices and legal cases have combined to create the societies of today, so I suppose my 'event' is the last 50 years of Western policy.

At this juncture I would like to make the point that I am not a student or practitioner of politics or law, and it is perfectly possible that I am wrong and that the right to equality in language is specifically enshrined in national or international laws. It's just that I couldn't find it. I am more than happy to be corrected if this is the case.

There is a Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights, but this pertains more to the right of peoples not to have their indigenous languages eroded or suppressed, and while this is another important tenant of equality it is not what I am on about today.

In my opinion the language of discrimination is one of the big hurdles standing in the way of universal equality. It is both an indicator of prejudice and a perpetuation of it. If, for example a child hears it's parents using derogatory language to describe a Chinese person, or a gay person, or a woman this is going to be the attitude and behaviour that the child learns, so it creates a cycle of discriminatory language. It is also an indication of societal norms. In a culture where the right to equality is enshrined in law the use of racist, or homophobic or sexist language is going to be far less socially acceptable and so less likely to be used. Of course it's not a perfect system, there are still people out there with these ridiculous attitudes, but it is a step closer to the ideal of a completely equal society.

I think language is an important tool in breaking these cycles. I think that discriminatory language is often used from sheer ignorance rather than a place of hatred. For example, in a society where women are considered to be second class citizens educating people in the ways that language can devalue people, and on the negative effects it can have just in terms of self esteem might have a knock on effect on attitudes towards women over all. Discriminatory language definitely acts as a barrier to status advancement for women in many societies. Then there is the other side of language education, in simply teaching people to read and write, this can open up worlds of ideas, and I don't think that the importance of education can be stated enough. Of course education about language needs to be part of a much wider movement of education and empowerment. But any country looking to enshrine equality in their constitution can't go wrong in ensuring that language is a big part of their legislation.

That is not to say that we shouldn't have freedom of speech by the way, but I think freedom looses it's value when we choose that freedom at the expense of causing somebody else harm.

People find change difficult sometimes, in the UK certain newspapers seem to gleefully collect stories of 'political correctness gone mad', and often cite ridiculous examples of the crazy ways we are now supposed to talk about people, usually twisting the facts in the process, there is an amusing article on this here. This kind of writing panders to those who find changes towards equality confusing or scary, but it is possible to see where this confusion can arise.

I had a conversation with someone not long ago where they referred to a person as 'coloured', I asked about this usage, as to me it seems somewhat offensive terminology (what 'colour' exactly? Green? Purple?) the person in question, who is aged firmly in baby boomer territory and could by no stretch of the imagination be referred to as racist, explained that when they were younger the term 'black 'would have been considered to be more offensive. I don't know how place specific this is but I suppose if such changes occur during your life time, so that something which would have once been normal suddenly marks you as racist, or a homophobic then it can be disconcerting and confusing, especially if you are not somebody inclined towards hatred.

There is still language in my society that is used to belittle and hurt people, there are still inequalities in legislation. An obvious example to my mind is the UK civil partnership act of 2004, this is a huge step forward for the gay and lesbian community as civil partnerships allow these couples many of the same rights as married heterosexual couples. However there is still inequality there encapsulated in one word, Marriage. Now you can argue that marriage is a religious union, and it undoubtedly is, but there are plenty of straight atheist couples who get married, and so there is still in name a barrier to equality. Maybe the answer is to make all legal unions civil partnerships and allow marriage as an optional extra, or maybe everyone should be allowed to get married, but in any case it is an inequality of rights.

Then there are gender specific insults still very much used today such as slut and bitch which conjure very specific negative gender stereotypes which don't have male equivalents. But if you look how far we have come in the last 50 years, each decade we (and by we I guess I'm specifically referring to Western society) have made steps forward which cumulatively have had big results.

I consider myself a liberal person, and I often get depressed by the seeming encroachment of right wing politics in today's democracies, so it is heartening to me that when you take a step back and look at the ways in which these nations have enshrined equality and the language of equality in their laws since the 1960's we do seem generally to be moving in the right direction, and here is hoping that the next 50 years sees this right to equality given to people everywhere.

Photo from Seattle Municipal Archives

Why was this man a dolphin?

2010-03-06T12:13:00.007Z

I have been wondering for a long time now why it was that the heir to the French throne used to be known as Dauphin, literally Dolphin, as this seems like such a random title. Over the last year I have asked two of my French friends this question and neither of them knew. Today I decided to stop being lazy and type the question into the google search bar, and now I know the answer.

