Oxford University Press's Blog, page 164

How well do you know Anne Brontë? [quiz]

Anne Brontë was born on 17 January 1820 and best known for her novels, Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. In honour of the bicentenary of Anne Brontë’s birth, we have created a quiz to help you determine how well you know the youngest member of the Brontë literary family.

Quiz image: Anne Brontë. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Feature Image: Brontë Parsonage. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Agency in Gerwig’s Little Women – but for whom?

Summing up nineteenth-century American literature as Moby Dick and Little Women, Greta Gerwig, writer-director of the newest film adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, argues that the latter is “one of our great works of American literature, but because it’s a women’s novel, it’s treated like an asterisk.”

Little Women came into being because others had recognized gendered divisions in American literature. In 1867, Roberts Brothers editor Thomas Niles, noticing the success of boys’ books by Oliver Optic and Horatio Alger, encouraged Alcott to write something comparable for girls. Alcott warmed to her work only after casting it as a tribute to her sisters and mother, but she became more enthusiastic as she completed the volume: “It reads better than I expected. Not a bit sensational, but simple and true, for we really lived most of it; and if it succeeds that will be the reason of it.”

Published 30 September 1868, Little Women was widely read and praised for its authentic American voice. Readers immediately demanded a follow-up volume, published in April 1869; sequels Little Men (1871) and Jo’s Boys (1886) eventually ensued. Alcott’s saga has inspired plays, films, radio and television performances, operas, dolls, stamps, cookbooks, spin-offs and other artifacts. Countless public figures have expressed appreciation, including Teddy Roosevelt, Simone de Beauvoir, Patti Smith, Laura Bush, J. K. Rowling, and John Green.

Little Women addresses coming of age, artistic ambition, family dynamics, romantic love, and vocation. Adaptations, including RKO’s 1933 film, starring Katharine Hepburn; MGM’s 1949 feature, starring June Allyson; Columbia Pictures’s 1994 production, starring Winona Ryder; the 2014-15 transmedia series, The March Family Letters; BBC’s 2017 miniseries featuring Maya Hawke; and a 2018 contemporary film with Lea Thompson as Marmee, each grapple with these themes. Adaptors respond to the novel but also to its adaptation lineage. Jo’s status as a writer is increasingly emphasized, with the two most recent adaptations immediately situating her in academic communities or publishing offices. Gerwig’s version extends this motif, giving Jo considerably more agency in negotiations with her publisher.

Earning rave reviews and strong box office receipts, and featuring a stellar cast, including Saoirse Ronan as Jo and Meryl Streep as Aunt March, Gerwig’s film innovatively emphasizes the second part of the novel, as the maturing March sisters sound their depths, expand their horizons, and discover their vocations. Gerwig highlights structural and thematic parallels in and across the first and second volumes, aligning Meg’s experience at Vanity Fair with Beth’s admission to the Palace Beautiful or, more poignantly, contrasting Beth’s adolescent and adult health challenges. Themes such as the economic realities for nineteenth-century women of a certain class or the ongoing rivalry between sisters (for genius, for success, for love) are given additional heft. A common refrain in Gerwig’s film is others’ praise for Jo’s talent as a teacher, which culminates in her realization that she would like to open a school. (In the 1994 film, Marmee dictates that Jo should open a school.)

Alcott’s unconventional ending and Jo’s marital status remain challenging. Viewers may need to re-watch the new film’s final scenes to decide what actually occurs—see Adam Chitwood’s consideration of Gerwig’s “radical change” or Marissa Martinelli and Heather Schwedel’s debate about her “Inception-Style Ending.” Gerwig wanted to give Alcott “an ending she might have liked” by emphasizing “how we . . . tell and retell the story of how we became who we are,” as she said when interviewed on The Director’s Cut podcast. While her film’s conclusion celebrates Little Women’s author, it fails to register the nuances of Jo March’s actual character trajectory.

Gerwig owes an apology to Niles, the editor who nudged Little Women into being and encouraged Alcott to accept its copyright in lieu of a lump sum payment. Mr. Dashwood in Gerwig’s film may be a comic foil, but as Alcott herself reflected, Niles’ sincere advice made all the difference: “An honest publisher and a lucky author, for the copyright made her fortune, and the ‘dull book’ was the first golden egg of the ugly duckling”.

Featured Image credits:  Wikimedia Commons

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Seven ideas for a new choral year

The New Year has arrived and with it comes that familiar feeling of a fresh start. Everything is bright and full of possibility.

If you’re the planning type, you probably have a typed list of shiny goals and resolutions already hung in a prominent place to remind you of your intentions for this year. Even if you’re not the planning type, you may have a few expectations for how you want this year to look.

For choral directors and educators, this is a time to reflect on teaching. What did I learn in the past year? How can I be more effective? We look for new resources or strategies. We collect ideas and teaching strategies and musical illustrations, ready to pepper our lessons and rehearsals with wisdom and insight.

