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Five significant discussions in history

History is the academic study of the human race and everything that humans have done stretching back millennia. Though it may tell stories of the past, it is certainly not dead. New insights and discoveries are constantly unearthed through the unceasing research of historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, and other scholars. From the ubiquity of human sacrifice in Mesoamerica to women in British politics to the Civil Rights movement and political oppression in China, we’ve excerpted five chapters that cover critical topics across the diverse historical spectrum.

How widespread were human sacrifices in Mesoamerican cultures?

When archaeologist Saburo Sugiyama opened up a chamber in the center of the Pyramid of the Feathered Serpent at Teotihuacan, Mexico, he found a collection of eighteen male human bodies crowded together wearing greenstone nose pendants, earplugs, and beads. All had been sacrificed and appear to have been high status adults. The surprising discovery began a reformation in our understanding of the ritual life and political worldview of the great capital that for decades had been viewed as the center of a “Pax Teotihuacana.” Previously, it was thought that this imperial city ruled large numbers of people and territories through a theocratic system of persuasion and intimidation with little need of practicing human sacrifice. Further studies of these ruins have transformed our understanding of how thoroughly ritual violence toward human beings and human sacrifice, in particular, created and maintained social order while also serving as instruments of communication about cosmology and moral life. – Davíd Carrasco

What has been the impact of the Civil Rights Movement?

Because of the increased educational and employment opportunities that desegregation and affirmative action programs provided, a growing proportion of African Americans were able to enter the middle class. African Americans’ political representation also grew tremendously in the decades that followed the civil rights struggle. By 2001, there were more than 9,000 black elected officials in the nation, compared to 103 in 1964. In addition, the activism of civil rights groups helped reinterpret African American identity and left a significant cultural and intellectual legacy that continues to shape American society in the twenty-first century. The prominence of black intellectuals such as Henry Louis Gates Jr., Toni Morrison, Nell Irvin Painter, and Cornel West testify to the power of this legacy. Finally, the black freedom struggle became a catalyst for other movements for equal rights, among them the women’s movement and the protest movements of Mexican and Native Americans. Not all benefited from the movement’s victories, however. Many blacks continue to struggle with economic problems, and in light of continued instances of injustice, many black politicians and activists argue that full racial equality is a goal yet to be achieved. – Simon Wendt

Image credit: President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the 1964 Civil Rights Act as Martin Luther King, Jr., and others, look on. 2 July 1964 by Cecil Stoughton. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

How do historians tell the story of women and British politics?

For some, it is a story that starts with Mary Wollstonecraft and ends with Margaret Thatcher, and has at its core the battles for legal and constitutional equality and representation. Different stories have been told by looking at the local or the international, or focusing on the experiences of upper-, middle-, or working-class women, or recovering the women who are all too often to be found on the margins of both politics and history. There seems to be a particular urgency for historians, a sense that these stories are still ‘live’—that the dreams and aspirations of women past have yet to be realized by women future. British politics has often been very male, middle-class, and white. Seeking to explain how and why the British polity has been so resolutely male has been a major preoccupation for historians interested in the relationship between women and British politics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Often, that relationship has been a fraught one that defies a simple narrative. It has been a relationship characterized as much by restriction as by opportunity, and reliant on a plethora of social and economic determinants. – Jennifer Davey

When did Mexican immigrants first migrate en mass to the United States?

Mexican migration to the United States became significant in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through a remarkable confluence of factors. In the United States, railroads and refrigerated cars made it possible to ship agricultural commodities from the West to midwestern and eastern markets. At the same time, massive irrigation projects increased the fertility of southwestern soils, paving the way for a major agricultural boom. In the midst of that boom, the US Congress was increasingly restricting immigration from Asia and Europe, so growers increasingly turned to Mexico to supply their need for cheap, mobile labor. The completion of railroads in Mexico facilitated travel to the US-Mexican border. Meanwhile, the extreme violence and hardship of the Mexican Revolution and smaller upheavals of the 1920s such as the Cristero War drove many Mexicans into exile in the United States. The 1920s marked the real advent of mass migration from Mexico to the United States, and that decade also witnessed the first efforts to regulate that migration. – Timothy J. Henderson

Image credit: The memorial of the 10th anniversary (1999) of Tiananmen Sqare (Beijing, China) massacre, June 4th, 1989. Photo by Julo. Pubic domain via Wikimedia Commons.

