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Before Northanger Abbey: Jane Austen and “Susan”

Before Northanger Abbey: Jane Austen and “Susan”

With hindsight, it’s hard to imagine a more spectacular publishing flub than the rejection of Pride and Prejudice in its first version (working title “First Impressions”) in 1797. True, Jane Austen was at that point a complete unknown, and it was ambitious of her father George to offer the manuscript to Thomas Cadell of The Strand, proprietor of one of the fanciest firms in the business. “First Impressions” may have been quite unlike the published text of 1813 (for one thing, it was probably about 20% longer), and of course Pride and Prejudice was not to attain bestseller status until decades later. Even so, Cadell now looks to have been a little hasty. “Declined by return of post,” he scrawled on George Austen’s letter, though at least he took the trouble to archive it. An Austen relative bought the letter back in 1840.

A more complex and mysterious story surrounds Northanger Abbey (“Susan” in its original form), though interesting new evidence continues to emerge. This novel didn’t appear in print until after Austen’s death in 1817, prefaced by a terse notice in which she describes selling the book years earlier, in 1803, to a publisher who advertised it as forthcoming but went no further. “That any bookseller should think it worthwhile to purchase what he did not think it worthwhile to publish seems extraordinary,” Austen writes with a flourish of acerbic Johnsonese. The paradoxical result—for a work satirizing the vagaries of fashion in everything from Gothic spine-chillers (“Oh! the dreadful black veil!”) to must-have fabrics (“coquelicot ribbons instead of green”)—is that the world represented in Northanger Abbey was already a thing of the past. Explanatory notes are useful for twenty-first century readers but they may even have been useful then.

We learn more from Austen’s surviving letters. The publisher in question was the mid-market London firm of Crosby & Co., whose proprietor, Benjamin Crosby, had published William Godwin’s radical novel Caleb Williams in the 1790s, and was now expanding his fiction list to become the fourth most prolific publisher of novels between 1800 and 1809. Crosby paid £10, as much as a debut author could expect, but this was small potatoes alongside the handsome numbers commanded by big names like Ann Radcliffe (£800 for The Italian in 1797) or Maria Edgeworth (a prodigious £2,100 for Patronage in 1813). Then, as Austen says, he went ahead and advertised “Susan”.

But how seriously—how hard—was Crosby trying? A first advertisement was discovered by the great Austen scholar R.W. Chapman, who in his Clarendon Press edition of 1923 reported, from an obscure 1803 miscellany, a listing of “Susan” as forthcoming alongside several other “New and Useful Books Published by B. Crosby & Co.” That was the sum of knowledge until a Review of English Studies article of 2006, in which Anthony Mandal turned up the first known newspaper ad, in the Dorchester and Sherborne Journal, again listing “Susan” as “In the Press.” A third ad was reported by Margie Burns in the journal Persuasions in 2017: enough to confirm Austen’s belief that Crosby had indeed advertised the work, but all told, there is precious little to show for a century of trying. But then comes a beautiful instance of the way searchable full-text databases can now transform research, eclipsing decades of archival eyestrain with a few well-aimed keystrokes. The tally of known ads for “Susan” now stands at ten, seven of them, all from newspapers, first reported by Burns in a 2021 book. Again, these are all omnibus ads mentioning the forthcoming “Susan” alongside other Crosby wares such as The Mysterious Count, The Dangers of Credulity, and The Three Monks!!!, all of which appeared in 1803. Taken together, they show beyond question that for several months, Crosby genuinely intended to publish “Susan,” and was keen to promote the novel nationwide, beyond his core metropolitan market. One ad was in Austen’s local Hampshire Chronicle; others came out in Derby, Hull, Northampton, and Stamford, as well as in London. Newspaper survival rates are very low; there were no doubt further ads.

What made Crosby change his mind? Several theories have been floated, some of them based on the idea (plausible in itself) that it took Crosby several months to realise what a feisty, barbed satire he had on his hands. For the pioneering feminist Rebecca West in 1932, Northanger Abbey was a work that put “the institutions of society regarding women through the most gruelling criticism they have ever received,” and the last thing Crosby wanted to do was upset the respectable types who bought his books. Then there’s the widely touted theory that, with Gothic fiction prominent in his list, he couldn’t afford to publish a satire ridiculing Gothic fiction.

The likelihood is that Austen was just the victim of unlucky timing.

Over the years, however, Crosby was willing enough to publish oppositional fiction (witness Caleb Williams, a novel so politically charged that its author feared arrest), and he was no less willing to publish spoofs of the Gothic: witness The Three Monks!!!, an arch, mildly risqué tale about absent crusaders, randy friars, and bored ladies who “were always disposed to receive extremely well, the godly men who came to amuse them.” The most persuasive explanation is that of Mandal, who points to Crosby’s escalating business woes at the time of the “Susan” ads. The likelihood is that Austen was just the victim of unlucky timing as Crosby became risk-averse and retrenched for a year or two. His troubles soon eased, but by then, in the fast-moving world of literary fashion, he was looking for new acquisitions; “Susan” was already ancient history.

Austen seems to have waited and waited, but her patience snapped in 1809, the year newspaper ads for another novel titled “Susan” began to appear. Determined by now to retrieve her manuscript and publishing rights, she wrote to Crosby & Co. under the pseudonym Mrs Ashton Dennis, thereby teeing up an eloquent sign-off: “I am Gentlemen &c &c | MAD.” All she received in reply was an unpleasant letter from Crosby’s son, offering to sell back the manuscript but also threatening legal action should she publish elsewhere without paying. In the end, Austen was not to recover the manuscript until 1816, when she set about revising it (renaming her heroine in the process) while more or less simultaneously drafting Persuasion. The novels were posthumously published together as a four-volume set, marked, fortuitously or not, by an almost palindromic structure. Departing from Austen’s trademark rural setting (“such pictures of domestic Life in Country Villages as I deal in”), the framing volumes—the first of Northanger Abbey, the second of Persuasion—turn their satirical gaze instead on shark-infested Bath. With the unfinished Sanditon, they herald the more urban novelist that Austen might have become had she lived.

So, what about the other Susan, the one that made it into print in 1809, concerning a heroine confined on a Hebridean island for part of the action? Austen almost certainly saw the novel advertised (it was, the ads declared, distinguished by its “unity of interest and elegant simplicity”) and she may even have read it. If so, the simplicity would have struck her more than the interest. There were of course plenty of the usual novelistic incidents, as the Monthly Review wearily acknowledged: “a prodigious number of fevers, together with several faintings, two duels, and one or two deaths.” It just didn’t quite seem worth keeping count.

