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Ten things you didn’t know about Thanksgiving

By Erin Fegely

With Thanksgiving quickly approaching in the United States, we thought that it would be interesting to highlight ten fun facts on the holiday from the newly released The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America, Second Edition. Additionally, you will find an interview with Editor in Chief Andrew Smith dispelling common myths associated with the origin of Thanksgiving.

Of all the hundreds of thanksgiving days observed in New England in the seventeenth century, only one church record in 1636 suggests the possibility of a feast. No further references to thanksgiving feasting over the next 150 years have been located.

During the Revolutionary War, the Continental Congress declared 18 December 1777 a day of thanksgiving in honor of the American military victory at Saratoga.

The driving force behind making Thanksgiving a national holiday was writer Sarah Josepha Hale. She believed that Thanksgiving Day could pull the United States together while sectional differences, economic self-interest, and slavery were pulling the nation apart. Hale was among the first American women to have a novel published, and she was one of the first authors—male or female—to write a novel that addressed the problem of slavery. It is for her verse that Hale is remembered by many Americans; one of her poems was “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”

Perhaps the most famous Thanksgiving poem was written by Lydia Maria Child , whose “The Boy’s Thanksgiving Song” is better known to most Americans by its first line, “Over the river and thro’ the wood.”

A few months after the North’s military victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg in the summer of 1863, Lincoln declared the last Thursday in November a national day of Thanksgiving. Every president since has proclaimed Thanksgiving Day a national holiday. However, the first president to issue a Thanksgiving proclamation was George Washington, who did so at the direction of Congress on 3 October 1789. The few presidents who subsequently issued Thanksgiving proclamations commemorated particular events, such as President James Madison’s proclamation of celebration at the end of the War of 1812. Few presidents issued Thanksgiving proclamations thereafter.

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Two-course Thanksgiving meals were common in the nineteenth century. The first course consisted of roast turkey, chicken pie, ham, beef, sausage, and duck supplemented with sweet potatoes, yams, succotash, pickles, sweetbreads, turnips, and squash. The second course consisted of pies, tarts, puddings, creams, custards, jellies, floating islands, nuts, and dried fruit. Wine, rum, brandy, eggnog, punch, coffee, and tea were served with the meal.

Source: NYPL.

In 1835 William Alcott , a physician, wrote that he was opposed to the feast on moral grounds as well as for medical reasons. He called the Thanksgiving holiday a carnival loaded with luxuries. Alcott had another reason for opposing the Thanksgiving dinner—he had become a vegetarian in 1830 and later was one of the founders of the American Vegetarian Society. Although few Americans paid attention to Alcott or other vegetarians at the time, vegetarian concerns re-emerged at the end of the century.

The rapid adoption of the Pilgrim-Thanksgiving myth had less to do with historical fact and more to do with the arrival of hundreds of thousands of immigrants to the United States. Because the immigrants came from many lands, the American public education system attempted to create a common American heritage. One curricular need was to create an easily understood history of America. The Pilgrims were an ideal symbol for America’s beginning, so they became embedded in the nation’s schools, as did the Thanksgiving feast.

A Puritan thanksgiving was a solemn religious day celebrated with attendance at church and prayer to God.

Although pumpkins are of New World origin, the first recipes for pumpkin pie appeared in British cookbooks. From the earliest records pumpkin and other sweet pies were part of Thanksgiving festivities.

The second edition of  The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America   thoroughly updates the original, award-winning title, while capturing the shifting American perspective on food and ensuring that this title is the most authoritative, current reference work on American cuisine. Editor  Andrew F. Smith   teaches culinary hist ory and professional food writing at The New School University in Manhattan. He serves as a consultant to several food television productions (airing on the History Channel and the Food Network), and is the General Editor for the University of Illinois Press’ Food Series. He has written several books on food, including The Tomato in America, Pure Ketchup, and Popped Culture: A Social History of Popcorn in America. The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink is also available on Oxford Reference.

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Shakespearean passions around ‘bullyragging’

By Anatoly Liberman

After writing a post on bully, I decided to turn my attention to bullyrag, noun and verb, both branded as obscure. The verb has been attested in several forms, but only ballarag is of some interest. Ballywrag is a fanciful spelling of ballarag, while bullrag contains the familiar two elements without a connecting vowel. The first citation in the OED is surprisingly recent (1790). A freshman at Harvard College in 1758 remembered that some students had been examined for bulraging (sic) a certain man. His recollection pushes bullyrag and its closest analogs only to the middle of the eighteenth century. The later a word of unknown origin surfaces, the more uncomfortable one feels about its origin. We expect the past, ideally prehistory, to be a repository of odd things, but 1758? Lexicographer Joseph E. Worcester, a one-time formidable American competitor of Noah Webster, called bullyrag local and low; The Century Dictionary echoed Worcester (“provincial and low”). I wonder how they came to their conclusions (“local, provincial”). Joseph Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary says: “…in general dialectal and slang use in Scotland, Ireland and America.” Dialectal use does not mean “of dialectal descent”: people living far away from the capital and large towns are as prone to assimilate common slang as anyone else. The verb’s popularity at Harvard and Oxford (for Oxford see the OED) might even suggest that it arose in those quarters and spread everywhere, as happened, for example, to chum and crony.

