Oxford University Press's Blog, page 207

On observing one’s past

Let me share a memory with you. It’s a childhood memory, about an event from when I was around 13 or 14 years old. My father and I are playing soccer together. He is the goalkeeper, standing between the posts, I am the striker, taking shots from outside the box. My dad has been encouraging me to shoot with my weaker left foot, to develop the skills that come more easily on my more natural right side. He throws the ball to me, I control it on my chest, let it drop, and hit a sweetly-timed volley with the outside of my left foot. The ball arcs perfectly towards the goal. My dad moves across to save, although I’m not sure he has it covered, and then the ball thunders off the crossbar. Even though I didn’t score, I have an intense feeling of satisfaction, of executing a near perfect left foot volley, the quality of which I have struggled to reproduce in the intervening years. This memory has a rich phenomenology: it involves visual and motor imagery as well as emotion. Yet there’s an important feature of this memory, which is perhaps not apparent in the way I describe it. As this dynamic and evocative memory unfolds, I see not only my father, the ball, and the goal, but myself too. I see myself in the remembered scene, from the outside, as if someone had filmed us playing together and I am watching the old footage.

Such memories are called “observer memories.” Do you have memories such as these? Take a moment to think of the last time you gave a talk in public, or the last time you went swimming. Or, if public speaking and swimming aren’t your thing, think about an early childhood memory, an early birthday perhaps. Such events are often recalled from this type of third-person perspective. When you recall these events do you picture yourself in the remembered scene? Do you see yourself from-the-outside? Indeed, can you switch perspectives, flipping between a first and third-person perspective? Some people can.

Here’s another question. How does this feature of my memory, of your memories too perhaps, strike you? Does it seem natural, or odd? Is there no doubt in your mind that it is a genuine memory? Or, conversely, are you sure that such images, with their anomalous points of view, simply cannot be genuine memories? Such a worry is quite intuitive, I think. How can an image in which you see yourself from-the-outside, from a point of view you didn’t occupy at the time of the original event, be a genuine memory? If memory preserves the content of perception, then these images shouldn’t count as memories. Yet science tells us that memory does not simply preserve the past. Memory is constructive. It is fluid and flexible, alive to the context of the present moment in which we are remembering. Images from an observer perspective may be the products of such a constructive system, which imaginatively modifies and moulds our memories by drawing on information we didn’t hold at the time of the original event.

…the context of the perceptual experience can encourage us to adopt an external perspective on ourselves at the time of the original event. We can, in a sense, get outside of ourselves.

I think this is the right story to tell about such observer perspective memories, at least in part. But I don’t think it is complete. Memory is constructive not only at the time of retrieval, but right from the start, during the processes of encoding. Perceptual experience involves more than sensory stimulation, and even at the time of the original event we are attending to, selecting, interpreting, and integrating information from various sources into a memory of the event. Memory is alive to the various sources of information and the context in which the event took place. I suggest that, at least sometimes, the context of the perceptual experience can encourage us to adopt an external perspective on ourselves at the time of the original event. We can, in a sense, get outside of ourselves.

This is not to suggest that such observer perspectives are memories of out-of-body experiences. You don’t have to literally see yourself during the perceptual experience in order to see yourself in a memory of that experience. When you are remembering an event from an observer perspective you are not remembering seeing yourself at the time of the event, you are simply remembering the event in different way. A different point of view can convey different information and promote understanding. Indeed, perspectives which go beyond the purely egocentric are not only found in memory, but in imagination, dreams, spatial cognition, art, language, and gesture, and they help us think about and interpret events and environments.

So, again, take a moment to think of your memories. Perhaps after reading this you will be aware of a curious feature of some of your memories, or of those of someone you know. Perhaps you’ll be aware that you, or others, sometimes remember from-the-outside.

Featured image credit: Photo Lens Lenses by jarmoluk via Pixabay .

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A European peace plan turns 325

2018 marks the 325th anniversary of the publication of William Penn’s Essay towards the Present and Future Peace of Europe, which proposed, among other things, the establishment of a European Parliament. Best remembered as the founder of Pennsylvania, Penn spent most of his life in England and remained deeply concerned about the fate of religious and political liberty across Europe. He proposed his “European Diet, Parliament, or Estates” as a way of promoting peaceful coexistence and breaking out of the cycle of nearly constant European war. A fresh look at Penn’s Essay is a task well worth undertaking, as refugee crises, fears of autocracy in Hungary and Poland, and the future of Brexit continue to roil European waters.

Like its twentieth-century counterpart, William Penn’s proposal for a European Parliament emerged out of an intimate familiarity with the reality of violence and war. In 1644, the year of Penn’s birth, the English Civil War was already two years old. By 1693, when Penn wrote his Essay, the War of the Grand Alliance had been raging for five years. And when Penn was struck down by a stroke in 1712, the War of the Spanish Succession had already been underway for more than a decade.

Much of Penn’s political activism was driven by his Quaker faith, but in his Essay he sought a broader audience. He beckoned to both Christian and classical sources by quoting from the Beatitudes — “Beati pacifici,” or “blessed are the peacemakers” — as well as from Cicero’s De officiis —“Cedant arma togae,” or “Let arms yield to the toga” (privileging civilian over military rule). And in the very first sentence of the very first chapter of his Essay, Penn appealed not to Scripture but to his readers’ basic humanity:

He must not be a man, but a statue of brass or stone, whose bowels do not melt when he beholds the bloody tragedies of this war.

He also emphasized the extraordinary benefits peace brings to human societies, and connected it to trade and prosperity:

Peace preserves our possessions; we are in no danger of invasions: Our trade is free and safe, we rise and lie down without anxiety . . . It excites industry, which brings wealth, as that gives the means of hospitality . . . But war . . . seizes all these comforts at once, and stops the civil channel of society. The rich draw in their stock, the poor turn soldiers, or thieves, or starve . . . but what the peace gave, the war devours.

Finally, he suggested a maxim — “justice is the means of peace” — and tied those two concepts together with the notion of that legitimate government is based on the consent of the people.

Moving from a condemnation of the current war to a plan for avoiding future wars, Penn proposed a Diet, or Parliament, of European states. Such a body would be consultative in nature and be characterized by a number of features aimed at minimizing the opportunity for bribery and corruption and soothing the easily offended honor of early modern princes, including a round meeting table “to avoid quarrel for precedency.” Each state would be granted a number of delegates proportional to “an estimate of the yearly value” of that country’s production.