Featured Image: ‘Northanger Persuasion Title Page’ by Jane Austen, Lilly Library, Indiana University via Wikimedia Commons. [Public Domain]

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Remembering Gresford

Remembering Gresford

Today, 22 September, marks the 90th anniversary of the Gresford mining disaster. To this day, the bodies of 253 miners remain in the pit underground below Wrexham. In 1934, the industry was rocked by the inquest into the disaster where accusations of forged documents, preventable deaths, and inadequate safety protocols were highlighted, echoing contemporary inquiries into disasters, such as the damning inquest into Grenfell which was published earlier this month. Nowadays, the disaster is remembered as a poignant moment in Welsh history.

In 1934, 266 men and boys perished when coal dust caught alight, causing an enormous explosion in the works of the Gresford mine. After several rescue workers died attempting to reach men trapped by the blast, it was decided that the pits should be sealed: nobody was left alive. The bodies of the vast majority of the men were not recovered.

For the families of the dead, this meant that they had no body to bury.  Henry Walker, Chief Inspector of Mines 1924-1938, explained to the families that recovering the bodies would be too difficult. Speaking to the family of John Clapper, who had worked close to the coal face where the explosion happened, he explained that he would have been blown to pieces, telling the family ‘I’m not going to get any [bodies]. I’d rather let it be their grave.’

For families of the dead, this meant that they had no body to bury.

The decision not to rescue bodies from the Gresford pit was a highly unpopular decision among the families of the men who were entombed, who lobbied officials to try and force them to retrieve the bodies of the dead. Some of the Gresford widows protested at conferences set up to discuss the remains, in which the bereaved had no official say, demanding news and making their own views known. One woman wrote to request the body of her brother be brought up, saying ‘the shock may be over with some people but it is not over in my home.’ This lack of bodies had a marked impact on the victims’ families. One widow explained ‘it was awful… you can’t describe it… it was so terrible… they didn’t have a chance of getting him home. It was awful, awful… his name’s on the stone in the cemetery… me Mother and my little girl are there, but my husband isn’t, only his name.’

At the disaster’s inquiry, Stafford Cripps, a former barrister turned Labour MP, questioned the colliery managers and delivered a resounding closing statement which blamed managers for preventable deaths, finding that they had forged documents after the explosion. The mining company was only convicted of inadequate record keeping. This ruling was met with contempt by the press and public.

Roger Laidlaw has charted the cultural memory of the Gresford disaster, arguing that it transformed from a bitter argument over how the disaster began, to a memory which glossed over this important part of workplace history. Yet this was not enough to cement the memory of Gresford as one where the colliery managers were proven to be in the wrong—and the disaster as a tragedy, without political edge, is the story which had dominated by the 1990s and remains to this day. When the pit closed in 1973, the only part left standing was the pithead which was to act as a monument to the entombed men. Following a grassroots campaign, led by the sister of one of the dead, this was officially recognised as a public memorial in 1982.

In the last couple of years, the memory of Gresford has once again become increasingly popularised, with a new global audience exposed by the Disney+ show Welcome to Wrexham. A 2023 episode focused solely on the Gresford disaster. It linked the football club, Wrexham AFC, to the disaster, as some men were working an extra shift in order to watch a home match when the disaster occurred. Now, the Wrexham AFC football shirts have the year of the disaster, 1934, on them. The new owners of the club are trying to create a fresh memorial outside a planned football stand, by moving a pit wheel to the new stand, mimicking the pithead memorial created by families of the dead in 1982.

For the 90th anniversary, a host of commemorative events, from the performance of a new opera through to remembrance services and a candle lighting vigil, have taken place.

Featured image by Llywelyn2000 via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

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Figleaves: 5 examples of concealed speech

Figleaves: 5 examples of concealed speech

In art, a figleaf is used to barely cover something one isn’t supposed to show in public. I use the term ‘figleaf’ for utterances (and sometimes pictures, or other things) which barely cover for speech of a sort one isn’t supposed to openly engage in.

When someone says “I’m not a racist but…” and then goes on to say something very racist, they are trying to use this first phrase as a figleaf—to convince the audience that even though they might seem racist they really aren’t. For many people, this figleaf won’t succeed. But for others, it will—convincing them that maybe it isn’t so racist after all. And this is why figleaves are so important and dangerous: they have the potential to shift our standards, helping to normalise what was once beyond the pale.

Donald Trump is a big user of figleaves, and it’s through reflecting on Trump’s speech that I began to understand their workings. However, this is not just a Trump phenomenon.

1. “I’m not a racist”

Two classic figleaves are “I’m not a racist” and “I have a Black friend”. These can be used at the same time as the racist utterance, or later to cover up for it. The reason these work is that many white people subscribe to a very restrictive view of what racism is: they think that a racist must be someone who is proudly and intentionally discriminatory toward all members of the group they take to be biologically inferior—the paradigm case here is something like a hood-wearing Klan member. A person like that surely wouldn’t have a Black friend or deny their racism.

2. “This doesn’t apply to everyone”

Trump launched his campaign with a speech in which he called Mexicans rapists, but added on “and some, I assume, are good people”. For many people, this won’t work at all—it seems like a bad faith addition to obvious racism. For others, it’s not needed: they are happy to see an obviously racist remark. But crucially, there is also a persuadable group: these people don’t want to support a racist, but are willing to be convinced that the utterance isn’t racist. If they are like many white people, they will think that racists must believe in the biological inferiority of racial groups. Someone like that wouldn’t add on the assumption that Mexicans are good people so for this persuadable group, the figleaf works: it makes them think Trump might not be racist after all. And it can even make them think that it’s not racist to call Mexicans rapists.

3. “Only temporarily”

When Trump called for a ban on Muslims entering the United States, he also used a figleaf: he said the ban was meant to be in force only “until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on”. This is also a figleaf, and it works on those who think that a racist would discriminate against all members of a group forever, rather than calling for a temporary ban. In fact, temporariness is rather an interesting broad-spectrum figleaf. We see Trump using it again, more recently, as he insists that if elected he will only be a dictator for one day. The idea here is that a real dictator would not be satisfied with this.

