Oxford University Press's Blog, page 18

Honoring Ernest Weekley

Honoring Ernest Weekley

This is the second and last post on Ernest Weekley, an excellent scholar and engaging writer. The “installment” a week ago dealt with the history of Standard English through the eyes of the inimitable Mrs. Gamp. I am aware of three essays Weekley wrote for popular periodicals. One (celebrating Mrs. Gamp) appeared in The Cornhill Magazine, two others in The Atlantic Monthly (vol. 133, 1924, 782-91, and 153, 1954, 347-54). Their respective titles are “On Dictionaries” and “Words, Words, Words: Forty Years of Growth.” It is mainly the earlier of them that will interest us today. The second is devoted to the history of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), and I suspect that Weekley was commissioned to write it for the benefit of the transatlantic public, because in it, he mainly discussed the huge number of American words that went into the OED’s additions and supplement. He reminded his readership that “Murray, in his Presidential Address to the Philological Society in 1880, spoke very cordially of ‘the kindness of our friends in the United States, where the interest taken in our scheme, springing from a genuine love of our common language, its history, and a warm desire to make the Dictionary worthy of the language, has impressed me very much’.”

A perennial source of inspiration.
Image by libellule789 via Pixabay.

Indeed, Murray had a huge enthusiastic following in the United States. In his essay, Weekley, most wisely, refrained from mentioning the fact that the hot-tempered Murray almost ruined the collaboration with the United States, when he learned about the project to publish The Century Dictionary (he feared that the new venture would compete and interfere with his great enterprise). And when the American dictionary began to appear, he attacked, with what seems today quite unnecessary vigor, the etymology of Cockney in Volume 1. He had his own idea on that score and wrote a nasty article about the ignorant Americans. An article by Anthony L. Mayhew to the same tune added insult to injury. It took Dwight Whitney a great effort to prevent a fatal rupture. Incidentally, the origin of the word Cockney is still partly debatable. The storm abated and finally blew itself out. Decades later, the picture looked idyllic. Such is a good deal of history in retrospect.

I would like to quote Weekley’s passing observation, which seems to be very much to the point. He noted that the word caption was old but had not become universally known till reintroduced with American films. He wrote: “Our ancestors drew their stock of metaphor from man’s essential occupations. Our descendants will draw theirs largely from mechanized life.” Today, we should add sports to mechanized life and essential occupations. Other than that, modern dictionaries (now, nearly all online) tend to become larger and larger, while the vocabulary of the speakers shrinks like Balzac’s La Peau de chagrin / the skin of shagreen. A single beloved epithet with three asterisks in the middle serves all purposes very well. It certainly reflects people’s essential occupation.

Cover your bases: a metaphor drawn from our modern experience.
Image by KeithJJ via Pixabay.

 In the first essay, Weekley surveyed the history of English dictionaries, and this survey is a pleasure to read. We trust dictionaries, and this is a proper attitude. Only lexicographers know “how easily a mistaken explanation, an incorrect form, or even a nonexistent word may be handed down from one compiler to another.” And yet our reverential attitude toward dictionaries never changes. In the section on usage appended to the first (1969) edition of The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, we read: “One of the commonest phrases is ’look it up in the dictionary.’ (Not any particular dictionary; just ‘the dictionary.’).” And this is a proper attitude. In litigation, dictionaries are always consulted, to check the correct sense of this or that word. And in everyday life, where else can we find all answers?

Bypassing a dictionary
Image by Kateryna Tsurik via Pexels

To be sure, today’s “lexicons” are much more reliable than they were four, three, and even two hundred years ago. Weekley reminded his readership that the earliest dictionaries aimed at explaining the more difficult words in the language. “Nowadays every dictionary contains, no doubt inevitably, nineteen twentieth or perhaps ninety nineteen-nine hundredths of unnecessary matter. Who, for instance, wants to know that… twenty is ‘twice ten’…?” Weekley quotes the detailed (and therefore hilarious) definition of kiss from the great Oxford English Dictionary, “a piece of erudition usually acquired by the youngest and least experienced without lexicographical help.” And yet, a dictionary has to include twenty and kiss! Weekly realized the problem only too well.

It appears that Weekley had his own copies of all the earlier dictionaries. Where did he keep them? His private life has been pawed over in quite unnecessary detail (even Wikipedia could not resist this temptation), but I have not been able to find a description of his library. To him every old lexicographer was like a personal acquaintance. He gave a sympathetic description of John Minsheu, the author of the first etymological dictionary of English (Minsheu’s name often appears in this blog). “[Minsheu] seems to have led an adventurous life abroad, wandering for long years from land to land in his eager quest for knowledge. He may have been a rogue, but he was certainly an enthusiast.” And here is Weekley’s portrait of a typical dictionary maker. “He is as irritable as a poet and as full of his own importance as a film star. He accuses his predecessors of incompetency and his contemporaries and successors of plagiarism…. Naturally[,] each lexicographer proclaims his own wares to be superior to all others.” Well, lexicographers are also human.

Most people will have heard about Samuel Johnson’s dictionary. Johnson was brilliant and judgmental. Weekley found many of his outbursts Boythornian. I will not highlight this epithet and let our readers find out its meaning for themselves. Johnson’s contemporaries believed that seventeenth-century English had reached a state of near-perfection. Weekly showed how untenable this idea was but could not resist the temptation of airing his own pet idea (see the previous post): “…the only people who now speak English with any approach to historical correctness are the few surviving agricultural laborers who are old enough to have escaped the devastating effects of the [1870] Elementary Education Act.” Weekley, as one can see, did not escape it.

And here are a few concluding flourishes. Weekley writes: “It is in accordance with poetic justice that the great dictionary makers of the age that followed Johnson should belong chiefly to the two races for which he professed a burlesque abhorrence: the Americans and the Scots.” The end of the essay is also worth quoting: “An imaginary conversation between Boswell and Johnson was once composed—perhaps by Sir James Murray himself, for all the best stories against the Scotch are due to Scotsmen. The Doctor and his adoring biographer are strolling in the Elysian Fields, when Boswell asks: ‘What would you say, Sir, if you were told that the task of editing the great English Dictionary which is to supersede all others had been entrusted to a Scotch Presbyterian?’ to which the Doctor replies: ‘Sir, it is possible to be facetious without being indecent’.” Hear, hear!