Bally (mainly British) is believed to be an alteration of bloody, but perhaps once it was a word in its own right and became a milder (less blasphemous) substitute for bloody. In any case, the original form of the ignoble verb seems to have been bullyrag, not ballyrag. What then can be its origin? The earliest guess I have found belongs to Edward Lye, the posthumous editor of Junius’s etymological dictionary (1743, the entry rag; like Stephen Skinner, Franciscus Junius did not live to see his dictionary in print). He traced the verb to Icelandic ból “house, dwelling” and rægja “to slander, libel” (I have modernized Lye’s spelling). This etymology is only of historical interest, as the gentle euphemism for “old and utterly useless” goes. Eric Partridge’s tentative derivation “to make a bully’s rag of” should join Lye’s. As long as we are dealing with rags, we may recollect that a rag is used to annoy a bull, but a piece of “low” British slang (I assume it is British) would have hardly originated in the customs of bullfighting (corrida), the more so as the form bullyrag occurs more often than bullrag.

The problem is -rag rather than bully. To rag means “banter, annoy; scold”; it is a synonym of bully. The Century Dictionary quotes a passage from Notes and Queries, which I too have in my database, but I found it a hundred years later: “To rag a man is good Lincolnshire for chaff or tease. At school, to get a boy into a rage was called getting his rag out.” The most natural conjecture would be to treat bullyrag as a tautological compound: “annoy-annoy.” Such words are rather numerous, and some time ago I wrote a post about them. The simplest way of emphasizing an idea is to repeat it; hence words like tum-tum, do-do, and beriberi (reduplication). Going a step further produces tautologies like courtyard (“court-court” or “yard-yard”) and Gothic marisaiws “sea,” literally, “sea-sea,” presumably “a large sea” or, if “a lake and a sea at the same time,” then a compound instead of hendiadys (= a single concept expressed by two words, with and between them ). Bullying people is bad, ragging them is also bad, but bullyragging is truly awful. Jonathon Green, the author of a recent dictionary of slang, also explained bullyrag as bull + rag but offered no discussion.

BULL(Y)RAGGING. Bull fight in Bogotá in 2005. Photo by Argyriou via Wikimedia Commons.

If one casts the net for look-alikes widely, the catch will not be too meager: Engl. rag “shred of cloth,” Dutch raggen “run around in a state of wild excitement,” Swedish ragla ~ raggla “wobble,” and ragamuffin, along with ragabash “disreputable person” (chiefly Scots). One of them may shed light on the etymology of rag “annoy, banter, rail at” (which is, most likely, of Scandinavian descent), but our concern is not with the origin of this verb since in dealing with bullyrag we take its existence for granted.

We might stop here, but for a word Shakespeare knew and liked. Scene 3 of Act 1 of Merry Wives of Windsor opens so: “FALSTAFF: Mine host of the Garter— HOST: What says my bully rook? Speak scholarly and wisely.” One wonders whether the phrase bully rook has anything to do with bullyrag. In Shakespeare’s days, rook usually meant “simpleton” (a usual reference to a bird, any bird being proverbially stupid: compare gull, goose, and so forth); the senses “sharper, cheat” turned up later. Assuming that bully here was part of a friendly greeting, we should agree that the host did not call Falstaff a simpleton, let alone cheat, and that no offence was meant. (Why should any deferential host insult a customer, especially someone who was not a commoner and even used to hobnob with princes?) In all probability, bully rook meant “boon companion; honored frequenter” or something similar. In the comedy, mine host addresses other people in the same way. The spelling of bully rook poses a minor problem. I followed The Oxford Shakespeare, but the variants bullyrook and bully-rook cannot be dismissed out of hand. Also, bullyrook sometimes alternated with bullyrock.

The Century Dictionary says that bully-rook is equivalent to Low German buller-brook (pronounce oo as aw inEngl. raw) and buller-bäck and is apparently free variation of bullyrag. This information seems to have been lifted from Barrère and Lelalnd’s 1897 Dictionary of Slang (bullyrag is said there to be certainly of Dutch origin), with the substitution of Low German for Dutch. Low (= northern) German is a vague term; without an exact reference to a dialect and the source the form cannot be verified. In Middle Low German, for which a splendid dictionary exists, no such word occurred. The Dutch counterpart of the OED lists only buller-bäck “boisterous man” and compares it with the words mentioned in my previous post (German Poltergeist and others). Buller-brook would have been more interesting because it sounds somewhat like Engl. bully rook ~ bully rock. One might suggest that the slang Shakespeare used was borrowed from the Low Countries, but, to do so, bully-brook must first lose its status of a ghost word. With the scarce evidence at our disposal, we can only say that bullyrag and bullyrook ~ bullyrock are indeed so similar that the coining of the tautological compound verb bullyrag may have been prompted by the existence of a noun meaning “habitué of pubs.” But in bullyrook and especially bully rook, bully meant “good, dear, excellent,” with rook weakened to “fellow, guy,” while our bully is probably a different word, as I tried to show last week. I found it hard to bridge the distance between “lover; friend” and “a person intimidating the weak.”

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

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Inside a brewery

How does beer get from barley malt to a tasty liquid? Garrett Oliver, editor of The Oxford Companion to Beer, takes us behind the scenes of the brewing process inside the Brooklyn Brewery’s Refermentation Room, and his favorite room in the brewery — the Barrel Room. He is brewmaster of the Brooklyn Brewery and the foremost authority on beer in the United States.

Inside a Brewery Refermentation Room

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Inside a Brewery Barrel Room

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Garrett Oliver, editor of The Oxford Companion to Beer, is the Brewmaster of the Brooklyn Brewery and author of The Brewmaster’s Table: Discovering the Pleasures of Real Beer with Real Food. He has won many awards for his beers, is a frequent judge for international beer competitions, and has made numerous radio and television appearances as a spokesperson for craft brewing.