4. “Others say”

Another broad-spectrum figleaf is to report what “others” have said. This can be a way of introducing racist content without having to be held responsible for it: it’s not necessarily racist to report a racist utterance from somebody else. This can also be used to spread wildly conspiracist claims.  A person who would feel hesitant sharing a post asserting that Bill Gates uses vaccines to monitor people’s locations might feel more comfortable sharing posts that merely assert other people are saying he’s doing this.

This technique is nothing new. British fascist Enoch Powell used this technique in his infamous Rivers of Blood Speech, when he described a constituent (a “quite ordinary working man”) saying “In this country in 15 or 20 years’ time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man”. In so doing, Powell placed some of the vilest racist rhetoric from his speech in the mouth of someone else.

5. “I’m only asking”

Another favorite figleaf for conspiracy theorists is to insist that they’re just asking questions. After all, one does not need to know that something is true in order to ask a question about it. And the person who pushes back on this can be accused of not really seeking the truth. Joe Rogan, a prolific user of figleaves, combines several in this utterance (figleaves highlighted):

This doctor was saying Ivermectin is 99 percent effective in treating Covid, but you don’t hear about it because you can’t fund vaccines when it’s an effective treatment,” he says on his podcast. “I don’t know if this guy is right or wrong. I’m just asking questions.”

An insidious all-purpose fig leaf, the standard of evidence required to ask a question is very low, and one doesn’t have to take on responsibility for asserting something. One can “ask questions” about immigrants stealing jobs, or scrounging from the state, or committing crimes. One can “ask questions” about the dangers of trans people. And one can do all of these without having to show that there’s any reason to believe these questions deserve to be entertained.

Featured image: © Pro Symbols/Shutterstock.com; THP Creative/Shutterstock.com

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The horseshoe theory in practice: How Russia and China became fascist states

The horseshoe theory in practice: How Russia and China became fascist states

Three-quarters of a century after the destruction of the fascist regimes that threatened to extinguish freedom during World War II, fascism is back and again a threat to the world’s democracies. The irony is that this new fascist threat comes from two powers whose histories as communist societies presumably distanced them as far as possible from fascism: Russia and China.

The self-proclaimed communist regimes founded respectively in Russia in 1917 and in China in 1949 in practice were Marxist dictatorships that after using massive and brutal force to overhaul the societies they controlled, claimed to have established socialism and thereby created the basis for building communism. As the Soviet Union, the world’s first such state, Russia in the 1970s reached what its ruling Communist Party called “developed socialism,” theoretically a stage enroute to communism. Instead, Soviet socialism stagnated and then collapsed, along with the Soviet Union itself, in 1991. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) tried and failed to outdo the Soviet Union in the late 1950s and again in the mid-1960s with its notorious efforts—the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution––to transition ultra-rapidly from socialism to full-fledged communism, but the regime itself survived these debacles. Its ruling Communist Party (CCP) ultimately had to settle for what it currently calls “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” or, oxymoronically, “market socialism.”

Definitions of fascism vary, but its key features are an authoritarian state headed by a dictator, a belligerent racial nationalism, and a capitalistic economy subject to strict state control known as state capitalism. Many experts with good reason maintain that since the rise of Vladimir Putin, post-Soviet Russia has become a fascist state. Despite continued CCP rule and claims of “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” the same has been said about China, even though China specialists remain more reluctant to apply what some of them call the “F-word” to China. The problem for those reluctant to use the “F-word” to describe current Russia and China is that conditions in both countries in the late 20th and early 21st centuries did not match conditions that had produced fascism in the past, raising the question of what exactly caused those two countries to become fascist. The answer, although complex, ultimately comes down to one word: communism.

To understand why, we must turn to the horseshoe theory, which postulates that political similarities and differences should be viewed not as points on a straight line but rather as places on a horseshoe. In the conventional linear political model, communism and fascism are opposites, lying respectively at the extreme far-left and far-right ends of the spectrum. The twain can never meet. In the horseshoe model, however, free political systems are at or near the horseshoe’s center and the most extreme and unfree ones are at or near its ends. Communism and fascism therefore are close to each other—with much more in common than the former has to the moderate left or the latter to the moderate right—a quality revealed by their respective locations at the far left and right ends of the horseshoe that curve toward each other. Far from being unable to meet, the twain are positioned face to face.

The horseshoe perspective has been criticized on the grounds that communism and fascism have radically different visions of how society should be organized and appeal to different social classes. While this may be true, it misses the point. What matters is not the type of presumably perfect society they advocate for or to whom either vision appeals but rather what must be destroyed to achieve these millennial goals. And that is civil society, the vast array of institutions and organizations independent of the state upon which democracy and free-market capitalism are based, precisely what was destroyed in both Russia and China under communist rule.

The fact that civil society was destroyed in Russia and China under communism also explains why fascism as it evolved subsequently in those two countries did not have to be revolutionary—that is, it was not necessary to destroy the old order and remake society––a characteristic many scholars maintain is an essential component of fascism. By carrying out their revolutions, Russian and Chinese communists already had completed that key part of building fascism.

What the horseshoe posited in theory has happened in practice

In Russia the destruction of civil society, which had been developing in tsarist Russia since the early 19th century, began immediately after the Bolshevik seizure of power in November 1917 under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin and was almost completed by Lenin’s death in 1924. What little remained was obliterated when Joseph Stalin’s industrialization drive and purges turned the Soviet Union into a totalitarian society. Not until Mikhail Gorbachev’s ill-fated attempt between 1985 and 1991 to save the Soviet system by making it less politically dictatorial and more economically productive could some seeds of civil society again begin to sprout. But those fragile seeds could not flourish in the societal desert Soviet communism had left behind in Russia, as became clear in the immediate post-Soviet years during Boris Yeltsin’s presidency. The only organized forces that had survived Soviet communism were the KGB, albeit with a new name, and organized crime, and within a decade after coming to power Vladimir Putin cooped that criminality and used his renovated version of the Soviet security and secret police apparatus to build the fascist Russian state we see today.