The picture, by the way, is of the arms of the Dauphin of France. Which is the funkiest coat of arms I think I've ever come across.

The title Dauphin was used by the heir to the French throne from 1349-1830, but originated earlier. It was probably originally the family name of the counts of Vienne, in any case they adopted the dolphin on their coat of arms during the 12th century. The count of Vienne came to be nicknamed the Dauphin and his province (in the French Alps, north of Provence) became known as the dauphinate of Vienne.

In 1349 this land was sold to King Philippe VI with the condition that the title of Dauphin be given to the heir of France. This condition continued to be honoured until the Constitution of 1791 when it was abolished in favour of the title Prince Royal. This constitution established France as a constitutional monarchy, but it only lasted a year, France abolished the monarchy and became a republic in 1792.

The title was briefly restored under the rule of the Bourbons in 1830, however as France hasn't had a king since 1848 it is no longer in use as a title.

For anyone curious the picture at the top is of Louis, Duke of Burgundy who lived from 1682-1712, although he, his father and his eldest son were all Dauphin at one point none of them became king. His father died of smallpox at the age of 49. Louis himself died of what appears to have been a lethal combination of measles and a broken heart at the age of 29 just 6 days after his beloved wife died of the same disease. His eldest son succumbed to measles within a month of his parents at the age of just 5.

There were success storeys in the family however, Louis' younger son, Louis (such originality in Royal families!) also contracted measles but survived as he was only 2 and was still in the care of his governess who forbade the extreme bloodletting that probably helped to kill his older brother. When his Great Grandfather Louis XIV died in 1715 after a 72 year reign he became King Louis XV at the age of 5, and went on to rule for 59 years.

Jambalaya and Duck!

2010-03-05T08:22:00.010Z

Today I am supposed to be doing two things; going to feed the ducks with my niece and my sister, and cooking their family a vegetarian adaptation of Jambalaya. Since I anticipate these activities taking up most of my Friday this entry needs to be short. I figured I would take a quick look at two words from my schedule; first up Jambalaya.

The OED says this is "a Cajun dish of rice with shrimps, chicken, and vegetables". Not my version! My sister is vegetarian so I substitute the meat and seafood with butternut squash and quorn pieces and it works quite well. Jambalaya was invented in southern Louisiana by the Cajuns and it was very much a poor man's dish. The fact that it is easy to cook in one large pot, that you can use the rice to make a small amount of more expensive ingredients go a long way, and of course, the fact that it is delicious helped to make it popular throughout the state.

Today it is still indelibly linked with Louisiana culture. The word jambalaya is supposedly an amalgam of jambon, from the French meaning ham, and aya, meaning rice in "African", however there seems to be doubt over this, specifically which African language aya comes from.

Jambalaya was first recorded in 1872 as a 'stew of rice and fowl'. and I have found several different stories about it's origin, it is probably developed from Spanish Paella, but there is also a story that it was invented when a traveller arrived at a New Orleans Inn long after food had been served, and the cook, Jean, was told to "balayez", or throw some food together, in order to provide him with a meal. The name then evolved into Jambalaya.

However it was named it is a delicious meal which is easy and cheap to make. I use my own adaptation of Jamie Oliver's recipe from his Jamie's America book which I cannot recommend enough.

I got my finger bitten by a duck once.

Well actually it was more like sucked really hard. I was feeding it bread in Christ Church Meadows in Oxford and it was a little over enthusiastic, actually it was pretty cool. My niece got bitten by a swan once, less cool, and I saw a Pelican snap at a toddler in a wildlife park a few years back, really quite scary! All this leads to one obvious question: why duck?

This really is as simple as it seems, it's because they duck under the water when feeding. According to the online etymology dictionary it replaced the old English word ened, but it's not really clear on when this happened. Duck comes from the old English ducan, to duck, so a duck is literally a ducker.

Ducks are apparently very social creatures and if they do not have other ducks around will adopt other animals as their 'flock', so if you decide to keep them make sure you get more than one or you may find yourself becoming an honorary duckling!

I'm off to feed the birds, have a fantastic Friday.

Jambalaya photo by Cliff Hutson
Ducks photo by Dave Gough

Titles (part 2)

2010-03-04T11:40:00.005Z

The next title I'm going to look at is Miss. Miss has been in use since at least 1645 and is another shortened form of mistress. It's earliest use was to refer to a prostitute or a concubine but by 1666 it had taken on it's modern form as a title for a young unmarried woman or girl. According to the online etymology dictionary Johnson described the word as "the term of honour to a young girl" so it had clearly lost it's earlier connotations by then.