Featured image by mrpolyonymous. CC by 2.0, via Flickr.

OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.

What can we expect to see in the 2024 Parliament? [long read]

What can we expect to see in the 2024 Parliament? [long read]

Labour’s landslide electoral win may not have been unexpected, but few expected to see quite so many historic firsts arise from it. For the first time in over fifty years, a governing party with a majority in the elected House has been replaced by another party with a majority. The scale of Starmer’s victory means that we have a record 335 brand-new MPs entering Parliament: 52% of the whole House. With more new MPs than returnees on the green benches, it feels likely that this huge turnover will lead to changes in the culture and working practices of the Commons.

In this blog post, we take a look at some of the big post-election changes to the composition of the Commons and reflect on the reforms we may see as a result.

The most diverse House of Commons on record

When the King opened Parliament on 17 July, the public were more likely than ever before to have seen themselves reflected in the faces of the MPs gathered to hear the monarch. There are now 263 female MPs (41%), a noteworthy jump from the 226 at the end of the last Parliament, although it still falls short of a 50:50 gender balance. There are also 90 MPs from an ethnic minority, amounting to 13.8% of the Commons (just short of equalling the 14% of the UK population). This is another significant increase: from 66 in the 2019 Parliament (10%) and, if we look further back, from zero in the 1983-87 Parliament. The Sutton Trust has found that “the educational background of the 2024 Commons is more socio-economically diverse than any parliament recorded since 1979”, with more MPs having attended comprehensive schools. Even so, there is perhaps more progress to be made: Social Mobility Commissioner, and former Leader of the House of Lords, Baroness Stowell of Beeston, noted the gap between the proportion of MPs who went to university, compared to that of the general public: 90% compared to 19%, an increase from 88% in the previous Parliament, and warned that this “represents most significant educational difference with electorate – not school type, or type of uni”.

A shifting party balance

The new Parliament has the largest group of government backbenchers since the early 2000s and they will all be keen to make their mark. Select committees have been strengthened considerably since the Blair years, but there may not be sufficient places for all the Labour MPs who want them; although a return to competition for select committee places will certainly be welcome after committee vacancies became problematic in the late stages of the 2019 Parliament. Perhaps we will see All-Party Parliamentary Groups take an even larger role as Labour’s new MPs look to more informal routes to effect change and to push forward the issues close to their hearts. With just 121 MPs, the Conservative Party will have the opposite problem as it takes up its place on the Official Opposition benches. The party’s new leader will not have a huge pool of MPs from which to form an opposition frontbench and will have to also find MPs to sit on select committees as well as legislative committees. Former party leader William Hague has already questioned whether the party will be able to maintain a viable opposition with so few MPs. 

These aren’t the only parties to see huge change. The Liberal Democrats will move back to the third-party benches, a place they haven’t been in since 2015, where we will no doubt see them being more strategic in their parliamentary work thanks to the third-party rights they will inherit including two guaranteed questions to the Prime Minister each week, a right of reply to all government statements, and a substantial set of select committee places. Party leader Ed Davey will need to think carefully about how to manage the largest Liberal Democrat parliamentary party ever. Many new Liberal Democrat MPs will find themselves covering an opposition portfolio. Cohesion and unity will be very important now, particularly if Davey wants to give the impression of doing a better job of opposition than the Conservatives. The SNP will need to adjust to the loss of this coveted position in the chamber and will face a dilemma around what sort of parliamentary party they now wish to be. The huge loss of MPs and votes means that the ‘Short Money’ public funding that the party receives will also take a big hit from around £1.2 million each year to less than £500,000. This may mean job losses within the SNP’s parliamentary office and as a result, the small band of surviving SNP MPs will have to concentrate on a smaller set of strategic issues close to their hearts.

There are two new parliamentary groups in the Commons too, with the Greens and Reform UK returning 4 and 5 MPs respectively. Both of these parties will suffer from a lack of institutional knowledge and expertise. Caroline Lucas, the UK’s first ever Green MP, stood down at this election and Lee Anderson is the only Reform MP to have served in the Commons before. The Greens have a very strong parliamentary resource network though and we can expect them to mirror the tenacity of Lucas who outperformed most other backbench MPs, in seeking out as many opportunities as possible to make their voices heard on committees and in the chamber.  With over 14% of the national vote and an ambition to ‘change politics forever’, we can expect Reform to want to act like a much larger party group than they are. This will rely on their MPs holding multiple portfolios and spending a lot of time in the chamber, something that they may not all be comfortable to do. Lee Anderson will play a crucial mentoring role for his colleagues in the early days in his role as Chief Whip. They will no doubt feel immensely frustrated by parliamentary rules which will largely inhibit their contribution to Commons debates and we may see them push for rules changes on the basis of their national vote share.  

A modernised House?

If the 2024 cohort of MPs do wish to change their new workplace, they will have a clear vehicle to do so. On 25 July, the Commons approved the formation of a Modernisation Committee, “tasked with driving up standards and addressing the culture of this House, as well as improving working practices”.  Like the Modernisation Committee introduced by the incoming Labour government in 1997 (and abolished under the Coalition Government in 2010), it will be chaired by the Leader of the Commons, an unusual arrangement for a select committee, but one that recent research (by Tom Fleming and Hannah Kelly) found led to the Modernisation Committee having more success than other parliamentary reform committees in getting its recommendations implemented. As Fleming and Kelly stated: “having the Leader of the House chair the Modernisation Committee made it more able to get support from government, and therefore to secure the necessary parliamentary time and votes for implementing its proposals”. The new Modernisation Committee, like its predecessor, will only include representatives from three of the 12 parties who sit on the green benches of the Commons chamber: something that has already provoked concern from representatives of the smaller parties.  

What might the new Modernisation Committee want to consider? Labour’s manifesto only specifically mentioned one policy area: banning second jobs for MPs (possibly more of a parliamentary standards issue, rather than one of parliamentary reform). Fleming and Kelly found that the 1997-2010 Modernisation Committee focused its time on four issues: “committees (20%), the House’s timetable (18%), the legislative process (17%) and scrutiny of EU-related policy-making (17%)”. There is certainly unfinished business in the first three categories, even if the fourth has become less relevant post-Brexit. The new Modernisation Committee, however, may want to focus on the relationship with citizens, particularly bearing in mind the decline in trust in the institution of Parliament. Whilst the previous Modernisation Committee 2005 report on Connecting Parliament with the Public, was pivotal for the development of public engagement within Parliament, in recent years this has lacked institutional strategy and investment as noted by the Administration Committee in 2023.  