In China the path from communism to fascism was more direct. As in Russia, the destruction of civil society––which existed albeit in limited form and under difficult conditions under the undemocratic but non-totalitarian Nationalist regime––also took place under communism, in this case beginning in October 1949 under the leadership of Mao Zedong. Under Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970s, the Chinese Communist Party implemented reforms to China’s socialist economy that initially involved small concessions to capitalist enterprise. As this policy succeeded, it was expanded until China’s socialist economy was dismantled and replaced by a tightly controlled state-capitalist economy, the exact type one finds in fascist societies. Meanwhile, the CCP reinforced its totalitarian, one-party dictatorship. But by replacing China’s socialist economy with a form of state capitalism—in effect, capitalism with Chinese characteristics, which some experts have dubbed “party-state” capitalism—Deng and his successors inadvertently removed the most important factor that distinguishes communism from fascism. Meanwhile, the CCP leadership, without admitting what it had done, understood that having abandoned socialism and its promise of equality it needed something new to legitimize the party’s dictatorship, a problem made dramatically clear by the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations. Massive, brutal repression, which crushed the demonstrations, was not enough.

The good news for the CCP was that what was needed was close at hand, as Chinese Marxism from the beginning featured a strong nationalist component. Therefore, within a year of Tiananmen Square, the CCP already was promoting a militant, anti-Western Chinese nationalism. As a group of CCP intellectuals warned in 1991, the party had to stress the “Chineseness” of the regime by “uniting Marxism with Chinese reality” lest the CCP “establish the Chinese value system on a dry stream bed, on a trunkless tree.” The result, as we see under Xi Jinping, is a militant, expansionist nationalism deeply hostile to Western democracy that, as with Russian nationalism under Putin, is indistinguishable from fascist nationalism.

Russia and China crossed the narrow horseshoe space between communism and fascism differently, but what matters is that they did it. What the horseshoe posited in theory has happened in practice. And it happened in the world’s two signature communist powers, the ones that mattered most. To communism’s (or Marxist socialism’s) horrific record of economic failure, totalitarian tyranny, and death on a genocidal scale must now be added another grim legacy: fascism.

Featured image by Oleg Moroz via Unsplash.

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Not everything is hunky-dory, and why should it be?

Not everything is hunky-dory, and why should it be?

A sword does not cut a repentant head.
Image by ” Breizh Clichés “ via Pexels. Public domain.

First of all, let me apologize for the egregious typo I made in the previous post in Ernest Weekley’s name. This is what comes of being too devoted to every line of Oscar Wilde and his comedy The Importance of Being Earnest. On the other hand, mistakes, not necessarily such shameful ones, may be a blessing in disguise. I sometimes receive no comments or questions for weeks. But God forbid if I write something wrong! It turns out that my readership is not only rather large but also wide awake. The terrible typo caught my eye the minute the post appeared, but it was too late to correct it in the email our subscribers received. My only hope for redemption is that a fault confessed is half-redressed, or a sin confessed is half-forgiven. According to a Russian saying, the sword doesn’t cut a repentant head (see the image!).

Allow me now to go on with my intended subject. I often say that I read newspapers with an etymologist’s eye. Every time I see words like zonk out or prissy, I look up their history, and the result is invariably the same: “Origin unknown.” I am gradually coming to the realization of the fact that most recent words belong to this group. Not long ago, I came across the noun hunks “miser” (of course, not in a newspaper!). Though I had been familiar with the word for years, I consulted a dictionary, to discover where it came from. The sources assured me that no one can tell. Nor can I provide the sought-for answer. Yet I have a vague idea, and sharing it may be of some use.

Limping. This is where today’s story seems to begin
Image by Vasily Kleymenov via Pexels.

My road to hunk begins with the German verb hinken “to limp” (Old English had hincettan, the same meaning). The relation between hink– and hunk– is the same as between English sink and sunk (ablaut). In older German, hancen also existed. The northern German noun hanke “hind leg of a horse” belongs here too. Itmigrated to French and returned to English in the form haunch. All kinds of legs and bones will reemerge below. When you squat on your haunches, you hunker down. (By contrast, when you collude with your buddies, you bunker down. Some time ago, bunker down swept the pages of newspapers. Presidents and foreign ministers never met: they invariably bunkered down, and I always thought of them as hiding in some basement or bunker for secret negotiations. Bunker, I am sorry to report, is also a word of uncertain origin.)

Strangely, several English words ending in –unk refer to unpleasant things, lack secure cognates, and provide no or almost no clues to their origin. Such are junk, punk, funk, and spunk. Long ago, I touched on the history of punk (see the post for July 4, 2012: “Real ‘spunk’”). Even bunk “sleeping berth” and bunk “to make off,” which evoke no negative associations, are obscure. Talk bunkum goes back to a well-known situation. A member of Congress could not be made to stop speaking because, according to him, he was bound to make a speech for Buncombe. The story may be true, but the idiom would hardly have stayed if not for the way Bunkum sounds. It is usually hard to explain, let alone to prove, why a certain combination of sounds (English –unk, for example) evokes symbolic associations. Yet, when the origin of a word is unclear, a guess in this direction may be worth the trouble.

I am returning to hunk, which seems to have an obvious connection with German hinken and its likes elsewhere in Germanic, including Old English. The root hunk, I suspect, was coined to refer to unsteady movement (to repeat: hinken means “to limp”). In this blog, I sometimes refer to Hensleigh Wedgwood, the main etymologist of the pre-Skeat era. His constant references to sound imitation ruined many of his hypotheses, but he had the rare knack of ferreting out cognates and similar-sounding words in various languages that sometimes made even his shakiest solutions worthy of consideration. English and German are of course related! I would like to quote Wedgwood’s comment on hump. “The immediate origin seems the notion of a projection, a modification of form which may either be regarded as traced by ‘a jogging motion, or as giving a jolt to those who pass over it,’ for a jolting movement is represented by the figure of a rattling sound or broken utterance.” He added English hobble ~ hob, hub, and Low German humpeln “to limp” (again “to limp”!), and hunch to his examples. Hunk, the object of this essay, seems to be in some general way related to hump because, from a phonetic point of view, the consonant groups –mp and –nk are non-identical twins: –mp is articulated on the lips, while –nk is its guttural counterpart. A hunchback, it will be remembered, is someone with a hump.

Hunch, a doublet of hunk, did once mean “to thrust, shove.” According to the common opinion, hunch is a word of unknown origin, but both it and hunk are akin to hinch “to push” and thus, directly to German hinken. Hinch and hunch are related to each other and to hinken ~ hincettan. The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology notes that hunch and hincettan do not agree in sense, but I have a hunch that Wedgwood was right and that some sort of unsteady movement underlies the idea of the entire small group.