As an adherent of a pacifist sect, Penn saw the avoidance of war as a holy calling, and in his Essay, he drew on a lifetime of European experiences as well as many attempts at mediation in both Quaker and colonial settings. Peace and prosperity had been themes in Penn’s tolerationist writings since his earliest days, and his emphasis on the economic devastation wrought by war reflected, on a larger stage, his domestic arguments that prosperity and civil peace would follow from the enactment of liberty of conscience in England. Penn also acknowledged — pragmatically — that, in addition to fulfilling God’s call for peace, the establishment of a European Parliament would help rehabilitate Christianity’s reputation “in the sight of the infidels,” and ease travel across Europe.

In addition to rehabilitating his own reputation, which had suffered after the 1688 Revolution, the Essay’s publication was also part of a larger process by which Penn was turning his thoughts to political units larger than colonies and nations. As such, the Essay can be read alongside his later proposal for a union of American colonies (A Brief and Plaine Scheam, 1697). That plan called for annual assemblies of colonial American representatives during wartime, with a colonial Diet not so different from the one proposed for European powers, to coordinate defensive preparations and foster intercolonial cooperation. And looking forward fifty years or so, we might look at Penn’s plan in light of the Albany Congress of 1754, where Benjamin Franklin proposed a system of intercolonial cooperation to combat the French threat and facilitate relations with Indian tribes.

Unfortunately for William Penn — and, perhaps, for Europe itself — his call for a European Parliament went unheeded. Penn died in 1718, and the notion of a European Parliament remained unfulfilled for more than two centuries after. Nevertheless, by remembering him and his Essay, we see that the dream of European unity predates our current difficulties and will surely continue whatever their outcome may be.

Featured image credit: “European Parliament Strasbourg” by Erich Westendarp. CCO via Pixabay.

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How politicians tried to sell Brexit to us

If we examine the two campaigns in terms of their message strategy, i.e. the way in which they sought to influence swing voters, significant differences become apparent.

Remain is widely regarded to have been poorly executed – not a difficult accusation to sustain, given that it lost – however, I’d argue that it was not the execution, but the message strategy that was flawed. From a brand communication perspective its campaign is built on a classic proposition: Britain – Stronger in Europe. This message easy to understand and virtually impossible to misinterpret. The four words work really hard and they clearly map out a defensible position: whoever you are, you will be wealthier if we stay in the EU and poorer if we leave. Therefore, life for you and your family will be much better if you vote to Remain.

This message also enjoyed robust endorsement from an impressive list of individuals and organizations that included not only the UK Government but also the Official Opposition, the IMF, Bank of England, CBI, US President Barack Obama, and not least the EU itself. The message was clear:

Remain campaign is a text-book example of “Message into Action” or rational model of brand communication. It is widely used and underpins most brand communication – indeed for much of the 20th Century it was the only the method employed. Rooted in classical economics, this model assumes that human behavior is rational and, therefore, that decisions are predictable. Consumer choices are influenced by two factors, wants and constraints, which lead people inevitably towards a compromise. For example, someone looking for a new car might want to buy a prestige two-seater sports car, but the constraint on their choice is that they only have a budget of £10,000 and need a vehicle capable of transporting their family around. In these circumstances they would choose the vehicle that goes furthest to meeting their wants within those constraints.

Remain reasoned, quite compellingly, that people were unlikely to vote for something that was going to make them poorer, or make their lives more difficult. Yet in reality, that is exactly what they appeared to do.

On the face of it the Leave’s offer was far less coherent than Remain’s. For a start there were two separate Leave campaigns running in parallel. The official cross-party Leave group ran with Take Control but there was also an unofficial campaign, led by UKIP leader Nigel Farrage under the much blunter headline We Want Our Country Back. They are in fact somewhat devoid of meaning – ‘Platitudes’ Michael Heseltine called them – and the more one dug into them, the more ephemeral they seemed to be. The two statements seem to imply something to do with sovereignty and sound empowering, but there was no real attempt (God forbid) to advance the rational argument for increased parliamentary sovereignty at the expense of reduced control over the machinations of the European Union. Nor was there a coherent economic case made for independence.

…people were unlikely to vote for something that was going to make them poorer, or make their lives more difficult. Yet in reality, that is exactly what they appeared to do.

In Leave’s defence, their campaign was necessarily nebulous. What Brexit would actually look like – hard/soft/Norway/Switzerland/Canada/WTO rules – was anyone’s guess. Beyond vaguely recognizing that ‘people’ were tired of ‘interference from Brussels’ and literally suggesting that anything might be better, there was not an awful lot in Leave’s campaign to hang your hat on.

For that reason, the Leave campaign slogans are not rational propositions, but emotional appeals. ‘Emotion into Action’ or the emotional model is alternative method for the creation of brand communication that emerged during the 1980s. Based on findings in the fields of cognitive psychology and behavioural economics, it is the method by which modern corporate brands communicate. The key difference between the two model is the starting point. The development of rational appeals begins with an interrogation of the product, but emotional appeals focus on the consumer.

Emotional appeals have proven to be hugely more compelling than their rational counterparts. A rational appeal is enough to persuade us to by a soap powder because it washes whiter, but an emotional appeal is what persuades us to buy Nike because it is Nike.

And when an emotional appeal comes up against a rational appeal something interesting happens: the emotional appeal comes out on top, almost every time. In fact, they are so compelling, they can even override sensory information. By rational argument I may be able to successfully convince you that my trainers, car and phone offer you the best value for money, but you will still buy the Nike, the Audi, and the Apple.

As Remain found to its cost, it is very difficult to reason people out of a position they have not reasoned themselves into. In such circumstances, rational arguments are about as effective as trying to stop a runaway bus by hurling ping-pong balls at it.

Leave succeeded because their campaigns invited voters to project their own meaning onto nebulous slogans. What does We Want Our Country Back actually mean? Well it means whatever people wanted it to mean: ask 100 different Leave voters and you’ll get 100 bespoke answers, each one nuanced towards the hopes, opinions, desire’s and prejudices of the individual. One might just as well ask what is the meaning of Nike’s Just do it or Apple’s Think Differently. The objective was to influence what people felt about Brexit not what they thought about it. Vorsprung Durch Technik?