The election changed the Commons, but what will it mean for the House of Lords?

The Labour manifesto stops short of committing the new government to major reform or even abolition of the Lords, instead stating:

“Labour is committed to replacing the House of Lords with an alternative second chamber that is more representative of the regions and nations. Labour will consult on proposals, seeking the input of the British public on how politics can best serve them.”

Some immediate smaller-scale reforms to the upper house are identified: the abolition of almost all of the remaining hereditary peers, a new participation requirement, and reform of the appointments process. To the surprise of seasoned Lords-watchers, such as Prof Meg Russell, the new government has also committed to introducing a mandatory retirement ages, with Peers retiring at the end of the parliament in which they turn 80. While this could substantially reduce the size of the Lords—with almost a quarter of Peers over 80 at present—by not requiring anyone to leave until the end of this Parliament, likely four or five years away, this will not be a quick fix. Indeed, Labour may be more keen on increasing rather than decreasing the size of the Lords, initially at least, as they seek to ensure key reforms pass smoothly and to bring in external expertise into government (such as the new Prisons Minister, James Timpson; new Attorney General, Richard Hermer; and new Science Minister, Patrick Vallance). It is only the abolition of the hereditary peers that made it into the King’s Speech.

Over the next few weeks and months, we will be able to observe firsthand how the influx of new MPs adapt to parliamentary customs and what they think about the institution as we start to hear their maiden speeches.   

*Information correct at time of writing.

Feature image by Deniz Fuchidzhiev via Unsplash

OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.

A listener’s guide to James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” [playlist]

A listener’s guide to James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” [playlist]

Discover the musical veins of James Baldwin’s 1957 short story “Sonny’s Blues” as we mark the 100th anniversary of the writer and civil rights activist’s birth.

Tom Jenks reflects on some of these key musical works.

1) “Am I Blue?”

Near the end of the story, Sonny and his bandmates perform at a village nightclub. The band finishes its first set to scattered applause, and without warning the bass player begins almost sardonically playing “Am I Blue?” But why sardonically? Billie Holiday, in her 1941 performance with the Eddie Heywood Orchestra, gives a lush, touching, and romantic upbeat lift to the song’s undertow of abandonment, sorrow, and loneliness. An earlier version by Ethel Waters has a somewhat more sentimental seriocomic tone. In a film version, Waters appeared surrounded by a troupe of smiling cotton pickers with cutaway shots of a white society couple in top hat and gown looking gaily down on the scene made for their entertainment. The bass player’s sardonic touch seems to say, Enough of suffering. Listen to what we can do instead with jazz.

2) “Body and Soul”

Louis Armstrong and this jazz standard harken back to swing-based music, which a teenage Sonny calls “old-time, down home crap.” Sonny’s distaste for Armstrong can be read as a younger artist’s natural need for self-assertion and transcendence of found forms. When Sonny’s older brother testily asks who Sonny admires then, the answer is Bird—Charlie Parker—and the shift in the story from Armstrong’s music to Parker’s signals an often-painful generational struggle for freedom beyond old conventions, styles, modes, expressions, and understandings. The thread of “Sonny’s Blues” follows the fate of estranged brothers within a larger context of races divided from one another; it embodies the truth that no one of any race can be free of the effects of generations of racial oppression so long as it continues.

3) “All the Things You Are”

Charlie Parker’s discovery that the semitones of the chromatic scale can lead to any key opened greater possibilities for improvisation and carried jazz beyond Dixieland and swing into an era of modal melodies as performed by musicians such as Miles Davis and John Coltrane. In idolizing Charlie Parker, Baldwin’s Sonny is not only attracted to the music but also to drugs. Sonny would have known that Parker, as a teenager already on the rise in the jazz world, was using heroin. What Sonny couldn’t have known was that Parker would die at the age of thirty-four, the erosion from drugs and alcohol overpowering his sublime gifts, and that he himself would come to understand the personal cost of addiction.

4) “If I Could Hear My Mother Pray Again”

One of several spiritual songs in “Sonny’s Blues,” this gospel lament celebrates a mother’s Christian virtues and her grown child’s desire for return to childhood faith. When the brothers’ mother, whose faith is deep, counsels the older brother to always be there for Sonny, she’s thinking of her sons’ mortal and immortal fate. Without a redeeming connection in this life, could there be one in the next? “But what a terrible song,” Sonny comments and laughs. His laughter sounds softer, milder, more mature than his angry teenage dismissal of Armstrong was, yet strikes further notes in a generational musical progression from spirituals to blues to jazz. Music, myth, and man are advancing together.

5) “Is That the Old Ship of Zion”

In “Sonny’s Blues,” street revivalists sing this late nineteenth-century hymn derived from earlier spiritual and gospel lyrics. The song promises that the ship will carry its voyagers over the difficult waters to a brighter destination—many a thousand will be rescued. The older brother comments that not a soul hearing this song on the street in Harlem has been rescued. The cloth of the story is woven from biblical allusion, cadence, church music, and imagery, but Baldwin poses all this in such a way that the reader can decide according to his or her own beliefs about salvation. Baldwin doesn’t insist, but his view is humanist. His concern is with the here and now. He seeks to encourage everyone’s participation and kinship in improving the quality of all lives on Earth.

 6) “A Love Supreme”

To get a fully embodied sense of the musical progression embodied in “Sonny’s Blues,” a reader can listen to Billie Holiday’s “Am I Blue?” and then listen to John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme,” the movement from one song to the other representing a shift from sorrowing to triumph and restoration, which is what James Baldwin’s short story is about. Coltrane’s song offers thanks for his recovery from heroin addiction, while Baldwin’s story poses two brothers’ estrangement over addiction and their ultimate rapprochement as an analogy to racial division and an inspiration toward unity and love.

Featured image by pinelife via Flickr. CC BY 2.0.

OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.