Harpagon, a classic hunks.
Image via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

We began our journey with hunks “miser.” This word is sometimes provisionally traced to the verb hang. Its affiliation with hinken and the rest seems much more obvious. A hunks might be a pushful individual. Once he amassed a fortune, he became a miser. Likewise, a curmudgeon was initially an ill-tempered man, and only later, usage turned him into a skinflint. The plural ending in hunks is typical. I discussed it at some length in the post for June 14, 2023 (the origin of buddy). This s, discernible in Boots, digs, and so forth, is always emphatic. However, an elaborate semantic reconstruction of hunks may not even be necessary. Here are a few lookalikes of hunks: Scottish hunk “a sluttish, indolent woman,” Low (= northern) German Hunke “a bone with all the meat gnawed off” (see the image in the header!), another German dialectal word Hunke–bunk “an emaciated man; a bad horse” (a jocular rhyming formation), and a few others (some of those examples were collected by Francis A. Wood, a distinguished etymologist of the age gone by). Not a love of money but low status is the central motif of this group.

Hunk seems to have emerged with reference to all kinds of inferior objects, and later, the name was transferred to despised individuals. English “miser” is only one of such senses. Of course, a hunks is more despicable than a hunk. (This is what is called grammatical stylistics.) The origin of words like hunk can probably be understood only while examining the entire family of similar etymological outcasts: a bird’s-eye view of the whole group will yield more promising results than a careful examination of each individual item. The words, mentioned above, were recorded in English late, even though some of their cognates are old. It of course remains unclear to what extent all of them are native and sound-imitative or sound-symbolic.

Featured image via PickPik. Public domain.

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Not everything is hunky-dory, and why should it?

Not everything is hunky-dory, and why should it?

A sword does not cut a repentant head.
Image by ” Breizh Clichés “ via Pexels. Public domain.

First of all, let me apologize for the egregious typo I made in the previous post in Ernest Weekley’s name. This is what comes of being too devoted to every line of Oscar Wilde and his comedy The Importance of Being Earnest. On the other hand, mistakes, not necessarily such shameful ones, may be a blessing in disguise. I sometimes receive no comments or questions for weeks. But God forbid if I write something wrong! It turns out that my readership is not only rather large but also wide awake. The terrible typo caught my eye the minute the post appeared, but it was too late to correct it in the email our subscribers received. My only hope for redemption is that a fault confessed is half-redressed, or a sin confessed is half-forgiven. According to a Russian saying, the sword doesn’t cut a repentant head (see the image!).

Allow me now to go on with my intended subject. I often say that I read newspapers with an etymologist’s eye. Every time I see words like zonk out or prissy, I look up their history, and the result is invariably the same: “Origin unknown.” I am gradually coming to the realization of the fact that most recent words belong to this group. Not long ago, I came across the noun hunks “miser” (of course, not in a newspaper!). Though I had been familiar with the word for years, I consulted a dictionary, to discover where it came from. The sources assured me that no one can tell. Nor can I provide the sought-for answer. Yet I have a vague idea, and sharing it may be of some use.

Limping. This is where today’s story seems to begin
Image by Vasily Kleymenov via Pexels.

My road to hunk begins with the German verb hinken “to limp” (Old English had hincettan, the same meaning). The relation between hink– and hunk– is the same as between English sink and sunk (ablaut). In older German, hancen also existed. The northern German noun hanke “hind leg of a horse” belongs here too. Itmigrated to French and returned to English in the form haunch. All kinds of legs and bones will reemerge below. When you squat on your haunches, you hunker down. (By contrast, when you collude with your buddies, you bunker down. Some time ago, bunker down swept the pages of newspapers. Presidents and foreign ministers never met: they invariably bunkered down, and I always thought of them as hiding in some basement or bunker for secret negotiations. Bunker, I am sorry to report, is also a word of uncertain origin.)

Strangely, several English words ending in –unk refer to unpleasant things, lack secure cognates, and provide no or almost no clues to their origin. Such are junk, punk, funk, and spunk. Long ago, I touched on the history of punk (see the post for July 4, 2012: “Real ‘spunk’”). Even bunk “sleeping berth” and bunk “to make off,” which evoke no negative associations, are obscure. Talk bunkum goes back to a well-known situation. A member of Congress could not be made to stop speaking because, according to him, he was bound to make a speech for Buncombe. The story may be true, but the idiom would hardly have stayed if not for the way Bunkum sounds. It is usually hard to explain, let alone to prove, why a certain combination of sounds (English –unk, for example) evokes symbolic associations. Yet, when the origin of a word is unclear, a guess in this direction may be worth the trouble.

I am returning to hunk, which seems to have an obvious connection with German hinken and its likes elsewhere in Germanic, including Old English. The root hunk, I suspect, was coined to refer to unsteady movement (to repeat: hinken means “to limp”). In this blog, I sometimes refer to Hensleigh Wedgwood, the main etymologist of the pre-Skeat era. His constant references to sound imitation ruined many of his hypotheses, but he had the rare knack of ferreting out cognates and similar-sounding words in various languages that sometimes made even his shakiest solutions worthy of consideration. English and German are of course related! I would like to quote Wedgwood’s comment on hump. “The immediate origin seems the notion of a projection, a modification of form which may either be regarded as traced by ‘a jogging motion, or as giving a jolt to those who pass over it,’ for a jolting movement is represented by the figure of a rattling sound or broken utterance.” He added English hobble ~ hob, hub, and Low German humpeln “to limp” (again “to limp”!), and hunch to his examples. Hunk, the object of this essay, seems to be in some general way related to hump because, from a phonetic point of view, the consonant groups –mp and –nk are non-identical twins: –mp is articulated on the lips, while –nk is its guttural counterpart. A hunchback, it will be remembered, is someone with a hump.

Hunch, a doublet of hunk, did once mean “to thrust, shove.” According to the common opinion, hunch is a word of unknown origin, but both it and hunk are akin to hinch “to push” and thus, directly to German hinken. Hinch and hunch are related to each other and to hinken ~ hincettan. The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology notes that hunch and hincettan do not agree in sense, but I have a hunch that Wedgwood was right and that some sort of unsteady movement underlies the idea of the entire small group.

