Oxford University Press's Blog, page 143

Five questions about PTSD

Post-traumatic stress disorder is an often discussed, and often misunderstood, mental health condition, that affects up to 7% of adults during their lifetime. Here we answer five questions related to misconceptions that often prevent people from seeking care. 

1.  Is PTSD a veteran disease?  

While a significant minority of veterans suffer from PTSD, this disorder can impact anyone who has experienced life-threatening trauma. Approximately 70% of people will experience a potentially traumatic event. Sexual assault, natural disasters, serious and traumatic illness, physical attack, etc. are all experiences that can become the stuck memories of PTSD. Trauma survivors with PTSD are haunted by these experiences, impacting everything from sleep to relationships.  

2.  Are people with PTSD violent?  

Traumatic experiences sometimes include exposure to physical violence and many trauma survivors have histories that include violence even if their target trauma does not. Sadly, violence is much too common.  Most people with PTSD are not violent. Most people with PTSD do not have problems with aggression or violence. When PTSD happens with alcohol or substance misuse, the risk for violence increases.

3.  Can PTSD only be managed but not really treated ?

Effective treatments for PTSD exist and include psychotherapy as well as medication. While these options do not work for all people suffering with PTSD, most people will see reduction in symptoms, and many will even see remission of PTSD over time. 

4.  If someone has mental health problems after a trauma , is it always PTSD?  

PTSD is just one possible mental health problem that can occur following trauma. Since PTSD involves being haunted by a trauma memory, it is easily connected to a traumatic event. However, studies following people after exposure to trauma show that for some people trauma may result in other issues, such as depression, panic disorder, substance abuse, or even obsessive-compulsive disorder. Good assessment beyond just trauma exposure is necessary to provide the best insight into diagnosis and treatment of trauma survivors.

5.  Is it all in your head ?

PTSD can feel like it is all in your head with the intrusive memories, feeling that you cannot connect to others, and a sense of feeling out of control. The impact of PTSD goes beyond just your brain and includes changes in how your body reacts to stress and other normal processes. These changes can even result in weight gain and cardiovascular problems. 

Misunderstanding PTSD and its causes contributes to many people never seeking care or dropping out of care before they have had a chance to experience the benefits. In getting the word out about PTSD and the good news that there are effective treatment options, we hope that more people will seek care and experience taking their lives back from PTSD.

Feature image: Silhouette by Isai Ramos via  Unsplash .

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Why college reform will promote racial equality

I was very active politically in the 1960s, 70s, and the early 80s. Life became more difficult in the late 1980s with the arrival of a third child, and as I focused to publish enough to get tenure in a large Midwestern university. Today, as I look back on that time, I struggle with two perspectives about current anti-racist activism and about a continued anti-racist struggle in the academy. One of them is to believe that the current political reckoning over racism in the United States is different. With the involvement of more non-whites, with the courage of the youth in the face of horrific police attacks, and with the swiftness with which people in high places are resigning and policemen are being dismissed or even indicted, real change appears to be happening in record time.

My second perspective is less sanguine. The changes appear too shallow and too centered on reform rather than transformation. This change may dissipate as the protests run out of a steam that is unsustainable unless there is real change in the roster of people who make the decisions. Decision makers need a different vision for true democracy that places people in the center of planning and posits the real lives of real people as the priority consideration for societal decisions.

Although colleges may seem somewhat removed from the need to provide universal health care, criminal justice reform, a living wage, secure food and housing etc. for all people, they are also centered to the need for meaningful human life and equitable human conditions. Some of the most prestigious institutions of higher education were formed even prior to the founding of the United States (e.g. Harvard 1636, Yale 1701, Dartmouth 1769). Their mission was to provide a liberal arts education to the elite. The idea that created major public universities begins to evolve in the 1840s but does not really come to fruition until the first Morrill Act of 1862, which created what later become some of the country’s major public universities, among them Penn State, Ohio State University, and the universities of Wisconsin, Minnesota, and California.

