Oxford University Press's Blog, page 1012
October 19, 2012
The myth of a constant and stable environment
Nature has always changed; even the moon’s rotation around Earth and distance from Earth have changed over the millions of years. Living things require, and depend upon, change in nature in order to survive. We have learned this from science, from geological history recorded in ancient nautilus shells to understanding radioactivity.
Yet it’s shocking how little science is involved when we apply environmental sciences to solve environmental problems. Most of our environmental laws, policies, and actions are based on ancient Greek and Roman beliefs about nature — the idea that nature, left alone, exists in a perfect balance, which will persist indefinitely if we just stay out of the way. This folktale nature isn’t just constant over time but stable as well, in the sense that it can recover from (some) disturbances. If it is disturbed — by our actions for example — and then freed from those disturbances, folktale nature returns to that perfect balance. Of course, every system has its limits, and even folktale nature can be pushed so far that it stops working.
Try as we might, we just don’t seem to get away from this myth. Many of my colleagues in ecology deny the existence of a folktale balance of nature, but when asked to create a policy, technical terminology for a law, or an explanation about why something has gone wrong with the environment, they set down statements that assume, depend on, and require a balance of nature.
A prime example is the current discussion about tipping points. The conversation is that we are destabilizing the atmosphere, and therefore the atmosphere is about to reach a tipping point that will trigger something undesirable, perhaps disastrous. But the reality is that the climate is always changing and has never been stable. It’s a dynamic system, always in flux, so it can’t really have a kind of point from which to tip. It can be messed up from a human point of view, but if we are serious about “managing” it, then we have to manage it as a system that never remains constant.
The Pygmy Scrub-hopper. Photo by Jeevan Jose, 2010. Creative Commons License.
This contradiction — believing that we have to act so that our environment achieves a balance, while down deep knowing this never really was true — has been recognized since the 1990s, but it just won’t go away. It underlies what most of us assume and believe about nature, including scientists, naturalists, and the person in the street. Why not?
Humans have been interacting with the environment for as long as our ancestors have been on Earth. If early humans were going to survive, they needed a good knowledge of local nature: which plants to eat, which ones made good medicines, and which ones were deadly (rudimentary science). But the world was also mysterious, full of beautiful, strange, frightening, dangerous things, events that were powerful and unexplainable. This led to attempts to explain nature through myths and folkways, which have persisted and are now deep within our culture.
When I first came across this contradiction, I couldn’t believe it. I was asked by the newly formed Marine Mammal Commission to explain the goals of the new Marine Mammal Protection Act (1972). The law’s goal was for every marine mammal species to reach an “optimum sustainable population,” but the commission said they didn’t understand what that could mean, either legally or ecologically, so they asked me to explain it. I knew some of the scientists who were on the scientific advisory committee to the commission, respected them greatly, and knew that they knew that oceans and marine mammal populations were always changing. But what they said to the commissioners about the law was based on the ancient belief in a balance of nature.
I wrote several books about all of this, including Discordant Harmonies, No Man’s Garden, and Beyond the Stony Mountains, hoping people would let go of this old myth, but the idea and the contradictions continue. Our laws require that we restore endangered species to their former abundance. But since there never was a fixed abundance, it doesn’t make sense to force an endangered population to some hypothetical, unrealistic size that isn’t helpful in promoting the persistence of species.
Consider forest fires. Until late in the twentieth century we were told by Smokey Bear that “only you can prevent forest fires,” which by implication could only be bad for nature. In the past fifty years, we have learned that many forest species, plant and animal, have evolved with, adapted to, and actually require forest fires. The great Sequoias of California, one of nature’s longest-lived creatures, can reproduce only after a clearing takes place in a forest from storms or fire. Recognizing this, many ecologists and foresters understand that forests need fire, need disturbance. But forest fires are tricky things; they easily get away and burn houses. Still, if we don’t light them, nature eventually does, and destroys houses anyway.
Why do our ways of managing and conserving nature keep falling back to the old ways of thinking? One reason, ironically, is that it isn’t nature by itself that needs to be unchanging; it is our civilization that depends on constancy. When humans were just hunter-gatherers without a permanent home, they could follow the environment as it changed, moving around the world to places that better suited them. But then farming started, and people began to stay in one place. Land ownership developed. With the advance of civilization, cities were founded and became important and desirable. Once people set up all these fixed structures — farmlands, cities, and towns — we became dependent on environmental constancy. It is we who want and need a balance of nature, not our nonhuman companions, whether polar bear, the blue whale, or sequoia tree.
We interact with nature in two ways: rationally and what we can best label as emotionally. Our emotional response includes our folkways, myths, spirituality, and religious sensitivities. Both ways of interacting with nature are important, but we get ourselves into trouble when we confuse the two, letting the emotional response determine what we think are rational decisions, while at the same time believing that rationality can replace emotion. Our myths and folkways are deeply embedded within us. We believe in both the grand idea of a balance of nature and in modern science, but only when science serves as revealed truth that we can believe without question.
Daniel B. Botkin is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of The Moon in the Nautilus Shell: Discordant Harmonies Reconsidered and Our Natural History: The Lessons of Lewis and Clark.
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To fix a broken planet
Whatever our faith-based differences concerning immortality, death has an unassailable biological purpose — to make species survival possible. Nonetheless, we humans need not always hasten the indispensable process with utterly enthusiastic explosions of crime, war, terrorism, and genocide.
In universities, where intellectual direction and fashion are now largely determined by numbing mimicry and raw commerce, our students need to learn something truly primal: An individual’s personal success can make genuine sense only if the larger world itself has a foreseeable and successful future.