Sometimes, we discover that this was a fleeting burst of energy, inspired by the brightness of the New Year. And by mid-February, we’re left feeling a little lackluster. Can you relate?

So, rather than talk about how to set the right goals or make resolutions that will last or plan out your entire year in one sitting, I want to share with you a few unconventional ways to start fresh and make this your best year:

1. Choose one thing to give up

What will you say no to this year? We tend to get so preoccupied by adding things into our already full schedules that we forget to make room, to create space for those good things we want to cultivate. Saying yes to a new conducting appointment may mean saying no to something else. Be intentional with what you choose to keep and hold onto and what you choose to let go of.

2. Choose one thing to simplify

What’s one thing that felt over-complicated or challenging last year? How could you simplify the process this year? Maybe it was planning and making decisions about music. Maybe it was organizing a concert or a teaching workflow in rehearsal. Whatever it is for you, spend some time thinking through all the steps you took. Write everything down and study it, looking for ways to eliminate or combine steps, cut back, or streamline things.

3. Choose one thing to energize

What’s one thing you want to invest your time and energy in this year? What do you want to do more of? Perhaps it’s conducting or music-listening in rehearsals or score-study. Think about what this might look like this year.

4. Choose one thing to savor

In our fast-paced world, we don’t always take the time to fully appreciate and enjoy things. What’s one thing you want to really savor this year? Maybe it’s a concert experience or a professional learning opportunity. Maybe it’s the week-to-week rehearsals along the way that help you remember why you started. How can you be intentional about slowing down and being present so you can fully appreciate these moments when they happen?

5. Choose one thing to prioritize

What do you want to focus on this year? What is your greatest priority, personally and/or professionally? Maybe it’s a recording project or preparing for a tour. Maybe it’s guest-conducting or learning a challenging piece of repertoire. What will it look like to prioritize this?

6. Choose one thing to explore

Exploring and discovering new things is an innate part of the creative process and something that’s fundamental to our work as musicians, educators, and directors. We have to make time for it. We have to reserve some whitespace for inspiration and carve out unstructured time for creativity. Maybe it’s one day a month where you go for a walk in a new place or visit a museum or go to a concert. Maybe it’s a couple hours per week or a few days per quarter. What are you curious about? What do you want to learn? What will you discover?

7. Choose one thing to de-clutter

This might be your desk, the music library, the digital music database, or your ensemble’s email inbox. Or maybe the most pressing space to de-clutter isn’t a space at all, but an area of your life that is taking up too much of your mental space (social media, anyone?). How can you bring order to something that’s chaotic and disorganized? Start by taking everything out and choosing what to add back in. How can you filter out the noise that crowds our thoughts on a daily basis? Set healthy boundaries. Be intentional with how you spend your time, guarding your mind from the barrage of information.

These approaches to starting the year can be a helpful way to start fresh and focus on the things that are most important to you. Begin with one approach and work from there. Perhaps you’ll discover a few unconventional approaches of your own for starting the year with intention and maintaining the motivation necessary to make real and lasting change.

Featured image credit: Karen Arnold via  Pixabay.  

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Before you eat, drink, or breathe: “throat”

At the end of 2019, I wrote about the origin of the verbs eat and drink. The idea was to discuss a few other “basic” verbs, that is, the verbs referring to the most important functions of our organism. My next candidate is breathe, but, before I proceed to discuss its complicated history, it may be useful to look at the derivation of the names of the organs that allow us to inhale the air and get the food through. Windpipe and trachea are self-explanatory, though it may not be immediately clear that the Greek word is an adjective meaning “rough”: the reference is to a rough artery (called in Latin arteria aspera). By contrast, throat is a Germanic noun, and its etymology is far from obvious, even though modern dictionaries choose not to discuss the conflicting hypotheses of its origin; they state their opinion as dogma or as a plausible conjecture.

Wide mouth, deep throat. Copper headed trinket snake by Steve Kharmawphlang. CC by 2.0, via Flickr.

Here is one of such conjectures. The Old English verb þrēotan meant “to trouble, vex, annoy”; hence Engl. threat (þ had the value of Modern Engl. th in thin). Its past participle was þroten, with the vowel (short o) at the same grade of ablaut as in the noun, and the most ancient sense of the root must have been “push, thrust.” The closely related Latin verb trudere, familiar to English speakers from intrude “to force, thrust in,” meant the same. The etymology I am citing here connects threat and throat, and the throat emerges as an organ for the thrusting of food down. Curiously, the verb throttle also refers to force, but to preventing the throat to function rather that performing its duty. Throttle was recorded only in the fourteenth century; yet its derivation is hardly in doubt.