Featured image credit: Brexit UK EU by Tumisu. CC0 via Pixabay.

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From “odd,” “strange,” and “bad,” to reclaiming the word “queer”

How has the word “queer” been reclaimed by the LGBTQ community? This adapted excerpt from Keywords for Today: A 21st Century Vocabulary explains its evolution.

The adjective queer poses etymological problems. Its sense of “strange, odd, peculiar, eccentric” is given an initial Oxford English Dictionary (OED) date of 1513; thus John Bale in 1550 writes of chronicles that “contayne muche more truthe than their quere legendes.” There is then another sense, recorded as obsolete, with a date of 1567: that of queer as “bad; contemptible, worthless; untrustworthy, disreputable.” In this sense the word is used with reference especially to vagabonds and criminals, and eventually also applied to counterfeit coins and banknotes. This bad queer (in early use often occurring as quire) seems to have been a different word, of unknown origin, from the strange queer, itself of uncertain origin, with which it gradually became identified after the end of the seventeenth century.

The merging of the more or less distinct words is subsequently important. Strange queer continues through into contemporary English, acquiring in the course of the eighteenth century an associated sense of feeling “out of sorts; unwell; faint, giddy.” The OED quotes from a 1750 novel: “All on a sudden, my Wife complained she was sick, and both myself and Sir Thomas found ourselves very queer and qualmish.” The major development is use of the term in the specific sense of, or relating to, homosexuals or homosexuality. The OED dates this from the early twentieth century, with an initial quotation from The Los Angeles Times in 1914 which characterizes a club as “composed of the ‘queer’ people,” where “the ‘queer’ people have a good time”; followed by a 1915 quotation from Arnold Bennett describing “An immense reunion of art students, painters, and queer people. Girls in fancy male costume, queer dancing, etc…”

Image credit: Radclyffe Hall, c. 1930. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

If context points to the specific, homosexual sense, the sense of “strange, odd, peculiar” is still present, both inasmuch as the equation of homosexuality and peculiarity is at stake and inasmuch as the appearance of the word queer may be taken one way or the other. The word appears a number of times in Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928), for example, but its use in particular instances might be read one way or another, or, more significantly and importantly, both ways at once. Stephen, the central figure, is “a queer kid” who discovers in the course of the novel what her queerness involves: “the queer compositions” she shows her father are strange, as is “the queer vital strength” of the hand of a woman she holds, both uses proleptically indicative of the queerness being discovered. “He’s in Paris; it’s too queer” is merely strange, though the effect of the frequency of queer in the novel pulls it nevertheless towards queer queer. The LA Times fixes the homosexual reference by putting queer in inverted commas; Bennett leaves the one-way-or-the-other reading just possibly open to those of his readers who lack the familiarity of knowledge that would enable the particular homosexual sense. Today, of course, the general currency of homosexual queer makes the reception of that sense more or less inevitable and, indeed, can be at the expense of earlier ambiguities, overriding or insistently overlaying strange queer.

The OED has two entries for queer as a noun. The first is derived from the ‘bad’ queer, and means “forged or counterfeit money.” The second has two separate senses. The first shows uses with the, i.e., things that are ‘queer’ in various senses, taken collectively. It is specified as rare, has a late initial date of 1826 and brings us back to strange, peculiar queer, with a quotation from Walter Scott: “His appearance bordered … upon what is vulgarly called the queer.” The second is that of a homosexual, in the first instance a male homosexual. The initial date given is 1894, referring to the infamous letter sent by the Marquess of Queensberry to his son Lord Alfred Douglas in which he anathematizes “The Snob Queers.”

In OED, the derogatory force is noted with which the adjective and noun queer could be used in respect of homosexuals. The merging of strange and bad queer senses made available a term of abuse and offensive judgment. Though the history of its use from the start by homosexual people and communities themselves is complex, making it more than simply abusive, only recent decades have seen the reclaiming of queer as a positive and empowering term of identification and identity. The OED cites a 1992 piece from The Nation referring to an advertisement as “thoroughly offensive to queer readers,” where what is offensive is not queer as an identification of a section of the readership but the advertisement itself.

At the same time, queer has been extended beyond reference to a particular homosexual identification. The term now calls into question both sexual identities and solid gender roles. The sense of queer as strange comes to the fore here, as the word refers to those who reject the terms of heteronormativity. Thus, the OED records the derivative queerdom as “the state or condition of being hom osexual; homosexuals collectively,” from 1961, but then has a quotation from 1994 that defines queerdom as “a polymorphously perverse, all-inclusive left-of-centre community.” This later use relates to the development of queer theory, itself with an initial OED date of 1990: an approach to social and cultural study which challenges or deconstructs accepted notions of sexuality and gender, goes against acceptance of heterosexuality as normative and the assumption of fixed terms of male and female. As a 2003 OED quotation from the Times Literary Supplement puts it, “The overriding priority for queer theory is to get rid of the idea that some kinds of people, and some forms of sex, are more natural than others.”

Contemporary development of queer becomes in these circumstances a site of contention, raising questions as to whether the word can be effectively separated from the history of derogatory and derisive usages, as well as questions regarding the effects of its general extension into an academic all-inclusiveness at the expense of specific cultural-political use in relation to particular identified groups.

Queer as a verb is a late development, and carries a sense of “to make a fool of, ridicule; swindle, cheat” (1781) as well as “to put out of order; to spoil” (1818), hence to queer a pitch (1846), originally with reference to spoiling the business of a street vendor or performer. The OED gives no sense or quotation relating to queer to the homosexual senses of adjective and noun queer although there is a book of gay musicology entitled Queering the Pitch (1994).

Featured image credit: WERK for Consent- A Queer and Trans Dance Protest 2819 by Ted Eytan. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons .

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Brian Eno’s Music for Airports 40 years later

Forty years ago, Brian Eno released Ambient 1: Music for Airports and Virgin-EMI has just given it a deluxe vinyl re-issue. The first work to formally identify itself as “ambient,” it garnered modest attention and a bit of derision; Rolling Stone referred to it as “aesthetic white noise.” But over time, it has become the work in the evolving genre of ambient music, topping lists of the most important ambient works, and receiving acoustic and electric performances from artists as varied as the new music ensemble Bang On A Can and the jazz-rock troupe Psychic Temple. It has even been subjected to a musical rebuttal, Music for Real Airports, by The Black Dog. By 2016, Ivan Hewitt, writing for the Telegraph, could describe Eno’s ambient venture as a “seismic moment in musical history.”