This planet, reflecting its myriad constituent parts, faces stubbornly insidious problems. “The blood-dimmed tide is loosed,” once observed the Irish poet William Butler Yeats, and “everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned.”
Today, expanding global deterioration and chaos is more a symptom than an actual disease. Virtually all world politics hides an inconvenient truth. This is the ubiquitous and determined unwillingness of individuals to seek meaning and comfort within themselves. In consequence, our upcoming presidential election will have no real bearing on the basic issues of human survival. Neither candidate truly understands the inner meanings of world politics. And neither candidate has it within his conspicuously cultivated capacities to ever discover these vital meanings.
In the end, says Goethe, we depend upon creatures of our own making. Ultimately, what is needed to fix a broken planet must lie far beyond the fragmented unities and feuding tribes of life on earth. Only when we are finally allowed to see ourselves as a single species, can we humans seriously entertain any credible hopes of progress and survival. In principle, well-intentioned emphases on diversity need not represent a contradiction of our overriding species singularity, but these would require an explicit and prior affirmation of diversity itself as an intermediate step toward eventual human solidarity.
In one form or another, tribal conflict has always driven world affairs. Without a clear sense of an outsider, of an enemy, of an inferior, of an “other,” most people will feel altogether lost. Still drawing our critical sense of self-worth from membership, in the state, or the faith, or the race — from what Freud, borrowing from Nietzsche, had insightfully called the “horde” — we humans cannot satisfy even the most minimal requirements of coexistence.
The veneer of civilization continues to be razor thin. Our entire system of international relations is rooted in a deeply etched and endlessly recurring pattern of horror. The sanitizing name that we assign to this pattern is “history.” Perversely, within this seamless litany of harms, it can be fully “rational” to defile and destroy those who have the temerity to express different beliefs and affiliations.
This calculated destructiveness has been most evident, of course, whenever one “tribe” encounters another that seeks distinctly alternative paths to immortality. It becomes a fundamental problem in world politics, because in this broadest possible realm of human activity, there can be no greater power than power over death.
Seeing requires distance. In our current frenzied rhythm, breathlessness is de rigueur. The cascading horror of life on earth creates a deafening noise, but it is still possible to listen for more transient sounds of grace and harmony. To begin, however, we must first pay close attention to our most intimate human dispositions of empathy and compassion. In the concluding analysis, these private feelings are considerably more important to species survival than the comfortingly tangible expressions of science, industry, and technology.
With regard to human durability, the politicians and the professors are both grievously unprepared, and manifestly wrong. From a survival standpoint, the critical time for science, modernization, and globalization is pretty much over. To survive together all of us must soon learn to rediscover a life that is detached from tribal manipulations, unfounded optimism, and contrived happiness. Indeed, it is only in the midst of this suddenly awakened human spirit that we may finally learn something beyond the suffocating clichés and banalities of American presidential politics.
“The man who laughs,” understood the poet, Bertolt Brecht, “has simply not yet heard the horrible news.” Too many still laugh amid the incomprehensible global triumph of incommunicable pain, death, and decomposition. We humans still lack a tolerable future, not because we have been too slow to learn what can make us successful as individuals, but because we haven’t yet begun to learn that such success is always contingent. In the end, success must always depend upon much wider and interpenetrating patterns of human progress.
“The egocentric ideal of a future reserved for those who have managed to attain egoistically the extremity of `everyone for himself’ is false and against nature,” wrote the Jesuit philosopher, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. “No element can move and grow except with and by all the others with itself.”
Louis René Beres was educated at Princeton (Ph.D., 1971), and is Professor of International Law at Purdue University. Born in Zürich, Switzerland, at the end of World War II, he is the author of many books and articles dealing with world politics, law, literature, and philosophy. He is a regular contributor to OUPblog.
If you are interested in the subject of the philosophy of death, you may be interested in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Death, edited by Ben Bradley, Fred Feldman, and Jens Johansson. In 21 essays from leading philosophers, the handbook explores the current philosophical thinking of death-related topics across the entire range of the discipline, from the metaphysical questions over the nature of death to normative ethics.
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Image credit: Broken Icy surface caused by ice breaker in frozen water. Photo by Orchidpoet, iStockphoto.
The birth of disco
On this day in 1959, a nightclub opened its doors in the quiet city of Aachen, West Germany, and a small revolution in music took place. The Scotch-Club was similar to many restaurant-cum-dancehalls of the time, with one exception: rather than hire a live band to provide the entertainment, its owner decided instead to install a record player. The immediate effect on the clientele was anticlimactic, and the innovation might have failed altogether, had it not been for a young reporter who was covering the opening night. Fuelled by whiskey, Klaus Quirini impulsively stepped up to the decks and galvanized the bored crowd by selecting and introducing each of the records. In doing so, he later claimed to have become the world’s first ever nightclub DJ.
More interestingly, the Scotch-Club appears to be one of the earliest recognisable examples of a modern disco. There were DJs before, of course—evidence for the terms disc jockey, deejay, and DJ goes back to radio presenters of the early 1940s—but Quirini’s quick-thinking located the activity on the dancefloor in a new form of venue-specific, DJ-mediated live entertainment.
Discotheque entered the English language at around the same time that the Scotch-Club was refining the concept. There were discothèques before 1959, but of a different sort: the word is a borrowing from French meaning a ‘library of phonograph records’, formed after bibliotheque. This was already current in English in the 1950s, and the French version was being used as a proper name by various nightclubs in Paris, where dancehalls had resorted to playing records publicly as a result of restrictions imposed during Nazi occupation in the early ‘40s. The name naturally became associated with the actual venues themselves, and the English sense of ‘a nightclub’ arrives in this context in a 1960 magazine article about the Left Bank:
1960 Atlantic Sept. 46/2 Since this is a discothèque, jazz is blaring from the walls and record sleeves are scattered about.