Several historically Black colleges and universities were also founded early in the country’s history: Cheyney (1837), Lincoln (1854), Wilberforce (1856), and Shaw and Atlanta universities in 1865. This is important because African Americans were either barred from southern institutions of higher education or limited by quotas in those in the north. In fact, the passage of the second Morrill Act of 1890 allowed southern states to bar African Americans from admittance to their state universities if they provided so called “separate but equal” facilities. This was even before the Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson ruling that allowed such discrimination in all other areas of life in the United States.

So what? This history has contributed to the over-privatization and cost of higher education in the United States. In addition to the already existing scholarship about the role of higher education and its benefit from the slave trade and slavery, higher education has been dedicated from its beginning to the preservation of class privilege and race privilege.

That did not easily give way to change. After the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision that de-segregated K-12 education, it was not until the 1960s that the struggle against racism in higher education and professional education (law school, medical schools, etc.) really gained traction. And that struggle was not just about admission, but also about access to housing, faculty diversity, and changing the curriculum.

As with racial integration in every facet of US life, faculty diversity often means a small number of non-whites hired. This leaves faculty members of color lonely, un-mentored, judged by higher standards than white faculty members, and over-worked because they needed to mentor students of color. Often their research is questioned. A close friend once shared with me that as he sat this very year and listened at a faculty council meeting about how concerned the overwhelmingly white council was about lowered standards for hiring faculty as they discussed an African American candidate, he replied “Well those lower standards must be because of the hiring of more unqualified white people because we haven’t hired enough non-white scholars to even begin to move that needle, we are so few in numbers.”

The academy has rightly begun to add to the numbers of non-white students, much less so the number of non-white faculty but that is beginning to happen also. College have also started changing their  curricula. But a discussion of the role of higher education in the creation of a more just society must go beyond counting non-white heads.

It needs to begin with a grand reflection on what we are teaching, on what we are saying to students about the role of educated and skilled people in society and their relationship to citizenship, about what it means to be a critical and informed thinker. Finally there needs to be a deep dialogue between higher education and K-12 education about both K-12 preparation and content, and this dialogue will benefit even those students who do not go on to college.

Higher education has a major role to play in promoting equality. But perhaps more importantly it has a major role to play in creating a just society that administers to the needs of its citizens and that promotes peace and security of all kinds.

Image courtesy of  Unsplash

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The criminal justice system’s big data problem

We are now witnessing enormous potential for criminal justice reform. State legislatures and mayoral offices are beginning to respond for calls for law enforcement transparency and broad shifts in police resources. At the same time, a broad range of private sector actors have publicly announced they will distance themselves from criminal justice institutions. Gannett, the company that owns USA Today and hundreds of other newspapers, has removed mugshots from news websites it publishes, and Amazon, Microsoft and IBM halted their facial recognition work for police departments. News organizations have worked to  blur the faces of protestors out of privacy concerns. Activists are also trying to ensure those arrested at protests don’t end up with a criminal record.

Private companies’ willingness to change their policies around criminal justice system involvement is an important step to limit the impact of the legal system in the everyday lives of millions of people who are arrested or charged with a crime each year. In America today, criminal punishment extends well outside the justice system in a myriad of ways increasingly exacerbated by new technologies. While the promises of>police misconduct or police shootings. As new legislation is rapidly ushered in to shed light on police and limit facial recognition to protect protesters, it may also be time to consider protecting those who have been targeted by police in the past and grapple daily with their criminal record on the internet.

There are specific steps the criminal legal system can take to limit the reach of digital punishment. We might consider creating more robust privacy protections for records created prior to a criminal conviction, similar to policies around grand jury targets or juvenile system data. Criminal justice agencies can use technology to limit the ability of third parties to scrape or crawl their websites, so that less records are disseminated across the internet without considerations of accuracy or veracity. States can continue to expand Clean Slate legislation that offers criminal record expungements, and demand criminal justice agencies better maintain their databases to limit mistakes and the spread of expunged records into the private sector. The public can also push social media and tech companies to recognize their role in extending police power, and demand privacy protections or a version of the European Right to Be Forgotten.

The public is quickly and increasingly suspicious of how technology has been leveraged to expand surveillance and social control and how>Pixabay.

