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Etymology gleanings for April 2020

Spelling Reform

I have read two comments on my post of April 29, 2020 and John Cowan’s post and came to the expected conclusion: even those who favor the idea of the Reform will never agree on what should change and in what order changes should be instituted. Every suggestion makes sense. For example, respell knack as nack, because k is mute there, or: don’t meddle with knack, because we are used to this spelling. As for the general principles, they have been discussed for more than a century and a half, and every possible objection has been known to everybody who has followed the history of this fated enterprise. Yes, any Standard (Received Pronunciation or Received Spelling, or Received Grammar) is undemocratic and reflects the influence of the greatest authors and the tyranny of the educated class. It will always, at least partly, stand at cross-purposes with the habits of the speaking community, most of which cannot care less for what is right and what is wrong. However, when it comes to English spelling, any reform will be better than what we now have. Those who don’t distinguish between futile and feudal, title and tidal; cot and caught; duel ~ dual and jewel, etc. are made and will be made to spell them differently, and this is unfair. The horror of due and do is known to every American teacher (“Professor [often: Proffesor], when is the paper do?”). And yes, English has many varieties, and any norm will disadvantage somebody.

A jewel of a dual duel. Eugene Onegin and Vladimir Lensky’s duel by Ilya Repin. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

It does not seem that in our discussion we are an inch closer to an agreement than our predecessors were in the days of George Bernard Shaw. Continuing the discussion in this blog would be a waste of time. Therefore, I’ll only make my point clear for the last time. Many people have offered or are ready to offer their variants of Reformed Spelling. They are intellectuals. Unlike them, in this one situation, I am mainly a politician. It is all the same to me whether knack will survive the Reform or change to nack. I want the idea of the Reform to be accepted by the public, but the public, I am sure, will oppose a revolution and the changes that will affect the most common words. Therefore, I would try to kill this monster in several stages and leave any, said, and their likes for dessert. Tampering with them today will cause an uproar and doom the rest of the proposal. This one war can be won only by attrition. Everybody wants to be scholarly; by contrast, I want to be practical. At present, the world has more pressing tasks than meddling with English spelling, but eventually the problem will resurface. The Spelling Society will offer its proposal. I can only hope that all of us will unite behind it, regardless of whether we’ll like it or not.

Counterpoint: grammar (the new normal)

A split infinitive in animal guise. Photo by Tiia Monto. CC-by-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

It seems that it is easier to change the way people spell words than the way they speak. But no! Look at the examples of the type I have cited many times. Out of the blue, they appeared for a singular person (“When a student comes, I never make them wait”) and became the norm overnight. Then somebody decided that all infinitives should be split, that it is better to say to be or to not be than to be or not to be. We also want to make a proposal turned into we want to also make a proposal, etc. People writing to newspapers bend over backwards, in order to split: “They decided to also not only go there, but even….” Such constructions have begun cropping up in oral speech too. So not everything is like Shakespeare’s “rocks impregnable.”

Another curious change in American English is the spread of the progressive (continuous) forms. Somebody told me that it had begun with McDonald’s ad or slogan: “I’m lovin’ it,” but they must have overheard it. Anyway, not the greatest fan of McDonald’s menu, I met this innovation without enthusiasm. By contrast, the world swallowed it hook, line, and sinker. “Also, Sweden is a socialist country with health care for all. Is he wanting us to have a very high death rate and Medicare for All?” Because of the pandemic, in some stores, older people are encouraged to shop early in the morning, and, it appears, “they are liking it.” From a speech by a prominent politician: “They’re going to have to do that regardless of what a stay-at-home order looks like because people are naturally understanding that we’re going to have to social distance, because….” I find the phrase social distance silly (isn’t distance enough?), the verbal phrase to social distance ugly, but they are understanding….? If people agreed (without any pressure) to torture grammar for no reason whatsoever, perhaps they will also agree to spell aggression with one g and deign without it?

Just in case someone decides to tell me that the use of forms like they are liking it is perfectly normal: I know that the present continuous has various uses. Traditionally, it has avoided see and hear (Can you see me? The answer is not supposed to be: “No, I am sorry, I am not seeing you”), but this is what I have been hearing sounds fine (at least today in American English and perhaps elsewhere). Although this tense designates actions happening at the moment of speech, the emphatic statement I am always losing my keys is perfectly acceptable. But the new-fangled usage? No, I am neither liking nor understanding it.

Chinese and Indo-European

I’ll refrain from citing Chang’s examples, because his work mentioned in the post for April 14, 2020, is available online, and anyone can consult it. My objections were the same as those given in the comments. Knowing nothing about the history of the Chinses language, I could not determine the age of the words cited in the paper, but I also feared that they were modern, and comparing them with Pokorny’s roots seemed to me incautious, to put it mildly. The methodology (comparing reconstructed roots and words of a living language) is indeed inadmissible. Chang did not provide a historical background for his hypothesis, but, according to him, the Indo-Europeans and the Chinese lived in such close contact that hundreds of words are common to both groups. (Incidentally, he opposed the idea of the Sino-Tibetan family.) Finally, his poor knowledge of the facts over which I do have control made me suspicious of his entire framework.

Some problematic words

Aloof. In explaining the origin of the word aloof, I mentioned the fact that such a-words (afraid, astride, adrift, etc.) are always used predicatively. The comment pointed out to the attributive use of aloof. This use is rare and shows that aloof is no longer felt to belong fully with the a-group. But it would probably still be odd to say: “My brother is an aloof man,” where private, reticent, withdrawn, or reserved is expected. I have recently run into aloof transcendence of God, but transcendence is “aloof” by definition, and the phrase struck me as an example of pomposity.

Glove. Dutch gleuf “slit” is not related to it. Gleuf has cognates all over Germanic: Icel. gleypa “to swallow,” and many others, meaning “yawn; bite, etc.”

Fix. “How did fix come to have almost opposite meanings? I can fix that—good. I’ll fix him—bad, I’m in a real fix—bad. I’ll fix dinner—good.” The verb to fix appeared in late Middle English with the meaning “to make firm.” The noun, originally an Americanism, is half a millennium later. Like so many other things, being “transfixed” may be good (stability is desirable) or bad (lack of resilience is to be avoided). Hence the clash of senses that puzzled our correspondence. In American slang, fix seems to have only negative connotations.