New words often inspire a period of heady inventiveness during their first surge of popularity, and people were quick to play with discotheque. In America, where Parisian style dominated the haut monde, it was immediately compounded by the press, who raved about the European discotheque trend for discotheque dancing. The world of fashion was particularly taken, one newspaper coining a rare adjective to describe a racy see-through outfit as ‘definitely discotheque’.
Then, in the summer of 1964, a short sleeveless dress known as the discotheque dress enjoyed a brief craze. It was designed to allow freedom of movement while dancing (ideally in sultry Left Bank clubs), and for a brief moment, before the ‘nightclub’ sense of the word prevailed, the dress itself was simply called a discotheque:
1964 Oakland (California) Tribune 9 July The best little discotheque we have yet seen is in the Miss Troy collection.
Which raises the intriguing possibility that for a short time in the early sixties, women might have gone out to dance in discotheques wearing discotheques.
This curious double meaning is a good example of the sort of excited confusion that can attend the birth of a new word, when various usages jostle for attention. Adding to the mix was the coincidental shortening of discotheque to disco, so that the discotheque dress correspondingly slimmed down to both disco dress and disco—especially among the ‘fashion-hep’ (or ‘hip’):
1964 Salt Lake (Utah) Tribune 12 July 4w/3 The ‘disco’ to the fashion-hep means a short, bare-topped dress whose main ingredient is that it must swing.
Swinging into view in this form, it provides the earliest evidence yet found for our word disco, and it isn’t until two months after this quote that the sense of ‘a nightclub’ is attested:
1964 Playboy Sept. 56/2 Los Angeles has emerged with the biggest and brassiest of the discos.
So, was a disco really a dress, before it was a nightclub? This isn’t such an incredible idea: the term discotheque dress is cumbersome and benefits from abbreviation, so it’s plausible that it inspired the simplified disco dress, which went on to influence a more general use of disco. But this progression seems overly deliberate. It’s far more likely that there is undiscovered evidence out there somewhere for disco being used to mean ‘a nightclub’ before it meant ‘a dress’.
Editors at the OED think so, too. We’ve featured disco as part of OED Appeals—a new initiative to involve the public in tracing the history of words—in the hope that someone might be able to help solve the problem.
Click here to view the embedded video.
Denny Hilton is a senior assistant editor at the Oxford English Dictionary. If you can help, visit: www.oed.com/appeals. Read more about the history of OED Appeals here.
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is widely regarded as the accepted authority on the English language. It is an unsurpassed guide to the meaning, history, and pronunciation of 600,000 words— past and present—from across the English-speaking world. As a historical dictionary, the OED is very different from those of current English, in which the focus is on present-day meanings. You’ll still find these in the OED, but you’ll also find the history of individual words, and of the language—traced through 3 million quotations, from classic literature and specialist periodicals to films scripts and cookery books. The OED started life more than 150 years ago. Today, the dictionary is in the process of its first major revision. Updates revise and extend the OED at regular intervals, each time subtly adjusting our image of the English language.
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Image credit: Image of disco dress via Access Newspaper Archives under the Fair Use Policy.
The value of networks
By Michele Catanzaro and Guido Caldarell
Thanks to a single Facebook post in 2010, an extra 340,000 people went to vote in the 2010 USA Congress. This striking discovery, made by political scientist James Fowler and colleagues, reveals the extent to which social networks can influence the basic workings of democracy. Of course, Facebook is just one of the many networks in which people today have embedded themselves. Every day, a typical person might meet friends and colleagues, log in to email and twitter accounts, send text messages and answer phone calls. There’s more: when this typical person takes a plane, makes purchases, or transfers money, it implicates her in further networks. In an IT intensive society, all these actions leave tracks. This poses huge privacy protection questions, but it also provides an unprecedented opportunity to study people and networks quantitatively.
Centuries have passed since mathematician Leonard Euler showed for the first time that thinking in terms of networks can be extremely revealing: he solved the Königsberg bridge problem (can the seven bridges of the city of Königsberg all be traversed in a single trip without doubling back?) by applying logic in this way. Decades have passed since sociologists and psychologists started to draw maps of human relations. But the science of networks has still much to tell, and the current data deluge is giving it a second youth. So how has thinking in terms of ‘networks’ helped us in recent years?
The financial crisis
In a paper published in August 2012, physicist Stefano Battiston and his colleagues defined the DebtRank, a powerful tool to evaluate which banks would generate the worst consequences if defaulting. This measure is inspired by PageRank, the algorithm that allows Google to discover the most relevant pages on the web. Battiston’s measure takes into account the network of stock ownership among banks, to identify those that are ‘too central to fail’ (in contrast with the classical ‘too big to fail’ paradigm). Such refined measures would be impossible without a networked approach to the large amount of financial data generated every day.
The 2009 swine flu pandemic
Old age plagues, like the Black Death, took years to spread. On the contrary, H1N1 jumped from one side of the planet to the opposite in a matter of weeks. The main difference between then and now? Modern infections have a powerful channel they can use to spread globally: the air flight network. Hence, the global map of airports’ connections was used by physicist Alessandro Vespignani and his colleagues as the basis for modeling the spread of H1N1, and as a result they were able to forecast the peaks of the disease in different countries.
Offers of employment
In the 1970s, sociologist Marc Granovetter discovered the ‘strength of weak ties’: he concluded that it was easier to secure job offers through acquaintances than via close friends. Decades later, Linkedin is one of the best applications of this discovery: people that have been contacted by headhunters or got offers through this social network know it well. Understanding how networks work can be very valuable to better handle relations, both online and offline.