Harpagon, a classic hunks.
Image via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

We began our journey with hunks “miser.” This word is sometimes provisionally traced to the verb hang. Its affiliation with hinken and the rest seems much more obvious. A hunks might be a pushful individual. Once he amassed a fortune, he became a miser. Likewise, a curmudgeon was initially an ill-tempered man, and only later, usage turned him into a skinflint. The plural ending in hunks is typical. I discussed it at some length in the post for June 14, 2023 (the origin of buddy). This s, discernible in Boots, digs, and so forth, is always emphatic. However, an elaborate semantic reconstruction of hunks may not even be necessary. Here are a few lookalikes of hunks: Scottish hunk “a sluttish, indolent woman,” Low (= northern) German Hunke “a bone with all the meat gnawed off” (see the image in the header!), another German dialectal word Hunke–bunk “an emaciated man; a bad horse” (a jocular rhyming formation), and a few others (some of those examples were collected by Francis A. Wood, a distinguished etymologist of the age gone by). Not a love of money but low status is the central motif of this group.

Hunk seems to have emerged with reference to all kinds of inferior objects, and later, the name was transferred to despised individuals. English “miser” is only one of such senses. Of course, a hunks is more despicable than a hunk. (This is what is called grammatical stylistics.) The origin of words like hunk can probably be understood only while examining the entire family of similar etymological outcasts: a bird’s-eye view of the whole group will yield more promising results than a careful examination of each individual item. The words, mentioned above, were recorded in English late, even though some of their cognates are old. It of course remains unclear to what extent all of them are native and sound-imitative or sound-symbolic.

Featured image via PickPik. Public domain.

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Warsaw Tales: An interview with Olga Tokarczuk

Warsaw Tales: An interview with Olga Tokarczuk

Ever since I first read “Che Guevara” in Olga Tokarczuk’s short story collection Playing Many Drums (2001), I have wanted to translate it. So, when I was asked to compile Warsaw Tales, it was one of the first stories to come to mind—an ideal contribution. The story mentions several easily identifiable places within the city and is set in December 1981, at a specific historical moment when the eyes of the world were on Poland. This was when the comparative freedom of the year in which the free trade union “Solidarity” seemed to have won some political concessions in Poland—and strikes were continuing in an effort to gain more liberty—was abruptly quashed by the imposition of martial law, tanks in the streets, internment, and a dismal period of oppression.

I have always wondered how autobiographical “Che Guevara” is. I knew Olga had studied psychology in Warsaw and originally thought of becoming a psychotherapist, but I’ve heard her jokingly say that when she realized her own mentality was even odder than that of her patients, she decided to be a writer instead! And I was curious about her choice of setting a story in Warsaw, when I know it’s not her favourite place, and she has only ever lived there as a student. So, I was thrilled to be able to ask Olga some questions about it.

ALJ: How much does “Che Guevara” echo your own experience as a student of clinical psychology in Warsaw during the student strikes of 1981? It feels extremely real, as if you lived it to the word, right down to the freezing cold and reading Cortazar.

OT: The whole story is based on my own genuine experience. I didn’t have to exercise my imagination very hard to write it. Nowadays that period in my life seems to me one of the toughest and most futile. It was a time of crisis in Poland, when everything was in deficit, and then the state of martial law that followed the so-called “Summer of Solidarity” crushed all our hopes of change. I also think of the martial law period as a time of collective depression.

In those days I was working as a volunteer at a community psychiatric care centre in the Warsaw district where I was studying clinical psychology. I looked after several patients, including a man whom I called “Che Guevara” in the story, though in reality he had a completely different nickname. I changed it because he was a recognizable figure in the streets of Warsaw and I wanted to make him more anonymous, though I didn’t really succeed.

ALJ: The patients: Che Guevara, Anna, and Igor are each suffering from a condition that isolates them but seems to give them a strange insight that the “healthy” people around them don’t have. Are they based on actual patients, or are they purely metaphors to highlight the strangeness of the reality that the whole country was living through?

OT: I’ve always been curious about other ways of looking at things we regard as obvious, shared experiences. At the time, I was intensely involved with my studies, with clinical cases and actual patients. Almost every day I was busy at the psychiatric hospital, so even my perspective of the political events was rather out of line. Mental illness is a sort of strange mirror that reflects the real world in other dimensions, which are not always realistic. From these different perspectives we can see other truths, other dependencies. I didn’t create these characters to be metaphors, but rather possibilities for alternative worlds that are there, just under our noses. Reality seems to contain other, lesser realities within itself: it’s built like a cluster, budding with possibilities in the same way that mental illness is a different way of perceiving reality.

Olga Tokarczuk
Photograph by Karpati & Zarewicz ZAiKS [Used with permission]

ALJ: The story was published in 2001 but perhaps written earlier. How does it fit into your work? Would you write it differently now? Has it ever come back to your mind?

OT: As this story is based on my own personal experience and did not require any effort of the imagination, I don’t think it could be written any differently. I sometimes go back to it when I arrive in Warsaw and recognize the places I moved about in then—frozen to the marrow, undernourished, and depressed. This story has become a part of my personal life.

ALJ: As a non-Varsovian, who went to university in the city but apart from that hasn’t lived there, what is your feeling about Warsaw? I know you’re a great fan of Bolesław Prus’s The Doll (set in Warsaw), and a great film-goer—what Warsaw-based literature or cinema would you recommend?

OT: I don’t like Warsaw, maybe because of those unpleasant memories from the martial law period, when I happened to be a student. I come from Lower Silesia, and Warsaw is rather an alien country for me. It’s a throbbing, rushing, wealthy city, full of competitiveness and stress, a business and trade centre, the Hongkong of central Europe. Everything that’s important and significant in Poland happens there—in terms of politics, the arts, business, and so on. But it’s not for me.

I’m very fond of the post-war films about Warsaw, about the reconstruction of the capital, because it was thoroughly destroyed, and I think its rebuilding is a sort of miracle, and the whole resurrected city should be a UNESCO world heritage site.

One could write a whole thesis on the cinematography of Warsaw. In the first place I would recommend Roman Polański’s film The Pianist and also Warsaw 44, directed by Jan Komasa, to understand the history of the city. The prewar history of Warsaw is excellently portrayed by the TV series The King of Warsaw, based on the book by Szczepan Twardoch. I also recommend Mr T.,Reverse, Day of the Wacko, the thriller serial Blinded by the Lights, and all the films of Stanisław Bareja, who had an incredible sense of humour.

– Olga Tokarczuk is a Nobel Prize winning Polish writer, her short story “Che Guevara” can be found in the new collection of translated short stories, Warsaw Tales.