What was the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square massacre?

The 1989 Tiananmen Movement, known in Chinese as “June Fourth” (Liu Si), was a nationwide nonviolent citizens’ movement calling for reforms in China. Sparked by the April 15, 1989, death of Hu Yaobang, the former general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party whose reformist views distinguished him from the hardliners in the leadership, Chinese intellectuals and students in cities throughout the country, soon joined by other citizens, began a series of peaceful petitions, demonstrations, and hunger strikes. The movement ended on June 4 when the Chinese government deployed over 200,000 soldiers, equipped with tanks and machine guns, to crack down on what the regime called a “counterrevolutionary riot.” Historian Tim Brook Historian Tim Brook argues that the military crackdown is a “massacre,” noting that “using combat weapons against unarmed citizens was a moral failure.” Tiananmen remains one of the most sensitive and taboo subjects in China today. Discussions in the media, on the internet, and in the classroom are banned. Even the actual number of deaths from the military crackdown remains unknown. – Rowena Xiaoqing He

Featured image credit: Sculpture representing human sacrifice from one of the ballcourts at El Tajín, 2007 by Simon Burchell. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons .

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Medical education and the good doctor

“Ahhhhh” moans a 16-year-old girl, her face contorted in pain as she lies on a stretcher in a busy emergency room corridor. Her distress is elicited by gentle prods to her abdomen by a young surgeon summoned by the ER staff. Fever, recent vomiting, and discomfort in her lower belly have brought her here to the hospital. The surgeon’s hands move from the source of pain to the patient’s own hand and she says, “I am sorry for your discomfort, but I need to know more. I think you may have an inflammation of your appendix. I may have to operate to be sure and if I find that I am correct, I will have to take it out.” Twelve hours later, after receiving corroborative laboratory tests and diagnostic imaging results, an appendectomy is performed swiftly and without complication. In the recovery room, the surgeon briefly clasps the young girl’s hand once again and tells her that she should be back to her usual self in a few weeks.

The lifetime risk of acute appendicitis is approximately 5-10% and the simple story depicted above is played out many times each day around the world. As with any fiction, however, we may change the plot and so, the sense and implications of the story. For example:

– The surgeon’s hands … prodded roughly into the young girl’s tender belly and her moan became a scream.

– and she says … testily to the ER nurse as she strides out of the room, “I want the urologist to see the patient; she likely has cystitis and I can see her again tomorrow if there is any problem.”

– an appendectomy is performed. … During the procedure, the surgeon nicks a peri-appendiceal artery, resulting in significant blood loss necessitating transfusion.

We rely on physicians such as the young surgeon described above to correctly diagnose and effectively treat appendicitis, as well as the many other illnesses or traumas with which we may be afflicted. And we would like such care to be given in a professional manner with confidence and compassion. Knowledge, judgment, technical skill, and empathy are attributes most people would wish their doctor to have. The first three of these qualities clearly need to be learned; the last, although present in most people to some degree, is not always evident and can arguably be fostered in an appropriate environment and by mentorship. The ways by which students can—and should—be taught these attributes are numerous and have been debated by medical educators for over 200 years.

Knowledge, judgment, technical skill, and empathy are attributes most people would wish their doctor to have.

In the 19th century, lectures by an experienced surgeon or physician, either community-based or in a hospital setting, were a common way for the student to gain theoretical medical knowledge. Apprenticeships for these students would often involve following or accompanying these lectures as a means to gain clinical experience. Although such methods undoubtedly produced competent physicians (for the time), this was far from guaranteed: the teacher’s knowledge and background were not formally evaluated and they sometimes had little to offer as “experts” other than an interest in supplementing their income or increasing their prestige.

Abraham Flexner championed a significant change in this learning process in a 1910 report on the status of medical education in North America. His model, which became the most influential for medical student teaching in the 1900s, consisted of two years of basic science study—often with a heavy emphasis on lectures given by knowledgeable university faculty members—followed by two years of clinical study in the hospital setting. Flexner’s concept was widely adopted and is still used in its basic form by many universities today. Minor variations in Flexner’s scheme include introducing students to clinical topics—and patients—earlier than the third curriculum year, and inclusion of other subjects such as ethics, humanities, and medical professionalism.