Relationships: from Medici to Messi
Cosimo de’ Medici’s leadership of fifteenth century Florence can be explained in part by his ability to make the most out of the network of relations between families in the city; this paper in The American Journal of Sociology looks at how ‘Medicean political control was produced by means of network disjunctures within the elite, which the Medici alone spanned’. Similarly, the differing performances of football player Lionel Messi when playing for Barcelona and Argentina can be partially understood when you consider the different pattern of relations between the other players in the two teams.
Criticism of network sciences should be taken seriously: risks can include unreliable data, carelessness with details, drastic simplifications in models, and fake trends. In general, scientists are, with reason, suspicious towards holistic all-purpose ‘theories of everything’. However, careful and intelligent application of network tools can continue to deliver a wealth of results in the future.
Michele Catanzaro is a freelance journalist based in Barcelona, Spain. He works for media in the UK (Nature, PhysicsWorld), Spain (El Periódico de Catalunya), and Italy (Le Scienze). He holds a PhD on Dynamics in Complex Networks by the Technical University of Catalonia (Barcelona), and is co-author of Networks: A Very Short Introduction.
Guido Caldarelli is Professor in Theoretical Physics at IMT Institute for Advanced Studies Lucca and a member of Complex System Institute of the National Research Council, Italy. He is the author of more than 100 scientific papers and an expert of scale-free networks and self-similar phenomena, especially of their applications in financial and economic systems. He is the author of the textbook Scale-Free Networks and co-author of Networks: A Very Short Introduction.
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October 18, 2012
The top ten dramatizations of Moby-Dick
Moby-Dick draws readers into it. And many of its more creative readers have sought to capture its grandeur on film and stage. From the first film in 1926 to the present, these attempts have taken liberties with the novel, sometimes for good, sometimes for ill. But that is the challenge that Moby-Dick offers its readers, a text that is deep and wide, an ocean of issues and concerns that we must all, in some fashion, navigate.
The Sea Beast (1926 film)
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Forget about the whale vanquishing Ahab. In this silent film, John Barrymore stars as Ahab. Although he is dismasted, he kills the whale and an evil half-brother and gets the girl.
Moby Dick—Rehearsed (1955 play)
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Orson Welles, who might have made a superior Ahab, wrote this two-act play about an acting troupe told they are going to perform Moby Dick. Welles had hoped to make this into a film but the results were disappointing. This play within a play, however, has some moments that Melville would have appreciated.
Moby Dick (1956 film)
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Directed by John Huston, co-written by Huston and Ray Bradbury, and starring Gregory Peck as Ahab. Although Peck hardly sizzled with Ahab’s philosophical gravitas, the film did challenge polite 1950s codes about racial relations and hinted at blasphemy. And the final scene, with Ahab forever joined to the White Whale is powerful.
Hakugei: Legend of the Moby Dick (1997-1999 Japanese animated tv series)
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Ahab commands a spaceship against Moby-Dick, a beast that is terrorizing a planet. Lucky Luck, like Ishmael, signs on for duty, finding perhaps more than he had anticipated.
Moby Dick (1998 tv mini-series)
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Famous as Captain Picard on Star-Trek, Stewart showed his acting chops as Ahab in this immensely popular made for television film. Ahab’s obsession, said Stewart, is what rendered him a tragic figure. Because he is cognizant of his obsession, he is a man in agony. And that is how Stewart sort to portray Ahab.
Songs and Stories from Moby-Dick (1999 performance art)
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Performance and techno-artist Anderson had been drawn to Moby-Dick in high school. She realized her vision of the saga with an electric violin and a “talking stick” that resembled nothing so much as a harpoon.
Moby-Dick: Then and Now (2007 play)
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This is a clever staging of the novel by Ricardo Pitts-Wiley. Except this time around, the protagonists are kids from the ghetto and their quarry is the white whale of cocaine.
2010: Moby Dick (2010 film)
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Here Moby has destroyed a submarine and dismasted its Captain, named Ahab. Ahab wants revenge. Ishmael is played by Renee O’Connor (formerly sidekick to Xenia, the Warrior Woman). Her name in the film is Michelle Herman (M.H. - get it? Herman Melville, in reverse).
Moby-Dick (2010 Dallas Opera)
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Ahab is an operatic figure, if ever there was one. Jake Heggie wrote the score, with Gene Sheer doing the libretto. Among the challenges were whittling down the book into something manageable for the stage. Spoiler alert: the opera does not open with the famous first line of the novel. But that line is heard – eventually. Photo by Karen Almond/Dallas Opera.
Moby-Dick Big Read (2012 radio series)
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The daily online release of chapters from Moby-Dick, recorded by a host of international and national celebrities.
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George Cotkin is Professor of History at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, and author of the forthcoming book, Dive Deeper: Journeys with Moby-Dick.
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Lofty musing: Has it only been 467 years?
Imagine yourself in a lofty cathedral, silver voices echoing off of vaulted stone, with a slight chill in the close air. Are you there? Ok, now you’re ready for the music of English composer John Taverner.
Touted as the most influential composer of his time, Taverner (c.1490-1545) was and continues to be admired for his skill in the creation of polyphonic (‘many-voiced’) music — that is, independent musical lines that layer on top of each other in a way that sounds harmonious; the lines fit together without losing any of their individuality.
Taverner, who died on this day in 1545 in Boston, Lincolnshire, was a composer of church music, employed by Catholic institutions Cardinal College (now Christ Church) and the Gild of St. Mary for a little over a decade of his adult life. His lifespan was almost exactly that of King Henry VIII (1491-1547), and, considering Henry’s contentious relationship with the Pope, it is perhaps not surprising that Taverner seems to have retired altogether from being a church musician a few years after Henry’s 1534 Act of Supremacy. (This didn’t stop Taverner dying a wealthy and highly respected man, though.)