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How understanding science can be made easy

When I was a teenager, I was awed by popular science writings. I was most affected by Roger Penrose’s The Emperor’s New Mind, with its detailed and fascinating account of quantum mechanics and relativity. However, it was not an easy read and it gave only one perspective of these amazing theories.

Some 30 years later one of my mentors has given me advice on what to tell my students when things get tough: “Science is hard.” He meant that doing good science is hard. You must be meticulous in your formulations, must be rigorous with your analysis, must be precise in your assumptions.

But must understanding science be hard? I have invested a non-negligible part of my time experimenting with this question.

I have volunteered to teach science in an elementary school. I have been led by my study of curiosity and have prompted my young students to ask me whatever they want (about science). I have used many different methods to try and make understanding science easy: we have made a play about DNA; we have learned that if Spiderman is a superhero, then patients treated with gene-therapy are also superheroes; and we have enjoyed moving around like gases and then condensating to liquids, each child is an atom.

The most important lesson for me was to truly answer students’ questions, take their inquiries seriously, and do the research that is needed (with them if possible) to get a proper answer that they can understand. They were rewarded with a glimpse to state-of-the-art science and technology, and I was rewarded by seeing their increased interest and enthusiasm of science.

But what about the really hard science, quantum mechanics? The more I learned about it, the more I was convinced that everyone should learn about it, in a fun, entertaining and thoughtful way. For this, I have partnered with my wife to write two quantum computer games: computer games that everyone knows, but with quantum rules. Quantum Minesweeper is exactly as it sounds: the mines are quantum and are in a superposition of cells, and you must use quantum measurements to find them. Schrodinger Cat and Hounds is a twist on the famous Fox and Hounds game, which I used to teach about superposition, measurement and entanglement. The audiences were both graduate students in physics, as well as biology-major high school students, with little to no background in physics. Suddenly, quantum physics was fun and playful.

Doing good science is hard. But understanding good science can be fun and joyful. May you learn what science your heart desires in an entertaining and insightful ways!

Featured Image Credit: Unsplash

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How we can understand ourselves through games

Games are a distinctive art form — one very different from the traditional arts. Game designers don’t just create an environment, or characters, or a story. They tell you who to be in the game. They set your basic abilities: whether you will run and jump, or move around your pieces geometrically, or bid and raise. And, most importantly, they tell you what your goals will be. By specifying the points and victory conditions, the designer sets the players’ core motivations in the game.

This helps us get a better grip on the uniqueness of games as an art form. Game designers aren’t just telling stories. Game designers are sculpting a specific form of practical activity. They are deciding what we will do within the game and how we will do it. They do so by designing the basic shape of our agency within the game, and then designing the obstacles that we will encounter. A game designer says, in Super Mario Brothers, your goal is to go right, your abilities are running and jumping — and the world is full of dangers to run past and jump over. In poker, your goal is to get money, and your abilities are strictly limited to bidding and raising, and careful surveillance of the other player’s actions and expressions — and the world is full of other people doing the same to you.

Let’s approach the issue this way: What is the artistic medium of games? If oil painters work in oil, and poets work in language, what does the game designer work in? I mean games in a very broad sense here, including video games, board games, role playing games, party games, and sports. To encompass all that variety, the answer can’t be something as narrow as software code or virtual environments. Many games are played on boards or in physical arenas. But, still, there is a common thread to all game design. The designer shapes our practical struggle by manipulating our practical interests and abilities, and the challenges we will face. Game designers work in the medium of agency itself. Games are the art of agency.

And, by shaping agent and world to match, the game designer can crystallize a particular and focused experience of the player’s own activity. In Super Mario Brothers the game is an active, reflexive activity of timing and movement. In poker the game is an information-gathering,>the arts of action. In a game, the audience isn’t just supposed to appreciate the aesthetic qualities of the game itself. The audience isn’t supposed to appreciate only the enduring and stable designed object. Games call for something more participatory. The game calls forth actions from the players, and then players are meant to appreciate the aesthetic qualities in their own actions. They are supposed to find beauty, thrill, and terror in themselves — in their own decisions, their calculations, their reflexive movements, or their coordination with their teammates.