Ernest Weekley and standard English

Ernest Weekley and standard English

Many people who are interested in word origins know Ernest Weekley’s English etymological dictionary. I am sorry that we cannot post his photo: for some mysterious reason, all his portraits on the Internet are copyrighted. He wrote many excellent books on English words. Scholarly and accessible to non-specialists, they are “popular” in the best sense of this term. Among etymologists, only Walter W. Skeat (1835-1912) excelled in this genre, but Skeat’s circle was not so wide. Weekley (1865-1954), most of whose books appeared in the nineteen-twenties, could rely on readers who knew more about “the romance of words” than did Skeat. He also wrote quite a few essays, which are truly brilliant. I am planning to discuss several of them. My choice for today is “Mrs. Gamp and the King’s English” (The Cornhill Magazine 125, 1922, 565-76). Few American readers, unless they are professional literary scholars, will have heard about that magazine, which existed for more than a century (1860-1975) and in which some of the greatest novelists published their works. Consequently, Weekley’s essay appeared in a truly prestigious periodical. (Corn in Cornhill of course means “grain.”)

Mrs. Gamp, an early Georgian duchess.
Image by Kyd (Joseph Clayton Clarke) via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

It is curious that Weekley does not explain who Mrs. Gamp is. Should we assume that in 1922 every educated person in Great Britain knew the answer? We live in a different epoch, and I am afraid that today, Mrs. Gamp is as little remembered as The Cornhill Magazine, at least in the United States. I’ll be happy to be reassured. Be that as it may, Mrs. Gamp was a nurse (or nuss, as she called herself), and a disreputable nurse was she. This lady is a character in Dickens’s novel Martin Chuzzlewitt (1843-1844). It may not be the greatest of his novels, but, among other things, it contains the most memorable satire of the United States ever written by a Britisher. Though American readers adored Dickens, American publishers, who reprinted his works by the ton, refused to pay the author, because there was no copyright agreement between the two countries. The American scenes were Dickens’s revenge. It took a long time to heal the rift between Dickens and the US. The names of three characters from Martin Chuzzlewitt became proverbial: Mr. Pecksniff, a mealy-mouthed hypocrite and scoundrel; Mrs. Gamp, and Mark Tapley (the latter for his unbeatable optimism).

In London you need protection from rain.
Image by Sid Ali, via Pexels. Public domain.

Mrs. Gamp is unforgettable, and so is her huge umbrella, now known in British English as a gamp. Word history informs us that umbrellas were invented to protect people from the sun: umbrella refers to umbra “shade,” and parasol to sol “sun.” French paraplue and German Regenschirm were coined on the analogy of the compounds whose first component meant “sun.” But “Sarei” Gamp lived in London and needed protection from rain. For some reason, umbrellas and etymology tend to cross paths more than once. In British English, the very word umbrella has been changed into brolly (in the same way in which the American word freshman has been changed into frosh). Why? However, today’s subject has nothing to do with umbrellas, parasols, or freshmen. It deals with the way Mrs. Gamp spoke Cockney.

In Weekley’s opinion, not old-fashioned Cockney is “corrupt English” but “standard English” is “corrupt dialect.” This is his key statement: “Of all those historic dialects which still distinguish… the speech of most Englishmen, none is of such interest as Cockney, that noble Mercian, Kentish, and East Anglian, which was written by Chaucer, printed by Caxton, spoken by Spenser and Milton, and surviving in the mouths of Sam Weller and Mrs. Gamp, has in a modified form and with an artificial pronunciation, given us the literary English of the present day.”

I’ll reproduce only a few statements from the essay. Weekley says that his students (he taught in Nottingham, East Midlands) pronounce t in often and insist on making forehead rime with hoar head. Most of those whom I know (I live in the American Upper Midwest) do the same, and it turned out that Weekley tried to fight the spelling pronunciation of forehead with my favorite verse about the girl who had a little curl in the middle of her forehead. “When she was good, she was very, very good, and when she was bad, she was horrid.” Longfellow, the author of the poem, did not say fore-head. Other than that, Weekley pointed out that what we regard as vulgarisms are usually older pronunciations which have been gradually expelled by the printed word. Such are ax for ask and waps for wasp. He of course did not say ax and waps: he just stated the fact. In his opinion, Mrs. Gamp spoke English very much after the fashion of a lady of quality of 1700-1750. She “talked like an early Georgian duchess, and Sam Weller like a town ‘blood’ of the same period.” And now back to etymology.

The origin of the verb forge (ahead) is not quite clear. “Perhaps an aberrant pronunciation of the verb force.” Weekley cites Mrs. Gamp’s Jonadge’s belly (= Jonas’s belly) and fiery furnage, that is, furnace, to illustrate the voicing of the sound s in this position. He says the same in his dictionary and even refers to Mrs. Gamp in the entry, but there, both the suggestions and the reference are lost, and today who will recognize his “authority”? He was sure that wear “to change to an opposite tack by turning the stern to the wind” was identical with veer, a synonymous nautical term, because the interplay of v and w is famous in Cockney (wery vell). The Wellers, father and son, of course called themselves Vellers.

Of special interest to American speakers is the history of words like porridge. Porridge goes back to pottage, remembered today only from a mess of pottage “lentil stew.” Pottage meant something “put in a pot.” The word surfaced in English in the thirteenth century. The consonant t was usually voiced between vowels, and American settlers brought this pronunciation to the New World. That is why they still fail to distinguish between writer and rider, futile and feudal, along with seated and seeded (as I know from my students’ papers). In the same way, pottage turned into poddage, but in some dialects d became r (“rhotacism”); hence porridge. Weekley cites impurent “impudent,” moral “model,” and blurry for the once unpronounceable bloody. (Eliza Doolittle’s not bloody likely is of course proverbial.) Weekley pointed out that paddock “a small enclosure of parkland” for the obsolete parrock “park” illustrates the reverse change (r to d), and such is the accepted etymology of this word.