There is a lot of the cathedral in Taverner’s music. Polyphony is complex in and of itself, but the way in which Taverner was able to manipulate musical notes so as to create beautifully interlocking, independent lines — at times bringing those lines together to create brief moments of homophony — is as impressive as the architectural marvels that are cathedrals. Anyone who has written counterpoint, or perhaps a particularly clever bit of code, can tell you that this is no small feat.
Take the Gloria from his “Western Wind” Mass for example (the score). Even if you can’t read music, you can tell that there are times when the text is being declaimed at relatively the same pace in all voices (homophony), and there are times when the voices separate out and sing the text at highly differing paces (polyphony).
For fun, trying picking one of the voices in the score (s=soprano, a=alto, t=tenor, b=bass) and following its progress while listening to the Gloria (the music in the score begins at 0:11 of the video).
Click here to view the embedded video.
Now, do that with all the other voices, and you’ll begin to have a glimmering of the skill and artistry that went into making this! Don’t you wish you were as skilled in making all the different threads of your life weave together so artfully?
As you exit the chilly cathedral into the fresh air beyond, remember, 467 years ago today an Englishman died who created some pretty impressive works of art.
Meghann Wilhoite is an Assistant Editor at Grove Music/Oxford Music Online, music blogger, and organist. Follow her on Twitter at @megwilhoite. Read her previous blog posts on Sibelius, the pipe organ, John Zorn, West Side Story, and other subjects.
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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Fit firefighters
Firefighters are expected to maintain high levels of physical fitness in order to safely perform their required duties. However, many firefighters struggle to maintain fitness levels and have problems with being overweight or obese. Obesity can have a significant impact on health, including an increased risk of cardiovascular heart disease, which is a leading cause of fatalities among firefighters. Obesity also negatively impacts on work productivity and there is concern that obesity may endanger firefighters’ abilities to protect the safety and well-being of the public they are serving as well as their own safety, health and well-being.
There is currently no statutory requirement for fitness testing in UK firefighters. Policy is varied among UK fire and rescue services, with each working independently to assess its own needs and requirements. Some services have fitness advisors and annual fitness tests, while others have no fitness policy, placing responsibility on the firefighter to turn up for work fit for the role.
In a recent paper, we examined the prevalence of obesity among over 700 UK firefighters from a fire and rescue service to assess whether it is a cause for concern. The study compared their weight, BMI, body fat percentage and waist size measurements in 2008 and 2011.
In 2008, 35% of the firefighters were classified as normal weight, 54% were overweight and 11% were obese. When compared to nationally represented data from the Health Survey for England in 2008, a greater proportion of these firefighters were considered as overweight (54%, versus 42%of the general male population); however, fewer firefighters were classified as obese (11% versus 24%).
Comparing these firefighters in their BMI groups showed that firefighters in the normal weight category in 2008 had on average, increased in body fat percentage and waist circumference from 2008 to 2011. In contrast, those in the obese category in 2008 showed an average decrease in the same measures from 2008 to 2011. There was no change for those in the overweight group.
These results suggest that UK firefighters with obesity may be receiving advice on losing weight from their fire and rescue services’ occupational health personnel or from their GP, whilst those classed as normal weight or overweight are not being targeted for health promotion.
Based on our findings, our firefighters may not be as fit as we think. However, does being overweight or obese pose a risk for the firefighters’ own safety and well-being? Although we have not examined this data for our firefighters yet, evidence from US firefighter studies suggest that being overweight or obese certainly has health-related risk factors for firefighters and the more obese you are, the greater the risk. So what about the safety and well-being of the public that the firefighters are serving? At the moment there is no evidence for an overweight or obese UK firefighter having caused a risk for the public.
Promoting activities related to good health outcomes is a public health priority. However, the NHS is more likely to see patients with health problems who are overweight or obese, and therefore are expected to promote health-related activities with these groups. Healthy individuals who fall within the normal weight category are less likely to be seen by their GPs. Hence, fire and rescue services should take a more preventative approach – by advising all firefighters on the benefits of a healthy diet and maintaining fitness; and supporting this advice with health promotion activities (e.g. introducing healthy food options in the canteen). Introducing health promotion advice and activities for all firefighters could avoid an epidemic of overweight and obesity among UK firefighters than is currently affecting US firefighters.
Dr Fehmidah Munir, Senior Lecturer in Psychology, School of Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences, Loughborough University, UK; Dr Stacy Clemes, Lecturer in Human Biology, School of Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences, Loughborough University; Dr Jonathan Houdmont, Lecturer in Occupational Health Psychology, Institute of Work, Health, and Organisations, Univeristy of Nottingham; Dr Ray Randall, Senior Lecturer in Organisational Behaviour and Human Management, School of Business and Economics, Loughborough University. The paper ‘Overweight and obesity in UK firefighters’ has been made free for a limited time by Occupational Medicine journal.
Occupational Medicine is an international peer-reviewed journal which provides vital information for the promotion of workplace health and safety. Topics covered include work-related injury and illness, accident and illness prevention, health promotion, occupational disease, health education, the establishment and implementation of health and safety standards, monitoring of the work environment, and the management of recognized hazards.
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Image credit: British firefighters discussing action plan at blaze scene. Photo by SteveStone, iStockphoto.