The Oxford Companion to Beer is the first major reference work to investigate the history and vast scope of beer, featuring more than 1,100 A-Z entries written by 166 of the world’s most prominent beer experts. It is first place winner of the 2012 Gourmand Award for Best in the World in the Beer category, winner of the 2011 André Simon Book Award in the Drinks Category, and shortlisted in Food and Travel for Book of the Year in the Drinks Category. View previous Oxford Companion to Beer blog posts and videos.

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Voltaire, l’esprit, and irony

By John Fletcher

In 1744 Voltaire produced for an edition of Mérope a “Lettre sur l’esprit”, which he later incorporated after corrections in later editions of the Dictionnaire philosophique under the article “Esprit.” In it he attempted to define the nature of wit in the following terms:

Ce qu’on appelle esprit est tantôt une comparaison nouvelle, tantôt une allusion fine: ici l’abus d’un mot qu’on présente dans un sens, et qu’on laisse entendre dans un autre; là un rapport délicat entre deux idées peu communes; c’est une métaphore singulière; c’est une recherche de ce qu’un objet ne présente pas d’abord, mais de ce qui est en effet dans lui; c’est l’art ou de réunir deux choses éloignées, ou de diviser deux choses qui paraissent se joindre, ou de les opposer 1’une à 1’autre; c’est celui de ne dire qu’à moitié sa pensée pour la laisser deviner.

(What we call “wit” is either a fresh analogy, or a delicate allusion: sometimes it’s the use of a word which is presented as having one meaning, but which the reader is invited to understand in another; sometimes it’s the subtle linking of two ideas which have little in common; it can be an unusual metaphor; it’s the quest for something which an object does not at first reveal but which is intrinsic to it; it’s the art of bringing together two separate things, or of dividing them where they appear linked, or of setting one against the other ; it’s a way of revealing only half of one’s thinking in order to let the reader guess the rest.)

What Voltaire here refers to as the art of presenting a word in one sense, while allowing it to be understood in another; of establishing a connection between ideas which at first sight have little in common; of bringing out unremarked relevance; of linking different notions and separating analogous concepts; of implying more than is explicitly stated: this, surely, is not simply a definition of wit in general, but of irony in particular. When Voltaire said “esprit,” he meant exactly what we now understand by the term “irony.”

Voltaire at his desk with a pen in his hand. Engraving by Baquoy, ca. 1795.

Irony is a notoriously two-edged weapon: ambiguity is of the essence. Writers seek to be understood à demi mot, that is, they wish for their overt statement to be grasped, and immediately afterwards, if not simultaneously, for their “true” meaning to force itself upon the reader’s attention. For this to happen, the skill of writers must be such that what they write will neither be too obvious (in which case there would be no irony, merely sarcasm), nor too obscure (for then the point would be lost). But the reader’s intelligence and sensitivity must also engage if the writer’s half-hidden meaning is not to pass altogether unnoticed. In other words, long before it became a commonplace in literary theory that the pursuit of literature necessitates the engagement of writer and reader in an act of cooperation rather than in the passive reception of a monologue, authors were in fact relying heavily on their audience’s ability to go half-way to meet them; if this did not happen, ironical discourse fell on stony ground. How often we say of a person in everyday life that he or she is “deaf to irony,” or that “irony is lost” on her or him. Obtuse people will receive only a writer’s overt meaning, and take it seriously; Voltaire’s belief that “a tyrant can only be spoken to in parables” holds true only if the tyrant in question is open to persuasion and willing to engage in the interpretation of double-entendres. But accomplished ironists usually manage to be sufficiently plain so that all but the most obtuse reader grasps the point they are obliquely making.

Voltaire’s speciality is what I call “double irony” and it works by springing a surprise on the reader. In Candide, for instance, we learn that the servants suspect that our hero was the son of the baron’s sister and a worthy gentleman of the neighbourhood whom she refused to marry because his genealogical tree had been swept away by the ravages of time. The reader thinks that this is simply a jibe at aristocratic snobbery. But then we see that Voltaire has a surprise in store for us: the lady did not let her snobbery interfere with her sexual appetite. Normally, though, his genius is not for such complexities of paradox. Simplicity of attack was his ideal: he intended that his irony should be transparent and that the point should not be obscured. His butts were the religious fanaticism and obscurantism of the clergy and the arbitrary injustice and cruelty practised by the state’s political masters. He prefers the relatively straightforward devices of using words like bonté (goodness), or héroïque, or honnête in the opposite of their usual senses, and of ironical concessions, such as “although he was young and wealthy, he knew how to curb his passions,” or “the master was a philosopher withdrawn from the world, who cultivated wisdom and virtue peacefully, but who nevertheless was never bored” (my italics). But he is not averse to showing his hand freely, as in Zadig: “He looked upon men just as they were, as insects devouring each other on a tiny atom of mud.”

On the 318th anniversary of his birth, let us salute the great ironist who — this time, too — clearly showing his hand, said “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” Even as I write, terrible atrocities are being routinely committed around the globe by those who have been made to believe absurdities: we have never needed Voltaire’s wit and wisdom more than at this moment.