More fundamental changes have been introduced in other models. Two of the most widely espoused are “problem-based learning” and “competency-based education.” The first of these, which gained significant popularity in the last part of the 20th century, emphasizes how to learn and how to find solutions to problems, rather than direct “learning,” such as in the lecture scenario. Such “self-directed” learning is facilitated by working with other students in small groups, and is often based on theoretical clinical scenarios.

More recently, the notion that learning (mastering) “competencies” related to specific objectives has become increasingly popular. Such competencies are predetermined by faculties or medical education institutions according to what is deemed important for the young physician to know upon graduation. They include competencies related to knowledge—such as the signs and symptoms of acute appendicitis—and techniques—such as how to perform a lumbar puncture.

Which of these, or other possible models, is the best to guide a medical student to become the competent and caring young surgeon whose patient encounter is outlined in the first paragraph? How does any one model apply to all of the many students with their varied educational backgrounds and underlying personalities? Which parts of the various models are worthwhile to keep and enhance, and which should be decreased in importance or eliminated altogether? The answers to these questions are certainly debatable and important to elucidate.

If the imaginary appendicitis scenario described above were to become real, it is likely that most of us would consider first our pain, then the treatment we are about to receive, and finally the manner in which this is explained and carried out. However, once the immediacy of the event is passed, we might reflect with benefit upon the ways in which our doctor came to be the person they are and how our medical schools can and should influence this.

Featured image credit: Doctor by marionbrun. CC0 via Pixabay.

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Why I Oppose the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact

Connecticut, where I live, is the most recent state to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. The Nutmeg State was wrong to join this Compact, designed to ensure that the presidential candidate who wins the national popular vote also wins in the Electoral College.

Supporters of the Compact argue that the popular vote for President can in practice be implemented without amending the Constitution: If states casting a majority of the votes in the Electoral College agree to pledge their respective electors to support the presidential candidate winning the nationwide popular vote, the President will effectively be chosen by popular vote – even though the constitutional formality of the Electoral College will be technically observed.

With Connecticut adopting the Compact, the Compact has now been joined by states casting 172 of the 270 electoral votes constituting a majority of the Electoral College.

I oppose the Compact for a number of reasons: The arguments against the Electoral College and for today instituting popular election of the President are weak. I am particularly skeptical of a so-called national popular vote conducted, not using uniform national voting rules, but instead conducted under each state’s own electoral statutes.

Image credit: “Hartford Connecticut State Capitol Building” by 12019. CC0 via Pixabay.

Moreover, structural changes of the type embodied in the Compact often cause unintended and undesirable consequences. Consider, for example, the fact that the Compact would not require the states to adopt uniform rules for voting eligibility. Thus, the popular vote under the Compact would continue to depend upon the vagaries of different states’ various voting laws. Suppose, for example, that one state allows sixteen and seventeen year olds to vote to maximize its impact on the nationwide popular vote.

I am consequentially skeptical of the type of radical change embodied in the Compact. I would instead encourage state-by-state experimentation with the methods of selecting Electoral College electors.

We would not adopt the Electoral College today if we were starting from scratch. But we are not starting from scratch. The Electoral College has been built into our political system. Structural changes of the sort to be implemented by the Compact often surprise and disappoint their proponents with unintended consequences.

I instead favor state-by-state experimentation with the method of selecting each state’s Electoral College delegation. Today, forty-eight states (every state but Maine and Nebraska) allocate all of their electoral votes on a winner-take-all basis to the candidate who wins the statewide vote. Maine and Nebraska, allocate one of their electoral votes to the winner of each congressional district. Such district-by-district allocation of electoral votes was common during the early years of the Republic. It would be productive to see what would happen if a larger state returned to this system in 2020.

In 2004, Colorado’s voters rejected a state constitutional amendment which would have allocated that state’s electors on a proportional basis. Proportional representation would also be a worthwhile experiment for one or more states to undertake in 2020.