October 17, 2012
‘Awning’ and ‘tarpaulin’
The title of this post sounds like an introduction of two standup comedians, but my purpose is to narrate a story of two nautical words. The origin of one seems to be lost, the other looks deceptively transparent; but there may be hope. Both turned up in the seventeenth century: in 1624 (awning) and 1607 (tarpaulin) respectively.
The famous sailor Captain John Smith wrote (OED): “Wee did hang an awning (which is an old saile) to… trees to shadow us from the Sunne” (1624) and “A trar-pawling; or yawning” (1626). Since Smith found it necessary to explain what awning meant, he did not expect the word to be known to his readership. However, he had some reason to use it, for otherwise he would have made do with an old saile. Possibly, awning sounded more precise and more professional to him. In 1626 he wrote yawning instead of awning. A slip of the pen (quill)? Or did the printer, who had never seen the word before, replace it with the meaningless yawning? By contrast, trar is certainly a misprint for tarre, which occurs elsewhere.
Awning and tarpaulin appeared in print at approximately the same time, which perhaps suggests that a new way of processing canvas was introduced early in the seventeenth century or that advances in technology required new terms. Yet even if this guess proved true, we would not be closer to the origin of awning. The word does not look like any of its analogs in German and Dutch, while attempts to produce a viable Romance etymon for it didn’t result in a single good find. But if awning is English, we wonder why we cannot guess the elements of which it consists.
The French for ell is auln, or even better for our purposes, aun. In 1671, Stephen Skinner, one of our first etymologists, derived awning from au(l)ning. The phonetic match leaves nothing to be desired, but why should anyone use a measure of length to name a piece of sailcloth? Since Captain Smith said that the awning was hung to trees, in order to shadow the people from the sun, heave, haven, and heaven have been tried as the words that might lead us to awning. But even the most resourceful scholars (Frank Chance was among them) didn’t know how to get rid of the initial consonant; awning has never appeared as hawning. Quite naturally, the suffix caused little interest. It was the root that bothered scholars, though the addition of -ing also poses a problem.
I will skip the suggestions that awning is a borrowing from Hindu or Persian (the latter belongs to Skeat, but he soon gave it up) and other fanciful guesses. The only breakthrough seems to have occurred in 1862. In the area of English etymology, the main contemporary predecessor of Skeat was Hensleigh Wedgwood. Between 1859 and 1865, more than a decade before the publication of Skeat’s magnum opus, Wedgwood’s dictionary was appearing in installments. George P. Marsh, a distinguished American historical linguist, formed a high (partly undeservedly high) opinion of that work but also saw its numerous drawbacks. He discussed every installment in The Nation and decided to bring out an American edition of “Wedgwood” that would incorporate his corrections. Unfortunately, only the first volume (A through D) came out. His notes can be found in his successive reviews (see them in my Bibliography of English Etymology), but how many people, even professionally interested in word origins, have the time and energy to look through the issues of a weekly periodical, published a century and a half ago? Anyway, awning begins with the letter a, and the A-D volume (1862), though not common in libraries, is not too hard to obtain.
Awning and tarpaulin: which is which?
Marsh offered a French etymology of awning, which I will cite in the congested formulation of The Century Dictionary. Allegedly, awning was a reduction of auvening, from auven, from French auvent “a penthouse of a cloth before a shop-window,” as defined in A French and English Dictionary by Randle Cotgrave (1611). As we can see, the timing is perfect; with Cotgrave, as with Captain Smith, we are at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Wedgwood found Marsh’s idea convincing and, although he did not reject his own original etymology, added auvent as a more likely source of awning. But he did not mention Marsh, and since 1872, the year the second edition of Wedgwood’s dictionary appeared, the improved etymology has been known as his. Even Skeat and Murray don’t seem to have known its true authorship.
Although clever and ingenious, Marsh’s idea is less than fully convincing. The posited intermediate forms (auvening and auven) have not been attested, and auvent has never been used as a nautical term. For these reasons, Ernest Weekley offered his own hypothesis. He cited Italian alona, Spanish olona, and so forth “sailcloth.” Cotgrave also has olonne “canvas for the sayle of a ship.” Weekley believed that “aulone…, instead of olonne, may have been mixed up with another aulonne, aulomne, which… is a woollen cloth named for Alonne in Beauce.” “I suggest, as a pure conjecture,” he added “that it is the origin of the awn- in awning, and that the latter is a sailor’s corruption of an unrecorded aulonning.” (Note how close aulonning is to Skinner’s au(l)ning. Weekley consulted Skinner but owned nothing to his reconstruction.) As time went on, he must have felt disillusioned with his idea, because in his dictionary, published fifteen years later, he only said “of unknown origin.”
As a general rule, all the involved etymologies are wrong, though, to be sure, exceptions exist (compare my summer post on apricot). On the other hand, very simple, naive derivations are also suspicious and smack of folk etymology. Wedgwood, a great master of obscure allusions, wrote in passing that awning should be compared with Danish avn “awn,” without explaining how exactly the two should be compared. Did he mean that an awn, a bristle on a grass spike, hangs like an awning suspended from its support? As early as 1826, John Thomson, the author of the otherwise useless book Etymons of English Words, derived awning from awn, because both, in their different ways, are coverings or hulls. Wedgwood of course knew the book. Perhaps that is all there is to it, even though Thomson’s derivation is almost too good to be true.
The word probably came into limited use around the time of Captain Smith’s expedition (the fact emphasized by the gloss “an old saile”), and in the 1620s it may have been nautical slang. We have no way of knowing whether it was coined by his crew and gained popularity among other sailors (a rather unlikely supposition) or whether his men picked it up from somebody else. A Romance etymology carries little conviction, because a nautical term borrowed from French could be expected to surface earlier and resemble its source more closely.