Much like with the use of Mr, in families the eldest unmarried daughter would usually be referred to as Miss, eg. Miss Jones, then the younger girls would be referred to with their first name as well, Miss Jill Jones, Miss Joan Jones etc.

These days miss is still often used as a title for younger unmarried women. In the UK, Ireland and Australia it is also used as the title for a female teacher, and it is used in beauty pageants, often with a place name to denote where the competitor is from, eg. Miss Ireland, Miss California etc.

Up until the 1950's Miss was also the default title for business women and women who were in the public eye, for example Amelia Earhart, who was married to George Putnam was still referred to as Miss Amelia Earhart. Miss was considered the default for women who worked. In business, where a person's marital status is usually irrelevant, it was deemed more correct to assume a woman was unmarried, it was also more likely to be correct as married women were less likely to work.

Yesterday I touched on some of the difficulties with Miss and Mrs as titles today. For women who are married and have taken their husband's surname Mrs is usually considered the correct and respectful title to use, and Miss is fine when addressing young, unmarried women. But what about someone like me? I am not married and I am in my late 20's, clearly I am not a Mrs, but I am getting to a point in my life when Miss starts to sound wrong. Or what about women who are married but have kept their original surname? Or women who have made a name for themselves professionally by the time they marry, so that privately they may be Mrs Brown, but in their professional or public life they still use their maiden name? Or women who are divorced?

Although Ms as another abbreviation of Mistress has been around since the 1600's it was first put forward as a bridging title between Mrs and Miss in America in 1901, however it didn't catch on. In the early 1950's with the rise in women in the work place it was suggested again. This time it started to gain popularity, mostly because the suggestion was made in the style handbooks produced for secretaries at the time. So from this point on it started to become popular as a default title for women in business.

During the 1960's the feminist movement began to adopt Ms as it is a title which doesn't rely on a woman's relationship to a man to define her, and in 1970 the National Organisation for Women in the USA passed a formal resolution calling for Ms to be used as the title to denote all women regardless of their marital state.

In 1971 the American feminist Gloria Steinem started Ms. Magazine which was very successful and may have done a lot to popularise the title. During the 70's newspapers also started to include the title in their style guides although not all of them, famously the New York Times held out until 1986 before accepting the title, meaning that they referred to 'Miss Steinem of Ms. Magazine' during the 1970's which apparently Ms Steinem wasn't too happy about.

These days Ms is widely used as a default title for business women, and more and more as a title for women in their private lives as well. Although it does still carry some feminist associations with it, especially for those who think of feminism as a negative term, it is mostly recognised as a useful bridge between the more specific terms Mrs and Miss, essentially a female Mr.

I hope this has been interesting and informative, as opposed to long winded and boring, I owe a large portion of the material on Ms to the stuff mom never told you podcast on Miss,Ms.,Mrs. from How stuff works so if you are interested by this topic check it out, they are great podcasts.

Just in case anyone is wondering, I hadn't really given it too much thought prior to writing this, but I think I'm going to go with Ms.

Photo by Sheep purple

Titles (part 1)

2010-03-03T09:32:00.006Z

Mr, Mrs, Ms, Miss. Outside of official and educational titles these are the words that we use to address people in English. These days they are usually used in a business setting. For men there is no real option, you are Mr. For women there is more choice involved and you may change your title on several occasions during your life. Most of us use these titles on a regular basis without giving much thought to where they come from. But the history of these words is quite interesting.

To start with, they are all abbreviations, including Miss which as it contains a vowel I had always kind of assumed was a whole word. Mr is an abbreviation of Master; Mrs and Miss are abbreviations of Mistress and Ms. is either another abbreviation of mistress or a contraction of Mrs and Miss depending on who you ask.

Master has a very long entry in the OED, but in this context it was used to mean a man who kept servants or slaves, the head of a household, a teacher, director or chief. Master comes from the old French word maistre, the modern version of which is maître (master) and has been in use in this context in England from at least the early 1200's. Maistre is from the Latin word magister which comes from the adverb magis meaning more, itself from magnus meaning great.