The Electoral College has evolved over two centuries. Further evolution and experimentation should proceed. But proponents of the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact should remember the old adage: Be careful what you wish for. You may get it.

Featured Image Credit: “Choice Select Decide Decision Vote Policy Board” by geralt. CC0 via Pixabay. 

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Studying law in the UK: Are you ready?

Your favourite club at school was the debating society, and you managed to negotiate an increase in pocket money as a teenager – it was obvious you were going to study law. But how much do you really know about studying for a law degree in the UK? How many people apply? And what pathways are available once you graduate? Take our quiz to find out.

 

Featured image: “Lecture Theatre” by Ian Barbour. CC0 Public domain via Flickr .

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Celebrating Emily Brontë

Only one birthday is “celebrated” in Wuthering Heights. It doesn’t go well. The young Catherine Linton begins her 16th birthday with a modestly optimistic plan to buck the established family pattern of solitary mourning to mark the date when she came into the world (“a puny, seven months child”), but her mother died two hours later. “On the anniversary of [Miss Cathy’s] birth,” Nelly reports, “we never manifested any signs of rejoicing, […]. Her father invariably spent that day alone in the library; and walked, at dusk, as far as Gimmerton kirkyard, where he would frequently prolong his stay beyond midnight.”

There is no suggestion that this is bad parenting, and Catherine does not seem to resent it. On this particular birthday, Catherine extracts permission to ramble with Nelly on the edge of the moor, promising to be back within an hour. In what Nelly thinks of as a miniature morality tale, the “happy creature” bounds ahead, running back to heel and going off again, like a “young greyhound” enjoying its freedom while keeping its human companion in view—until she strays too far. Eager to check on a colony of moor-game, Catherine comes within two miles of Wuthering Heights and crosses paths with Heathcliff, a man whose existence she has never yet heard of and who quickly forms a plan for manipulating her into marriage with his son and completing his revenge on the Linton family.

Emily Brontë’s own birthday seems to have been, by preference, a day for routine familiar pleasures. A diary paper written on the Wuthering Heights author’s 27th birthday, 30 July 1845, is cherished by biographers for the glimpse it offers into her temperament. It expresses an emphatic wish to keep going in the quiet patterns of home. Badly bruised by her short attempt at working as a teacher at Law Hill School near Halifax in 1833, she was more than happy to abandon the recent, short-lived scheme of starting a school in Haworth: “I am quite contented for myself, as idle as formerly, altogether as hearty, […] and merely desiring that every body could be as comfortable as myself and as undesponding.” This birthday was spent fending off teasing demands from the debilitated family servant Tabby to “pilloputate” (peel a potato), and it would have included blackcurrant picking with her sister Anne had the weather been sunnier. Even without that seasonal, task there was plenty of work needing doing: “turning” (another word for peeling, though it is possible that it here refers to rotating the position of clothes drying in the sun); then “ironing” and “writing.” The sole evidence of special birthday activity is the opening of birthday papers written by herself and Anne four years earlier (on her 23rd birthday) and reviewed with curiosity in the morning—only for Emily to realise halfway through her new report that they had got the date wrong. This was the 31st not the 30th. But no matter, “Yesterday was much such a day as this…”

Unsurprisingly in a house where, for many years, there was little money to spare for luxuries, presents are sparely recorded in the Brontë archives. Birthdays seem to have been marked on some occasions by literary gifts (a story from eldest sister Charlotte to Anne, written at Roe Head School), and probably by other home “crafted” presents, such as paintings and sketches. A birthday, it is worth remembering, could be an occasion for giving not receiving: one year their father Patrick Brontë gave a copy of his Cottage Poems (1811) to their servant Martha Brown.