From pottage to porridge.
Image 1 via Rawpixel, Public domain. Image 2 from Page 7 of The Three Bears by McLoughlin Bros. New York via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Earnest Weekley could both write and listen well. For a final flourish, I’d like to quote his statement about the old days: “One of my earlier subjects, some forty years ago, for phonetic experiment was a venerable London busman, an admirable specimen of a type now replaced, to the infinite loss of Cockney humour, by a race of smudgy-looking misanthropists. This sage opined that a man who was in a hurry to get to the ‘cimetery’ would do well to take a ‘drop o’ sperrits’ of a cold morning rather than the cup o’ cawfey’ recommended by benighted teetotalers. … The first lexicographer (seventeenth century) to register ‘coffee’ spells it ‘cauphè,’ the vowel sound having been gradually shortened….” For more information on coffee see my post of August 21, 2024. Other than that, enjoy Weekley, his books, his essays, coffee, and occasionally “a drop o’ sperrits.” At one time, spirit was pronounced sprit.

Featured image via PxHere, CC0.

OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.

20 HBCU graduates that have shaped America [slideshow]

20 HBCU graduates that have shaped America [slideshow]

Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) are dedicated to empowering students and alumni with the tools to drive significant civic and cultural change. Through their intentional focus on leadership, advocacy, and excellence, HBCU graduates have made remarkable strides in political, legal, cultural, and artistic fields. These institutions foster an environment where students thrive and emerge as trailblazers. By nurturing talent and commitment, HBCUs continue to shape leaders who make profound contributions to American democracy. Click through the slideshow below to learn about twenty inspirational graduates.

[See image gallery at blog.oup.com]

Featured image created using Canva by Sarah Butcher, Marketer at OUP.

OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.

How interdisciplinarity enhances our understanding of social media’s societal impact

How interdisciplinarity enhances our understanding of social media’s societal impact

Addressing today’s most pressing challenges requires a new approach to thinking. An interdisciplinary transformative approach can advance knowledge by exploiting and harmonizing the strengths of various disciplines within a unified framework. This approach deepens our collective understanding by bringing together the disparate and sometimes contradictory perspectives of many disciplines, all of which offer valuable insights.

Recognizing the value of this integrated approach, we can apply it to understand the complexity of social networks in our increasingly connected world. Social media platforms are at the intersection of different technologies and media types; they combine text, images, video, and interactive elements, often integrating features. This convergence influences how content is created, consumed, and shared, and changes the dynamics of communication and marketing.

Every day, people from a variety of backgrounds engage in online social interactions. At the heart of this digital transformation is the evolution of individual and cultural identity in a globally connected world. Social platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram serve as digital public squares, where identities are formed and expressed. These spaces also allow the construction of digital diasporas, allowing users from different backgrounds to maintain cultural links and create new common links between geographical divisions. On social networks, personal interactions can strengthen or remodel local traditions and societal norms.

The blending of the global and the local extends into the realm of religious expression. Social media facilitates a new form of religious engagement, where traditional practices are reimagined in the digital landscape. Online prayer groups and live services illustrate how religious communities adapt and flourish in these new media environments. This shift to digital worship prompts scholars from theological, sociological, and digital communication fields to offer a richer understanding of spirituality in the digital age.

This interdisciplinary exploration is essential for the development of strategies that promote a diverse and balanced media landscape, essential for a healthy democratic society.

In the realm of news and journalism, the advent of generative AI and sophisticated algorithms has transformed how information is curated and consumed, often reinforcing existing biases through echo chambers. Social media is a battleground where misinformation can spread as swiftly as legitimate information. Given that public discourse faces significant challenges to its integrity and authenticity, it is essential to engage experts in the field of information technology, psychology, and media studies in a collaborative effort to carefully examine and address the implications of these technologies. This interdisciplinary exploration is essential for the development of strategies that promote a diverse and balanced media landscape, essential for a healthy democratic society.

Similarly, the intersection of social media with commerce and marketing has sparked a transformation in consumer behavior and business strategies. Influencers and digital marketers now play pivotal roles in shaping consumer preferences and purchasing decisions, highlighting the need for insights from economics, marketing, and data analytics.

The vigorous debate on freedom of expression, data confidentiality, and platform responsibility underlines the need for sound governance and ethical surveillance in social networks. As legal frameworks race to catch up with technological advances, a collaborative approach involving legal scholars, ethicists, and technologists is essential. Their joint efforts aim to balance innovation with the protection of individual rights and social well-being, addressing key issues such as data confidentiality, content regulation, and platform responsibility. These efforts also analyze wider societal implications such as disruptions to traditional business models and privacy concerns.

In the educational sphere, social networks have revolutionized traditional learning environments, introducing tools that combine entertainment with education. The effective integration of these instruments into pedagogical practices requires the combined knowledge of educational theorists, technologists, and cognitive psychologists. This collaboration is essential to understanding how digital interactions can improve or prevent processes and learning outcomes, ensuring that educational progress keeps pace with technological innovations.

Finally, the impact of social networks on mental health and physical well-being cannot be overlooked. The role of social media in shaping social interactions and personal identity has profound health implications, requiring a joint effort from psychologists, health professionals, and digital communication experts. Together, they can develop strategies to mitigate the risks associated with digital involvement, such as cyber harassment and information overload, while unearthing the positive aspects of social connectivity.

These varied investigations make it clear that a robust interdisciplinary approach is essential for understanding the societal impacts of social media. As we traverse this digital landscape, the insights gained from such an approach are crucial in developing informed strategies and policies, which aim to maximize the benefits of social media while minimizing its risks. Each disciplinary perspective enriches our understanding and promotes a more careful and effective interaction with the digital world, equipping societies to manage the complexities of this evolving environment.

Featured image by mikoto.raw Photographer via Pexels. Public domain.

OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.

A fabulous story, or spilling etymological beans

A fabulous story, or spilling etymological beans

For a long time, I have been trying to learn something about the source of the idiom to spill the beans “to divulge a secret” but discovered nothing. Though the Internet is full of vague suggestions, no one knows the origin of this phrase (which, incidentally, is a fairly common case with idioms). As just indicated, neither do I. Yet at the end of this essay, a rather disappointing hypothesis will be offered, and in the absence of more substantive ideas I thought it might be reasonable to touch on the origin of bean, a word that perhaps presents more interest than the evasive idiom.

Isidore of Seville.
Image by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

The great sixth-century scholar Isidore of Seville was the author of a book titled Etymologiae, that is, “Etymologies,” one of the most famous works written in the Middle Ages. After Isidore, etymology as a branch of linguistics had to wait for more than a thousand years before turning into some semblance of science. However, we read ancient and medieval theories of word origins, from Plato on, with interest, because the tortuous history of human thought is not less instructive than the achievements of our time and because occasionally old scholars guessed well. In Isidore’s days (as well as before and long after him), learned people derived all words of European languages from Hebrew, Greek, or Latin.