John Fletcher is emeritus professor of comparative literature at the University of East Anglia and senior research fellow at the University of Kent. He translated Voltaire’s Pocket Philosophical Dictionary for Oxford World’s Classics. He wishes to acknowledge the generous help of Orla Fletcher in compiling this blog post.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

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Copyright law and creative social norms

By Michael Birnhack

Copyright law provides a general legal framework intended to encourage creativity in literature and the arts. However, in some fields of cultural production, to borrow a term from Pierre Bourdieu, we observe that the players develop their own set of norms. These social norms de facto replace the formal law. The norms often develop in a bottom-up way, rather than the set of top-down rules. This intersection of formal copyright law and social norms in creative fields requires attention. Contemporary research has thus far focused on several creative fields, such as fashion designers, French chefs, American stand-up comedians and the tattoo industry. To better understand the phenomenon, I suggest that we study initial meeting points of copyright law and social norms in each field of cultural production.

Law and social norms have a complex relationship. Lawyers, legislators and judges, not surprisingly, firmly believe in the power of the law to regulate human behaviour. Without such a belief, much of the law would be meaningless. This belief is anchored in a political theory, one that democracies cherish, the idea of the rule of law. When law and social norms conflict, jurists opt without hesitation for the law’s side. When the law reflects social norms it consolidates our cultural practices. On occasion, there are grey areas: social and legal spaces where the law says one thing but it is social norms that regulate what we do and don’t do, in a different way, but without a conflict. Copyright law offers such grey areas.

Copyright law purports to set the rules of the game for human creativity. The law declares which authorial or artistic works will deserve legal protection, under which circumstances, what would be the scope of the protection, or its duration, as well as rules about ownership, transfer of rights, and more. These rules, taken together, form a legal regime, within which creativity takes place. Of course, the law does not instruct sculptors how to carve a stone, authors what to write, or painters which colour to use. Nevertheless, the law does encourage some kinds of works (“original”, in the legal meaning of the term, or which works one can use without permission as the raw material for a new work, etc.).

Scholars have argued that the law assumes certain modes of creative production, the ‘romantic author’ being the quintessential image behind the law. As studied by Martha Woodmansee, Peter Jaszi, and others, the image of the author is of a sole character, motivated by passion and inspired by a muse, rather than by financial gain, let alone a collaborative work. A law structured with ‘Shakespeare in Love‘ in mind, rather than the real Shakespeare, excludes other forms of creative production.

One form of authorship that is excluded by default in this manner, is that of the national author: authors that have a strong sense of being part of a community, whereas the community is organized on the basis of a shared nationality. This was the case with many authors around the globe during the 19th and 20th centuries, when the British Empire extended its copyright laws to its colonies (self-governing dominions, crown colonies, protectorates and mandate territories included).

The British were interested in colonial copyright for their own sake: to protect British authors throughout the Empire. They disregarded the locals. Under the emerging international regime of copyright law, the 1886 Berne Convention, and after consolidating the many British copyright laws into one coherent law, the 1911 Imperial Copyright Act, the British Empire imposed its law onto its colonies. This was a case of legal transplant, by way of a colonial transplant.

Studying the transplant not only from the colonizer’s point of view, but from the colonized perspective reveals that the law often stayed in the books for quite a while, and was simply ignored for some time. The first, and for many years the only ones to use the law, were foreign, British copyright owners, who brought lawsuits in the colonies, under the British law. This was the case in South Africa, New Zealand, and Palestine, for example. The absence of legal cases should not mislead one to think that there was no creative production in the colonies. There was much, in all colonies. It just did not fit the British model, as reflected in the law. In Mandate Palestine (1917-48), Hebrew authors defined themselves as part of a collective, with a strong national character—a Zionist one, coupled with firm socialist tones. Authors did not consider themselves individuals acting for their own sake, but rather as agents of the community. The gap between the authors’ self-image and the image of the romantic author, as reflected in the Imperial Copyright law (which was extended to Palestine in 1924) resulted in a set of social norms alongside the formal law.

The social norms among Hebrew authors in Mandate Palestine in the 1920s consisted of high standards of originality (higher than the law requires), contracts between publishers and authors that regulated elements that were left undecided by the law, and moral rights (which were absent from the law), enforced by public shaming. These norms were possible under circumstances of a small, close-knit community with a shared ideology. Once these conditions loosened, the door was open to the foreign law to set foot. The process was completed only decades later, well into the state of Israel.

Michael Birnhack is a professor of law at Tel-Aviv University, Israel. He is fascinated by the way the law treats information and the interaction between law and culture. His research focuses on copyright, privacy, and freedom of expression, which he views as different aspects of information. Birnhack is the author of Colonial Copyright: Intellectual Property in Mandate Palestine which published in October 2012.

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Image credit: The front page of the Mandate for Palestine and Transjordan memorandum, presented to UK Parliament in December 1922, prior to it coming in to force in 1923. By Her Majesty’s Stationery Office [Public domain via Wikimedia Commons].