Featured image by Suicasmo via Wikimedia Commons [CC BY-SA 4.0]

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Dogwhistles: 10 examples of disguised messages

Dogwhistles: 10 examples of disguised messages

Dogwhistles are one of the most discussed methods for politicians to play on voters’ racial attitudes in a stealthy manner, although they come in handy for manipulation on other topics as well. They take their name from whistles that can be heard by dogs but not by humans. The key to a dogwhistle is this hiding of what’s really going on. Broadly speaking, a dogwhistle is a bit of communication with an interpretation that seems perfectly innocent—but which also does something else. It can send a clear coded message to those in the know—what I call an overt code dogwhistle. Or it can work on its targets without their awareness—what I call a covert effect dogwhistle. Let’s turn to some famous and less famous examples:

1. 88

The number code ‘88’ is a very clear case of an overt code dogwhistle. White supremacists and neo-Nazis often use number codes to communicate with each other, especially (but not only) online. ‘88’ stands for ‘Heil Hitler’ because ‘H’ is the eighth letter of the alphabet. To those not in the know it just looks like a number. And, crucially, it sometimes is. This is why you’d want to know why the person on a dating app is wearing a sweatshirt with ‘88’ on it. It could be the year they graduated. Or it could be something much, much worse.

2. Egg Dumplings

Images can also serve as overt code dogwhistles. In Austria, Nazis will post images of Hitler’s favourite food (Austrian egg dumplings) on his birthday. To one not in the know, they just look like pictures of egg dumplings. But this method of Nazi communication is so well-established that an Austrian policeman received a prison sentence for engaging in it.

3. The Willie Horton Commercial

One of the most infamous examples of a dogwhistle is the Willie Horton commercial, used by George HW Bush in his campaign against Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis in 1988. Created by Republican political mastermind Lee Atwater, this advertisement did not mention race but merely showed the face of William Horton (called ‘Willie’ in the ad), a Black man convicted of murder who had been given a furlough from prison under Massachusetts law. During this furlough, he committed further violent crimes which were described in the ad. Political psychologist Tali Mendelberg studied the ad and found that exposure to it made racially resentful voters more likely to vote for Bush. This effect, however, began to disappear as soon as racial justice campaigner Jesse Jackson called attention to the role of race in the ad. This is what led Mendelberg to argue that this kind of political messaging functioned outside voters’ awareness—once they became aware of it, it didn’t work any more. And that’s what makes it such a clear example of what I call a covert effect dogwhistle—it only has its intended effect if it remains outside awareness. (Mendelberg argues, by the way, that Jackson’s criticism was so effective that Dukakis might well have defeated Bush if the election had been held two weeks later, a sobering thought for those interested in alternative histories.)

4. The Breaking Point Billboard

The Breaking Point billboard from the Brexit campaign very likely works a lot like the Willie Horton ad. It makes no reference to race, thereby conveniently providing deniability. But the one white face in the crowd depicted has been carefully covered, inexplicitly activating the audience’s racial attitudes.

5. Save The Children

Not all dogwhistles are about race, however. They are also very popular with conspiracy theorists, and in particular with devotees of the Q Anon conspiracy theory. This theory holds that a highly placed Washington insider, Q, has been releasing hints online about a vast conspiracy of paedophiles and child abductors and about the efforts to bring them down—including the role of Donald Trump as chief savior. Followers of Q Anon have adopted the slogan “Save the Children”, employing it on T-shirts, signs, and hashtags—much to the dismay of the venerable anti-poverty charity. The fact that this is the name of a mainstream charity but also a coded way for followers of Q to communicate with each other makes this a highly effective overt code dogwhistle.

6. Emojis

Emojis are also used as dogwhistles, and some of them have become especially popular amongst anti-vaccination groups as a means of avoiding content moderation. These include carrots, cake, and pizza emojis to represent vaccinations.

7. Groomers/Grooming

Dogwhistles can vary greatly from country to country. Consider, for example, the idea of grooming. In its mainstream usage, grooming refers to a technique used by pedophiles to gain the trust of their victims. The terms ‘grooming’ and ‘groom’ have become popular dogwhistles in both the US and the UK, though they largely target different groups. In the US (and sometimes the UK), the term ‘groomer’ is used primarily to refer in a derogatory way to LGBTQ people, based on the false and defamatory stereotype that they’re attempting to make children trans or gay. In the UK, the term ‘grooming gang’ is used primarily to perpetuate stereotypes of Pakistani men, referencing some particular cases of child abuse—and ignoring the evidence that such gangs are in fact more likely to be white. In both cases, users of these terms are able to fall back on the claim that they’re concerned about child abuse, rather than about trans people or Pakistani men.

8. Immigration/Immigrant

Another term that can be used as a dogwhistle is ‘immigrant’ or ‘immigration’. We can expect to hear this one a lot. It’s particularly potent because it can dogwhistle so many different things—racism, Islamophobia, anti-Eastern European views, or simply xenophobia. And these shifting possibilities make it especially hard to discuss or object to.

9. George Soros

It can be easy to suppose that the right approach to dogwhistle terms is to simply avoid them. But not all such words are avoidable. Take for example George Soros. He’s a real person who has done a lot of important things that one might wish to discuss. But his name has also become a very widely used anti-Jewish dogwhistle. Much as we might like to avoid using dogwhistles, we can’t simply avoid all discussion of George Soros. (And for Soros himself this would be even more difficult!).

10. Anti-Jewish Art Mural

Importantly, it can sometimes be difficult to discern the intent behind a dogwhistle. Back in 2012, Jeremy Corbyn tweeted his support for an artist whose mural was being removed. When Corbyn was Labour leader in 2018, this became a subject of considerable controversy. The reason was that the mural was filled with classic anti-Jewish dogwhistles: in particular, hook-nosed bankers. As a half-Jewish person who is very interested in dogwhistles, I initially agreed with those who felt there was no way Corbyn could have been unaware of this. I found to my surprise that very large numbers of my friends in the UK did not recognize the anti-Jewish dogwhistles in the mural and were sceptical when I pointed them out. This left me uncertain about whether Corbyn in fact recognized them.

And this is where we sometimes end up with dogwhistles. What is well-known and obvious to some is not at all obvious to others—so it can be difficult to know what the intention was behind the usage of a dogwhistle term or image.

Featured image: © Pro Symbols/Shutterstock.com; THP Creative/Shutterstock.com (used with permission).