The attempt to make games legible within traditional theories of art has often lead theorists to ignore that self-reflective character. Arguments that “games are art!” have usually sought to assimilate games to the more traditional arts by praising the sorts of stable properties they share with the traditional arts — like their graphics, music, or story. But that emphasis tears our attention away from the most unique aesthetic goods on offer.

If we can learn to respect games for their own special qualities, then we will see games’ true place in our ecosystem of artifacts. Games enable a distinctive kind of communication. Every form of art lets us capture a different aspect of our experience and being. Paintings capture sights; music captures sounds; fiction capture stories. And games, it turns out, can capture and transmit different ways of being practical. Games are our technology for communicating modes of agency.

One way to put it: traditional libraries are marvelous, vast collections of texts, which we can use to explore all sorts of ideas, stories, and emotional perspectives. The body of games represents another kind of library: a library of agency. Every game encodes a different practical style. Chess encodes sharp, precise, tactical look-ahead. Diplomacy encodes manipulation and deceit. Tetris encodes rotational spatial relationships. And by playing games, we can explore these different practical styles. Through games, we can learn new ways to inhabit our own agency.

Featured image by chuttersnap on Unsplash

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India Cooper and the art of copyediting

The editor behind many of Oxford University Press USA’s highest profile titles was not a staff member. But is impossible to measure the significance of the impact she had on Oxford’s history, biography, and music lists. First hired as a freelance copy editor by OUP’s legendary managing editor, Leona Capeless, she became one of the most admired American copy editors, working for University of Chicago Press, and Macmillan, as well as other publishing houses, over the past thirty years.

India Cooper died on 17 May 2020, in Madison, Indiana, at age 67. Her final copyediting assignment this spring was for OUP, a biography of William Tecumseh Sherman that has already garnered praise—a fitting legacy.

Cooper was born on 24 July 1952, in Jackson, Mississippi, but grew up in Denver. After an early career as an actress and director in Chicago, she moved to New York City in 1990, hoping to find a day job where she could take advantage of her love of books and didn’t have to wear pantyhose or punch a clock. She moved to Indiana with her husband, actor Fred Burrell (who died in 2018), around 2005.

Among the 100+ books she edited for OUP were four of Oxford’s Pulitzer Prize winners and six volumes of the Oxford History of the United States. When writing about the series, she said that she “quickly realized that, blood ties aside, my relationship with the Oxford History of the United States is the longest, most stable one I’ve ever had.”

For their part, OHUS authors were enthusiastic about their relationship with Cooper. On hearing of her death, they have said that “working with her was a sheer delight;” that she was “the ideal copy editor:” and that she was “absolutely fabulous to work with.” One author recalled the letter India sent when she was assigned his book as “so wonderfully chatty and encouraging and enthusiastic about the big job she was about to take on.”

Of all the things at which she excelled, perhaps foremost was her ability to bring out excellence in others. Her editing was sensitive and never heavy-handed. While editing one manuscript, she added a characteristic comment in the margin to the author: “You have so very many fine, fine sentences, and this is one of the best. Really lovely.” She brought a special joy to her work, commenting, “Though I almost never get to meet our authors in person, I think back happily on moments of delight with each one—cracking jokes back and forth within the margins, each in our different colored pencil; me leaping up wherever I was to run and read a paragraph to whoever I could find, ‘Listen to this, I had no idea,’ ‘Listen to this, it’s beautiful,’ ‘Listen to this, it’s so sad’—and perhaps less happy but just as lively and just as memorable moments of frustration when no matter how many telephone calls or e-mails we exchanged, we couldn’t quite get that sentence right . . . but often, eventually, we did.”

As another one of the writers she edited said, “she found authority for quotes I couldn’t find. She found authority for ideas I propounded. She was like a co-author in important ways and I am so grateful. She made unclear thoughts crystal clear. What a powerful help!”

As an actor, Cooper appeared in several episodes of Law & Order, as well as other TV shows and movies. She also competed on Jeopardy!, where she was a five-day winner (when champions were limited to five appearances) and participated in four Tournaments of Champions. Authors and OUP friends were often delighted upon learning about her TV career and enjoyed looking up videos of her on YouTube.