Seven words that gained fame on TV shows

Television shows have a huge influence on popular culture, and so it is not surprising that many words and phrases have come into common usage through the medium of television. Here are a few of our favourite words and phrases that were popularized through iconic TV shows.

mind-meld

In science fiction, this is a (supposed) technique for the psychic fusion of two or more minds, permitting unrestricted communication or deep understanding. Originally from the US television series Star Trek, the use has extended beyond the original sci-fi context: one quote featuring in the entry in the Oxford English Dictionary from N.Y. Mag reads “The next [moment], he’s mind-melding with an ABC News producer about educational technology initiatives.”

omnishambles

Coined by the writers of the satirical television programme The Thick Of It, an omnishambles is a situation that has been comprehensively mismanaged, and is characterized by a string of blunders and miscalculations. Omnishambles was selected as the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2012.

cowabunga

Cowabunga was first popularized by a character on the US television programme Howdy Doody in the 1950s and 1960s. It later became associated with surfing culture and was further popularized by use on the US television cartoon programme Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987–96).

d’oh

Perhaps most commonly associated with Homer Simpson from the American cartoon series The Simpsons (1989–), created by Matt Groening. When frustrated about things not going well, the beer-loving, incompetent patriarch of the dysfunctional family exclaims ‘D’oh!’. Dan Castellaneta – the voice of Homer Simpson – notes that the scripts for The Simpsons only ever read ‘annoyed grunt’, and not ‘D’oh!’. Dan took inspiration for Homer’s ‘D’oh!’ from a similar noise made by the nemesis character in Laurel and Hardy. D’oh has been recorded (as doh, d’oh, and dooh) in the OED as early as 1945, with the current first citation from a BBC radio script.

much?

The OED uses these quotes from the Buffy the Vampire Slayer film to illustrate this usage: “A stranger, walking the other way, bumps into Buffy, doesn’t stop… Buffy. Excuse much! Not rude or anything.” The use of ‘much’ in this way was popularized by the Buffy film and the television series derived from it, but the first OED citation is from a 1978 Saturday Night Live transcript. Find out more about Buffy‘s other distinctive words and sentence structures in our blog post about the language of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

boom-boom

This phrase was popularized in Britain as the catchphrase of the children’s television puppet Basil Brush, which first appeared in 1953. Boom-boom is used to draw attention to a joke or pun, especially one that the speaker or writer regards as weak, obvious, or laboured. The OED lists Monty Python’s Flying Circus as its first citation for boom-boom, with the quote “I’ve got a chauffeur and every time I go to the lavatory he drives me potty! Boom-boom!”

Tardis

An acronym of Time And Relative Dimensions In Space, ‘Tardis’ is the name in the science-fiction BBC television series Doctor Who (first broadcast in 1963) of a time machine that resembles a police telephone box on the outside, but is much larger on the inside. Tardis is now used as a synonym for ‘time machine’ but also occasionally for a building or container that is in reality much larger than it seems. Illustrative quotes from the OED include: “10 Downing Street is like the ‘TARDIS’—it is much bigger inside than it looks on the outside.” Referring to the sense of a time machine, there are quotes like this: “This ground. . . is like a Tardis, transporting me back to the days of playing in front of stately homes or in some noble lord’s grounds.”

This article originally appeared on the OxfordWords blog.

Oxford Dictionaries Online is a free site offering a comprehensive current English dictionary, grammar guidance, puzzles and games, and a language blog; as well as up-to-date bilingual dictionaries in French, German, Italian, and Spanish. The premium site, Oxford Dictionaries Pro, features smart-linked dictionaries and thesauruses, audio pronunciations, example sentences, advanced search functionality, and specialist language resources for writers and editors.

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Elliott Carter

Paul Griffiths, librettist for Elliott Carter’s opera What Next?, remembers the composer, who died on 5 November 2012 at the age of 103.

I must have seen Elliott Carter several times in London from deep back in the seventies; perhaps the earliest of my mental photographs has him standing at the kerbside at Oxford Circus, waiting to cross the road, his head slightly turned and raised to look at his publisher who was with him, Janis Susskind, his face (as it would always be) smiling, his white hair lifted by the wind. But an occasion to meet him properly did not come until June 1995, at the Aldeburgh Festival, when I had to interview him for The (London) Times about the piece he had written for the coming Proms: Adagio tenebroso, the middle movement of his Symphonia. Already then his continuing productivity was remarkable, and that was certainly on my mind as we sat together in an area of the lounge at the Wentworth Hotel, where we were both staying. Here was Elliott Carter, whose first published works, though by no means youthful, were by now almost six decades old. Here he was: sitting, smiling, waiting for the first question.

Pocahontas by Elliott Carter (manuscript sketch), 1939(?). Library of Congress.

“Mr. Carter,” I began, “now that you’re eighty-seven—”

“Eighty-six!” he promptly and cheerfully intervened.

I interviewed him again about a year later, when The New Yorker decided it wanted to know from him how to listen to his music. We spoke about his solo violin piece Riconoscenza and also about attention, and I began to understand how for him his music, so often taken as highly abstract, was a social contribution: “Paying attention,” he said, “has to be a very real and important thing in a democratic society.” This time we would have been in his downtown apartment, though my memory of the scene — the two of us seated on a sofa, looking at the music open on my knees, facing a fireplace — does not accord with the room I came to know so well only a few months later.

Of that subsequent episode — the weeks of working together on the libretto of What Next? — I kept a journal, which was published with the ECM recording, so here let me move into some more generalized reminiscences of what it was like to be with and to speak with this extraordinary person who had said, at our Aldeburgh meeting: “People tell me I’m old, but I don’t feel old.” Perhaps he never did. He was eighty-eight when the What Next? process started, and it occurred to me very early in that process that he would still be composing when he was a hundred. Of course, he outstripped even that expectation.