The German cognate of throat is Drossel, and the verb er-drossel-n also means “to throttle, suffocate,” though it surfaced in texts only in the sixteen hundreds. Many will remember Drosselmeyer from The Nutcracker, and those who can read German fairytales in the original will think of King Drosselbart “Beard on the throat,” literally “throat-beard” (Thrushbeard does not translate Drosselbart!).  The double s in –drossel– corresponds to Engl. t, because in German, p, t, and k were in some positions shifted according to a peculiar law, known as the Second (or German) Consonant Shift. That is why English has eat, from etan, while German has essen.

Remember King Drosselbart and The Nutcracker! König Drosselbart by Johann Mithlinger Siedlung. CC by 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

As far as I can judge, this etymology of throat has been abandoned, but such is the fate of numerous hypotheses on the origin of words: they are forgotten, rather than disproved. Anyway, here is another conjecture. Throat, that is, Old Engl. þrote ~ þrotu, resembles Old Engl. þrūtian “to swell.” Hence the possibility that the reference is to the part of the neck that projects, or swells. Only Adam’s apple projects more or less visibly. Yet some of the best researchers have endorsed this etymology. At one time, þrūtian was invoked to explain the meaning of the Gothic name of leprosy, but that etymology failed. Many years ago, I wrote a long article about this subject. If someone is interested in such obscure matters, let me know it: I’ll dig up the article and send it to the questioner.

To complicate our investigation or to facilitate it (everything depends on the point of view), we notice that the Dutch word for “throat” is strot. The first consonant need not bother us: it is the well-known s-mobile, the mysterious prefix that appears in front of numerous roots for no obvious reason. Strot is, as far as we are concerned, s-trot. Now, if throat has a related form outside Germanic (in Greek, Latin, Celtic, Slavic, Baltic, and so forth), this form, obedient to the inexorable First (or Germanic) Consonant Shift, must begin with t (compare my standard example: Latin trēs versus Engl. three). However, after s, the consonants p, t, and k were not shifted, so that Engl. throat and Dutch s-trot are a perfect match. Quite naturally, strot has the same cognates as throat, including German Drossel. Dutch dictionaries do not go beyond the idea of either “swollen” or “protruding.” The sought-for etymology of throat depends, at least partly, on our success in digging up a non-Germanic cognate, and it has been produced, but, in my opinion, the form is not without a wrinkle.

The cognate has allegedly been found in Slavic and Baltic. The Russian word trost’ “walking cane” once meant “reed.” Now, a reed is a tube, and of course that is what we may expect the oldest meaning of throat to have been, for the throat is indeed a passage. This etymology (throat allegedly cognate with trost’) found the support of several leading scholars, but trost’ has s in the middle, and so do all the Slavic words and their Lithuanian cognate, while Germanic does not. The protoform of Greek thrýon is also given as trusom (naturally, with s). That is why I have discussed in some details the history of s in German Drossel: this consonant is not original: like s in German essen, it is the product of a later change. Nor does a cautious comparison with strut (s-trut), whose earliest meaning was “to swell,” answer the troubling question about s in the Slavic and Lithuanian forms (or rather about its absence in throat).

From love to hate, from reed to cane…. Reed image by Arek Socha from Pixabay. Man with a bowler hat and cane, CC by 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

A quick look at what the throat is called outside Germanic provides no clue to our problem. English has the word gullet “esophagus,” rather than “throat.” It is a word taken over from Old French, a diminutive, which derives from Latin gula “throat,” possibly related to German Kehle, another name for “throat.” The protoform of gula seems to have begun with gw-, but it still bears some resemblance to Engl. gurgle ~ gargle (nearly the same forms exist elsewhere in Germanic) and Latin gurgulio “gullet.” Those are rather obviously sound–imitative (echoic, onomatopoeic) words, like glug-glug, and so is probably French gosier “throat.” Glutton and gorge may also belong here, even though not directly. Russian gorlo “throat” (stress on the first syllable) sounds amazingly like the Romance words, but it is native. Throat is obviously not sound-imitative.

We seem to have come out of the reeds with the English word throat devoid of a clear etymology, unless we agree that the throat was understood as “swollen,” and perhaps this idea can be salvaged. As is well-known, the same word often applies to several adjacent organs and body parts, and their etymology is often obscure (such are, for instance, crop and craw). In looking through various lists, I discovered that in related languages, the throat and the neck are sometimes called the same. If throat was first applied to the neck and only later specialized with reference to its front part (the passage to the lungs or stomach), then “swollen” would provide a more or less acceptable clue to its etymology. But the evidence to this effect is wanting. To my mind, this etymology remains in limbo. To reinforce the statement about the same words designating different parts of our anatomy, I may add that the Germanic cognates of neck mean “nape,” and nape is, alas, a word of “undiscovered origin.”

And now from neck to throat? First image by Engin Akyurt from Pixabay. Second image by Igor Schubin from Pixabay.