Brad Rutter, a Jeopardy! colleague, shared this on Twitter:

Everyone liked India, because she was quite simply one of the nicest people I’ve ever met. Affable, charming, gracious, and she was one of those people who when they ask you how you’ve been, you can tell it’s out of genuine interest and not just small talk.

Cooper had a marvelous sense of humor. She and her husband loved to travel and had driven through all of the 48 contiguous states. She often said that they were trying to figure out how to drive to Hawaii. If anyone could do it, she could!

Of her copyediting career, Cooper said, “Some people assume that makes me Maxwell Perkins. Some assume it means I push commas around. ‘Can you really make a living at that, since everybody has spell check?’ some ask.” Anyone who had the honor of being edited by Cooper knew that copyediting was more than a living; it was an art form in her hands. And her work will live on in the pages of so many books, invisible to most readers but absolutely critical to those books’ accuracy and mellifluous prose.

Respected, loved, and admired by all she knew, India Cooper will be greatly missed.

Featured Image Credit: by 3844328 via Pixabay

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Accepting uncertainty creates freedom

We all want to be in control.

Our quest for control in the current atmosphere of fear has resulted in the hoarding of toilet paper, hand sanitizer, and face masks. In the illusion of control, we close our minds and our hearts to the possibility of the meaning we may discover during a time of crisis. Ironically, the very security we struggle to find becomes a wall that we build around ourselves, quarantined in terror. The most dangerous isolation is not the necessary reality of the precautions being taken for public safety, it is an overwhelming fear that separates us from our humanity and corrodes the courage we need to find so that we can learn to accept that, regardless of our constant attempts at control, we live with uncertainty.

When I was 55 years old, I was diagnosed with an aggressive breast cancer. And I hadn’t even entered the rather annoying elderly person category yet! My odds of surviving without treatment were 40%. I chose an aggressive treatment that raised my odds to a 70% survival rate. For the past 13 years, I have lived with a C-average in staying alive. Those of us who have faced down a life threatening diagnosis get a crash course in the truth that every human being faces, that we always live with an uncertain future regardless of the plans we have made. We will be “at risk” for the remainder of our lives. The challenge for those dealing with illness is not allowing our personal identity to be exclusively that of a medical patient. Since my diagnosis in 2007, I have dedicated my work as a psychotherapist to those who choose a personal exploration of cancer survivorship, living with cancer, and, sometimes, looking at the end of their lives. These brave people have honored me with their stories, their discoveries, their joys and sorrows. Together we have stood on the firm ground of uncertainty.

We have learned that accepting uncertainty has opened doors and windows, has let light into darkened rooms and that, when a light burns low, we can find enough breath to blow on the tiniest spark to ignite a flame.

We’ve discovered that risk creates aliveness.

We aren’t born with any guarantees and we certainly don’t come with an unlimited warranty. Letting go of the false promises of absolutes and living with the openness of uncertainty creates the freedom to live a wholehearted life. The challenge of dealing with the threat of illness, financial disaster, and other potential losses is also not allowing personal identity to be born out of fear but forged in courage and compassion. We’ll know what comes next when next arrives.

What does living with uncertainty mean to you? Exploring the truth of uncertainty is a deeply personal process. Learning to live with uncertainty may be your greatest challenge and your most profound opportunity as you navigate the turmoil of these stormy seas. Accepting uncertainty creates freedom. Yet we demonize uncertainty, think of it as something that should go away quietly and leave us alone. We swear and scream at it and run away from it because we’re frightened by what we don’t know and what we can’t control. But the creature of uncertainty, when ignored, will search for you in your dreams and haunt you in the ruminating obsessions of your days. Banished from your consciousness, fear returns from your unconscious depths as a monster that creates bigger and scarier stories than you need to carry around within you. Facing the “monster under the bed” of uncertainty and letting go of scary stories to explore your own authentic relationship with whatever comes through the doors and windows of your consciousness, brings you aliveness, and an opportunity to engage with what is real in your life. Being willing to meet and explore the challenges of uncertainty by exploring who you are now in your life allows a space for personal transformation. Inquiry and introspection may be a more meaningful use of your time and energy than buying up the last roll of toilet paper on the planet.