According to the online etymology dictionary the use of the abbreviation Mr is first recorded in English in 1447. In the past it was used as a mark of respect for someone of a higher social standing. In a family the oldest male would have been Mr (eg. Mr Smith) and all younger males would have had their first name added to their surname to show a junior status (Mr John Smith, Mr David Smith etc) this custom is no longer really used.

From 1814 Mr has been recorded in use with a following noun or adjective to indicate a person who embodies that quality, for example Mr Right, Mr Nice Guy.

The plural of Mr is Messrs, this is an abbreviation of the French Messieurs which is the plural of Monsieur. You might think that after more than 800 years we would have managed to anglicise the plural a bit.

Master was retained for a long time as a title for young boys, however it has now largely lost this meaning and is mostly used in the world of business and academia: master carpenter, masters degree, headmaster.

Mrs, as I said is an abbreviation of mistress, this was used as a title denoting respect for a woman who employed or had authority over servants, and was in use by 1426. It was also used as a term for a female teacher or governess; and has been used in our more modern sense, of a women kept by, or having an affair with, a married man since 1430. Mistress comes from the old French word maistresse, the female form of maistre.

Mrs has been in use since at least 1582, although our modern pronunciation 'missus' was considered vulgar until at least the 18th century. Its use in our modern sense, to denote a woman who is married, is surprisingly recent as it only became common in the 1920's. Before this it had had the same meaning as mistress. It was also used as a mark of respect for high ranking female staff in a household, cooks and nannys were often referred to as 'Mrs' regardless of their marital status.

Mrs also has a French plural: Mmes - this is an abbreviation of mesdames the plural of madame.

By the 1920's etiquette writers were laying down rules for the use of Mrs as a title for a married woman. Mrs should be used only with her husband's first and last names. So if the woman's maiden name was Jane Smith and her husband's name was John Brown (what boring sounding people!) then Mrs John Brown was correct but Mrs Jane Brown or Mrs Jane Smith were not. These days we tend to use Mrs as a title for women who take their husband's surname however we usually use her first name; the use of Mrs John Brown sounds at best old fashioned and overly formal, at worst it could be considered offensive.

Today more and more women are choosing to keep their own names when they marry, this can cause problems for people when they are addressing them formally. Mrs Jane Smith sounds odd and Miss Jane Smith is potentially patronising. For some Ms is the answer, while for others, like the New York Times (!) it brings with it dangerous notions of militant feminism. I will address Miss and Ms tomorrow.

Photo by Luigi Crespo

Tongue Twisters

2010-03-02T11:56:00.005Z

Try saying "toy boat" quickly ten times.

Tongue twisters are a form of wordplay common to every language and popular with people of all ages. They rely on the difficulty either in forming a dense array of complex sounds in the mouth

'Six sick hicks nick six slick bricks with picks and sticks'

trying to swap between similar sounds, in this case the 'ch', 'sh' and 'st' sounds

'If Stu chews shoes, should Stu choose the shoes he chews?'

between different vowel sounds

'Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.
A peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked.
If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers,
Where's the peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked?'

or trying to swap between two sounds which don't easily run into each other

'Flash message!'

As you can clearly see from my explanation of how tongue twisters work I am no linguist, but the joy of a good tongue twister is that anyone can enjoy them, and you don't have to know how they work to appreciate them. There is even a variant of the tongue twister in sign language, known as a finger fumbler, at least one of which doubles as an effective tongue twister

'Good blood, bad blood'

They can range from a couple of words, usually repeated

'Red lorry, yellow lorry'

to a difficult phrase

'The sixth sick sheik's sixth sheep's sick'
(this by the way is supposed to be the hardest tongue twister in English, and I have to say it's pretty tricky!)

to whole tongue twister poems

'How much wood would a woodchuck chuck
if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
He would chuck, he would, as much wood as he could,
and chuck as much wood as a woodchuck would chuck
if a woodchuck could chuck wood.'

Tongue twisters are not just for fun though, they are used for a wide variety of purposes: to check the fit of dentures, in speech therapy, as a learning tool for language students, as a test for applicants for broadcast jobs, they are even recommended by some as a cure for hiccups!

Tongue twisters can often be a good indicator of whether someone is a native speaker of a language as they are often impenetrable to those who aren't familiar with them, here are a few international tongue twisters, and obviously as I'm not learning these languages they will be unfamiliar, but I'm willing to bet that most language students would have a hard time with this lot too.

Czech: 'Vlk zmrzl, zhltl hrst zrn.'