Feature image credit: KC Ballet dancers Amanda DeVenuta and Joshua Bodden with company dancers. Photograph: Brett Pruitt & East Market Studios. CC by 2.0 via Flickr. Image has been cropped to fit.

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How to write about science or technology clearly

Today, English is the international language of science and technology. People around the world read and write science or technical articles in English. A clear writing style helps to make your work easier to read, both for the colleague down the hall, and the one on the other side of the world.

One key to writing clearly is to use essential scientific or technical terms while minimizing other long words. (By long word, we mean a word with 3 syllables or more, not counting a 2-syllable word that becomes 3-syllables by adding, -s, -es, -d, -ed, or -ing).

Part of working in any field is learning that field’s special terms. But that doesn’t mean writing an article is an occasion to show off every big word you ever learned. Instead, try to explain the subject using words familiar to your audience.

One method for revising your writing is to go through your draft and underline each long word. Which long words do you really need? (You may find that most long words are not at all scientific or technical, but just part of the narrative “glue” that holds your story together.) Then, try to brainstorm ways to say the same thing using a shorter word, or a few short words. For most long words, you can probably find a way to replace them with a shorter word, or a phrase that uses shorter words.

Once you’re done brainstorming, use your best judgment about how well each alternative works. Sometimes, the original long word works best; but, when you find that a shorter word works just as well, use it.

Which long words do you really need? We propose that an essential scientific or technical termis any long word that meets four tests:

There is no plain English equivalent.You can’t paraphrase in a few short words.Experts use it consistently, andYou can look it up in a standard reference.

An example of an essential medical term is atrial fibrillation. 

There is no plain English equivalent.You can’t paraphrase it in a few short words.Doctors use it consistently.You can look it up in a medical dictionary.

By contrast, the word, pulmonary, does not meet all four tests:

You can sometimes replace pulmonary with lung.You can sometimes paraphrase in a few short words, e.g., related to the lung. Doctors don’t use pulmonary consistently. Instead, they tend to use various terms: pulmonary, lung, pneumonic, etc.You can look up pulmonary, lung and pneumonic in a medical dictionary.

Controlling long words goes a long way to improving reading ease and clarity. But, the key is to decide which ones you truly need. The more you can express your ideas in simple terms, the more people will understand and trust what you write.

Featured image: Writing with a fountain pen by Aaron Burden via Unsplash

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The problem of consciousness

Many people find consciousness deeply puzzling. It is often described as one of the few remaining problems for science to address that is genuinely deep—perhaps even unsolvable.

Indeed, consciousness is thought to present a challenge to the prevailing scientific image of the universe as physical through-and-through. In part this puzzlement arises because people are (at least tacitly, on an unconscious level) innate dualists—they consider there to be a division between the mental and physical, the mind and body—resulting from a deep disconnect between the core principles of our intuitive, common-sense, or so-called “folk” psychology and the structure of our intuitive (pre-scientific) physics.

This is why people the world over have always been open to belief in ghosts and spirits, as well as the possibility of an afterlife. It is hard for them to see how the mind could be comprised of arrangements and interactions of physical matter. But this problem—the problem of how mental states in general can be physical—has arguably been solved by cognitive science through some combination of functionalism and the representational theory of mind. That is, the mind is comprised of physical states that perform distinctive functional roles—such as motivating actions in the case of desires, or guiding them in the case of beliefs—while carrying information about (and representing) objects and properties in the world outside of the thinker.

Even cognitive scientists continue to find consciousness mysterious, however. But this is not the consciousness of being awake versus asleep, nor the sort of consciousness involved in being conscious of (that is, perceiving) some event in one’s environment. Neither of these is mysterious from the standpoint of cognitive science. What is thought to be puzzling is so-called phenomenal consciousness—the introspectively accessible felt properties of our experiences. The nature of this puzzlement is best captured through—and arguably depends on—philosophers’ thought experiments. (My view is that cognitive scientists wouldn’t take these thought experiments seriously were it not for their own tacit dualism about the mind; and non-scientists find the consciousness-debate so fascinating because it confirms their tacit dualism about the mind.) For it seems that I can imagine a creature for whom perceiving the greenness of grass feels introspectively to it in just the same way that seeing the redness of a rose feels to me. Indeed, it seems that I can imagine a creature exactly like myself in all respects (physical, functional, and representational) except that it lacks this (the way my current experience of red feels to me). Many think, in consequence, that phenomenal consciousness involves special properties—often called “qualia”—that aren’t explicable in physical terms.

In fact, however, there are no special properties. There are no qualia. The temptation to think otherwise derives from the special way in which we can think introspectively about our own perceptual states, deploying concepts such as this (feel of my experience of red). The “problem” of consciousness merely arises out of the contrast between first- and third-person modes of thinking about our own states. For it is one-and-the-same state, with one-and-the-same set of physical and functional properties, that can be thought of now as a perception of red and now as this feel. The latter is just a different way of thinking of the very same state as the former.