Dante Alighieri. British School. Via the Dulwich Picture Gallery.

Incontinence. Our correspondence writes: “Recently I picked up Dante’s The Divine Comedy and came across the term incontinence, and it was defined as ‘including all wrong actions due to the inadequate control of natural appetites or desires’. It was stated that this goes back to Aristotle’s division of reprehensible actions: incontinence, brutishness, and malice or vice…. When I looked for current definitions, all seem to be related to bodily functions. No reference is made about the past definition by Aristotle.” The question was about “how a word changes its meaning.” An answer to this question would require a book. Here I’ll say only two things. 1) When a word of Romance origin ends up in English, it starts a new life. You see French foyer and believe that you understand it. Alas, in French, this word means “home.” 2) Other than that, meanings deteriorate (the ancient meaning of the root of whore meant “dear”), ameliorate (fond once meant “silly”), broaden or narrow their range of application. Long ago, book meant “record, document,” and now it refers to any work consisting of pages put together. Incontinence has obviously undergone narrowing.

A reinforcing simile. In Tennessee, they say: “As heavy as Hoopenheimer horse.” Why? I know nothing about Mr. Hoopenheimer (perhaps someone from Tennessee will enlighten us?). Judging by the spelling, the name is Dutch, and people bearing this name exist, but what bothers me is the modern meaning of hoopen “penis.” Though I don’t know the age of this word in American slang, hooperdooper “a remarkable thing; an important person” is rather old. All this makes me think that the associations the name evokes are more important than the identity of the horse’s owner. The in-your-face alliteration (h-h-h) reinforces this suspicion. Comments are welcome!

In search of Mr. Hoopenheimer. OSU Special Collections & Archives. No known copyright restrictions. Via Flickr.

Feature image credit: Noah Webster, The American spelling book (1790), p11. No known copyright restrictions. Library of Congress, Rare Book and Special Collections Division.

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Confronting mortality in the COVID-19 pandemic

In the last four months, the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has marched across the globe. It has stomped to every continent and, as of my writing, to 134 of the 195 countries in the world, sickening hundreds of thousands of people – and killing thousands of them – on its way to global dominance.

Recently the New York Times ran a story about a doctor and a nurse, both women in their mid-twenties, each with a loving partner and a young child, who, in the hospitals of Wuhan, had cared for people with COVID-19. I know the terror they must have felt when they donned their personal protective equipment and walked into infected patients’ rooms. I know the terror they must have felt when they took that equipment off. Maybe they had mistakenly touched the outside of one of their gloves and then, unknowingly, rubbed the virus into their eyes. Maybe they had left a microscopic gap in their face masks and inhaled the virus. Whatever had gone wrong, both became infected. Both became terribly sick. One of them needed mechanical ventilation for her lungs to work. She died a horrible death. Inexplicably, the other survived.

What if I had come into close enough contact with someone who had COVID-19? What if I had picked up the virus from an infected person?

When I went to a store recently – we needed a few staples – I thought that people would obey the precautions the infectious disease experts have been exhorting everyone to take: stay at least six feet away from other people, and if you exhibit symptoms of COVID-19, including a cough, do not go to places where other people are. When I went to the store, furrowed brows signed our communal angst, suggesting that we all wanted to get what we needed while protecting others.

Yet a woman stood over the Gala apples and coughed several times. It was a dry hack, the kind that suggests a viral respiratory infection that indicated COVID-19. On the dry goods aisle, two people, obviously close acquaintances, stood face-to-face catching up with each other. They just chatted, laughed, and carried on. I could not get past them without coming into their six-feet orbit. Even though they did not appear sick, they still could have been asymptomatic carriers of the virus. I asked them if they could make way for me to get by so that I could access what I needed, which was just on the other side of them. “Go around to the next aisle,” one of them said to me. I made a circuitous route. In our eagerness to get what we all needed, few seemed compelled to obey the six-feet rule.

I came home, took off my clothes, washed them, and scrubbed my hands. Maybe I did not need to wash my clothes. But what if the virus had landed on them and then, after I touched, I picked up the virus on my hands and, without thinking, rubbed my eyes? I would infect myself, and then, I could die a horrible death just as that young healthcare worker in Wuhan did. Or worse, I could infect my wife and son, and they would die that horrible death.

Of course we all will die!

Yes, but please not from COVID-19, not a communicable disease that, with the right public health precautions, we all could have been prevented from acquiring.

This pandemic has brought the world to its knees. Financial markets have nosedived. The global economy is in recession, and an economist from one of the world’s leading banks thinks it could be deep, in large part, due to the pandemic. Whole countries are on lockdown, with their citizens instructed to shelter in their homes until further notice.

Why has the COVID-19 pandemic gripped us – at least us in the countries of the Northern Hemisphere – with such existential fear?

Maybe we are gripped with fear because, by and large, the world’s governments are inept. They have bungled what should have been a straightforward public health response. Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan have contained the disease. An epidemiologist and his graduate student have written about the public health response these countries, two of which are city-states and the other a fairly small island, have successfully taken. Perhaps countries the width of a continent like mine could very easily have taken similar effective responses – or maybe not. But we will never know, because they did not try.

Maybe fear grips us because we have become accustomed to science and technology curing diseases and solving emergent problems. For instance, we continue to place our faith in science and technology to cure the disease that plagues the earth – the disease that we are the vectors of, the disease of global climate change. We do not look at our behaviors, our modern lifestyles, as the virus that is killing Earth, even though they are. Instead, we continue to live as we have and say that, soon, very soon, the scientists and the engineers will find a way to take out all the greenhouse gases we pump into Earth’s atmosphere, the very gases that are causing Earth to warm up and die. Soon science and technology, we say, will solve global climate change, the disease caused by us. Yet we are the virus.