Music for Airports is a curious album. None of the music it presents was written and then recorded. Rather, it was composed or assembled from tape loops of previously recorded material manipulated by Eno and overlain with various synthesizer tones. Moreover, it does without lyrics, melodies, motive developments, evolving harmonies, or rhythm. Press play and one finds clusters of sounds – short piano phrases, four voices singing “ahhhh,” barely dynamic synthesizer tones – repeating at irregular intervals. And the tracks carry the barest of names: 1/1, 2/1, 1/2, 2/2. How are we supposed to listen?

But maybe that is the wrong question. A mini-manifesto accompanying the album imagines a music that adds an atmosphere or tint, an ambience. In fact, Eno takes his rival to be Muzak. He is offering music to accompany activities other than listening to music such as reading or tidying up. And that is one function the album can play. Instead of commanding our attention, it unfolds into life, collaborating with other sounds and activities, inducing, as Eno says, “calm and a space to think,” something he thought particularly welcome in airports.

Image credit: Brian Eno live remix at Punkt 2012. Joerundtp. CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

But the album is more than that. In fact, even as background music it proves too interesting to ignore, despite Eno’s insistence that it “must be as ignorable as it is interesting.” Sometimes a piano line (or two) catches our ear, as in 1/1 or 2/1, or, after a long silence, we’re caught by an “ahhhh” in 1/2 or 2/1. And because no track ever settles into rhythmic patterns, it never really settles into the background. Instead, Music for Airports is arresting. But, unlike canonical classical music, it never takes one anywhere, that is, if you give it your full attention, one’s mind wanders (and wonders). The music is coy. It catches our attention and then leaves it, suspended. Sometimes, we’re just caught between hearing and listening. Other times reverie results. Whatever we were doing becomes slightly strange, something to think more about, perhaps pursue differently. The album thus accomplishes something that a lot of powerful art accomplishes. It dislodges the familiar. But rather than replace it with some new vision, it leaves us to ponder what might yet be.

To really get Music for Airports, I think you need to fall into this space between listening and hearing, and to begin listening in different ways, say to what John Cage, a decided influence on Eno, terms the “activity of sounds.” (The album is, in fact, a self-conscious heir of many avant-garde efforts, including Erik Satie’s “musical furniture,” Cage’s chance compositions, LaMonte Young’s experiments with sustained tones and drones, and Steve Reich’s phase works.) No longer searching for what isn’t there one can focus on sounds and their textures, whether the sustain of a piano key in 1/1, the strangeness of the voices in 2/1, which sound strangely affectless, or the lapping, horn-like tones in 2/2. In traditional music, a note is a part of a larger whole. Here, each might prove a thicket.

Interestingly, a change in technology —CD to FLAC to vinyl, or speaker to earbud— offers variations on the album’s textural themes. (Digitized, the affectless voices on 1/2 some even less human without thereby becoming angelic.) But that is how Eno wants it. The album belongs to the tradition of experimental music, which initiates processes in order to produce unintended results. Since his art school days, Eno has been interested in cybernetics, the study of regulatory systems, such as tape loops running asynchronously and thereby generating novel interactions on a master tape. But playback systems are also regulatory in their differential emphases across a sonic field. The album invites listeners to keep the experiment going, and playing with different technologies is one way to do, as is scoring it for acoustic instruments in the manner of Bang On A Can, or taking its tonal outlines into an improvisational scene in the manner of Psychic Temple.

As you can tell, the album can be approached in many ways, which calls for yet another approach. Not only does it function as background music, music for reverie, and an experiment in the activity of sounds, it also stands as a piece of conceptual art, prompting reflections in the nature of music, the composer, and listening. (It even provides background music for such reflections.) Music for Airports is thus very much, in Evan Ziporyn’s words, a “multifaceted masterpiece” that deserves its forty-year journey from “aesthetic white noise” to a paradigmatic piece of ambient music that continues to surprise and inspire, or simply accompany.

Featured image credit: Larnaca International Airport, Cyprus: departure area, 2017 by A.Savin. FAL via Wikimedia Commons .

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Feeling my oats for the last time this year

Having sown my wild oats (see the post for December 12, 2018), I can now afford the luxury of looking at the origin of the word oat. It would be unfair to introduce the holiday season by discussing a word of unknown etymology. A Christmas carol needs a happy end, and indeed I have something reassuring to say.

The Latin for “oats” is avena, a word known to some from botany and to some from the family name Avenarius “pertaining to oats,” oaty, or oat–some, as it were. Two special terms exist: avena sativa and avena fatua. They mean “cultivated oats” and” wild oats” respectively (fatuus is “stupid, idiotic,” not exactly “fatuous”). The Old English for oats, or rather oat, was āte. As always, the macron over the vowel designates length, so that ā sounded more or less like a in Modern Engl. father. The recorded examples are few, with most of them occurring in the parable of the enemy who sowed tares—avena fatua, it would appear—in a grain field (Matthew XIII: 24-30). But in Middle English, the word, now pronounced as ōtes (with o as in Modern Engl. or, but without r) came to mean “avena sativa.” The plural predominated, and it still does. James A. H. Murray believed that the word had denoted an individual grain, not the plant or produce in the mass; hence the plural. We’ll return to his formulation later.

Today, avena sativa often refers to the so-called “green straw” and is advertised all over the place. On the Internet, I found the following information. The plant, we are told, “which has been passed down through generations, was a herbal supporter of health—especially in women. It also has a reputation as an aphrodisiac [of course!] for both men and women, with the saying sowing your wild oats thought to have originated with regard to this particular benefit of Avena sativa.” Since the text has a herbal rather an herbal, I assume that it originated in the UK, rather than the US. Why, oh why, didn’t they say who thought the idiom owes its existence to the salubrious qualities of the plant? Medieval assurances (“wise people say,” “as is well-known,” “widely traveled men told me,” and the like) no longer suffice.

Besides āte, Old English had ātih “weeds,” continued in northern English dialects as oatty “oats of very short stalks” and “mixed with wild oats.” The names of weeds and cultivated plants often sound alike, because several species of grain arise from weeds growing in sown fields or because they resemble one another. A typical example is Dutch tarwe “wheat” and Engl. tare. The two words are related, even though tare has been known from texts only since the Middle English period.