Given that there is no extra property that enters the world with phenomenal consciousness, it follows that the question of consciousness in non-human animals is of no scientific importance. There are many important questions that arise when comparing the minds of ourselves and other animals. We can ask about capacities for long-term planning in animals, for example, and we can ask to what extent their working-memory capacities resemble our own. But the question of qualia isn’t among those questions. For there are no qualia. There are just perceptual states that are available to be thought about (in humans) using a distinctive set of first-person concepts like this feel.

Some will say that although the question of animal consciousness might not matter for science, it surely matters for ethics. And indeed, as the continuities between human and animal minds have been increasingly recognized, so people have come to feel that it is urgent to identify the set of creatures that are capable of consciousness. This may be because consciousness is a prerequisite for empathy. One can’t enter imaginatively into the experience of another creature unless those experiences, like one’s own, are like something to undergo, it is thought. But empathy arguably is not, and shouldn’t be, foundational to ethical thinking. And the emotion of sympathy, in contrast, can be grounded in a third-person understanding of the desires and sufferings of the creature in question. Perhaps this may be all that is necessary for questions about the ethical treatment of animals to arise.

Photo by Anthony Intraversato on Unsplash

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Hilary Putnam on mind and meanings – Philosopher of the Month

Hilary Putnam was one of the most influential philosophers of science of the twentieth century and had an impact on philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, epistemology, and metaphysics. Along with Richard Rorty, he was also a key figure in the revival of Pragmatism and was influenced by the philosophies of John Dewey, William James, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. As a philosopher, he tended to hold a middle and liberal position and was famous for changing his views.

Putnam was born in Chicago in 1926. His father, Samuel, was a scholar of Romance languages and translator, and a Communist who wrote a column for the Daily Worker. His mother, Riva, was Jewish but Putnam had a secular upbringing. Putnam grew up in France and Philadelphia and received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania, in philosophy and mathematics, in 1948. He began his PhD at Harvard under Willard Van Orman Quin and completed it at University of California, Los Angeles, taught by the leading figures in logical empiricism, Hans Reichenbach and Rudolf Carnap.  Although Putnam distanced himself from logical empiricism and became a critic of the movement, his close contacts with his mentors remained visible in his work. He taught at North-western, Princeton, and M.I.T before joining Harvard in 1965.

In the 1960s and 70s, Putnam was well-known for his theory of semantic externalism and the functionalist theory of the mind. According to Putnam, words get their meaning not from images or descriptions that individual speakers associate with those words in their minds, but from the causal links and contacts we have with the external world. He wrote about his views on meaning in two articles, “Meaning and Reference” (1973) and “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’” (1975). He used a famous Twin Earth Thought Experiment to demonstrate that meanings are not subjective or “in the head” as he put in, and depend partly on the social and natural world.

In the 1960s and early 1970s Putnam helped to refine a theory of mind known as functionalism, according to which mental or psychological states are defined by the roles that they play and are “functional states” of an entity. He proposed a theory of machine state functionalism and argued that human mental states are computational states. He later rejected this as he believed it was too scientistic and instead embraced a conception of the mind much more in line with Aristotle’s notion of hylomorphism which represents the view that all physical beings are composed form and matter.  We are physical beings whose perceptive and cognitive capacities are embodied in the physical form and structure that compose us.

Putnam was also a critic of metaphysical realism, which views the world as mind and language-independent. He argued that the structure and descriptions of the world are functions of the human mind and grounded in human purposes. In Reason, Truth, and History (1981), his critique of metaphysical realism, he drew upon the ideas of Immanuel Kant, William James, John Dewey, and Wittgenstien again to develop his conception of realism and truth. His view can be interpreted as Kantian in that it rejects the attempt to find foundations for human knowledge outside human practices and human effort to know about it.

He was elected as president of the American Philosophical Association in 1976. He retired from active teaching in 2000 but continued to lecture at Tel Aviv University. He also served as the Spinoza Chair of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam in 2001. He died on 13 March 2016 at 89.

Featured Image Credit: “Blue and teal smoke” by Paweł Czerwiński. CC0 via Unsplash.

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Women on the front lines: Military service, combat and gender

The 1990s saw women beginning to fill a wider range of roles in the military, with many countries relaxing their bans on women serving in combat roles. As a result, women are able to fly combat aircraft, serve in artillery units, staff missile emplacements, serve as combat medics, and fill various other roles that involve potential combat exposure. Additionally, many more women are assigned to combat-support roles located on the front line. Yet most research on women involved in military life still concerns itself with the wives of enlisted men, women in civilian posts within the military, women that were sexually assaulted in the military, or women in non-combat-related military service. It is thus patently obvious that women combatants and veterans who fulfill assignments in conflict zones deserve closer attention.