As regards bean, or rather Latin faba, Isidore derived it from Greek phago– “eat(ing).” English speakers know phago– from the compounds sarcophagus and esophagus. Isidore’s idea outlived him by many centuries. Yet it inspires little confidence. Significant is only his comment: “Because beans are the first vegetables for humans.” In this respect, he was certainly right: beans have accompanied people through their entire history. Those who doubt it should read or reread John Steinbeck’s charming story “Tortilla Flat,” as well as the immortal fairy tale Jack and the Beanstalk. Finally, pay attention to the Latin name Fabius, which means “grower of beans.” One does not get such a name for nothing. By the way, Isidore consumed the beans, today known as Vicia faba, while our variety is called Phaseolus vulgaris and stems from America.

As far as English is concerned, let us first note that the same word for “bean” has been recorded in all the Old Germanic languages (the differences are due only to the vagaries of historical phonetics): Old English bēan, Old High German bōna (the modern form is Bohne), Middle Dutch bone (Modern Dutch boon), and Old Norse baun. Plinius mentioned the Frisian island Baunonia, apparently, “Land of beans.” The Common Germanic form must have sounded baun-.

The protobean after the surgery.
Image by Sanjay Acharya via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

Why, centuries and centuries ago, did people call this vegetable baun-? Similar forms have been recorded all over the place. For instance, the Slavic word for “bean” is somewhat like the Germanic one, namely bob. It has been suggested that bob is a sound-imitative word (like English phut or pooh–pooh). Presumably, beans split with some noise. In the Grimms’ tale “Straw, Coal, and Bean,” the bean splits with laughter at seeing its companions perish. Why this event tickled the bean to death is a special subject, but we may assume that some noise did accompany the splitting. Anyway, a tailor who happened to be close by sowed the patient together (hence, we are told, to this day, a black seam appears in the middle of all beans).

Bob (the Slavic form) may have gone back to some form like bha-bh(a). Monosyllables beginning with and ending in the same stop, such as dud, tut, gig, tut, kick, pop (and bob!) do look like onomatopoeic creations. But Germanic baun– is unlike the Slavic word bob– in that it lacks the second b. Attempts to reconstruct some ancient Indo-European protoform like babn-o, with the loss of the second b in Germanic, are among the many sterile exercises plaguing etymological algebra. Conversely, initial f in Latin and initial b in Germanic are a regular match: both go to the consonant bh.

Rather probably, the two forms (baun-, its root being bau-, and bob-) emerged independently, even if the impulse that produced them was similar. Considering the fact that beans were known to Germanic speakers very long ago, one wonders whether the name of the vegetable might be borrowed from some indigenous speakers, that is, from the people who inhabited their land before the Germanic invaders (we may call them newcomers, because we have no evidence testifying to an invasion) and whose language is now lost beyond recovery. Such words taken over from an unknown language are covered by the term substrate. In our case, this guesswork is unproductive, because we have no information about that hypothetical language or about the previous settlers.

Let me finish this part of the essay with a bit of humor. Two phrases have been recorded in British dialects: Bob’s a dying and kick up Bob’s a-dying. Both mean “boisterous merriment; to make a great noise.” No one knows their origin, but it may not be quite fortuitous that the proper name Bob was chosen for the occasion (not Jack, let alone Tom, Dick, or Harry): perhaps it still evokes the idea of ruckus. I am now returning to the proverbial saying. Why do we say to spill the beans? Everything is puzzling about it. The phrase surfaced late: no attestation in print before the beginning of the twentieth century. It looks like an American coinage (in any case, the first examples are from American media). And we don’t know what situation inspired the idiom. Who in real life used to spill beans and thus “leak” precious information? Even the image of beans being spilled is far from clear.

I have no answer to the riddle, but it is curious how often beans appears in idioms. An amusing British regional saying, which was current at least as early as the eighteen-thirties, sounded so: “To know how many beans make five,” that is, to be fully aware of one’s interests (a reference to some forgotten game?), while not to know beans still means “to be ignorant.” “Not to care a bean” is a synonym for “not to care a thing, a fig, a brass farthing” (or “a hill of beans”!), and so forth. To get beans means “to be punished,” to give somebody beans “to beat to a pulp,” and so it goes down to cool beans “great job.” This environment provides no clue to the phrase that interests us, but it shows that beans has long been a favorite element of idiomatic sayings (even more so than nuts). Beans is also ubiquitous in the context of sex. This is surprising, seeing that beans, even though, as noted above, have played an outstanding role in human history, are no longer the most important part of our diet, while all the idioms with beans are or seem to be recent. (Incidentally, when Russian speakers draw blank, they are said to be left on (the) beans. Why? The phrase is ostat’sia na bobakh.)

Spilling the beans.
Image by Eren Li via Pexels.

Perhaps the phrase to spill the beans simply joined many others containing the overused word. Oscar Wilde once wrote a tale titled “Sphinx without a Secret.” The tale is not one of his masterpieces, but the title is brilliant. Isn’t our idiom such a sphinx? You get beans, you give somebody beans, you spill beans. Why bother? I conclude: no need crying over spilled beans.

Featured image by Elizabeth Tyler Wolcott, Digital Commonwealth via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.

Iris Murdoch on how to lose yourself in nature

Iris Murdoch on how to lose yourself in nature

Anxiety is the most frequently diagnosed mental health problem in the world today. The handful of psychiatric treatments for anxiety that nowadays dominate the field are well known. But it’s worth remembering that philosophy also has a long and illustrious history as a form of anti-anxiety therapy. As I argue in my new book, philosophers from all over the world have been thinking and writing about anxiety since time immemorial, long before it was officially catalogued as a psychological disorder. From Stoicism and Epicureanism in Greece to Confucianism in China, from Hindu and Buddhist sources to the European existentialists, philosophers have had plenty of therapeutic wisdom to share with their readers.