His music never felt old either, and perhaps it gained its vigour and its dart from his own physical and mental condition. The last time I saw him at close quarters, when What Next? was staged at Miller Theatre at Columbia, he was celebrating his ninety-ninth birthday, and there was still the alertness of mind and body. His movements were slow, no doubt, and he used a stick, but he was not in any sense frail, as Helen, his wife, had been frail, carrying a laden tea-tray across to us when we had pages of libretto in our hands, and one wanted to jump up and just hold her. Elliott stayed strong as he stayed sharp. As if the continuing music were not enough to back up that claim, I remember a transatlantic telephone conversation, also when he was in his late nineties, when I needed to ask him something about his Italian songs Tempo e tempi. With no warning of the question, which had to do with a work by then almost a decade in the past, he understood exactly what I was after, to the very measure.

Acute, his memory was also, of course, marvellously long. When we were in Berlin, for the first performance of What Next?, he expressed a wish to visit Potsdam, “because I haven’t been there since 1923.” He remembered being at a party in a New York apartment where Bartók was playing the piano, and it was hot, so somebody opened a window, and the street noise made it almost impossible to hear anything, but Bartók went on as if nothing had happened.

Part of our loss now is the loss of that memory, the loss of having Bartók — and Schoenberg and Ives, even Debussy and Scriabin, who were alive and composing when Elliott Cook Carter started at the piano — still part of our living present.

And the generosity. There was always a warm smiling welcome at the door when I arrived at his apartment, always at four o’clock, with a couple of pages of stumbled libretto draft in my bag, or with nothing. Hearing that I would be taking my two sons to Greece in the Easter vacation, he pressed a guidebook to Mystras — quickly found from the shelves in the sitting room — into my hands, and so my boys and I found ourselves following in his footsteps of perhaps forty years or more before.

Was there ever anyone he was not delighted to see? Was there ever anything he was not happy to hear? — other than sometimes the music of composers a generation or two, or three, younger, composers who were not charming and challenging their audiences to pay attention, though even then there would be the smile that said: “Well, this too is part of life.”

Paul Griffiths is a writer and editor on music, music critic, novelist, and librettist. He is the author of Modern Music and After, and contributed dozens of articles to The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, now in Grove Music Online. To learn more about Paul Griffiths, read his 2012 interview with Grove Music Online or visit his website.

Oxford Music Online is the gateway offering users the ability to access and cross-search multiple music reference resources in one location. With Grove Music Online as its cornerstone, Oxford Music Online also contains The Oxford Companion to Music, The Oxford Dictionary of Music, and The Encyclopedia of Popular Music.

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An interview with Emanuel Tov

By Robert Repino

From 1990 to 2010, Professor Emanuel Tov (Professor Emeritus, Hebrew University of Jerusalem) served as the Editor in Chief of the Dead Sea Scrolls Publication Project, producing over thirty volumes from the famed 1947 discovery near Qumran. The scrolls — written between 250 B.C.E. and 70 C.E. by a Jewish monastic community (most likely the Essenes) — have had an enormous impact on Biblical studies scholarship over the last 65 years, calling into question, among many other things, the origin and influence of certain practices and beliefs. The volumes that Tov helped to produce during his tenure can now be found in the Discoveries in the Judaean Desert series, the foundational point of reference for students of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Not surprisingly, Professor Tov is also one of the leading experts in the field of textual criticism, a method which aims to determine the reliability of a given text based on its historical context, transmission history, competing versions, and varying interpretations. This is a crucial and controversial process, given that no original manuscript of any book of the Bible has ever been recovered. Rather than consulting an original document, scholars have had to rely on numerous versions that were copied by hand and edited over generations. Complicating matters even further is the possibility that there simply is no “original” text to be unearthed or pieced together — multiple variants may have circulated among religious communities for many years. Though this situation is common among ancient documents, the connection between the Bible and religious doctrine is so strong that it was only recently that the practice of textual criticism has begun to take root, driven in large part by the Dead Sea Scrolls discovery.

In this interview (audio below) conducted for Oxford Biblical Studies Online (OBSO), Professor Marc Brettler (Brandeis University) discusses with Professor Tov his early days as a scholar of Biblical studies, his research into the Qumran scrolls, and the legacy of his work — most notably his landmark book Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible (3rd ed., revised and expanded; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2012), which continues to set the standard for his field.

[See post to listen to audio]

A transcription with footnotes is available on Oxford Biblical Studies Online.

Robert Repino is an Editor in the Reference department of Oxford University Press. After serving in the Peace Corps in Grenada, he earned an MFA in Creative Writing at Emerson College. His work has appeared in several publications, including The African American National Biography (2nd Edition), The Literary Review, The Coachella Review, Hobart, and JMWW.

Oxford Biblical Studies Online provides a comprehensive resource for the study of the Bible and biblical history. The integration of authoritative scholarly texts and reference works with tools that provide ease of research into the background, context, and issues related to the Bible make Oxford Biblical Studies Online a valuable resource not only for college students, scholars, and clergy, but also anyone in need of an authoritative, ecumenical, and up-to-date resource.

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Music in political ads

By Ron Rodman

Ask most TV viewers about what they think of political ads on TV, and they will say that they hate them. But political TV ads have been shown to be effective in validating voters’ leanings toward or against a particular candidate, or for sowing seeds of doubt about a particular candidate. (See Daniel Stevens, Barbara Allen, John Sullivan, and Dean Alger, “What’s Good for the Goose is Bad for the Gander: Negative Political Advertising, Partisanship and Turnout,” Journal of Politics, 70: 2 (2008) 1–15, for example.)