There is still severe opposition to integration of women into combat roles. The presence of female bodies in the military is often seen as a potential threat to team cohesion and combat effectiveness. In fact, women’s struggle for equal participation in the military is often criticized, even by feminist activists. Many scholars hold the view that the struggle for equality in the military has negative side effects, including possibilities of reinforcing militarism, of encouraging the militarization of women’s lives, and even of bringing about legitimization of the use of force. Yet, irrespective of these debates, since women are currently serving in a variety of combat roles and combat-support positions in many countries, there is much for us to learn about the gendered elements of military service.

Conversations with women veterans reveal multiple levels of oppressions and various difficulties for women in combat – the women often reflect about what it means to be a woman in the military and what it means to be feminine in the military. Tal, a former combatant in the Israel Defense Forces, described the process that she went through like this: “After the entire process of combat training, I became a man. [As a combatant] I am not a strong woman, but a kind of a weak man.”

Noa, for example, reflected on the complex nature of femininity and masculinity in the military as she understood it:

How can I be feminine here [in the military service]? If I look like a man, behave like a man, and crawl like a man – then am I a woman? So, you notice an effort: when they go home for the weekend, some [women combat soldiers] put on earrings and make-up to … as if it was a feminine experience. I want to develop a different perception of what it means to be feminine. To be feminine doesn’t necessarily mean to be gentle or to wear make-up. To be feminine for me is to be strong, to be protective, to be supportive of others. Maybe this is what feminine means? So I give it [femininity] a different meaning.

Noa’s view contrasts with Tal’s comment above to the effect that in the army she became “a weak man” rather than “a strong woman.” Tal’s view echoes the theoretical debate and body of knowledge about gender, which presume that to act like a soldier is not to be womanly. The women soldiers grapple with the question of their gendered identity as combatants. They displayed different and often ambivalent attitudes towards the question of how they ought to have behaved as women in the military.

While each women has a particular interpretation of the role she ought to have assumed as a combatant, they all acknowledged that the system demanded that they become more masculine. Most expressed a certain tension between the desire to meet this expectation, on the one hand, and a resistance to it, on the other. Women in the military are confronted with both formal structural barriers and non-formal barriers in the form of various exclusion mechanisms that are difficult to expose and change.

The ex-combatants admit that they encounter a double standard in the military and later in civilian life: when a woman is assertive, authoritative and determined, she is considered mean and spiteful rather than, say, an effective commander or manager, whereas a man who exhibits the same qualities is perceived as competent. What, then, is the “proper” way to be a woman combatant?

Ma’ayan, a commander in a combat unit, sums up this discussion and expressed resistance to the fact that women combatants are essentially expected to act like men:

The most confusing thing in combat service in the military is that in the name of feminism you become a man and act according to masculine rules. Instead of inserting feminine rules that are meaningful and equally good, your rebellion [in becoming a combatant] eventually consists of transforming into more of a man than a woman… The common knowledge is that in order to be a good combatant you have to act as a man …. What does it mean to be a woman combatant? …. To be a good combat commander [as things stand], I need to be less sensitive and complex; I need to understand and adopt masculine codes; to be stronger. What we understand [in this role] is that in order to be equal, we [women combatants] need to behave like men.

The women veterans’ experiences in the military exemplify the complexity of the perspectives that inform their diverse securities and insecurities. Their testimonies illuminate aspects that are often absent from dominant narratives of war and combat service. Attending to these narratives can contribute significantly to forming alternative discourses on war and security.

Feature image credit: Used with permission. Owed by OUP.

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Etymology gleanings for December 2019

Once again, my thanks are to everybody who read this blog in 2019 and commented on its fifty two posts. However, I still have to wave a friendly goodbye to the ghost of the year gone by and do some gleaning on the frozen field of December.

An etymological problem: Why are Greek grassidi “grazing field” and Engl. grass not related?

It has, naturally, been known for a long time that Engl. grass and its cognates (they sound almost the same in the other languages) resemble Greek gráō “I chew, gnaw,” Sanskrit grásati “I devour”, Latin grāmen “grass,” and especially Greek grástis “forage, herbage.” Sanskrit and Greek words refer to food. Latin hordeum “barley,” another likely cognate, points in the same direction.

In contrast, English (and Germanic) grass is ensconced in a different semantic nest. Its cognates are grow and green. To conclude: the Greek forms and its congeners in Sanskrit and Latin describe eating (and grass as food for the cattle), while the Germanic ones deal with vegetation as such. If they were borrowed from Greek or some other non-Germanic language, they would probably have taken over the connotations familiar in those languages. This is how etymology can disentangle a knot of seeming lookalikes and suggest a reasonable solution.

Grass the Greek way, and grass, the Germanic way. Livestock image by stokpic from Pixabay. Landscape image by RitaE from Pixabay.