Tarpaulin (the word, not the thing) may be less opaque, but some doubts prevail. Skeat, however, had none. The word, he says “means tarred pauling or tarred palling; a palling is a covering, from the verb pall, to cover.” But the OED is more cautious: “The blackness of tarred canvas may have suggested its likeness to a funeral pall; though, in the absence of any instances of tar-pall, this origin must remain conjectural.” Be that as it may, tarpaulin seems to have been tarred, and the OED gives a 1725 citation to this effect. Equating pallin(g) with paulin is more problematic. Someone whose curiosity has been piqued by awning will, naturally, try to solve the riddle of tarpaulin. After all, Captain Smith used the two words synonymously. So it comes as no surprise that Ernest Weekley also devoted some time to tarpaulin. He suggested that paulin is the same word as Middle English palyoun “canopy.” Its cognate in all the continental Scandinavian languages is paulun, a popular variant of pavilion. Low German exhibits nearly the same form. Given this reconstruction, tarpaulin is half-English and half-Scandinavian (or German, though more likely Scandinavian).
The questions remain open. With minimal enthusiasm, I would trace awning to awn and half-heartedly endorse Weekley’s etymology of tarpaulin.
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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Image credit: (1) Diwan-i-Khas, Red Fort, Delhi with red awnings or shamianas, in 1817. Ghulam ‘Ali Khan (fl.1817-1852). British Library. (2) Pressening 200 gram efter två säsonger Foto : tagen av (mig själv) Hans Friedman 2007-10-20 via Wikimedia Commons.
The rise of the academic novel
The academic novel is usually considered a quaint genre, depicting the insular world of academe and directed toward a coterie audience. But it has become a major genre in contemporary American fiction and glimpses an important dimension of American life.
In the past twenty years, many prominent American novelists have contributed their entries, including Paul Auster, Ann Beattie, T. C. Boyle, Michael Chabon, Percival Everett, James Hynes, Denis Johnson, Jonathan Lethem, John L’Heureux, Sam Lipsyte, Lorrie Moore, Tim O’Brien, Richard Powers, Francine Prose, Richard Russo, Jane Smiley, and Neal Stephenson. The academic has become a common figure in American fiction, showing up in two of the most well-known novels of the past decade, Jonathan Franzen’s Corrections and Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code. The former stitches an academic novella into its first half about the wayward son, Chip Lambert, and the latter shows the glamorous side of professing: consulting for world governments, fighting the bad, and getting the girl.
Moreover, there are simply an overwhelming number of academic novels. Drawing data from the standard bibliography, there were 70 published between 1990 and 2000, and 238 from 1950 to 2000. That doesn’t include mysteries, of which there are about 500 in the same period. It also specifies novels that center on faculty or staff rather than students (the latter I would distinguish as “the campus novel,” since they usually turn on student life on campus).
This new American wave constitutes an important body of literature, superseding previous expectations. British novels — Lucky Jim, Small World — are sometimes taken as the archetype, but while the genre has continued in England, there were only around 200 British academic novels and mysteries from 1944-88.
This idea of quantifying and graphing the novel is an approach suggested by the critic Franco Moretti, who has charted the genres of the novel over the past two hundred years. Still, while I found a simple count telling, I have not turned in my humanistic license and think we have to go further than that and decipher what these novels mean. All novels are not created equal, and the numbers don’t tell you why the genre has flourished.
My thesis is that the academic novel stems from the rise of mass higher education in the United States. It follows the demographics; the fact that two thirds of Americans go to college provides an audience. College is no longer a cloister but as common as the shopping mall. (For good or ill, it seems England is trying to catch up to this American tendency.) Professors were rare in the U.S. in 1900 — only about 1 in 3,167 people was faculty. Medical doctors and lawyers were much more common — about 1 in 600. However, by 2000 professors came to constitute 1 of 243, so they were a familiar professional to most American people — especially to those who read literature, who in all likelihood went to college.
Also, the novels show academe not as removed but in the thick of public culture, embroiled in the culture wars and subject to the vicissitudes of adult, middle class life. The academic novel no longer depicts a pleasant enclave, but faculty are subject to pressures that any other professional experiences. In fact, one wing of the recent wave depicts those just hanging onto tenuous jobs in academe. It’s no longer close to a sinecure. In short, the academic novel portrays class in the USA, touching a chord with the reading public.
Jeffrey J. Williams is currently Professor of English and of Literary and Cultural Studies at Carnegie Mellon University. He is the author of “The Rise of the Academic Novel” in the latest issue of American Literary History, which is available to read for free online for a limited time. Williams regularly publishes criticism in venues such as The Chronicle of Higher Education and Dissent magazine as well as academic journals. He is the co-editor of The Critical Pulse: Thirty-six Critics Give their Credos (Columbia UP, 2012) and one of the editors of The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (2nd ed. 2010).
Recent Americanist scholarship has generated some of the most forceful responses to questions about literary history and theory. Yet too many of the most provocative essays have been scattered among a wide variety of narrowly focused publications. Covering the study of US literature from its origins through the present, American Literary History provides a much-needed forum for the various, often competing voices of contemporary literary inquiry.
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Slang is good for you
Slang is good for you
Some people say that it isn’t. They think it’s vulgar, sloppy, repetitive. They think it’s casual speech out of place in semi-formal discourse, Chuck Taylors with a jacket and tie. They think it betrays an unbecoming emptiness of mind. At the same time — and, need I mention, inconsistently — they point out that we already have plenty of words, and slang is redundant, misplaced creativity. “Use the words you’ve got,” they say, “not the words you want.” No one cares to hear about how dissatisfied you are with the language you’re given. That’s what they say.