Richard Avenarius, once famous for his philosophy of empirio-criticism. Image credit: Richard Avenarius (1843-1896) by Ohne Angabe. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Some of the most dependable dictionaries say that oat is an isolated word. This is wrong, for good cognates of it have been found in Frisian and dialectal Dutch. Their existence shows that we are dealing with a word of limited distribution in West Germanic but tells us nothing about its origin. Oat has a few suggestive look-alikes. The first of them is Gothic atisk. As often mentioned in this blog, in the fourth century, Bishop Wulfila translated the New Testament from Greek into Gothic. Of his translation, which is the oldest consecutive text of great length in any Germanic language, many parts are extant. Mark 2: 23 and Luke VI: 1 are among the surviving fragments. In the text of the Authorized Bible, we read: “…his disciples began… to pluck the ears of corn” and “…his disciples plucked the ears of corn” (corn “grain”). In both places, the Gothic word atisk “grain field” occurs. The Greek text has sporímon “cultivated area” (in the accusative). The root of this word is familiar to English speakers from spore and its cognate sperm.

The Gothic noun does not designate any plant, but the similarity between atisk and Old Engl. āte is unmistakable. Also, a bridge between “grain field” and “oats” is rather easy to draw. To be sure, we don’t know what kind of a field it was, and whether oats rather than wheat or rye seduced the hungry disciples. But, as always, the main trouble is of linguistic nature. The Old English word, we remember, was ātes, and in that language long a (that is, ā) was the product of the old diphthong ai contracted into a long monophthong. For instance, Gothic had stains “stone,” and in Old English, stān corresponded to it. Again and again, I refer to the inexorable laws of ablaut. In the old Indo-European languages (and English belongs to this language family), vowels alternate according to strict rules, and it so happens that ai (the source of Old Engl. ā) and short a belong to different series and cannot break the magic circle around them.

Yet the temptation for special pleading is great. Hans Kuhn (1899-1988), a distinguished and at his time extremely influential scholar, conjured up the ghost of an ancient fashion for short a (!), which allegedly set in when the Indo-Europeans were learning agriculture. “Common sense” suggested to him that oak (from aik-) and acorn, as well as ait– “oat” and Gothic atisk, were related pairwise. Common sense is a wonderful asset, but ablaut is a good thing too, and, if we disregard the strict laws of etymology, our companions will be medieval scholars with their fanciful ideas. A fashion for short a? It is more prudent to stay away from such concepts.

To complicate matters, goats seem to have a fondness for oats, and, surprisingly, the words for “goat” and “oat” sound alike (even identical) in several languages. Could oat get its name because of an association with the animal? Few etymologists are ready to endorse this idea, but it once had famous advocates. Also, Latin ador “spelt” (the cereal) and some forms of the verb eat have been compared with oat (our oldest English etymologists explained that this culture is “forage for horses in all places, and in some, provision for men”), but both ideas died unmourned. And so did a few others, even though they too had their day in court. That is why so many good reference books dismiss oat as a word of unknown origin. Yet not a bad hypothesis has been offered, and I think it has potential.

Who said that oats do not swell? Image credit: Oatmeal & Berries by Melissa Belanger. Public Domain via Unsplash.

We are returning to phonetics. Old English ā developed from the diphthong ai. In German and Icelandic, the continuation of ai is not ā but ei. Walter W. Skeat, as early as the first edition of his etymological dictionary (1884), cited Icelandic eitill “nodule in stone” (it also means “nodule in wood”) as related to oat. He reconstructed the original sense of this word’s root, which has cognates in German and elsewhere in Scandinavian, as “swelling,” and concluded that oat belongs with eitill. He found some allies, but the best authorities dismissed or rejected his hypothesis. True, the sense is not specific (why was it chosen for oats, rather than for any other cereal?), but Old Engl. ātan (plural) designated “darnel, cockle, tares (lolium, zizania)” and may in prehistorical times have been applied to several kinds of weeds. Other than that, with oats it is as with barley: “The sultry suns of Summer came,/ And he grew thick and strong;/ His head weel arm’d wi’ pointed spears,/ That no one should him wrong.” Skeat’s etymology did not satisfy Murray’s OED, but, as pointed out long ago, it tallies well with the idea that oats primarily denoted not the plant or the produce in the mass, but an individual grain. Skeat never changed his opinion. He had the greatest respect for Murray’s etymologies, but here he did not budge, and he may have been right.

A FAREWELL TO 2018:

This blog was born on March 1, 2008, and ever since, those interested in word origins have been able to read my essays on OUP’s website every Wednesday. This post is No. 675. For staffing reasons, there will now be a break. The next post will appear on January 9, 2019. So I am hastening to announce my New Year resolutions. I have completed work on a middle-sized etymological dictionary of English idioms and prepared a selection of the most interesting essays from this blog in book form. In the coming year, I hope to submit both books to the publisher. And to our readers I want to say: “May any evil you have seen/Become like vapor in ’nineteen!”

A HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Featured image credit: What rain paid off by Kylo. Public Domain via Unsplash.

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OUP Mexico on Place of the Year 2018

Mexico is the 2018 Place of the Year, and we are celebrating its win. To get to know Mexico better, we asked our friends at OUP Mexico what they love most about their country. From fresh guacamole to the warmth of the people, their responses bring Mexico to life.

Amparo Quiñones

Mexico means war-hearted people. It’s a great country, full of colours and traditions like “Día de Muertos,” when shrines are built in homes and graveyards to honour relatives and friends who have passed away. We cannot forget “posadas,” held in the nine days leading up to Christmas Eve, and its colourful “piñatas.”

Mexico also has many magic towns like Guanajuato with colonial architecture, Teotihuacan and its amazing pyramids full of history, and Puebla and the delicious mole poblano.

Mexico, a place where you can find joy, love, and happiness.  That is why I love my country!

Luis Miguel González

If I could sum up what Mexico is in just one word, I would have to choose FAMILY.

Mexico, just like a family, is a microcosm of emotions and feelings, of smells and flavors, sights and wonders.

Our country is a place where sometimes you’ll encounter chaos, but also a place where the word peace finds its meaning.