A short postscript may be of some interest. If Latin vorare “to eat greedily; devour” (compare Engl. voracious) is related to granum, the ancient root began with gw, and, if hordeum and granum belong together, that root began with gh . The root of grass certainly began with gh. Were the picture clearer, we might even prove that Engl. grass and Greek grassidi do not belong together. At the moment, we only have a cogent hypothesis.

This case teaches us an important lesson: words form groups and should be studied in their wider context. The distance from “grass” to “grazing” is short (graze is of course derived from grass), but in the early period of Germanic, the oldest nouns, adjectives, and verbs did not cross it. And I should repeat what I have said more than once: Greek is an Indo-European language related to Sanskrit, Germanic, Celtic, Slavic, and so on, but not their source.

Indo-European and substrates

An avalanche, a substrate phenomenon? Image by Hans Braxmeier from Pixabay.

Although hypotheses on the origin and spread of Indo-European are doomed to remain intelligent guesswork, the idea that this ancient language absorbed numerous elements from the immense territory of Eurasia cannot be contested. The important thing is not to jump to conclusions. Many words are of unknown or controversial origin. Strangely, this is also true of dozens of modern words, especially, but not only, of slang. Anyone who has followed the attempts to discover the etymology of heifer, niblick, masher, kibosh, or jitney will be surprised at the obscurity in which their past is enveloped. Etymology is unable to pull a rabbit out of its hat whenever the question “Where is this word from?” comes up. If modern words present such difficulties, what can we expect of the words that have existed since time immemorial? Consider the last post of the previous year (drink).

Substrate words certainly exist, and some features that characterize them as a group have been listed, but each case is problematic. Reference to the substrate is more convincing when we deal with plant and animal names, the words denoting some feature of the local landscape, and the like. I’ll cite only one example. Engl. avalanche is a borrowing from French, but its distant origin is disputed. Perhaps we are dealing with a substrate item of some Alpine language. Perhaps French avaler “descend” influenced it, or the word goes back to Latin lābī “glide, slide, slip; totter, fall.” Swedish has lauwine. The same form existed in Old High German but has been ousted by Lawine. A noun like this must have been coined by those who often watched masses of rapidly descending snow and gave this phenomenon a name.

Cicero and the Goths

According to a brief comment, Cicero predates the Goths. Why? Cicero lived in the first century BCE, while the Goths were noticed by Roman historians in the first century CE. Surely, unbeknownst to each other, the Goths as an identifiable tribe were at least as old as Cicero. We don’t know whether they spoke a language nearly identical to the one that has come down to us (Bishop Wulfila’s fourth-century Gothic), but this is beside the point.

Cicero and the Goths, near-contemporaries. Cicero from Master Builder: Monuments of Classical Antiquity, Vol. 1. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. “Grande Ludovisi” sarcophagus, Roman artwork, ca. 251/252 CE. Jastrow, public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

How many English words spelled as fret are there?

In my blog on eat, I mentioned fret “to gnaw,” fret “to adorn,” and fret “a wooden bar used in some stringed instruments.” But if we take into account the noun fret with some general meaning “a wearing away, abrasion, etc.,” then we’ll end up with a sizable list of  words, all sounding as fret: “chafing, as in the folds of the skin of fat children,” “herpes, tetter,” “the agitation of a the surface of a fluid, as when fermenting, or boiling (hence rippling on the surfaces of water)”; “a flurry; a glass composition, compounded of silica, lime, soda, etc.”  (The definitions have been adapted from The Century Dictionary). The common denominator is obviously “to gnaw; to wear away.”

Rum and its lookalikes

On October 6, 2010, I wrote a post on the etymology of the word rum. A question from a reader made me return to it. As usual, I discovered that some comments had appeared there much later. May I repeat that those who are kind enough to add something to an old essay should write the additions after the most recent post, for how else can I know that those additions have been made? Incidentally, this is Post 726, for the blog “The Oxford Etymologist” came into existence on March 1, 2006 and is approaching it fourteenth anniversary. Obviously, for each set of the “gleanings” I look only through the posts of the previous month.

Anyway, is dram “a small draught (draft) of liquor” related to rum? No, it is not.  The word refers to 1/8 fluid ounce and goes back to Old French drame or Medieval Latin dram, a variant of drachma, ultimately from Greek.

Hog on ice again

Words connected with games are often hopelessly obscure. In the previous set of gleanings (November 2019), I discussed the origin of the American idiom as independent as a hog on ice. The image seems to go back to the game of curling. Our correspondent writes: “Cochon ‘pig’ is the French for the little ball with which players of the game of boules or petanque in turn try to strike a large ball.” Another idea from the same correspondent seems to take us away from pigs, but, strangely, not from animals: “a puck (phonetically close to pig) is the object which players in hockey or ice hockey try to shoot into the opposite goal.” Some sources identify this puck with Puck “goblin”; others derive it from a variant of the verb poke. Our correspondent continues: “Could this word connect with a pig’s palpable unlovability,” so that thwacking it affords pleasure to the players? In the letter, those are called wild guesses. The similarity between pig and puck looks fortuitous, but the French term, as compared with hog on ice, is suggestive, is it not?