One more recent example can be found in the work of Irish-born novelist and philosopher, Iris Murdoch, who provides an insight about the management of our attention and mental energy from which we anxious sufferers stand to benefit. In her 1970 book, The Sovereignty of Good, Murdoch writes, “We are anxiety-ridden animals. Our minds are continually active, fabricating an anxious, usually self-preoccupied… veil which partially conceals the world.” Instead of letting our attention be dictated by what she calls our “fat relentless ego”, Murdoch thinks that we can achieve a modicum of relief from anxiety and inner turmoil by turning our attention outward, away from the self. This is an activity she calls unselfing. Here is a key passage:

I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious of my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. Then suddenly I observe a hovering kestrel. In a moment everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing now but kestrel. And when I return to thinking of the other matter it seems less important. And of course this is something which we may also do deliberately: give attention to nature in order to clear our minds of selfish care.

Unselfing is the attempt to turn off auto-pilot, to redirect the self-centered flow of thought and attention. We’re trying to detach from what Murdoch calls the “greedy organism of the self” which gives us a false, distorted picture of reality and perceive and engage with the world as it really is.

This is what unselfing is all about. Not inattentiveness or mere daydreaming, but attention deliberately steered away from the self.

It’s interesting that Murdoch’s description of unselfing draws on the experience of spotting a bird —a “hovering kestrel”—outside her window. My sister, a biologist and avid birder, has told me that part of what she finds so captivating about bird-watching is a soothing reminder (that virtually always accompanies the activity) about the existence of an ancient and intricate world (elusive songs and sounds, vibrant colors, migration routes many thousands of years old, a world quite literally of the dinosaurs) to which human beings are normally more or less oblivious, and that, by deliberate focus of attention (early in the morning, tramping through the woods, crisp air in the lungs, binoculars dangling around the neck) one can get a brief glimpse of this world and share, to some small extent, in its business and happenings. This is what unselfing is all about. Not inattentiveness or mere daydreaming, but attention deliberately steered away from the self. Immersion in Bird World allows us to temporarily “lose ourselves”, to achieve some distance from the anxious self. A calming forgetfulness of self is stimulated. We’re no longer focused on the anxiety that had us in its grip just a little while earlier.

Murdoch’s account of unselfing helps us see that anxiety is a fundamentally inward-facing mental state. Anxiety focusses its sights on the direction of the self, and the self is where anxiety lives and thrives. This helps explain why time spent in nature provides comfort and peace to so many anxious sufferers. Directing attention towards the beauty of a mountain landscape, the mesmeric sounds of birds or rushing water nearby, the fresh odors of trees, the moist, healthy soil, allows us to temporarily lose track of ourselves. In such moments we achieve some distance from the self and we feel less anxious as a result. The same idea applies to all of the activities we know to be helpful for diminishing anxiety (meditation, listening to music, a few miles of running, and so many more). Whenever we catch ourselves feeling more peaceful and less anxious, there’s a good chance that achieving some distance from the self, whether knowingly or inadvertently, played an important role in bringing that happier state about.

Treatment for anxiety is everywhere we look. Beyond the usual therapies and medications on offer, our society seems also to have built up a vast anti-anxiety infrastructure. Health food stores selling “mood boosting” vitamins and dietary supplements. Weighted blankets and meditation apps. Essential oils and online Mindfulness training seminars. Adult coloring books, salt lamps, stress-relief toys, emotional support animals. An endless stream of self-help books. A million things to help us fall and stay asleep: melatonin pills, therapeutic pillows, soothing teas infused with valerian, white noise machines, CBD oil. And the list goes on. Whatever one thinks of this vast infrastructure, it’s clear that the imperative at the heart of Murdoch’s doctrine of unselfing — to “give attention to nature in order to clear our minds of selfish care”—is one that we anxious sufferers would do well to take seriously.

Featured image by Sydney Sims via Unsplash

OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.

Rethinking unjust enrichment

Rethinking unjust enrichment

Restitutionary claims are pertinent to our daily interactions and commercial dealings. These claims arise in many scenarios including: improperly collected taxes, mistaken payments, disputes between cohabitants, payments on another person’s debt, mistaken improvements on another person’s property, and provision of unrequested services.

Originally coined by one of the leading private law scholars of the 20th century, Oxford Law Professor Peter Birks (1940-2002), the law of unjust enrichment provides a unifying framework for understanding the nature of all restitutionary claims, revealing a single ‘skeleton’ beneath. Stated in these terms, the law of unjust enrichment is a distinct ground of liability, alongside such classical private law categories as property, contract, torts, and equity. By situating previously disorganised restitutionary claims within one normative thread, unjust enrichment makes an argument about the past, present, and future of private law.

Professor Peter Birks stated that the following four elements constitute unjust enrichment’s liability formula:

A defendant’s enrichment—the claimant should demonstrate that the defendant received some ‘benefit’ or ‘value’;at the plaintiff’s expense—the claimant should demonstrate that the enrichment occurred at their expense, establishing a causal link between the parties;the enrichment is unjust—the claimant should demonstrate that the enrichment falls into one of the categories previously recognised by the courts, such as mistake, duress, undue influence, or frustrated contract;defences—if the claimant proves the first three elements of the formula, then the defendant is able to claim the existence of one (or more) of the defences previously recognised by the courts, which could deny restitution.

Consider, for example, the case of mistaken payments where a claimant mistakenly transfers money to a defendant. The defendant receives money, meaning they are ‘enriched’ at the claimant’s expense. The case falls within one of the previously established categories—mistakes. It is open to the defendant to claim one of the defences. For example, the defendant can demonstrate that they spent the money in good faith on purchasing certain goods; something they would not have done without the mistaken transfer.

The four steps formula has been adopted in the House of Lords in Lipkin Gorman (1992) and then followed to varying degrees in other common law jurisdictions, such as Singapore, Hong Kong, and New Zealand. The four-stage formula has also heavily informed Canadian jurisprudence. Unjust enrichment has a different history in Australia where it has fallen in and out of favour. Yet, the future of unjust enrichment could not be brighter, not just in the UK, but across a wide range of the Commonwealth jurisdictions.