While much has been written on the visual style of political ads, very little has been written on the use of music in ads. A recent article in The Washington Post describes the music in ads in generic terms, like “fun,” “inspirational,” “ominous,” “patriotic,” “relaxing,” “sad,” “somber,” and “upbeat.” These descriptors break down into musical styles, which often associate themselves with demographic and socio-graphic groups in society, and expressive genres that convey emotional states, “upbeat,” “sad,” “inspirational,” etc., in music.

Political ads on TV can be divided into three general types:

Advocacy ads are those that endorse a candidate and put him/her and/or his/her policies in the best possible light,
Negative or Attack ads are those that attack a candidate on personal and/or policy grounds,
Contrast ads are a sort of hybrid of both previous models, usually attacking an opposing candidate, and then affirming the supporting candidate, or quickly alternating back and forth.

Contrast Ads

The contrast ads feature an interesting juxtaposition of music.

“Believe in America”

Mitt Romney’s “Believe in America” ad opens with text and images of an Obama speech in 2008 juxtaposed with pictures of worn-out buildings, etc., in a grainy, washed out color. Undergirding his words on the economy are ominous electronic rumbles, reminiscent of late 20th century avant-garde electronic works (by composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen and Vladimir Ussachevsky). The music is ominous and sinister sounding, with its soft, low and rumbling texture, and abrasive electronic, dissonant sounds.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The images and sounds give way from Obama to candidate Mitt Romney, in rich color, his image intermingled with American citizens, both young and old, posing at work, or with flags. The sound of the ad is Romney giving a speech about American jobs, accompanied by music that is hymn-like, hopeful and inspirational.

The Romney ads use musical expressive genres in a stereotypical way — music of his opponent is dissonant, ominous, and sinister, while his music is consonant, hopeful, and even inspirational.

A closer look at the music shows that the music goes deeper in meaning when considering the musical styles counterposed in the ad. The “Obama music” is dissonant, electronic 20th century avant garde: often considered intellectually effete, somewhat degenerate, and secular, and thus out of touch with most ordinary American’s musical tastes. Romney’s music, on the other hand, is a hymn: a sacred, consonant, patriotic anthem that is identifiable to “hard-working” white Christian Americans.

“The Choice”

President Obama’s ad, “The Choice”, features the well-dressed president speaking directly to the camera in a nicely appointed room — presumably a room in the White House. He begins by denigrating his opponent’s policies, claiming the policies have been tried before and have failed. Meanwhile, a faint soundtrack featuring a piano playing repetitive chords is heard. As Obama changes his text to speak on his own policies, the images change to Obama mingling with ordinary Americans, at a dinner table, in an office, and in an auto factory. The music swells slightly, adding bass, light drums, and guitar.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Obama’s ad uses a musical style that can be called “light rock,” a style that maintains an upbeat, rock-like rhythm, and harmonic structure, but is a less loud version of mainstream rock. This style also seems “intimate,” “contemporary,” or at the very least, “nondescript,” or even “non-offensive.” The increase in texture (by adding more musical instruments) and the slight increase in volume add a touch of “inspiration” and “hopefulness” to the mix. The light rock style also conveys these expressive genres.

While both Obama and Romney ads use the same basic approach in their contrast ads, Obama’s is more subtle, with less contrast, while Romney’s is perhaps more effective for TV. Romney’s ad uses more extensive production techniques, and features a greater contrast of musical style and expressive genre to contrast himself with the president.



Attack Ads

Both 2012 presidential campaigns used attack ads (some would say excessively) as a campaign strategy. While the contrast ads above use music in a somewhat traditional manner, both presidential campaigns also used music in a unique, ironic way in some attack ads.

“Firms”

The Obama campaign’s ad, “Firms”, shows Governor Romney singing “America the Beautiful” at one of his campaign rallies. During the song, the images shift away from the Governor to empty factories, boardrooms, and then to landscapes of Switzerland, Bermuda, and the Cayman Islands (suggesting the locations of Romney alleged hidden bank accounts).

Click here to view the embedded video.

The sound design is particularly effective in this ad, with reverb added to Romney’s singing to signify the emptiness and desolation of the landscapes. Some have also speculated on whether Romney’s singing was “auto-tuned” to be “out of tune.”

“Political Payoffs and Middle Class Layoffs”

The Romney campaign countered with an ad featuring Obama singing an excerpt of Al Green’s 1971 hit song, “Let’s Stay Together” at a campaign rally.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The ad opens with a dark, blurry image of people aimlessly walking in slow motion, with a text about unemployed Americans. A faint whistling sound is heard. Then, a grainy image of President Obama appears as he sings a line from Al Green’s song, as supporters cheer him on. The ad ends with text that says: “The Obama Record: Political Payoffs and Middle Class Layoffs” while ominous, electronic sounds emanate from the screen, followed by a sub-bass thud.

The lavish production values of these ads hint to the expense that political ads accrue.

Luckily, we voters won’t have to watch for another four years.

Ron Rodman is Dye Family Professor of Music at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. He is the author of Tuning In: American Television Music, published by Oxford University Press in 2010. Read his previous blog posts on music and television.

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Giant pumpkins

By Cindy Ott

At this year’s Topsfield Fair in Massachusetts, Ron Wallace broke the world record for the biggest pumpkin yet with a specimen weighing in at 2009 pounds. Photographs of Wallace next to this colossal body of orange flesh made headlines not only in the regional Boston Globe but also the nationwide Huffington Post. Yet every year in the popular press scenes of a pickup truck with its bed filled to the brim or a grown adult comfortably nestled inside a single giant pumpkin document the variety’s comically huge size.