French:' Je suis ce que je suis et si je suis ce que je suis, qu'est-ce que je suis?'

Irish: 'Thabhairfainn gal don té a thabharfadh gal dom is gal aige is gan gal agam; ach an té ná tabharfadh gal dom is gal aige is gan gal agam, ní tabharfainn gal dó is gal agam is gan gal aige.'

Swahili: 'Kale kakuku kadogo ka kaka kako wapi kaka.'

Japanese: 'Tokyo tokkyo kyoka-kyoku kyou kyuukyo kyoka kyakka.'

and this German tongue twister translates into a pretty effective English one:

'Fischers Fritz fischt frische Fische. Frische Fische fischt Fischers Fritz'
(Fisherman Fritz fishes fresh fish, fresh fish fishes fisherman Fritz)

The great thing about tongue twisters is that being so widespread and often passed on through oral tradition they provide a living link with our history and the way people used language in the past.

Photo by Fabiana Bello Cifuentes

Stilton

2010-03-01T11:13:00.013Z

Yesterday my mum visited and brought with her bread and cheese for lunch. While we were eating it we got to discussing where the names of cheeses come from and I stated that Stilton is named for a place in England. This was disputed. I am now pleased to announce that I have researched the matter and can confirm that Stilton is a village in Cambridgshire, or in other words I was right.

Strangely, given the location of Stilton the village, Stilton the cheese can only be made in the counties of Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire. This is due to the fact that although the cheese is named for the town, and it was originally made there, once it became popular in the 1720's the owner of the Bell Inn, which sold the cheese, started to farm out production to Leicestershire. Stilton was an important stop on the route from London to Edinburgh in the 1700's and the Landlord of the Bell Inn at the time, Cooper Thornhill, obviously had a head for business. As well as selling the cheese to passing trade at the Inn he also sold it in London. The cheese quickly achieved fame, being mentioned by Daniel Defoe in his “Tour through the villages of England & Wales” in 1724. If for any reason you wish to continue the study of Stilton cheese then I recommend this page, it contains a short documentary about the history of the cheese and the village including an interview with the charmingly named Peter Hornbuckle, a farmer in the Valley of Beavers, got to love English names!

These days, according to stiltoncheese.com, as well as the rules on which counties Stilton can be produced in it must also meet the following criteria:
- it must be made from locally produced milk that has been pasteurised before use
- it can only be made in a cylindrical shape
- it must be allowed to form its own coat or crust
- it must never be pressed and
- it must have the magical blue veins radiating from the centre of the cheese

It has to be said that, as with all blue cheeses, Stilton is an acquired taste, but if you can get past the fact that you are eating cheese riddled with mould which smells like wet socks then you are in for a delicious treat as it is one of the tastiest foods I know. Traditionally it should be eaten with a glass of port but it is good with any full bodied red wine and works well in all sorts of recipes from salads to soups.

Stilton the village meanwhile hasn't let it's inability to produce it's namesake cheese keep it down, every year on mayday they practice the sport of cheese rolling. A Stilton is rolled from the top of a hill and after a few seconds start the competitors chase it, first to catch the cheese or cross the finish line wins. Bonkers but brilliant!

Cheese rolling photos by
www.ecofocus.co.uk

Stilton photo by jlastras

Haiku

2010-02-27T10:48:00.009Z

Haiku have always made me feel a little stupid, I know they're poems, I know they're short and I'm pretty sure there are rules about syllables, but that is all. Other people always seem to know exactly what they're all about. So I decided to shed a little ignorance and find out, and now I feel a lot better. This haiku stuff is pretty complicated so either most other people have been nodding along knowingly while wondering what a haiku really is, or they have all grasped a pretty complicated technique in which case hats off to you all. What follows is my attempt to condense my understanding of a rule heavy poetic technique which spans the globe and originated in a language which has rules that don't apply to English into a neat blog entry, in other words it is condensed and by no means complete.

Disclaimers aside, haiku seem to have originated in Japan around the 17th century, they are short poems consisting of 17 moras, or 'on' and written in three metrical phrases consisting of 5, 7 and 5 moras. Moras is hard to define in English as there is no exact equivalent, they are often referred to as syllables but this isn't quite right. One moras is a syllable with a short vowel sound (for example 'of') however if the syllable contains a long vowel sound ('loaf'), a double consonant ('off') or ends in an 'n' ('on') then it is counted as two moras. Obviously my examples are far from perfect as they are in English but you get the idea. Haiku written in English usually follow a three line pattern to reflect the Japanese metrical phrases and contain between ten and seventeen syllables.