Image credit: Bronte Museum by Jay Sands. CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Given the general elusiveness of descriptions of gifts, one present from Charlotte to Emily stands out. A Book of Common Prayer, now in the possession of the Brontë Parsonage Museum, contains a book plate dedication in Charlotte’s hand, pasted inside the front cover and dated 1st February 1842—the month in which the two sisters travelled to Belgium. Intended, presumably, as a way of keeping Emily in touch with her own church practices as she entered a foreign school environment dominated by Catholicism, the book bears very few signs of use. Only one inside page has obviously been handled: the recto opening of the “Order for Evening Prayer,” which carries the dark brownish-grey imprint of a right thumb near the base of the spine. Assuming for a moment (it is not a very safe assumption) that the thumb print is Emily’s—a material residue of sebum, sweat, or dirt of the kind intensely attractive to modern historians and theorists of the “material object,”—it suggests various possible meanings: that her religious observance was minimal (the most vivid eyewitness account of her irregular appearances in church recalls her sitting with her back to the pulpit in a “solid stoical manner, bolt upright in the corner of the pew”); that she saw no reason to turn the pages because, like most of the congregation, she knew the service by heart; that she valued it as an keepsake, but not a book she much cared to spend time with. Like everything else about Emily Brontë, the perspective it suggests on her inner life is tantalisingly limited.

Featured image credit: “Bronte sisters in Haworth, England” by Immanuel Giel. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Are you a forensic psych expert?

The moment a defendant walks into a courtroom, everyone is trying to get in their head to figure out if they actually committed the crime, and what could have driven them to the act. That’s why expert testimony from mental health experts can be critical for juries, especially in high-profile cases.

Do you think you know how forensic psychology and psychiatry affected these famous court cases, and have what it takes to prove yourself to be an expert witness? Test yourself with this quiz, informed by Minds on Trial: Great Cases in Law and Psychology.

This quiz is also available online here.

Featured image credit: Tree, forest, question and bark HD by Evan Dennis. Public domain via Unsplash  

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Where to put hyphens

After reading a draft of something by a colleague, I asked her how she decides when to use hyphens. She responded tartly: “Hyphens. You mean like in well-spoken, or half-assed? I’m not sure. I don’t care for them.”

Personally, I’m a big fan of hyphens and sarcasm won’t deter me.

Hyphens are different of course from dashes, which come in two flavors: en dashes and em dashes. The en dash (sometimes called the en rule) is the width of the letter n—longer than a hyphen but shorter than an em dash. The en dash is used to indicate ranges of numbers and to substitute for words like to or and (as in an east–west route). It’s also used many forms of joint action, such as a US–Canada negotiation or the mind–body problem.

The em dash is the width of a letter m. It is used like parentheses or colons—to indicate an interruption, afterthought or elaboration—but while the parentheses are a soft whisper to the reader, the em dash is a hand waving for attention.

The em dash can even be doubled to indicate a sentence-ending ellipsis or the omission of letters. We often see this in dialogue such as “I think he had better——,” where the double em dash indicated that the sentence is never finished or in written examples like “I refer now to the testimony of Mr. F——.”

Hyphens are different than dashes. Hyphens indicate that words should be read as a unit, and they are about avoiding ambiguity among a series of words. Typically this involves phrases where a compound adjective modifies a following noun.

A small-business owner

A popular-movie critic

A second-language teacher

The hyphen is sometimes necessary to prevent momentary misreading (as in the above examples) but the grammatical convention of hyphenating compounds before nouns holds more generally, even when confusion is unlikely:

A Pulitzer-Prize winner

High-school graduates

A well-known actor

A two-thirds majority

A messed-up situation

When the compounds follow the verb, hyphens are usually omitted:

She won a Pulitzer Prize.

They all graduated from high school. The actor is well known.

I lost two thirds of my savings.

The situation is messed up.

There are of course various intricacies. (What would grammar be without them?) Thus, compound adverbs ending in –ly lack hyphens when they occur before an adjective plus a following noun. So we write that something is a completely obvious point, not a completely-obvious point.

Hyphens are necessary when adding prefixes to certain words that might otherwise be misread. I once received a post-it note on corrected reimbursement form telling me to “Please resign.” Words like re-sign, re-press, re-creation, and co-worker, call out for hyphens, as do words with identical vowels bumping up against each other like co-op or re-educate. Some prefixes, like the ones in pre-concert, anti-war, and self-worth, all-inclusive, and trans-national (among others), consistently require hyphens.

Hyphens are also important to use in many compound words, like mother-in-law, cat-of-nine-tails, five-year-old, and north-by-northwest.  And number words are hyphenated from twenty-one though ninety-nine.