Feature image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay  

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The blunt edge of “knife”

The word knife came up in one of the recent comments. I have spent so much time discussing sharp objects (adz, ax, and sword) that one more will fit in quite naturally. The word that interests us today turned up in late Old English (cnīf) and is usually believed to be a borrowing of Old Norse knífr (both ī and í designate a long vowel, as in Modern Engl. knee). The word occurred in Old Frisian and Old Low (that is, northern) German in nearly identical or slightly different forms (for example, gnippe). Today, the cognates of knife are Icelandic hnífur (along with similar forms in all the modern Scandinavian languages) and Dutch knijf. We have seen that cutting tools may denote both house utensils and weapons. The same holds for knife. The Old Icelandic idiom deila kníf ok kjötstykki “to share knife and meat (pieces)” implies that knives were used for cutting food, but knífr also denoted a dirk, “such as the ancients wore fastened to their belts; and so a knife with a belt is frequently mentioned as a gift; the handles of these knives or dirks were neatly carved of walrus’ tusks” (this is a quotation from the great dictionary of Old Icelandic by Cleasby-Vigfusson). Slavic nozh- “knife” was sometimes glossed as gladius (“sword”) in old texts. Old Icelandic knífr also meant “penis,” obviously, a secondary meaning.

This is the object they called knífr. From the Swedish History Museum. CC by 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

As could be expected, the origin of knife remains a matter of speculation. Lithuanian knêžas “knife” looks like Slavic nozh-, but with the enigmatic initial k-, as in knife. True to our rule not to explain obscurum per obscurius, that is, one word of undiscovered origin by referring to another “dark” word, we will, for the time being, remain on Germanic soil, though the temptation to find some cognates in Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Celtic, and so forth is always great.

At first sight, the hypothesis I’ll cite below has little potential, but we will see that it is not fanciful. About a century ago, Edwin W. Fay, at that time a well-known specialist in Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin linguistics, was very active in the area of Indo-European etymology. He seems to be almost forgotten. Wikipedia does have an entry about him, but it is very short and gives no idea of the range of his activities. Those interested in a rather representative list of his publications, at least to the extent it concerns Germanic, will find it, among other places, in my Bibliography of English Etymology. Obviously, if knife has a non-Germanic cognate, it should begin with gn– (by the First Consonant Shift). Fay cited Greek genus “lower jaw,” allegedly from a root meaning “to cut.” He pointed out that the jaw with the teeth was the first cutting instrument and that Samson made use of the jawbone of a donkey for bloody slaughter. Several other scholars also tried to derive knife form a gn-root meaning “to cut.” Perhaps knife, or rather knífr, did at one time mean “cutter,” but those who have read the previous posts on sword, axe, and adz (see, for instance, the latest one for June 17, 2020) will remember the many rather uninspiring attempts to explain all of them as cutters.

Samson at the height of his fame. Samson slaying the Philistines by Hilaire Pader. Photo by Didier Descouens. CC By-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

We should rather concentrate on the phonetic shape of knife. A glance at an array of kn-words will take us to knob and its twin nob “head”, knop “bud,” knub ~ nub “a small lump,” knot, German Knopf “button,” and Knospe “bud,” among very many others (thus, various protuberances). It is hard to tell how many relatively recent words spelled with an n might once begin with kn-. Perhaps the underlying sense of knob and the rest was “swelling.” Close to them are Engl. knee and German Knochen “knee.” Unlike knot, knee has respectable relatives, with Greek gónu and Latin genu among them (genu is familiar to English speakers from genuflection). It seems natural to reconstruct the meaning of this root as “to bend,” especially because Greek gōníā means “angle.” However, a knee is also a kind of protuberance. Not incredibly, the kn-root in Knochen and elsewhere is sound-imitative, as in German knack “crack.” Nor is Engl. knack “skill at performing a difficult task” too far from knack “a sharp blow or sound.” Fay’s jaw, knee, German Knochen “bone,” and their kin are members of an amorphous mass, containing the names of vaguely similar objects.