Mexico, like our family, is where the heart always returns. We return to its millenary traditions mixed with 21st century life style, to its vast variety of heartwarming food and drinks, to its beautiful, narrow cobblestone streets and old churches, and to its hectic and feverish cities. We return to the white sand beaches and to the mountains and volcanoes, to the rivers and the deserts, to the warmth of a coal-stove kitchen, to the melody of a mariachi-played song, to the loudness of a soccer match, and to the quiet mayhem of our graveyards in Dia de Muertos.

But where everything comes together is in the heart and soul of the Mexican people. We are unique. We know how to smile even in the most difficult of times. We are collaborative and giving. We love like no one else does. If you’re accepted and welcomed, you become part of our families. We can party (and do it in style!), but we’re also as hardworking as any.

Mexico is like family. We as a country are far from perfect. We have many issues to tackle, but we wouldn’t change our country for the world. To me, Mexico is the greatest place on earth.

Emma Belcher

For me, Mexico is a beautiful place of contrast and complexity. As a foreigner in Mexico, I was welcomed and included. I found friends with heart and with passion, openness, and acceptance. I will always carry with me the sights, the smells, the flavours, the atmosphere, and especially the food. My favourite place had all the elements of superb fine dining: plastic chairs, paper plates, and no booking system. But you sit in a valley with views of the mountain, the smell of arrachera on the barbeque, the bustle of families around you, and queso fundido con chorizo on the table in front of you. I will have Fiesta Tacos on speed dial for my last meal.

Hugo Velasco

My favorite place is the land where my parents were born, San Juan Chilateca, Oax. Here, there is  my whole family, and from there, many have left to try their fortune in several places of the country and abroad.

The best time to visit is in July for their patronal feast. Second best is in December, when everyone comes together, and we have inns where there is wind music, piñatas, tamales, dance, and the walk of trees on December 24. When you come, try the tlayuda.

Image credit: provided and used with permission of Hugo Velasco.Image credit: provided and used with permission of Hugo Velasco.

Carole Slater

During my time working in Mexico City (not with OUP, but in a previous role), I found my time marked by exactly the sentiments above: beautiful, sympathetic, and caring people with all the time in the world to help a colleague or a stranger.

Hugging and kissing colleagues in the lifts on the way into the office in the morning and on the way out in the evening. The amazing warmth of all greetings and the genuine interest when someone asked how you were today. My colleagues back in the London office always knew when I had just come back from Mexico as it took a few days to decompress and return to “British” norms.

Mexico City was vibrant and exciting and the family activities in the parks at weekends showcased how absolutely important family ties are to the Mexican people.

Susana Paredes

We may say many things about Mexico. We could talk about its beautiful beaches in the Mexican Caribbean or the Pacific Coast. We could talk about its wonderful traditions such as “Day of the Dead” or the nine parties before Christmas called “posadas.” We could talk about the historical sites at Teotihuacan or Chichen Itza or about enjoying the cold feel of the shiny silver from Taxco and Zacatecas. But there is one thing I really enjoy because it can be shared with the world: food. As a matter of fact, UNESCO has appointed traditional Mexican cuisine an Intangible Cultural Heritage for the world.

I would like to share with you a very simple recipe (which was not easy to find as our gastronomy or Mexican cuisine is not simple at all). We must keep in mind that 3 out of the following 6 ingredients have been a gift from Mexico to the world (*). It is our traditional GUACAMOLE.

The word guacamole comes from the Nahuatl voice ahuacatl (avocado) and molli (mixture). According to the legend, Quetzalcoatl, highest god of ancient cultures, offered this recipe to his people, who took it throughout the territory.

Ingredients:

– 3 spoonfuls of chopped onion

– 4 serrano hot peppers (*)

– 2 spoonfuls of chopped coriander.

– 3 large avocados (*)

– 2/3 cup of finally chopped tomato (*)

– Salt

Blend the onion, peppers, coriander, and salt. Cut the avocados in half and remove the seed, but do not discard it. Use a wooden spoon to remove the pulp and smash it. Mix it with the blended onion mixture. Add the sliced tomatoes and season it. Place the seeds on top of the guacamole to keep it from darkening.

From my kitchen to yours! Enjoy!

Rael Martinez

What I love about Mexico is their people. We are hardworking and happy, and we see for our family (and when I say family, I do not mean a consanguine family, but a solid bond between people, whether they are relatives or not). Because of this, there’s always a place to stay, a bond to preserve, for you and for everyone in Mexico.

Olivia Tapia

I love Mexico for our traditions. We consider traditions a heritage from our ancestors, and I think all of us feel proud and committed to each of them. It doesn’t matter if you don’t have a penny in your pockets or if you live in a little, little town in this country; we always look for ways to follow old traditions. My family is from Michoacan, a state full of them! My favourite tradition: Dia de Muertos.

Greg Davies

After 15 years in Mexico, the photos below show what I LOVE about living here. This school has shown dedication by creating a great, colorful stage in the photo behind Fifi the Fox. The students demonstrate the love that Mexican people ooze all the time. Inside that suit is the educational consultant, Osiel Fernandez, who cares so much about his job that he goes the extra mile and brings teaching to life and really lives our mission. He is changing lives through education, and he cares deeply about what he is doing.

It makes me so proud to be part of the leadership team, with really great people making a difference every single day.

Image credit: provided and used with permission of Greg Davies.Image credit: provided and used with permission of Greg Davies.

Ramon Flores

I would like to share some of the contributions of Mexico has made to the world, mainly in the field of food.

Aguacate / Avocado is native to the highlands of central and eastern Mexico. It is one of the most extraordinary gifts Mexico has brought to the world. Its flavor, texture, and dietary and nutritional properties have made it one of the most favored fruits worldwide.

Ensalada César / Caesar Salad: The iconic salad was invented in 1924 when César Cardini, owner of a restaurant in Tijuana, didn’t have enough food to feed his hungry clients. He used the only remaining ingredients to serve them, and the Caesar salad was born.

Chile / Chili was paramount for the ancient Mexicans. In the cities of Teotihuacán, Tula, and Monte Albán, vestiges of a wide consumption of chile among its inhabitants have been found. And the Aztecs developed a culture of chili, many of whose aspects endure to this day.

Jitomate: Tomato. It is one of the most important contributions of Mexico to the world cuisine.

Vanilla: Mexico gave the world vanilla. Mexican vanilla is still the queen of all vanilla. It is native to the region of Papantla, State of Veracruz.