Maybe fear grips us because we know that science and technology cannot move fast enough to extinguish this virus. Maybe the vaccine the scientists will develop and the novel delivery method the biomedical engineers will discover will come too late. Maybe millions and millions of people will have died by then, our grandmothers and grandfathers, our parents, our siblings, our children. We do feel helpless, in part because we see the limits of science and technology. Helplessness is a terrifying monster.

But I think our deepest fear in the pandemic is this:

We are now confronted with a fundamental truth that many of us in the countries of the Northern Hemisphere have hidden from ourselves. It is truth that perhaps those who daily face the threat of malaria know, a truth that those who have endured Ebola outbreaks have known, or that those who lived before polio was vanquished knew. It is a truth that nurses and physicians know whenever they place themselves in harm’s way. It is a truth that the coughing woman picking out apples was confronted with, a truth people blocking my way down the grocery-story aisle could not confront. Life is ephemeral. We will die.

I do not want my death to be today or tomorrow or in the next 14 days from COVID-19, but I know I will die. I have seen death, and as a nurse, I have seen my death in the death of others. In seeing my death, I have been confronted with the truth that life is short.

In the face of possible but preventable death from this virus, we confront the need for our lives, in the ephemerality of human life, to have inestimable value. In this pandemic, we confront the meaning of life itself.

Featured Image Credit: by sasint via Pixabay

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Music schools respond to COVID-19 shutdown

Keeping Upbeat in Tough Times is the new motto for the San Francisco Community Music Center. The phrase sums up the school’s attitude toward the abrupt transition to online instruction that it had to make this spring, after local schools closed their doors because of a government-ordered mandate aimed at slowing the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. Teachers at music schools have done their best to adjust to virtual teaching. “I’m trying to think about it as positively as possible,” said Peabody Preparatory violin and viola teacher Jaclyn Dorr. “We miss seeing our students and their families in person. But given the current circumstances, it’s amazing that technology allows us to connect with our students at all.”

Dorr has come to realize that connecting online with her young students is “the most important aspect of what we are doing. Teaching them violin is only one piece of the puzzle now. It’s also about being there and creating a sense of normalcy during these uncertain times, sending students positive energy and letting music be an artistic escape from being in the house all day.” Moreover, research has shown that both making music and listening to it can provide a feeling of well-being, a much needed reason to keep youngsters involved with music during this crisis.

Dorr and some other teachers at Peabody Prep, in Baltimore, changed overnight to online lessons for their students, after it became clear that Maryland schools were closing. San Francisco Community Music Center took just two days to regroup, as did New York’s Third Street Music School. In Seattle, the Music Center of the Northwest had been closed last winter for several weeks because of a blizzard and decided then to look into online options in case “there should be another snow-mageddon,” explained Chas Arnold, the school’s executive director. “So we had a plan in place.” He had also stockpiled a few computer tablets in case of a future emergency and was able to hand them out to faculty and others who didn’t have one.

Music schools have generally let teachers and students use whichever video-conferencing options work best for them, although holding group classes has been challenging. Ensemble performing in real time is impossible with today’s technology. The lag time in the transmission of sound between online devices means there is no way musicians on either end of a connection can play or sing in sync. Music schools were determined to find a work-around because group and ensemble classes are part of what keeps young people involved with music. Group classes are a mainstay of early childhood music education. For middle schoolers, the social aspects of joining an ensemble can keep them making music when other interests may lure them away.

“We are stressing the importance of the social element in online group classes,” said Brandon Tesh, director of Third Street Music School. “We’re encouraging teachers to stick to their usual class time. At the start of class, just have everybody there via video for a few minutes to do a check-in, so students can say hello to their classmates, ask what they’ve been doing.” Video-conferencing apps post photos on the screen of everyone on the call.

Advance planning smoothed the way for Third Street’s group classes. The school set up its piano accompanists with good recording equipment at home so they could make recordings of pieces a class or ensemble would play. Those recordings could be sent both to students for practicing at home, and to teachers for use during a group class or private lesson. If there’s no accompanist to make a recording, teachers could find recordings online. One group-class strategy used by several schools creates “mini individual lessons during the group class,” said Tesh. A teacher works with Student A on a phrase, while muting other students’ mics. The other students practice the phrase on their own, until it’s each one’s turn to have their mics go “live” to perform for the teacher.

For group classes with young students, “you have to mix things up, just as you do with live group lessons,” said Rebecca Henry, co-chair of the string department at Peabody Preparatory. “We play ‘copy cat.’ I mute them all and play something. Then they play it. I can’t hear them but I can see them all, and can see if their bows are going in the right direction and they’re using the right fingers.” She plays flash card games with them and music bingo, using bingo charts that she sent to parents to print. Using the screen-share option, she showed students the score of a fun new piece. “We clapped the rhythm together and said the note names. I played it, and then they played it.”

For her teen students, “we are not canceling anything,” said Henry. “We are doing exams, recitals, and studio classes.” For her advanced teen group class, she is setting challenges for them—such as to learn to play one of Paganini’s “24 Caprices” in three weeks. She also asked what projects they’d like to work on if virtual lessons have to continue. Some asked to learn how to do the video editing needed to turn videos of each of them playing a group piece at home into a virtual concert.

The poor sound quality in online gatherings frustrates Henry, as do the limits on what she can teach. “But it makes you be creative in other ways,” she noted. She has started doing a-synchronous lessons for a student who didn’t do well with online lessons. This student records a piece at home, emails it to Henry, who emails back comments, leading to a fresh round of emails and video chats.

A San Francisco Community Music Center student having a virtual cello lesson. One of the school’s teachers, Maestro Curtis, noted that online lessons for young people during this crisis can help “focus them on their own power, their ability to rise above anything through music. Music keeps you centered on the energy within yourself.”

To boost community spirit, the San Francisco Community Music Center has hosted Facebook Live sing-a-longs and music-making activities for young children. Third Street Music School has presented Facebook Live virtual concerts.

“It’s more exhausting to teach online, especially for group classes, which require a lot of extra planning,” said Peabody Prep’s Jaclyn Dorr. San Francisco Community Music Center piano teacher Jonathan Kornfeld added that “projecting into a computer for hours is mentally fatiguing in ways I wouldn’t have expected. Without being in the room with my students, it takes much more mental energy to communicate and compensate for all the lost nuances that are part of normal interaction.”