The German for “nutcracker” is Nussknacker. Image by Monika1607. Public domain via NeedPix.

Knife looks different, but it too belongs with several kn-words, and the goal of the previous excursus was to point out that the multitudes with which we are dealing have porous borders.  Two German words spring to mind: kneifen “to pinch” and its regional variant kneipen. Other kn-words have different forms but mean approximately the same: Engl. knead, German knatschen “to crumple,” German knicken “to snap; fold, bend,” and so forth. We wade through this morass (knack, knick-knack, knock, knop ~ knob) and begin to realize that the words are eerily alike: they denote lumps, bones, small hard objects, blows, cracks, and so forth. We hardly detect a root there in the strict sense of this term. In such words, one rather senses an impulse, perhaps sound-imitative, perhaps sound symbolic: kn– and more or less arbitrary “supplements.” Say kn– and add whatever you want; people will understand you. This process goes back to antiquity. Outside Germanic, gn– performed the same function. Is knife one of such words? Perhaps. If so, it is, from an etymological point of view, not a cutter, but rather a crusher (Dutch knappen means “to crush”). Walter W. Skeat thought that knife is related to nip and nibble: compare Low German knibbeln and Dutch knabbeln (the same meaning).

Other suggestions about the origin of knife are not radically different from those we have seen—except one. It is usually believed that French canif “knife” is a borrowing from Germanic (possibly from Old English). The twelfth-century form was canivet, which to the unprejudiced observer looks like a diminutive form of the same word, with a inserted to facilitate the pronunciation of the unfamiliar group kn. Theo Vennemann, a distinguished German philologist and linguist, concentrated on Basque ganibet ~ kanibet “knife.” According to him, the word consists of two parts: kani and bet, both of which he analyzed in detail. This word, he believes, traveled to Catalonian and French and from the Basques to Germanic, including Old Icelandic. Knowing nothing about Basque, I’ll leave kanibet alone, though, I suspect that the proposed etymology is too complicated, and complicated etymologies seldom survive. Finally, to repeat, I am not sure why canivet could not be a diminutive of canif. Vennemann’s hypothesis is part of a much larger whole, for he believes in the existence of a significant Basque substrate in the modern European languages. This aspect of his reconstruction cannot be discussed here.

The Basque country. Map by Panonian. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

In my opinion, knife should not be separated from a host of other Germanic kn-words. Occam’s razor works very well in etymology. Knife, as it seems, was coined in Germanic, most likely, in Old Norse. It belongs with many words designating objects and actions that suggested knocking, pushing, bending, pressing, and so forth. Not improbably, all such words were “expressive.” From the Vikings the word became known in English, French, and Basque; Basque borrowed it in its diminutive form. We are in the dark about the attraction of the Germanic knife, but, given the movements of great masses of soldiers at that time, the names of various weapons could and did easily become common property.

Feature image credit: photo by Nicolas Monasterio. Public domain via Pixabay.

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The 1968 riots and what Trump could learn from LBJ

The demonstrations that have spread across the country since the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis on 25 May unavoidably invite comparisons with the massive riots that occurred in more than one hundred cities after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on 4 April 1968. The most serious disturbances broke out in Washington, DC. They began a short time after King’s death, resumed with ferocious strength the next day, and continued with gradually diminishing intensity for nearly two weeks. By the time they ended, 13 people were dead and 1,201 injured. Property losses were estimated at $27 million, including 1,352 private businesses and 403 housing units that were destroyed or heavily damaged.

One critical difference between today’s protests and the riots of half a century ago is that in 1968, there were no peaceful demonstrations. The disorders in Washington and elsewhere were raw, angry, out of control, and enormously destructive. Lyndon B. Johnson confronted a much more severe crisis in the streets than Donald J. Trump has faced, and he handled it in a much more measured way. For Johnson, the riots of the long hot summers that began in 1963 created an agonizing dilemma. On the one hand, he was appalled by the violence. “There is no American right to loot stores, or to burn buildings, or to fire rifles from rooftops,” he declared in 1967. “That is a crime—and crime must be dealt with forcefully.” On the other hand, he recognized that protesters had legitimate grievances. He made clear that the “only genuine, long-range solution for what has happened lies in an attack . . . upon the conditions the breed despair and violence.”