They are mostly people who have trouble with people who have trouble with authority, especially authority over language. These nattering nabobs of normativity are brim full with rectitude. They think they are doing you and the rest of the world a favor with helpful advice about how we — by which, it’s important to note, they mean you — ought to talk. When I hear them on the radio, I stick my fingers in my ears, close my eyes — I don’t know why, I can’t see them anyway — and say, “La la la la la la la la …,” but I don’t do this in face-to-face linguistic confrontations, because it’s impolite. Whatever, no matter how often or loudly the nabobs complain, you have a right to slang.
Keeping it on the d.l.
You want your gang of friends to be distinct from all of the other gangs. You and yours swagger, they strut. You wear high-tops and hold high standards, their tops and morals are low. You have your linguistic style, they have theirs. So, within your gang, when someone accipurpodentally twists the forms of words, or takes hairpin conversational turns that keep meaning on the down low, everyone else in the group gets it. But no one outside the group does, and it isn’t really any of their business, anyway. There are norms after all, but they are the norms of behavior, including verbal behavior, that constitute your group’s identity, not the normativity of nabobs hell bent on obliterating your identity, normativity that’s just uniformity wearing a not particularly effective disguise.
BTW, here’s some advice for people who don’t like slang. You don’t need to listen: stop eavesdropping on it. It’s like television or radio; change the channel. You don’t have to understand every conversation, far less approve it. We each have our space in the world, and I don’t mean a house with a garden and fence, but language space, the freedom to express ourselves on our own terms, when it matters to us, accumulating and distributing cultural capital without spending a dime. So, if I’m full on slanging with my mates, don’t mack my flow. If social networks matter to you, if you and your friends are hip to one another, if you think friendship depends on private language, then slang is good for you.
Language with attitude
The language nabobs have their rectitude, but you have your attitude, and there’s no point in having one unless you can express it. You don’t have to express it everywhere and every hour, but you can count on slang to help establish your style, even — or especially — if your style happens to be raunchy or profane. You can have different styles at different times with different people. You don’t have to be raunchy at the office, and you don’t have to talk like you’re in a meeting when you’re with friends. With your friends, your language can be NSFW. And, by the way, you can be proud of your human resources-approved language. It takes some time, takes some practice to speak it fluently, even if — or just because — it sometimes betrays an unbecoming emptiness of mind. But at least some of the time, you want to be fly, and that’s where slang comes in.
There is a painting/drawing/print by Henri Fantin-Latour I can’t locate on the Web, but I saw it in a museum somewhere decades ago. A sober gentleman in black — pretty much the whole thing was black and white, which makes me think it’s a print — is backstage at the Folies Bergère admiring his favorite dancer, who shows a bit of leg — the leg is up, too, her foot is on something, the knee bent — throws her head back, and lifts a glass of red wine, the only thing in the print that isn’t black or white. The gentleman is stiff with his rectitude, and he’s missing the point of slumming. Slang is that splash of color in the wine glass, defiantly racy among the black and white of everyday language. It’s slightly intoxicated language — and her leg has something to do with slang, too. On occasion, you need language with attitude, and then slang is good for you.
Read my mind
Slang keeps your mind nimble. Speaking or listening to rhyming slang is like doing the crossword puzzle in The Sunday Times, London or New York. A group of researchers in the UK measured the brain activity of human subjects while those subjects read Shakespeare’s play Coriolanus. They discovered that when Shakespeare used words in odd ways, for instance, when he put a word typically recognized as a noun to use as a verb — “He godded me,” for instance — the subjects’ brains were suddenly very active. Apparently, the activity was positive: it wasn’t as if the brains were confused, exactly, but rather as if they had been awakened from linguistic boredom. Language used casually that nonetheless takes you by surprise — slang — is good for your brain. Even if you were bored reading Coriolanus, it’s a good bet that your brain thoroughly enjoyed it.
Here’s what confuses me: the very people who most need the mental exercise of slang are those who most resist it — older people, people who are stuck in their ways, people who don’t like surprises, people who live their lives as far away from the Edge as possible, the nattering nabobs aforementioned, or any combination of these. They complain about other people’s slang, but instead, they should be thanking us all for keeping them on their toes. They like us to think that they have their feet firmly on the ground, that they are too stable and statusful to bear our slang, let alone use their own. They are a bit boring, really, but they’re also rather lazy, aren’t they? They don’t want to do the brain-work slang requires; they want it easy, they want it predictable. But whether they like it or not, slang is good for them.
And another thing
Maybe “La la la la la la la …” understates my frustration with the antagonists of slang. I mean, honestly, as the arithmetically challenged Jack Walsh says in Midnight Run — ironic, isn’t it, that he’s taken an accountant into custody — “Here come two words for you: shut the f**k up.” I’m not sure which two words he has in mind, but they’re not “the up.”
Ah, the therapeutic expletive. It’s forceful, but not without a touch of whimsy, and cheaper than a shrink. It’s the French inhale of English. “Just because it kills you doesn’t mean it isn’t sexy,” said the praying mantis. Slang, on the other hand, is good for you.
Michael P. Adams is Associate Professor of English and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of English Language and Literature at Indiana University. He currently edits quarterly journal American Speech and is President Elect of the Dictionary Society of North America. His published work includes Slayer Slang: A Buffy the Vampire Slayer Lexicon, From Elvish to Klingon, and Slang: The People’s Poetry which is available in paperback as of October 2012. Read his previous blog posts: “The invented languages of clockwork apples and oranges” and “The Oxford English Dictionary: my favourite book ever“
More OUPblog posts on slang include: “Slang words: not what you think,” “Props to the cats – the lifespan of slang,” and “Quiz: know your slang, poindexters?“
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