Newly formed compounds tend to be written first as separate words or with hyphens and gradually become unhyphenated as they find their place in our linguistic consciousness. This makes hyphens especially fascinating to linguists and historian of the language.

Sometimes, however, compound words that were once hyphenated become so familiar that we treat them as single words, like the word online. Newly formed compounds tend to be written first as separate words or with hyphens and gradually become unhyphenated as they find their place in our linguistic consciousness. This makes hyphens especially fascinating to linguists and historian of the language. Thus, the formerly hyphenated compounds bumblebee, lowlife, and crybaby are now spelled as single words. And oddly, some once-hyphenated words even go the other way, being spelled with a space like ice cream and test tube. Seeing what still gets a hyphen and what no longer does lets us watch language change in process.

And because language changes, memorizing all the special cases and exceptions would be crazy-making. But if you focus on just a few principles like the ones mentioned here, your hyphens will usually be in the right place.

And take heart. Hyphenation has gotten easier, since most of us no longer need to worry about hyphenating words at the end of line of typed text (though those working in column inches still do). Yet it is oh-so-easy to get confused. Around my university, I’ve been seeing signs encouraging people to eschew cologne and other scents. They read:

FRAGRANCE FREE ZONE

Help us keep the air we share healthy and fragrance-free. Please DO NOT wear perfume, cologne, aftershave and other fragrances.

That should be FRAGRANCE-FREE ZONE and Help us keep the air we share healthy and fragrance free.

I resisted the urge to edit the signs. I wouldn’t want to be considered an anal-retentive English professor.

Featured image credit: “Chocolate ice cream and Rhubarb-rose ice cream” by  Rebecca Siegel. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

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Philosopher of the month: Saint Thomas Aquinas [timeline]

This August, the OUP Philosophy team honours Saint Thomas Aquinas (1224/5-1274) as their Philosopher of the Month. The Italian philosopher, theologian, and Dominican friar is regarded by many as the greatest figure of scholasticism. Thomism and Neo-Thomism are both popular schools of thought related to the philosophical-theological ideas of Aquinas.

Thomas Aquinas’ written output was both broad and vast. His work included numerous translations and commentaries on Aristotle, theological writings, and the two major texts for which he is best known, the Summa contra Gentiles (‘Against the Errors of the Infidels’), and the Summa Theologiae, universally acknowledged to be the crowning achievement of medieval systematic theology. Eight million words is a conservative estimate of his written output, despite dying at the age of no more than 50.

Although many have named him the greatest of the medieval philosopher-theologians, he and his work have received centuries of neglect by thinkers outside of the Catholic Church. Aquinas’ writings are increasingly studied by members of the wider philosophical community, however, and his insights have been put to work in present-day philosophical debates in the fields of philosophical logic, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, moral philosophy, and the philosophy of religion.

For more on Thomas Aquinas’ life and work, browse our interactive timeline below:

Featured image credit: St. Thomas’ family castle, Roccasecca by Pietro Scerrato. CC-BY-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons .

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Laudable mathematics – The Fields Medal

Kicking off the International Congress of Mathematicians 2018 in Rio de Janeiro was this year’s Fields Medal awards ceremony, celebrating the brightest young minds in mathematics. The prize is awarded every four years to up to four mathematicians under the age of 40, and is viewed as one of the highest honours a mathematician can receive.

This year’s recipients come from diverse mathematical backgrounds, spanning the fields of algebraic geometry, number theory, and optimal transport. Honourees in 2018 are:

Caucher Birkar

For the proof of the boundedness of Fano varieties and for contributions to the minimal model program.

Alessio Figalli

For contributions to the theory of optimal transport and its applications in partial differential equations, metric geometry and probability.

Peter Scholze

For transforming arithmetic algebraic geometry over p-adic fields through his introduction of perfectoid spaces, with application to Galois representations, and for the development of new cohomology theories.

Akshay Venkatesh

For his synthesis of analytic number theory, homogeneous dynamics, topology, and representation theory, which has resolved long-standing problems in areas such as the equidistribution of arithmetic objects.

The obverse of a Fields Medal made by Stefan Zachow for the  International Mathematical Union (IMU), showing a bas relief of  Archimedes (as identified by the Greek text). Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

To celebrate the achievements of all of the winners, we’ve put together a reading list of free materials relating to the work that contributed to this honour.