Both teachers will be glad to return to in-person instruction. But Dorr noted a benefit of online lessons. “I’ve been getting to know my students on a deeper level, to find out what would inspire them during this time period—learning a new piece, writing their own pieces, practicing scales under a tree in the backyard, or trying to incorporate in a lesson music by a rap artist that a teenager is inspired by.”

Her colleague Rebecca Henry sees a more practical benefit. “Make-up lessons for snow days are history,” she announced. “On snow days, I’ll give online lessons, instead of waiting to the end of the semester for make-up lessons. It will also be easier now to say to parents, ‘If your child is sick, I’ll do the lesson online.’ This crisis is making us think more about the illness factor, especially since we are so tactile in molding young bow holds.”

“I would not be surprised if next year there is some element of flexibility in allowing remote instruction, not full-time, but for special classes or for illness,” said Third Street Music School’s Brandon Tesh. “But we are a community music school. The face-to-face connection with the teacher and other students is really important. We’ll always be emphasizing that.”

Featured Image Credit: Courtesy Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, from its recent virtual concert online.

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Why we need humour at a time like this

Comedy has always offered swift relief in times of stress. A good laugh can be good therapy, can lift us out of sadness and depression. Our sense of humor can restore us to high spirits and renew our sense of hope. Some scientists even believe that humor activates pathways in our brain that circumvent the primitive fight-or-flight response that leads to violence or evasion. A deft joke, then, acts much like a wise teacher in a tense classroom, directing us to take Time Out for reflection, re-channeling knee-jerk reactions toward more helpful, healthful outcomes.

Today, when the whole world feels the strain of a global epidemic, it pays to notice how people around the globe respond to anxiety with random acts of humor. Soon after news of the virus sent people scrambling for supplies, light-hearted memes began circulating through social media. One showed a pair of Swiss rescue dogs carrying toilet paper rolls instead of whiskey kegs. Another displayed an old-fashioned hoop skirt re-purposed for social distancing. On television, people everywhere watched Italians on balconies bursting into spontaneous songs.

Every nation uses humor to counter adversity in its own way. For a broader view of this phenomenon, we might turn to the planet’s great traditions of movie comedy. Because comedies reflect the times and cultures that produce them, they can help us understand what makes other people so distinctive as well as what we have in common. At a time when some are calling for closed borders, watching comedies from Europe or Africa, Scandinavia or the Far East can keep our minds and cultural borders open.

First, a closer look at laughter as good medicine. The therapeutic value of humor has been recognized by many cultures throughout history. Medieval doctors in Europe based their practice on principles, dating back to ancient Greece, that the body’s equilibrium depends on four vital fluids, called “humours.” They believed that physical, emotional, and mental health require a harmonious balance of these fluids. There is a similar concept in traditional Chinese medicine, which links wellness to the flow of qi, a vital energy or spirit. The free, unobstructed flow of qi through the body assures one’s physical health and mental stability

Today, psychologists and neuroscientists are finding scientific evidence that links humor to a sound body and a healthy brain. It turns out that laughter releases endorphins that buoy our moods and increase our tolerance to pain. Furthermore, comedy can put us into a special frame of mind, a comic mode that lessens distress and averts destructive impulses. Our cognitive effort to understand the incongruity of jokes (“Aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?”) stimulates parts of the brain associated with higher-order thinking. This gives us “time out” from adversity, a chance to entertain alternative behaviors in the playground of comedy.

There is, as well, a social dimension to comedy. Laughter can be contagious. Jokes can remedy embarrassing moments, reframe threats, and reinforce our sense of group belonging. That’s one more reason why evolutionary biologists are investigating the survival value of humor.

Film comedy registers a society’s nervous tensions through its many forms—from slapstick to parody, from light-hearted farce to the dark messages of black humor. Like fun-house mirrors, these comic sub-genres exaggerate reflections in various ways. Audiences laugh at the distorted image of themselves, which also functions as a corrective lens for viewing our values and the times in which we live.

Humor is universal, but social norms influence what we perceive to be funny.

In Russia, political satire and musical comedy have served as important outlets or defensive weapons during eras of revolution and repression. Alexander Medvedkin’s silent gem Happiness (Schastye, 1934) spoofed Russian society in the tradition of Gogol and Bulgakov. Medvedkin’s hero is a hapless peasant who dreams of a little happiness. “to eat the fat of the bacon and sleep.” When he decides to kill himself in despair, an army of Cossacks, soldiers and priests try to stop him. “Who will feed Russia if the peasants die?” they scream. Grigori Aleksandrov’s Jolly Fellows (Vesyolye rebyata, 1934) centers on a carefree shepherd from a collective farm. His madcap adventures lead a ragtag group of jazz musicians to Moscow, where they “sing and laugh like children, through the unending struggle and toil.”

In Africa, the comic roles that actors play owe much to the continent’s oral traditions of folktales, with their trickster animals and clownish dupes. In Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Hyenas (Hyènes, 1992), the wily swindler is a woman who seeks revenge on those who wronged her, and like her famously tittering namesake, she enjoys the last laugh. Ousmane Sembène’s two earliest movies, The Money Order (Mandabi, 1968) and Xala (1975) are also structured much like cautionary trickster tales.

In Western Europe, the dry, detached qualities of much British humor and the cerebral wit of traditional Gallic humor abound in their best movie comedies. Listen to the clever wordplay in Patrice Leconte’s Ridicule (1996), set in Louis XVI’s mockery-driven court, or in Dany Boon’s Welcome to the Sticks (Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis, 2008), France’s biggest box office hit ever. Then compare this energetic verbal jousting to the understated dialog of Alec Guinness in his 1950s Ealing comedies or John Cleese in A Fish Called Wanda (1988). When Cleese makes love to Maria Atiken, they each undress discretely on separate beds, in contrast to an American couple in the next room, who rip off their clothes and dive into the sack like animals.