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The great Jewish migration from Eastern Europe

The great Jewish migration from Eastern Europe

In 1899 a young Jewish woman published a harrowing account of her journey through Germany in 1894, based on Yiddish letters she had written during the journey. Maryashe (Mary) Antin’s travelogue From Plotzk to Boston stands out as one of the few detailed contemporary descriptions of a migrant journey from the Russian Empire to America.

In the spring of 1894, when she was thirteen years old, Maryashe, together with her mother and sisters, left her hometown of Polotzk in northern Russia to join her father, who had moved to Boston in 1891. The family’s journey resembled that of thousands of other Jews. Usually, a young father would follow an acquaintance or relative, find employment, save sufficient funds, secure housing, and send prepaid tickets to his family. After the tickets arrived in early 1894, Maryashe, her sisters, and her mother embarked on the journey.

At the German border they were denied passage because they did not carry enough cash. But a member of a Jewish aid association managed to get them across the border. They boarded an overcrowded train specifically designed for transmigrants. The train was sealed and did not stop at regular stations. After passing through Berlin the train came to a halt in a deserted area a few miles west of the city. The conductors rushed the tired and confused passengers off the train. A group of Germans in white overalls, screaming orders, separated men from women and children, throwing the luggage on a big pile. Antin describes a scene of utter chaos as the terrified travelers were driven into a small building.

“Here we had been taken to a lonely place. . . . Our things were taken away, our friends separated from us; a man came to inspect us, as if to ascertain our full value; strange-looking people driving us about like dumb animals, helpless and unresisting; children we could not see crying in a way that suggested terrible things; ourselves driven into a little room.”

The migrants had to strip naked, were washed with soap, and showered with warm water. The German officials urged the migrants to hurry.

“They persist, ‘Quick! Quick!—or you’ll miss the train!’—Oh, so we really won’t be murdered! They are only making us ready for the continuing of our journey, cleaning us of all suspicions of dangerous germs. Thank God!”

Antin’s harrowing account appears to eerily foreshadow the experiences of Jews who were deported by the Nazi regime to concentration and extermination camps between 1941 and 1945. But can we draw a line from the disinfection of Jewish (and other) migrants from the Russian Empire traversing Germany in the 1890s to the Holocaust?

The procedures for Russian transmigrants in Germany were implemented in part because the United States demanded it. Disinfections of migrants and travelers became common towards the end of the 19th century in different parts of the world, for pilgrims heading to Mecca, Russian settlers moving to Siberia, and during the First World War on the U.S. Mexico border. The growing importance of public health regulations was one facet of unprecedented mass mobility and migration around the globe during the second half of the 19th century. A cholera epidemic in Hamburg, a major port for Jewish and other migrants from the Russian Empire traveling to the United States, claimed thousands of victims in the summer and fall months of 1892. In 1893 the United States imposed a quarantine requirement for all Russian migrants. And in 1893/94 disinfection procedures were implemented by the German authorities and the steamship lines along the main transit routes and at major transit points along the Russian border.

Featured image: Immigrants at Ellis Island undergoing a medical inspection by The New York Public Library via Unsplash.

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7 books to understand the US election [reading list]

7 books to understand the US election [reading list]

As the US Election approaches, explore a few Very Short Introductions to help answer your questions. Get informed before the debates begin, with concise guides on a wide range of topics from American political parties to democracy. Whether you’re a first-time voter or a seasoned political enthusiast, these introductions will provide you with the essential knowledge you need to understand the issues at stake and make an informed decision.

Check out our VSIs for the upcoming election:

1. Elections: A Very Short Introduction

Most citizens know how elections work in their own country, but not all elections are created equally. Elections determine who will hold public office and who will have the power to govern. They allow citizens to choose who will make decisions on their behalf and regulate their behavior. 

Read Elections: A Very Short Introduction

2. American Political Parties and Elections: A Very Short Introduction

Few Americans and even fewer citizens of other nations understand the electoral process in the United States. Still fewer understand the role played by political parties in the electoral process or the ironies within the system. The third edition of American Political Parties and Elections: A Very Short Introduction provides an inside view of the paradoxical aspects of the American electoral system.

Read American Political Parties and Elections

3. The U.S. Supreme Court: A Very Short Introduction

For 30 years, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Linda Greenhouse chronicled the activities of the U.S. Supreme Court and its justices as a correspondent for the New York Times. In this Very Short Introduction, Greenhouse draws on her deep knowledge of the court’s history and of its written and unwritten rules to show readers how the Supreme Court really works. This third edition tracks the changes in the Court’s makeup over the past decade, including the landmark decisions of the Obama and Trump eras and the emergence of a conservative supermajority.

Read The U.S. Supreme Court: A Very Short Introduction

4. Democracy: A Very Short Introduction

Democracy refers to both ideal and real forms of government. The concept of democracy means that those governed—the demos—have a say in government. But different conceptions of democracy have left many out. Naomi Zack provides a fresh treatment of the history of this idea and its key conceptions.

Read Democracy: A Very Short Introduction

5. The American Presidency: A Very Short Introduction

The American founding fathers were dedicated to the project of creating a government that was both functional and incapable of devolving into tyranny. To do this, they intentionally decentralized decision-making among the legislative, executive, and judiciary branches. They believed this separation of powers would force compromise and achieve their goal of “separating to unify.” This updated edition reviews crucial themes, including democratization of presidential elections, transitioning into and organizing a presidency, challenges in leading the permanent government, making law and policy, and reforming and changing the institution.

Read The American Presidency: A Very Short Introduction

6. American Politics: A Very Short Introduction

American politics seems to grow more contentious and complicated by the day, and whether American democracy works well is hotly debated. Amidst all these roiling partisan arguments and confusing claims and counterclaims, there has never been a greater need for an impartial primer on the basics of the American political system.

Read American Politics: A Very Short Introduction

7. The U.S. Congress: A Very Short Introduction

Donald A. Ritchie, a congressional historian for forty years, takes readers on a fascinating, behind-the-scenes tour of Capitol Hill, pointing out the key players, explaining their behavior, and translating parliamentary language into plain English. He also explores the essential necessity of compromise to accomplish anything significant in the legislative arena. However, recent events show that political polarization has hardened and produced gridlock, as Ritchie explains in this new edition.

Read The U.S. Congress: A Very Short Introduction

Featured image by Philip Goldsberry via Unsplash.

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