A Quantitative Analysis of Metrics on Rn with Almost Constant Positive Scalar Curvature, with Applications to Fast Diffusion Flows, by Giulio Ciraolo, Alessio Figalli, and Francesco Maggi, published in International Mathematics Research Notices

The authors prove quantitative structure theorem for metrics on Rn that are conformal to the flat metric, have almost constant positive scalar curvature, and cannot concentrate more than one bubble.

 

The Langlands–Kottwitz approach for the modular curve, by Peter Scholze, published in International Mathematics Research Notices

Scholze shows how the Langlands–Kottwitz method can be used to determine the local factors of the Hasse–Weil zeta-function of the modular curve at places of bad reduction.

 

The Behavior of Random Reduced Bases, by Seungki Kim and Akshay Venkatesh, published in International Mathematics Research Notices

Kim and Venkatesh prove that the number of Siegel-reduced bases for a randomly chosen n -dimensional lattice becomes, for n→∞ , tightly concentrated around its mean, while also showing that most reduced bases behave as in the worst-case analysis of lattice reduction.

 

A Note on Sphere Packings in High Dimension, by Akshay Venkatesh, published in International Mathematics Research Notices

An improvement on the lower bounds for the optimal density of sphere packings. In all sufficiently large dimensions, the improvement is by a factor of at least 10,000.

Featured image: Math concept. Shutterstock . 

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Etymology gleanings for July 2018

Spelling Reform

Work on a project for reformed spelling is underway (under way). Three comments and letters have come to my notice.

Masha Bell called our attention to useful and useless double letters. No doubt, account and arrive do not need their cc and rr, and I am all for abolishing them. I won’t live long enough to see acquire spelled as akwire, but perhaps aquire will satisfy future generations? A more complicated question is whether we should follow naïve spellers’ instinct and double the letters after short vowels (verry, etc.). The idea is good, but adding letters to words in Modern English will, I am afraid, appeal to few. Making English spelling fully logical and natural is a forlorn hope, but cleaning the mess somewhat would be a boon.

On the other hand, I have again received a letter from India, confirming Mr. Madhukar Gogate’s view that in India, where there are more English speakers than in the United Kingdom, reformed spelling has no chance of being accepted. I can only repeat that the British Spelling Society and its American allies, if they succeed in pushing the stone downhill, and regardless of whether it will grow a measurable amount of moss, cannot make anyone follow the new rules. We are not a legislative body.

Original attempts to reform English spelling continue. This is what Mr. Gregory Ory writes: “I am working on a spelling system for English called Restored Latin Spelling (RELS), which I am presenting in little steps on my website and on different media. Apart from the theoretical body, I have been producing both transcriptions of English texts into RELS and original articles and essays. I have been working on a glossary as well.”

And here is the map. Photo courtesy of Rob Towart.

Here are a few samples of his text: “THE UNIVŒRSAL DECLAREIHON OF HUIMAN RAITS.” …inhierent digniti, iequal and ineilienabel  raits, all members of the hiuman famili, etc. He can be reached at ad.gregorium@startmail.com.

Etymology and usage

Last week (the post for 25 July 2018), I discussed the idioms beginning with all on one side like. A very old phrase puzzled me: all on one side like Kingswear boys. I am greatly indebted to Rob Towart, who sent me the following comment and even appended a map: “Kingswear is on the east of the river Dart (at the end of the railway line), and the ferry goes across to Dartmouth, where the Royal Naval College is situated. The town is home to the Royal Navy’s officer training college (Britannia Royal Naval College), where all officers of the Royal Navy and many foreign naval officers are trained. So I imagine that the local Kingswear boys would stay on that side, as opposed to the young boys (non-local) training at Dartmouth.” He even appended a map. Here it is.

Another correspondent suggested his version of the idiom: “All on one side like…”—and he added the name of the local newspaper. Quite true of any other newspaper.