Maíz / Corn: Its cultivation began seven thousand years ago. It has been the basis of our diet for thousands of years. The corn appeared on the earth, privileged in Mexico.

Frijol : Beans: In Mexico, there are more than 470 types of beans

Maguey: Mexico is a source of highly appreciated drinks in the world like mezcal, tequila, and pulque. Pulque was considered a sacred drink in ancient Mexico.

These are just some examples of the culinary wealth of my country which make me proud.

Luz Rincón

In Mexico, everything is magic. Every corner and person has been inspired, including great artists and writers who are not Mexican. Just imagine what it is like for me. I breath it, I eat it, I listen to it, I look at it, and I admire it daily. I love Mexico.

Luis Antonio Flores

Mexico is art, traditions, care for others, passion, and love for education. I remember one time I was at a school talking to an English coordinator when I suddenly noticed a tree with the school’s philosophy. Together, students and teachers painted this beautiful representation of how a learner envisions his/her future throughout their learning journey. Putting together nature and knowledge, the school gives the students the necessary encouragements to enhance their days at school and home. Their representation embodies Oxford’s objective to give education to everyone around the globe.

Mexicans do have a clear goal in all the schools I have visited. Under no circumstances should they find school boring or repetitive. They teach and learn with devotion to their beliefs. Mexico is ecstasy, dedication, and courage.

Image credits: provided and used with permission of Luis Antonio Flores. 

Beatriz Ceballos

When people think of Mexico, they think we are just tequila, sombreros, sun, beaches, and ancient ruins. My country is much more than that. We have an array of landscapes, from jungle to desert, from mountains to beaches, from modern cities to colonial and traditional villages. Mexico offers so much more than the all-inclusive beach resorts from Cancun to Tulum, from Acapulco to Puerto Vallarta. In my opinion, the Caribbean beaches are some of the most gorgeous in the world, but if you visit Mexico and stay in a tourist resort or the beach the entire time, you are missing out on so many amazing things. Mexico is a diverse country with a wide variety of activities to do and experiences to have. You can swim, snorkel, or dive in natural underground sinkholes known as cenotes, explore some of the many ancient Mayan ruins, see gorgeous waterfalls in the jungle, explore authentic Mayan villages, eat traditional Mexican food, engage in adventure activities like zip-lining over the jungle treetops, wander through colourful and colonial towns and cities, and much more. There are many things to do, both touristy and off the beaten path. Mexico is definitely a country worth exploring.

But I have to agree with my colleagues that what makes Mexico unique is the people. We have some issues — we have been beaten lately —, but in general, Mexicans are warm-hearted people that are willing to go out of their way to help others. We adore having guests and visitors, and we are always trying to make everybody feel at home or even part of our family. Come and visit. Mi casa es tu casa (my home is your home).

Featured image credit: Landscapes San Miguel De Allende by marcoreyesgt. CC0 via Pixabay.

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The merits of and case for Land Value Taxation

Politics matters for tax as tax matters for politics. The high-minded Scottish economist Adam Smith had four maxims of taxation:

Tax should be progressive.Tax should be certain, not arbitrary.Tax should be paid at the time most convenient to the contributor.Tax should take as little from the contributors as possible to pay for the state.

In contrast, Jean-Baptiste Colbert reportedly said “the art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing.” Many present taxes fall foul of many of these maxims, but one way of organising taxation which meets most is Land Value Tax.

Land value tax

The UK, especially London, has long experienced the kind of property boom that makes prices unaffordable. A recent Confederation of British Industry survey reported that this unaffordability is of great concern to employers. But these booms also mean that the owners of that land are accruing unearned gains which are not being efficiently or equitably taxed. The cost of building or repairing a house is almost the same whether it is in Knightsbridge or Knowsley – it is the land that makes the difference. The value of land comes from the uses to which it is put. The granting of planning permission, for example, increases the value of land, as does the addition of utilities.

The spiralling cost of land in and around London calls to mind the long history of those who have talked up the need to tax land and the inequity of unearned income not being taxed. Smith stated that “both ground-rents and the ordinary rent of land are a species of revenue in which the owner, in many cases, enjoys without any care or attention of his own.” In 1909, A young Winston Churchill highlighted the problem that “to not one of those improvements does the land monopolist as a land monopolist contribute, and yet by every one of them the value of his land is sensibly enhanced [leading to] the unearned increment of its owner.” Economist David Ricardo also emphasised the need to tax land so that owners did not gain unearned income.

The UK has been broadly successful at making taxes progressive, but not totally. In the UK early poverty relief, the Poor Laws, were traditionally paid for locally. But the areas with the most need do not raise much money.

There are three main reasons why Land Value Tax is so appealing:

Land doesn’t move.Land is scarce because there is no more being created.Taxing ‘unimproved’ land does not distort transactions.

Land Value Tax may be the best way to fund local government because land cannot be moved to another area to avoid the tax. And granting local government greater fiscal responsibility may be a good thing. Since the Scottish parliament has been given responsibility for raising money, not only spending it, the politics of tax in Scotland has become more mature and more measured.

Council Tax

One of the most visible, and unpopular, taxes in the UK is Council Tax, an attempt to pay for some local authority services by taxing the value of a property. Council Tax was introduced in the early 1990s with each property assigned one of eight bands according to what the property is assessed to have been worth in 1991. Council Tax fails Smith’s first maxim, but also Colbert’s: Council Tax is regressive, it generates relatively little revenue but there is plenty of noise from those who pay it.

A progressive tax is one where the marginal rates is always higher than the average rate. Council Tax fails to meet this measure. But it is not based on earnings or wealth – it is set according to what the owner’s property was worth in 1991. It could be made more progressive by having it start with a zero rate up to a certain point, taxing the owner rather than the occupier, taking account of the ability to pay and being based on modern values, not those of three decades ago.

How to make Land Value Tax acceptable

One of the most frequent objections to Land Value Tax is the little old lady. This lady, often a widow, lives in an expensive house but has a meagre income and is thus asset rich but cash poor. Should a Land Value Tax make her homeless? Tom Paine called for such a tax to be collected when the asset passes from one person to another (at death or sale). This ensures that no one need fear losing their home while alive.