In response to the riots in Washington in 1968, Johnson, drawing on the lessons of the previous outbreaks, sought to end the bedlam without inflaming greater fury, and perhaps, armed resistance. As the turmoil escalated the day after King’s assassination, he reluctantly decided to mobilize National Guard and federal troops; they eventually numbered about 15,000. But he also ordered that the troops use minimum force to restore calm. “If humanly possible,” he said, “I don’t want anybody killed.” The soldiers who were deployed in the city carried ammunition but did not load their weapons unless absolutely necessary. They fixed bayonets but did not unsheathe them. The strategy was to combat unchecked violence by making a massive show of force for the purpose of avoiding its actual use. Federal and local officials adopted a “policy of restraint” in part because they worried about inciting exchanges of gunfire. One rioter later suggested that if the police and troops had shot looters, “there would have been a whole lot of killing on both sides.”

The strategy was effective in reducing the violence. The presence of troops, the use of tear gas, and a strict curfew eventually restored order. Army and National Guard soldiers shot a total of only fourteen rounds of ammunition during the twelve days they patrolled the city. None of the deaths that occurred in Washington during the riots resulted from gunfire by military units.

The contrast between Johnson’s actions in 1968 and Trump’s approach to the demonstrations in 2020 is stark and disturbing. Johnson worked closely with Walter Washington, the recently appointed mayor of the District of Columbia. He consulted with civil rights and congressional leaders, and he relied heavily on the expertise of knowledgeable and experienced advisers. Trump ignored DC Mayor Muriel Bowser and seems to look for counsel, if at all, from ill-informed, unseasoned sycophants. Johnson tried to diminish racial tensions; Trump fuels them. Johnson strived for unity; Trump blasts political opponents and the news media. Johnson adopted a policy of restraint; Trump threatens to unleash “vicious dogs” and the “most ominous weapons.” Johnson kept a low public profile during the riots; Trump staged a photo opportunity after forcefully clearing Lafayette Park of peaceful protesters. Johnson was keenly aware of the conditions and injustices that produced the riots; Trump from all indications views the protests only through the prism of his own self-interest.

“Smoke rises near U.S. Capitol, during riot, 1968 ” by Marion S. Trikosko. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

At the peak of the riots in 1968, twenty-five to thirty-five new fires broke out every hour in the nation’s capital. Johnson later recalled “the sick feeling that came over me . . . as I saw black smoke from burning buildings fill the sky over Washington.” He added, “I wondered, as every American must have wondered, what we were coming to.” Trump’s response to the protests of 2020 raises the same question in distressingly sharp relief. He could learn some important lessons from the experiences of 1968, but there is no reason to think he will do so.

Featured Image Credit: “Damage to a store following the riots in Washington, D.C., April 16, 1968” by Warren K. Leffler . Public Domain via  Wikimedia Commons .

The post The 1968 riots and what Trump could learn from LBJ appeared first on OUPblog.

Art and theater after Stonewall [podcast]

As we’ve seen over recent weeks, direct action is sometimes necessary in order to exact social change. On June 28, 1969 in Greenwich Village, a bastion for New York City’s gay community, a riot broke out after police raided the popular Stonewall Inn. The demonstration became the catalyst for the modern LGBTQ movement in the United States; it immediately led to organizing and the formation of gay rights groups in New York City, and the first New York Pride march occurred on the anniversary of the riot in 1970. The Stonewall riots truly transformed the United States of America.

Our episode of The Oxford Comment today features interviews with Elizabeth Wollman, author of Hard Times: The Adult Musical in 1970s New York City, and Micah Salkind, author of Do You Remember House?: Chicago’s Queer of Color Undergrounds, on the convergence of LBGTQ culture and art, especially in the aftermath of Stonewall and other movements focusing on gay rights in the late 1960s and 1970s.

Featured image credit: Stonewall Inn the day after President Obama announced the Stonewall National Monument in June 2016. CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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