We can find both delicate and zany forms of humor in East Asian comedies. At one end of the spectrum, Hong Kong’s “king of comedy,” Steven Chow, mixes manic slapstick with mind-bending double talk in films like Kung Fu Hustle (Gung fu, 2004) and The God of Cookery (Sik san, 1996).  At the other end, Taiwan’s Ang Lee serves up a gentler, more humanistic form of humor in The Wedding Banquet (Xi yan, 1993) and Eat Drink Man Woman (Yin shi nan nu, 1994). If Lee’s comedies embody centuries of Confucian values, a restrained ‘ethics of mirth,” Chow’s playful approach is more akin to Daoist teachings and the commotion of contemporary Hong Kong.

All of these movies show, in their own way, how people everywhere turn to comedy for relief, comfort, and connection. If, as Victor Borge once observed, humor is “the shortest difference between two people,” watching the world’s comedies can bring us all together safely through the common bond of laughter.

Featured image by Tim Mossholder via Unsplash.

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Figuring out phrasal verbs

English contains a bewildering number of so-called phrasal verbs: two- or three-word compounds that seem to consist of a verb and a preposition—things like bring up, fill in, give away, pay back, work out, and many more. The Oxford Phrasal Verbs Dictionary lists 6,000 of them in its 2016 edition.

Native speakers of English learn these naturally in the course of language acquisition, though the diversity and intricacy of phrasal verbs makes them difficult for English speakers to analyze and explain. What is the difference between cleaning an office and cleaning up an office? Or writing something and writing up something? If you clean an office, you are removing dirt, dust, and trash; if you clean up an office you are making it orderly. To write something often implies starting at the beginning, while to write up something suggests some result or organization is already evident.

Phrasal verbs are not only semantically idiosyncratic but grammatically complex as well. Grammatical descriptions of English can be helpful, but terminologically daunting: some sources say that phrasal verbs are made up of verbs plus prepositions. But other sources may refer to the second element as a particle—a somewhat vague grammatical term for a word which is uninflected and which forms a part of another word. And most prepositions can also be used as adverbs. Look up, call off, drop in: are these verb plus preposition, verb plus particle, or verb plus adverb? Before you give up, let me offer a few tips to navigate the complexity of phrasal verbs.

Phrasal verbs are verbal idioms whose meanings are less predictable than their prepositional or adverbial counterparts. If we say that someone looked up the answer or dropped off a package, the meanings of up and off are not literal in the way that they are in looked up the hill or dropped off the cliff.Phrasal verbs often have formal synonyms: You can hand things out or distribute them, turn them in or submit them, set up or arrange, call off or cancel, go ahead or proceed, look into or investigate. If a two-word verb seems it have a more formal paraphrase, often from Latin or French, it may be a phrasal verb.Phrasal verbs have a unique syntax in that they allow the particle to shift away from the verb and hop over a direct object when one is present. You can hand out the exams or hand the exams out. The separability—the hoppiness—of the particle tells you that out the exams is not a prepositional phrase.Syntactic tests can be tricky though, since they are not completely exceptionless: if the direct object is a pronoun, then the particle must occur after it (the teacher handed out them is not fluent English, but the teacher handed them out is just fine).Another exception: if there is an indirect object, then a particle is not permitted unless the indirect object is preceded by a preposition. So The teacher handed the students out the exams is decidedly unEnglish, while The teacher handed the exams out to the students or The teacher handed out the exams to the students are both fine.Another good test test is to convert the sentence to the passive voice. If the predicate contains a phrasal verb, then the direct object can shift to the subject positon. We can say The house was fixed up by the new owners or The character was killed off by the writers. But oddness of The trail was walked up by the hikers or The horse was fallen off by the rider suggests that up and off are more closely connected to the trail and the horse than to the verbs walked and fallen.

You can double check this another way too. If you suspect something is a prepositional phrase rather than a particle plus noun, you may be able to shift the prepositional phrase to the front of the sentence: Up the trail, the hikers walked or Off the horse, the rider fell are okay. But Up the house, the new owners fixed or Off the character the writers killed don’t work at all.

Less predictable meanings, more formal synonyms, particle hoppiness, and openness to the passive voice—four tests that can help you to decide when you are dealing with a phrasal verb.

Try them out. Who knows what you will turn up.

Featured image: Photo by Art Lasovsky on Unsplash

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Why the COVID-19 pandemic feels like a movie

I read there is a spike in streaming of the 2011 film Contagion by Steven Soderbergh. The film uses a made-up virus loosely modeled after a Nipah virus outbreak. Contagion opens with a black screen, and we hear a woman coughing. The fictional virus MEV-1 hits the brain (and not the lungs as in corona virus pandemics), and we see deadly seizures and exposed brains with surprised pathologists. In Contagion the virus spreads quickly across the globe and kills its victims via a simple chain of germs—from a credit card to a bartender’s hand, to the cash register, to the glass on the bar.  It is a great depiction of fomite transmission (i.e., the proven concept that some infectious agents remain detectable on plastic and stainless steel surfaces for days).  Contagion has another clear message:  it appropriately asks viewers to question how our leaders and public health organizations respond to such situations but also how quickly industries can manufacture a vaccine.

Contagion portrays a world with public overreaction and slow, clueless governmental response, although the World Health Organization and Centers for Disease Control are presented as trustworthy and uniquely clear headed (sounds familiar?). The carnage is tremendous, and the Red Cross runs out of body bags ―another nod to the current pandemic,  in which freezer trucks filled with cadavers in New York City were needed when morgues reached capacity. Contagion does not address the now well-known concern of intensivists that hospitals may suddenly become overwhelmed with patients with severe viral (and bacterial) pneumonia in need of ventilators, but this movie virus is neurotropic. But there is even more. A quote from this film rings true to this day: “somewhere the wrong bat met up with the wrong pig.” (The species-jumping virus in Contagion that ultimately infected humans is a mix of bat and pig virus.) A vaccine is found very quickly but in a strange way. A CDC research scientist speeds up the process by inoculating herself with the vaccine, and it becomes available for general use in just a few months.  Contagion is a great movie, not because it now looks so plausible, but because the filmmaker’s asked epidemiologists Larry Brilliant and Ian Lipkin to participate in writing of the screenplay.