However, despite the continued support for unjust enrichment, there have always been academic critics of the idea. This now includes those who once supported the idea. The recent monograph by Oxford Law Professor Robert Stevens has challenged each one of the constitutive elements of the formula. Stevens demonstrates the significant difficulty that the UK courts have faced since Lipkin Gorman. Some elements and concepts of the formula (such as the concept of ‘value’ and the ‘at the plaintiff’s expense’ element) are intolerably vague and flexible, leading to unjustifiable results and implausible unpredictability.

Most troublingly, Stevens shows that a careful review of many restitutionary claims reveals them to be at odds with the most important element of Birks’ formula—the defendant’s enrichment. An examination of the courts’ reasoning over the centuries suggests that the courts have traditionally focused on the nature of a particular transaction between parties, rather than on the consequences of it. The question of whether given plaintiff was enriched, suffered a loss, or remained the same as a result of a transaction has been irrelevant to the question of finding a defendant liable in restitution. In other words, restitutionary claims appear to epitomise a law of defective transactions, rather than a law of a defendant’s enrichment. Stevens’ point is brutally simple: unjust enrichment doctrinally collapses.

Furthermore, contemporary scholars across the world have united in their opposition to unjust enrichment; the sceptics coming from such jurisdictions as Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Canada, USA, Ireland, and India have expressed their concerns. The united manifesto says that a deep understanding of unjust enrichment requires an examination of its core claims from different angles. This understanding is critical for the future development of private law and private law categories, and the consideration of how these can serve the needs of society in the most just, fair, and predictable way.

Accordingly, our work Rethinking Unjust Enrichment has provided a comprehensive outlook of unjust enrichment from the following multi-layered, interdisciplinary perspectives: doctrine, history, theory, and sociology. For instance, it has been argued that the doctrinal fallacies of unjust enrichment are not limited to the UK, but pertinent to other jurisdictions as well. Historically, it has been doubted whether unjust enrichment was present in the reasoning of common law judges. The very idea that a defendant should be found liable due to their enrichment appears to be problematic through the conceptual lens of justice and fairness in private law. Finally, sociologically, it has been suggested that the remarkable success of unjust enrichment should be attributed more to the identity of the reformers rather than to the doctrinal attractiveness of the four-stage formula.

Unjust enrichment stands at a crossroad. The lessons of the recent years perhaps demonstrate two things: (1) the centrality of restitutionary claims and (2) the heated debate between supporters and opponents of the idea of unjust enrichment as a unifying basis of those claims. A productive dialogue between the two rival camps should be encouraged to contemplate together how we should understand the past, present, and future of private law.

Featured image by Ash Edmonds via Unsplash.

OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.

Religious faith in contemporary society

Religious faith in contemporary society

The idea that religious beliefs claim truth is an unpopular position in Western societies. Any religion can sometimes be out of step with whatever the current secular consensus about moral priorities is. The claims of any faith can seem threatening when many wish to be autonomous and not be told what to think. They want to decide on their own identity.

Religious faith, on the other hand, often appears to make dogmatic assumptions about truth that apply to all people whether they believe it or not. It allegedly takes us towards an authoritarianism that challenges individual liberty. It is tempting instead to see faith as part of the identity of a person instead of a stance taken about the nature of the world—perhaps then faith is just a characteristic of some people and not of others. However, that does not do justice to the fact that any use of the word, whether in a religious context or not, must always specify who or what we have faith in. This then involves reason because we have to know what we believe and be able to specify it. Faith without content is not faith at all if it lacks all focus.

Once we talk of what we have faith in, the question must always arise whether we are justified and whether our views might be true. Religion needs reason if it is to appeal to an objective truth, and the two are not intrinsically opposed to each other. The issue should always be what any faith is directed at. Reason may be powerless without faith to guide it, but faith is arbitrary without the support of reason, and unable to appeal to others who do not at present share it. That is the case in secular cases of faith and is all the more so with the central issues of religious faith. Reason without faith lacks motivation. Faith without reason is blind.

Faith can never be just a personal property or the mere badge of a particular community because of the nature of its claims about who we humans are and why we should matter to each other.

Faith may seem an individual matter, but there is also a corporate side to it, such as when we refer to ‘the Christian faith’, the ‘faith’ of another religion, or even ‘faith leaders’. The word can be about a transmitted body of belief as well as an individual’s stance to the world. A casual reference to ‘communities of faith’ can produce a view of different bodies of faith, each with their own standards of belief and practice, which cannot then be criticised from an external standpoint. This may seem very tolerant, but it is an approach that involves a departure from the idea of a rationality which we all share. It can encourage the establishment of self-contained sectors within modern society, resentful of outside interference or scrutiny, let alone the application of a general, non-sectarian, set of laws. It encourages the breakdown of a cohesive society, with a shared concern for what may be the common good.

Why though does any form of religious faith matter? The temptation is to leave people alone with their personal beliefs and practices, or to respect the views of communities to which we do not belong on the grounds that they are of no concern to the rest of us. Religious faith, though, is never just a matter of private belief and practice but is manifested in actions that resonate in wider society. Our life at every level is always influenced by our understanding of the world and the place of humans in it. That applies to all of us whether we accept or reject a religion. Attitudes to the world and understandings of its nature and the place of humans in it, produce the morality that guides different people to see what is important. Any religion typically makes claims about how we should behave, and religions such as Christianity and Islam preach forms of morality that they claim have universal applicability. Such claims to truth by different forms of religious faith are too significant to be cast out of the public square. If true, they deserve acceptance by everyone, and if false, their influence must at least be controlled. If we do not know which, they deserve serious debate and examination.

Faith can never be just a personal property or the mere badge of a particular community because of the nature of its claims about who we humans are and why we should matter to each other. It can appear a disruptive component in society because, when it talks of God, it refers to an authority beyond this world and superior to those who have political power. That is a threat to those who hunger for power in any society, and it is not surprising that religious faith is typically outlawed by totalitarian regimes. Even so, just because it deals with what people think is most important for them in their lives, any religious faith can be a powerful motivation, harnessed for good as well as evil. This then brings us back to the issue of the place of rationality in the guidance of faith. Religious faith will typically demand its place in the public square and its voice in deliberations about the common good. It should not be swept aside and ‘privatized’ but should be able to contribute to democratic debate. Faith must never be afraid of the full searchlight of reason if it believes it is proclaiming a truth that is applicable to everyone whether they recognise it or not.

Featured Image by Jack Sharp via Unsplash [public domain]

OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.