While the giant pumpkin looks like a wonder of nature, it is just as much a product of history and culture, that is, as much an idea as a plant type. Americans have a great passion for agrarian life and a desire to perpetuate a rural identity, however fanciful that may be. Giant pumpkins are made up of not only plant DNA but also cultural values relating to a belief in the goodness of nature and in agrarian virtues.

If the appeals of gardening and the grand size were the only factors that motivated these growers, then a giant squash, which is botanically identical to the pumpkin, should be just as popular, but it is decidedly not. The World Pumpkin Confederation, an organization devoted to the sport of giant pumpkin growing, has a rule that for an entry to be considered a pumpkin, “the fruit must be 80% orange.” It categorizes the rest as squash. Most squash are barred from pumpkin competitions, even though it is essentially the same vegetable. Those competitions that make no distinctions between the two types are disqualified from joining in the major weigh-offs. There is no difference between a pumpkin’s and a squash’s genetics, cultivation, nurturing, and weight — only in the attitudes toward them. Squash compete in weight and girth but not in meaning.




King of the Mammoths

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Buckbee seed company touted its “King of the Mammoths,” a 469-pounder exhibited at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, for its grandiose size, calling it a “wonderfully grand and colossal variety, astonishing everyone by its mammoth size and heavy weight.” The pumpkin was featured at the fair because it was an awesome natural specimen, but more important, because it embodied the agrarian stories that many Americans like to tell about themselves. H.W. Buckbee Seed and Plant Guide, Rockford, Illinois, 1899. Special Collections, National Agricultural Library

A Thanksgiving postcard

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Published around the time of World War I depicts an oversized pumpkin as the embodiment of “Peace and Prosperity.” Americans embraced the pumpkin as a symbol of the simple things in life that are found in the classic American dream, such as the rewards of hard work in a land of opportunity, and therefore served to invigorate the war effort. Thanksgiving postcard, ca. 1910s. Credit: Warshaw Collection of Business Americana Collection, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution

Pumpkin folktales

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The huge size and prolific growth of the pumpkin historically inspired folktales that depicted the crop as more beast than vegetable and also led to its most famous incarnation as the Halloween Jack-O’-Lantern. “Halloween,” color postcard, circa 1900. Author’s private collection

Atlantic Giants

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Howard Dill sits in a patch of Atlantic Giants, the variety he developed in the 1960s, circa 1990. Credit: Don Langevin and GiantPumpkin.com

A giant pumpkin rind defies all sense of proportion.

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Credit: Don Langevin and GiantPumpkin.com

World record 1,725-pound giant pumpkin

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Christy Harp poses with her world record 1,725-pound giant pumpkin at the Ohio Valley Growers Weigh-Off in Canfield, Ohio on October 3, 2009. Credit: Scott Heckel, Canton Repository

World Championship Pumpkin Weigh-Off in Half Moon Bay

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Growers inspect the underside of a giant pumpkin being lifted for weighing at the World Championship Pumpkin Weigh-Off in Half Moon Bay on October 12, 2009. A 1,658- pound monster from Iowa set a new record for the festival. Credit: UPI/Terry Schmitt

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To understand why a pumpkin means something different from a squash requires interconnecting the crops’ physical traits, market status, and uses. For hundreds of years, no one made such distinctions. People on both sides of the Atlantic thought about and used them interchangeably. Colonists considered pumpkin and squash food for desperate times and a symbol of a primitive way of life and of nature’s bounty. They derived their attitudes from the plant’s prolific and unwieldy nature and from its origins in the Americas, which many Europeans conceived as a vast wilderness. With increasing prosperity and a greater number and variety of crops available, Americans became more discriminating about what they ate in the early nineteenth century. Squash were the types they continued to eat at the table. The orange field pumpkin was the type they deemed least desirable because of its stringy innards and bland flesh, though some farmers kept them in production as cheap supplement for livestock fodder because they were so prolific and easy to propagate. Most varieties of winter and summer squash lost their vibrancy as a symbol of nature and a primitive way of life because they were so much a part of the modern world, appearing in markets and dinner plates on a regular basis.

Because the orange field pumpkin was divorced from antebellum America’s expanding marketplace and associated with an old-fashioned subsistence farm economy, it remained a powerful object to talk about nature and a rustic way of life, symbolism long associated with all forms of squash. The orange field pumpkin became the pumpkin only partially because of its natural attributes. It also became the pumpkin because of people’s ideas about it. Americans linked the orange pumpkin’s physical qualities, its economic standing, and its uses, to construct an image of a rural way of life that was the basis for popular views of the nation’s history and identity founded that still resonate today.

These historic themes live on among giant pumpkin growers who conceive of the pastime as a morally and physically uplifting pursuit. Pumpkins — historically the most common and least commodified field crop — give great symbolic weight to the growers’ endeavors, not to mention the simple pride in their ability to produce such physical tonnage. By propagating giant pumpkins, generations of growers like Ron Wallace have not only perpetuate a botanical species but also kept a sense of American agrarian identity alive.

Cindy Ott is Assistant Professor of American Studies at St. Louis University and the author of Pumpkin: The Curious History of an American Icon. This post is excerpted and updated from Cindy Ott’s “Object Analysis of the Giant Pumpkin” in Environmental History (15 (4) 2010).

Environmental History is the leading journal in the world for scholars, scientists, and practitioners who are interested in following the development of this exciting field. EH is a quarterly, interdisciplinary journal that carries international articles that portray human interactions with the natural world over time.

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