There are several measures that mean that any Land Value Tax could be designed in such a way as to make it more progressive and, perhaps, acceptable politically:

Remove Stamp Duty on house sales (a tax applied to property transactions).Start Land Value Tax at £0 up to a certain value, e.g. £60,000, then collect part of it annually.Ensure councils have no need to fear residents opposed to development by allowing councils to keep (some) of the tax revenue so they are incentivised to agree new development and not worried about losing the new money that they make from it.Allow the tax to be paid at death or the sale of the property. Then no one asset rich but cash poor need fear.

Given the parlous state of the finances of many local councils, calls for reform should be no surprise. But what reform? Continuing on the current path will lead to public outcry over the state of public services. Councils are funded by some property taxes. One, business rates, is being changed to allow areas to keep more of it. But the problem with this is that it reduces equalisation between areas. So, there are no easy answers, only trade offs.

The first review of the Mirrlees report, the Institute for Fiscal Studies’ 2011 report on tax reform, accurately states that “those who lose from tax reforms tend to be vengeful, while those who gain from them tend to be ungrateful.” So all reform is hard, but maybe it can be worthwhile. Current taxes could be tweaked to correct current anomalies: removing the exceptions from farm land, empty buildings and land that has previously been developed but is not currently in use. This may incentivise the owners of those buildings or brownfield to make some use of them. These are useful but insufficient.

Land Value Tax captures unearned gains, something too few taxes do. Another tax which does is Inheritance Tax. But politicians must be brave and talk up the value of taxing unearned gains. This is all the more important with an aging population and the cost of social care helping to push councils towards financial ruin. Maybe now, finally, the time for the tax has come to help pay for social care and to take some small steps towards reducing unearned gains from inheritance.

Featured image credit: houses-facades-houses-chimney by falco. CC0 via Pixabay.

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A timeline of American music in 1917

The year 1917 witnessed a dramatic shift in American musical life, as the United States’ entry into World War I forced Americans to reevaluate their musical tastes. The Austro-German musicians who had dominated classical music for generations came under suspicion, and the new genre of jazz proved ideally suited to the anxious mood of wartime. Aiding this transformation were major improvements in recording technology of both classical and popular music.

Featured image credit: Lieutenant James Reese Europe, ca. 1919. Underwood &Underwood, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Bob Chilcott shares his memories of Sir David Willcocks

I joined King’s College Choir as a boy treble in 1964. This was a time of real energy in the media, recording and concert world, and this possibly brought a different kind of perspective to David’s work with the choir. There were a number of firsts for the choir around this time. In 1965 we made our first stereo recording for EMI Records. The album, Sing Praises, included carols from a new publication entitled The Cambridge Hymnal. David turned up with brown Xeroxed copies of a new arrangement of “Tomorrow shall be my Dancing Day,” and when we sang it through for the first time, he shared in the amusement of us all when we sang, “O my…O my…O my love.” We all thought this was all rather racy.

Image credit: Sir David Willcocks by Maggie Heywood.

In the same year we made what was perhaps the first foreign tour for the choir, to Germany and Sweden. At a reception in Germany, David gave a ‘thank you’ speech in what turned out to be rather good German, but of course to us boys sounded absolutely hilarious. A couple of years later we sang a concert in Holland for Queen Juliana of the Netherlands. David taught us the Dutch National Anthem, which we sang in what was probably extremely average, but enthusiastic Dutch. After the concert, David and the choir were introduced to the Queen. We giggled mercilessly as we witnessed David, desperately attempting to introduce and remember the name of his senior (and extremely familiar) choral scholar. The Queen, true to form, was amused. This was probably in 1966, the year of England’s triumph in the football World Cup. On the day of the final, very annoyingly for many of us, we had to practice and sing evensong in the Chapel. David, being a great sportsman himself, probably sympathised with us. During the rehearsal in the Chapel (which coincided with the game) he would from time to time shout at our senior chorister, Andrew Marriner, and send him out. Each time Andrew would come back he would whisper in David’s ear, what was, we discovered later, the latest score.

Bob Chilcott as a treble. Image credit: provided and used with permission of Bob Chilcott.

David’s energy was boundless, pouring his enthusiasm into everything that he did, and this hugely impacted on the morale, the spirit and the musical aspirations of the choir. It was a great time for recordings. For all the members of the choir it was very inspiring to see the kind of artists that were brought in as collaborators. The Academy of St Martin in the Fields and the English Chamber Orchestra were regular visitors for recordings, as were also singers such as Heather Harper, Janet Baker, Robert Tear, Herman Prey, and John Shirley Quirk. David would prepare the choristers thoroughly for projects and recordings. I can remember when we were preparing to record Handel’s ‘Dixit Dominus,’ for many months we would sing the fiendishly difficult coluratura in the ‘Gloria Patri’ section virtually every day. When we got to the recording we couldn’t wait to do it, because David had prepared us all so completely. Many of David’s great recordings came from this period, including the Masses of Haydn, many recordings of the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams with both the King’s College Choir and the Bach Choir, the Coronation Anthems and Chandos Anthems of Handel and also the Faure Requiem. There was also an ongoing collaboration with the composer Benjamin Britten, and we sang several performances with Britten conducting of “The Spring Symphony” and the “War Requiem,” a work that David would himself champion worldwide. Whenever we sang with Britten, David would try and get us to sing with a much rougher sound than we would for him, because he was aware that perhaps Britten was not a fan of boys who sang with the kind of refined and plummy sound that we made. We were strangely reticent to do this, as we did not want to betray the finely honed sound world that David had so fervently drilled into our musical experience. He inspired great loyalty in his singers.

Several years later, after I left the choir, I can remember going back to King’s as a sixteen year old and hearing the choir sing the Five Mystical Songs of Vaughan Williams. It was, to this day, one of the most startling choral experiences that I have ever had – it was so beautiful, unified and confident. It showed  that everyone involved knew what they were doing, and most importantly, that they loved doing it. For me, this became a template for my aspirations in my life as a musician. And I know, without a doubt, that any friend or colleague who sang with David would have had the same sort of experience and realization as I had had, and would want to do the same. I was lucky enough to return to King’s as a Choral Scholar in 1973, David’s last year at King’s. It was wonderful to be back, and David’s wit, his energy and his drive had not diminished one iota. For all of us who sang in his final “Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols” in the Christmas of that year, we knew that we were not only witnessing the end of an astonishing era of his work with the choir at King’s, but also having the chance to share once more in the musical gifts that David gave to us all with such passion and commitment throughout his life.

Featured image credit: Kings College Cambridge In The Snow via  iStock .

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