Catty corner and catawampus

I can refer to a very old post of mine for 20 June 2007 (“The Curmudgeon and the Catawampus”). In my etymological dictionary, I have a special entry on kitty corner. All the variants (kitty, its phonetic spelling kiddy, and cater) are “correct,” but cater is more equal than the two others, because it alone is true to the word’s Danish origin. The word means “askew, awry” (hence “slanting; diagonally across,” with the reference to cats being due to folk etymology. In catawampus, only the meaning of wampus “hobgoblin” has been more or less traced to its beginnings, while cata-, in which the second a is probably an inserted vowel, as in cock-a-doddle-doo, is obscure. Our correspondent heard wompus cat when he was a child. The person who used this phrase transposed the compound’s elements—another tribute to folk etymology, for, whatever catawampus means, it has nothing to do with cats, except that cats have a traditionally bad reputation in folklore.

Let us agree that this monster is a catawampus. Image credit: “Monster Troll Halloween Shudder Figure Devil” by artemtation. CC0 via Pixabay.
What is the origin of stove up “stuck and can’t find a way out”?

I am almost sure I can suggest a dependable etymology. Stove up is an American coinage. The verb stave means “to break up (a cask) into staves” (from the noun stave “stick or lath of wood”). Its principal parts are staved, staved. But it shared the fate of another weak verb, namely, dive, whose past tense dove has almost superseded dived in the US, and developed the forms stove, stove, fairly well-known in American English. Stave in means “to break a hole (for instance, in a cask or a boat),” while stove up, seemingly extant only in the form of the past participle, came to mean “put into a cask” and thus (figuratively) “stuck and unable to move.” Anyone interested in local American usage should consult the great and incomparable Dictionary of American Regional English, a great monument to our civilization.

The origin of ish

This is a suffix that has taken on the life of something between an adjective and an interjection. It goes back to words like reddish and stylish. The suffix became very productive, and finally appeared as a separate word meaning “sort of.” It is trendy and an acquisition not to everybody’s taste.

Ambiguous verbs

The question about the confusion between borrow and lend is familiar: people use borrow in both senses. According to H. W. Fowler’s Modern English Usage (but, if you use this beautiful book, I recommend the first or the second edition), British speakers often confused substitute and replace (and said A was substituted by B, instead of B was substituted for A; incidentally, foreigners constantly make this mistake). Of course, it is enough to remember what the term substitute teacher means, to avoid the confusion, which is very rare in the US, but the verbs are close, and the mistake is easy to understand. Also, consider the American use of the verb to rent. What happens when you rent a house? Do you give or get it? If people had stuck to the difference between to let and to rent, everything would have been fine, but, alas, they constantly go astray, and this is how language changes, much to the disgust of the cultured class.

The Louvre Pyramid is kiddy/catty/ cater-corner from the Louvre Palace, and that position lends it status. Image credit: “Louvre Pyramid Paris Tourism France Museum Arts” by EdiNugraha. CC0 via Pixabay.
A methodological postscript

I received a long comment about the possible relations between and among the most heterogeneous words. One concerned the difficult mud in the phrase mud in your eye, which I discussed very briefly in the post for April 5, 2017. Our correspondent wondered whether mud in this phrase could be connected with mote and moth. Unfortunately, I am unaware of any evidence to this effect.

He also discussed possible ties among many gr– words, such as grey (the color and “badger”), Greek, and some other matters, including the ethnogenesis of the Greeks, who, he suggests, were black. Is this idea from the book The Black Athena? The ultimate origin of the inhabitants of the Greek archipelago is unknown (the same can be said about the origin of the Huns and many other, if not all, ancient tribes, because they were nomadic cattle herders). The historical Greeks were not black. By contrast, grey “badger” must indeed have received its name from the color of its fur. I’ll keep defending my conservative stance and refrain from bold hypotheses. Stringing words together is a tempting pursuit; it is proof that is hard to come by.

In passing, the same correspondent suggested that if the Bible had been translated into Old English much earlier, English might have absorbed many Greek words already at that period. This hypothesis is shaky. Wulfila translated the New Testament into Gothic from Greek in the fourth century, and he used Greek words only for the objects that did not exist among the Goths and that could not have Gothic names. Such borrowings are, predictably, very few.

A personal grievance

I am sorry that no specialist has commented on my recent post on Pidgin.

Featured Image: Stove up and perfectly happy. Featured Image Credit: Diogenes by Jean-Léon Gérôme. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons. 

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