A number of important films have addressed medical epidemics over time. Jezebel, which is about yellow fever, shows a long parade of patient-laden horse carts driven by nuns through New Orleans and afflicted homes marked with a big Y. The film 1918 combines the devastation of returning from war with the influenza epidemic and creates a realistic depiction of how communities were affected. Although the cause was never found, Encephalitis lethargica was also pandemic through 1918, both in Europe and the United States and resulted in Awakenings, based on the book by Oliver Sacks.

In an article in the April 13, 2020, issue of The New Yorker, “Experiencing the Coronavirus Pandemic as a Kind of Zombie Apocalypse,” writer Lorrie Moore asks, “Is a virus not a kind of zombie, a quasi-life-form moving in and out of inertness?” Is the virus the zombie or have all those quarantined at home become zombies? Moreover, scriptwriters can let their imagination run wild, using the rapid spread of Ebola or avian flu in the zombie genre (World War Z). The zombies then selectively choose to infect only healthy hosts but refrain from infecting the terminally ill. Brad Pitt’s own infection with Ebola virus protects him. Within the context of the story, this raises the preposterous prospect of protecting people by infecting them with some deadly but curable disease until the zombie epidemic abates. Another virus (simian virus ALZ-113) is used to exterminate the world’s population with very few survivors (Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, 2014). Epidemics of scavenging undead appear to have become an industry.

Nonetheless, movies have also offered serious depictions of yellow fever, cholera, and poliomyelitis epidemics. The AIDS epidemic, a most devastating epidemic with more than 30 million dead, particular in sub-Saharan Africa, is far from eradicated. AIDS has sadly struck close to home for many in the arts and has remained a source of inspiration to filmmakers. Films have shown the serious complications of the disease and recently how activists tried to change policy. The recent, celebrated 2017 film, 120 BPM (120 battements par minute), shows the struggles of an activist group in Paris. Their main objective was drug availability; the need for safety was the government’s and pharmaceutical industry’s push back.

Inventive scriptwriters have been inspired by the emergence of new diseases. Fear of the unknown, as well as the uncertainty of a threat we do not understand, remains a fantastic resource. Pandemics are serious, and initial disbelief (perhaps denial) is always rampant with many physicians trying to see the real danger beyond the histrionics. Thus, with our current pandemic, it may feel as if we are in a movie, and movies seem to mimic reality, although not quite.

Featured Image Credit: by Pexels via Pixabay

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A pandemic of boredom

It was just the two of them: on a raft, lost, floating off the coast of Africa—the lone survivors of a shipwreck. Years before, struck with stupendous boredom, Hymie Basteshaw decided to become boredom’s master. He read what others wrote about boredom, studied its physiology, and discovered its secrets in the wavering folds of human cells. Mid-sea, he now shares with Augie March his first and “obvious” findings. Boredom is “the shriek of unused capacities, the doom of serving no great end or design, of contributing to no master force. The obedience that is not willingly given because nobody knows how to request it. The harmony that is not accomplished.” Basteshaw is but a minor character—a psycho-biologist, a carpenter, a genius, a “maniac”—in Saul Bellow’s long picaresque novel, The Adventures of Augie March. He offers not a minor or obvious feature of boredom, but a discerning appraisal of its intimate nature. Boredom, Basteshaw tells March, although not in these exact words, is hybrid, both personal and social.

Our current situation is one of crisis, of resources, values, and priorities. It’s also a crisis for the study of boredom. It’s a call to understand boredom both as a psychological and social phenomenon. If our aim is to capture what it means to experience boredom right now—the boredom of social distancing, quarantine, and the pandemic—we can’t rely exclusively on lessons that we’ve drawn from willing participants in on-line or in-person studies. Yes, we are bored with more or less the same things that previously bored us. But we are bored because of our newfound and newly imposed social condition. In social distancing, we find ourselves in an unusual position. Both restrained and acutely aware of the meaninglessness of our everyday actions we are under the threat of a new boredom—a boredom that looks and feels just like our ordinary boredom, but which has grown out of a much different and more fertile ground.

What is boredom most fundamentally? Boredom is an unpleasant state that signals to us the presence of an unsatisfactory situation and which, at the same time, contains a strong desire to do something else. During boredom, we feel both frustrated and listless. We’re disengaged from and dissatisfied with what we do. Our situation doesn’t hold our attention. It doesn’t interest us and doesn’t strike us as meaningful. In a state of boredom, we’re moved to think of alternative situations and goals, ones that are more interesting, engaging, and meaningful to us than our current ones. We itch to leave boredom behind and are propelled to try to do just that.

Boredom is a problem—a disruption of agency, a deficit of meaning, or a block in our ability to engage cognitively and satisfactorily with our situation at hand. And yet, it’s also a solution. Or better, it’s the promise of a solution. The unpleasantness of boredom, along with its effects on our psychological processes and behavior, offers us a possible way out. Boredom is that disagreeable reminder that we should be doing something other than what we are currently doing. It’s also a repellent force, a drive that could, under the right conditions, allow us to overcome our discontent.

What I have just described sounds a lot like a psychological state that exists in a social vacuum, but that isn’t so. Boredom can arise out of a perceived dissatisfaction with our situation, a mismatch between our wishes and reality, or even a lack of sufficient engagement with the task at hand. All of these prompts of boredom can be both personal and social. Any social condition that either begets or supports them would be one that promotes boredom.

We are currently experiencing a change in social order. Compared to our recent past, the present of the pandemic is one characterized by excessive order. Out of necessity, caution, concern, or fear, we are constrained. There’re real and tangible limits to our opportunities and obstacles to free action. And so, out of this new social order, boredom grows. “Boredom arises when we must not do what we want to do, or must do what we do not want to do,” psychoanalyst Otto Fenichel once observed. In Melancholy and Society, German sociologist Wolf Lepenies warned us of how socially frustrated agency is a fertile ground for boredom. Experimental studies agree that conditions over which individuals have little control can give rise to boredom. And a recent study examining the attitudes of people living in quarantine in Italy appears to confirm it.