An old pond!

A frog jumps in-

The sound of water.

(Basho, Matsuo. 1644-1694).

Another feature of haiku which is impossible to properly replicate in English is kireji, this is a cutting word used to provide structure to haiku and is often placed in the middle of a line to provide a comparison between ideas, cut thoughts or suggest parallels; or it is placed at the end to provide a more dignified ending. In English we don't have kireji so often punctuation is used in the middle of haiku to do a similar job.

Dry gray branches

surround the robin...

winter thaw

(Edward A. Weiss)

One technique which English haiku can borrow from the Japanese is in the use of a kigo, this is a seasonal reference, traditional haiku are about nature and would always contain a kigo. While this is something easily done in an English haiku it is not always used as many people use this form for subjects other than nature which can often take a jokey form.

the morning paper

harbinger of good and ill

- - I step over it

(Dave McCroskey)

So there you have it. I don't claim to be an expert but I hope I have helped anyone else out there who wasn't sure exactly what a haiku is. It seems that, outside of Japanese, English is the language most often used for haiku these days, but I'm sure there are examples of haiku in many other languages, it's just that, as I have previously mentioned I am a monoglot. Finally I leave you with this offering...

course work waiting

procrastination...

can't stop blogging

Yes, I know, it's terrible, but I felt I should at least try!

Photo by Andres Ojeda

Nebula

2010-02-26T11:44:00.006Z

My rather clever two year old niece is going to be an astronaut, and so is on a mission to learn everything there is to know about space. One of her favourite astronomical features is the nebula (which she pronounces neblia-but enough cuteness) and if you've ever seen one you can understand why. A nebula is a cloud of gas and dust in outer space, although the word was also used in the past to mean galaxy. It comes from Latin, literally meaning mist and is related to the word nebulous which means hazy or ill defined.

Nebulae can be hundreds of light years across and change quite rapidly, however they tend to appear constant to us as we are too far away to see the changes. Just as the light that reaches us from the furthest stars was emitted billions of years ago, what we see when we photograph nebulae is not what is happening at this moment, and a photograph of course by it's very nature is static.

The process of photographing nebulae and other features of deep space is called astrophotography and it is theoretically possible to do on an amateur basis although you do need specialised photography equipment, there is an interesting article about this here .

Top and bottom photos by ilker
Middle photo by Flavio Takemoto

Monoglot

2010-02-25T12:59:00.013Z

Since I used this word in my description of my blog I thought it would be a good place to start. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) describes 'monoglot' as using or speaking only one language. It comes from the Greek 'monoglottos', 'monos'-single and 'glotta'-tongue, which makes a lot of sense.

Being a monoglot puts me in the minority: according to the Center For Applied Linguistics (an American organisation for anyone wondering about my spelling) the bilingual and multilingual people in the world far outnumber those of us with just one language.

I couldn't find stats for this but from my own experience I wouldn't be very surprised if a large proportion of people with just one language were English speaking. It seems to me that in most of the English speaking nations (England, USA, Australia etc.) we just don't have the same emphasis on multilingualism that you find in schools elsewhere, the obvious exceptions to this would be countries like Ireland and Wales where there has been a drive to preserve the native languages in recent years, and where a larger proportion of the population are bilingual. It is hard to tell if increased global communications will do much in the way of changing that, English seems to be the go to language for business and more and more people worldwide speak at least beginners level English leaving native speakers in a situation where we don't really have to learn.

I think we are loosing out as in my, somewhat limited, experience of learning another language I found that it not only gave me a greater knowledge of another culture, it also made me want to travel more and it taught me more than I could have imagined about my own language, and all this from beginners level French. If I am honest I have forgotten most of what I knew about the past tense of 'Aller' but the bi-products of this learning have remained and grown.

Imagine what worlds must have opened up through languages for somebody like Cardinal Mezzofanti(1774-1849) who spoke more than 38 languages fluently and reportedly without an accent, although apparently he never left Italy so a better illustration of my point might be Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821-1890) who, by his death was fluent in 29 languages and at least a dozen dialects he was also an explorer, diplomat and translator so he personifies my point rather well.

Really though the luckiest in language are people who those who grow up multilingual, those of us who have got this far on one language will have to buckle down and get studying, we are seriously missing out if we don't.

Photo by dog madic