Stability amidst change

From NEWS SERVICE:

“…the kingdom’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, whom U.S. and other Western intelligence agencies have concluded ordered the killing.” American English keeps changing at full speed, but the confusion of who and whom has remained stable for a very long time.

Featured image credit: Fog Over the Sea by Tom Mrazek. CC-BY-2.0 via Flickr. Image has been cropped and flipped horizontally.

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A Job I Never Expected

In her late eighties, my mother begins to lose her grip. Checks bounce. Bills are misplaced and go unpaid. Bottles of Grey Goose vodka appear more frequently in her recycling bin. Afraid for her safety, friends begin putting her in a cab after they finish playing bridge. Soon she is dropped from the group. Jackie is at the beginning of both vascular dementia and alcohol dementia. In the late spring of 2017, my siblings and I decide to move her against her will into Tuscan Gardens residential care facility in Venice, Florida. It’s a clever, stealthy, risky scheme. To our great surprise, it works.

Caring for my mother is like having another job. As her Power of Attorney when she became demented, I had to make decisions that I thought were in her best interests even as she fought me every step of the way. I don’t recommend applying for it, but if you are an aging child of an aged parent, the job will likely seek you out. The job posting might look like this:

Qualifications 

The successful candidate will:

Serve as Durable Power of AttorneyBe of sound mind and body and reasonably competent in the midst of unreasonable circumstances

Job description: 

Decide when and how much to intervene as your mother becomes compromised.Work with physicians and caregivers to devise safe and respectful systems of care.Combine respect and firmnessBecome aware that you will revert to painful patterns of emotion from your childhood.Manage the fear and anxiety and the resentment provoked by your mother’s rage, denial, confusion and fluctuating competency.Confront her when checks start to bounce, bills get misplaced, and she spends hundreds of dollars monthly on payment to nonprofit solicitations.Learn to make decisions about finances, driving, household maintenance and repairs, competence, home health care, residential care, long term care, etc.Work with your siblings to create—when possible—consensus about major decisions.Remember that your mother’s well-being is primary and that the way you and your siblings care for her is the model your children will have when it becomes their turn to care for you.

The above job description contains many of the core issues and challenges that sneak up and surprise aging children of old parents. We never imagine that so much of our own aging will be devoted to caring for our frail or demented or dying parents. Even though there is increasing public awareness of the aging of the aging population and its health problems, there is no training for this job, whose burden generally falls most heavily on women and especially women in families with limited financial resources.

Why so many memoirs written about caring for elderly parents?  Each experience is new, filled with unique intergenerational challenges, exhausting, and confusing. When siblings are involved, there is often conflict that brings out the worst in them–unresolved fear, competition, resentment toward mother and toward each other. Some of our best writers, as well as ordinary people, find the need to write about this experience. Writing is a way of making sense of things that cannot be predicted or controlled, e.g. forms of dementia with its uncertain and relentless progression; or decisions about care of the dying for which people are not prepared and haven’t thought about in advance.  Among the most memorable works I have read on this topic are: Philip Roth’s Patrimony, Roz Chast’s Why Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant?; and Eleanor Fuchs’, Making an Exit: A Mother-Daughter Drama with Alzheimer’s, Machine Tools, and Laughter. These vivid and powerful works take us through humor and beauty as well as the heartbreak and shame. They can help us begin to understand and prepare for these challenges on our own lives.

For readers looking into these issues, I suggest Louise Aronson’s magisterial Elderhood, the richest and most comprehensive source for understanding heathcare for, as well as broad social and historical aspects of, aging and old age. As geriatrician she shares harrowing case studies of elderly people who have been misdiagnosed or mistreated by medical professionals. She also examines the ways an ageist modern society and the medical community and its depersonalized treatment protocols continue to fail elderly patients. Along the way, Aronson also shares her own struggle to care for her aging father, who throughout his mid-seventies to his mid-eighties suffered from a heart attack, a knee replacement, cardiac bypass surgery, pneumonia, an allergic reaction, a bladder infection, orthopedic surgery, and other ailments.

My mother’s dementia has progressed to the point where she needs more help. We have moved “memory care” unit at her facility.  Our family is privileged to have long-term care insurance and other resources to ensure that she will be well cared for.  Things now are stable, even as my siblings and I anticipate the next stage of her decline. We have set up guidelines and directives to care for her if we are unable to there with her as she dies. Even though I think I am doing a “good job” in caring for my mother, none of it eliminates the confusion, the ongoing sadness and grief that infuses my experience of caring for her, which is far from over.

Feature image by Dominik Lange via Unsplash

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