There’s another element of our social condition that contributes to the rise of boredom. Boredom is related not just to the perceived control or autonomy that we have over a situation but also to how meaningful our situation strikes us. Studies report that perceived meaninglessness is both a component of and a likely antecedent to boredom. While social distancing, we often feel that our actions and activities are lacking in meaning. Why? In the face of the pandemic, our everyday activities seem insignificant. For those of us who are not nurses, doctors, first respondents, essential workers, or actively involved in helping others or fighting the spread of the virus, our actions seem to have little effect on the situation.

When faced with the boredom of the pandemic it helps to bring to mind the function of boredom. It offers us a productive way to think about our boredom, for it underlines its existential import. We are fortunate not for this or that experience of boredom, but for the capacity to experience boredom. Boredom—in its non-chronic form—is a valuable tool and perhaps now, more than ever, a privilege. It’s both an affective reminder that we are stuck with ourselves and a call to become more than what we are right now.

But boredom can only do so much. Once it has made itself known to us, we are on our own. We have to decide how to act and what to do. We can turn to diversions or reflection, act rashly or prudently, give up or stand up, help others or look after ourselves. The possible outcomes of boredom are many and varied.New habits, opportunities, and careers often start with the thought “I am bored.” But so can unhealthy eating habits, binge drinking, drug use, or even destruction.

One hopes that in times like these boredom’s call can be put into productive and compassionate use. To borrow Voltaire’s words, one hopes that we can cultivate our garden: the ground out of which our personal and social existence can grow and flourish—not as an act of quietism but as a sign of resilience and as way to realize change.

It’s worth a try, even if it is done out of boredom.

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Intermittent fasting can help people in high-stress jobs

During times of crisis such as the COVID-19 outbreak, citizens often rely on first responders to ensure their daily living remains largely unaffected. However, behind the scenes, people serving in high-stress occupations (i.e. soldiers, police officers, nurses, firefighters, etc.) are often plagued with lack of sleep, shift work, poor eating habits and lack of access to nutrient dense foods, psychological stress (i.e. post-traumatic stress disorder), and minimal time for exercise. Over time, chronic exposure to these stressors can result in depression, weight gain, and the eventual development of heart disease. In fact, more firefighters die from heart disease related events than from actually fighting fires, and both police personnel and military soldiers have recently been documented as being too overweight to adequately perform their jobs. Given the abnormal work cycles of these high-stress occupations, an intervention flexible enough to accommodate the most hectic schedules, could prove to have life-saving implications.

Time-restricted eating is a nutrition intervention which alternates between a period of fasting (12 – 16 hours) followed by a period of eating (8 – 12 hours). Unlike other diets, which focus on the caloric content of a meal or which foods you should eat, time-restricted eating focuses exclusively on when you eat by compressing and standardizing the feeding window each day. In turn, people following this type of eating pattern naturally enter a state of caloric deficit.

A common counterpoint from critics is, “why not just reduce daily caloric intake?” Although people who extend their fasting window are likely to consume fewer calories, the consumption of ultra-processed foods is likely itself the key driver to weight gain and obesity. These ultra-processed foods can serve as trigger foods, which can lead to overeating and overall poor adherence to following a diet pattern simply focused on reducing caloric content. Moreover, ultra-processed foods are generally the foods available to nurses working nightshifts, firefighters returning to their department after a call, police officers patrolling neighborhoods, or military soldiers during field-exercises. Thus, time-restricted eating removes the added stress of what to eat, and serves as a practical intervention conducive to the schedules of many people.

If you are not yet convinced of the practicality of implementing time-restricted eating into your daily routine, reading about the health benefits of time-restricted eating might influence you to give it a try. Time-restricted eating has been shown to lower circulating insulin, blood pressure, body fat and overall body weight, inflammation, and oxidative stress.

Can someone following time-restricted eating still obtain health benefits, regardless of whether or not they lose weight? What about regardless of whether they restrict their caloric content during the eating window? Here’s the good news. One recent study which split college-aged males into two time-restricted eating groups showed that simply confining those calories to a specified eating window resulted in improvements to body composition, blood pressure, cholesterol, and anti-inflammatory markers. Further, a separate study demonstrated that overweight men following time-restricted eating improved their blood pressure profile and insulin levels regardless of weight loss at the end of the study. Bottom line: change how you eat, and you could prevent the need for blood pressure medications down the road.

So, if you are interested in implementing time-restricted eating, where do you begin? Simple: choose an eating window (8 – 12 hours) that fits into your daily routine and one that you can consistently maintain day-to-day. Consistency is the key. When the feeding window has closed, maintain your fast until the next feeding window becomes available. For example, if you are following a 16/8 (hours fasting/hours feeding) cycle, and have your first meal at 8:00 a.m., your feeding window would end at 4:00 p.m. You would then fast, having only non-caloric beverages until 8:00 a.m. the next morning.

Two common questions are: Can I drink coffee and tea during my fast, and 2) Does it matter the duration of my fasting window? Regarding the first question, research is not conclusive about caffeine, antioxidants, polyphenols, and other compounds found in these beverages and how it interacts with the fasting phase. Regardless, until evidence is found that these ingredients significantly impact the fasting window, feel free to consume these, making sure to forgo any sweeteners. As for the fasting duration, there does seem to be a dose-response relationship, meaning the further the fasting window is extended, the greater the health benefits obtained on average. With this said, do keep in mind that there is a point of diminishing return—not to mention the longer the fasting window is extended, the less likely someone will be able to adhere to this type of eating.

Overall, time-restricted eating is a strategy meant to alleviate some of the stresses of everyday life by providing a practical alternative to traditional dieting techniques. Customize the fasting/feeding windows to fit your lifestyle, and in doing so, potentially extend your own life.

Featured Image Credit: Intermittent fasting via Wikimedia Commons

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A.J. Ayer and Logical Positivism

Alfred Jules Ayer (1910-89) was a philosopher and a leading English representative of Logical Positivism. He was responsible for introducing the doctrines of the movement as developed in the 1920s and 1930s by the Vienna Circle group of philosophers and scientists into British philosophy. Ayer’s philosophy was also influenced by empiricism of David Hume and the logic of Bertrand Russell.

Although he was born and raised in London, Ayer’s father was a French Swiss national and his mother was a Dutch citizen of Jewish ancestry. He was educated as a scholarship student in classics at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford. At the age of 16, while at Eton, he also read the work of Bertrand Russell and was impressed by his essay Sceptical Essays and its argument that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground for believing its truth. At Oxford, he was a student of Gilbert Ryle (1900-76) who described him as “the best student I have yet been taught by.” He also studied the works of the empiricist David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739) and Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) by Ludwig Wittgenstein. On Ryle’s suggestion, after graduating from Oxford in 1932, he went to study with Moritz Schlick in Vienna for a year. Schlick was the leader of the influential Vienna Circle of philosophers, scientists and other intellectuals.

At the age of 24, Ayer published a very influential first book, Language, Truth, and Logic (1936), which presented and built upon the logical positivist ideas of the Vienna Circle. It became one of the most widely read and successful philosophical books in the twentieth century.

Its central doctrine is based on the principle that if something cannot be verified as true through our own sensory experience of the external world, it is meaningless. According to this principle, there are two sorts of cognitively meaningful statements: those which are empirically verifiable and those which are analytic. Scientific statements and statements of ordinary fact belong to the first class, while statements of mathematic and of logic belong to the second. Ayer used this theory to argue that religious and metaphysical statements such as “God exists” are unverifiable and meaningless. Many of Oxford’s more traditional philosophers did not support such a view, making Ayer the “enfant terrible” of British philosophy.

Ayer’s second book, The Foundation of Empirical Knowledge (1940) focused on epistemology. His third important book, The Problem of Knowledge (1956), considered his finest work, has also been very influential in subsequent epistemological thinking in Britain and America. In this work, he discussed the problem of scepticism and tried to show how we could justifiably come to know truths about such phenomena as the external world, other minds, and the past.

After the Second World War, he became Grote Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic at University College, London, in 1946. He became the Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford in 1959. In later years, Ayer turned to writing the history of philosophy, producing volumes on Voltaire, pragmatism, Wittgenstein, G. E. Moore, and Russell.

Ayer was also a public philosopher and played a prominent role in British intellectual and political life, supporting a variety of liberal causes. He campaigned against the British involvement in Vietnam War and served as the president of the Homosexual Law Reform Society (helping to change the public opinion on homosexual activity between consenting adults). He was also a successful broadcaster and made frequent appearances on the BBC.

Named as a fellow of the British Academy in 1952, a president of the Aristotelian Society from 1951 to 1952, a president of the British Humanist Association from 1966-1970, Alfred Jules Ayer was knighted in 1970. He died in 1989.

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How childhood trauma resurfaces during COVID-19

Children who are victims of bullying often suffer a sense of helplessness. They don’t know what to do during bullying episodes and they don’t really believe anything will change or anyone can intervene effectively. Children subjected to bullying say it makes them feel sick, afraid, and helpless. It can also lead to feelings of anxiety, anger and depression. We know that as adults former victims can undergo similar feelings in the right circumstances.

Due to my research in the area of childhood bullying, I am contacted by many people about their own bullying incidents as children. They describe how they coped at the time. Often, they comment on how they’ve managed their lives in the wake of bullying.   The great majority have survived and gone on to live productive lives. However, during this world-wide COVID-19 crisis, adults relate that their mental state is similar to how they felt as children. I have received messages describing the reactivation of childhood memories of being captive to someone while feeling powerless.  In the face of the uncertainty generated by the coronavirus, the same emotions are rekindled: fear, anxiety, anger, and a certain amount of depression. While most are doing what they can in terms of preparedness and health precautions, helplessness is once again a prevailing emotion. Substance abuse held at bay has reemerged as a problem.

By this point, perhaps the majority of people are aware of a sense of helplessness while trying to outwait and outwit COVID-19 by using every best effort. It is a helpless feeling to see the numbers of deaths and to witness the struggles in the healthcare system. While everyone may feel some amount of anxiety related to the virus, survivors of bullying experience a heightened degree of fear, anxiety, and depression based on triggered childhood feelings. Helplessness is a familiar but unwelcome manifestation impacting their daily mood. Sheltering-in-place is difficult emotionally in general. But for victims of childhood bullying it is reminiscent of and activates the loneliness that was an everyday burden.

Trauma is an aspect of this health crisis. The loss of family and friends, and the fear of their loss, is overwhelming. Trauma results when such overwhelming stress exceeds one’s ability to cope. There are three distinct types of trauma: acute, chronic, and complex. Acute trauma describes what people are living through now, meaning the trauma is the result of a single event- the corona virus. Trauma can become chronic depending on the duration of an event; in this case how long people are required to shelter-in-place with all the problems attendant to that (loss of income, lack of childcare, family violence, etc.). Chronic bullying is traumatizing for children and it leads to changes in the brains’ ability to think clearly. At the very least, bullied children worry and their worries influence their actions. They try to hide and they learn to avoid their bullies. They often become worried, anxious adults. For those who endured bullying victimization as children, the trauma is complex. Those adults deal with childhood trauma and its effects in an ongoing way. Now they are dealing with the very personal nature of the fear of the virus as well.

Children can do very little when they are helpless. They don’t have the tools, the wisdom, the resources, or the maturity needed to ameliorate adverse childhood conditions. Adults by virtue of greater years, greater resources, and greater mental capacity are able, much of the time, to deal with difficult circumstances. But COVID-19 extracts its toll despite wisdom, years, or great resources. The virus is an equalizer in this respect. It exerts power over its victims. It is relentless in pursuing a host to control. It searches for any weakness to exploit. COVID-19 acts exactly like a bully. For those who have already been a victim in childhood, this new terror is another bully forcing people to stay inside hiding from its power. In this way, victims of childhood bullying, even with their adult resources, are revisited by an age-old sense of helplessness unique to them.

For adults intimidated and threatened throughout childhood, helplessness is not new. It has come back again in the shape of something even more powerful and intimidating.

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