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Journey into Darkness: The 2025 Eurovision Song Contest Basel, Switzerland

Journey into Darkness: The 2025 Eurovision Song Contest Basel, Switzerland

When you let me go
I barely stayed afloat
I’m floating all alone
Still holding on to hope

—JJ, Austria, “Wasted Love”
Winning song of the Eurovision Song Contest 2025

Many waters
Cannot quench love
Neither can the floods
Drown it

—Yuval Raphael, Israel, “New Day Will Rise” (from the original Hebrew)
Second place, Eurovision Song Contest 2025

How very different the bridges of the first- and second-place songs, JJ’s “Wasted Love” for Austria and Yuval Raphael’s “New Day Will Rise” for Israel, were at Eurovision 2025. And how uncannily the same. Does love survive when tested by the seas and floods threatening to inundate it? The survival of love is both denied and affirmed, threatened but still buoyed by the precarity of hope. Darkness haunts both songs, filling the stage with the stark play of light against the ominous backdrop of black. If the two songs and their metaphors are consonant at many levels, they were also portentous of the larger dissonance of the largest song contest in the world and its turn toward the darkness that envelops Europe in 2025.

JJ, “Wasted Love,” Official Eurovision video

The signs of Eurovision’s turn in 2025 took many and varied forms, but it is the abundance and commonness that pose questions about Europe itself. In significantly larger numbers than previously, the lyrics of the competing Eurosongs were in languages other than English. Each of the Baltic states, for example, sang in languages other than English—Latvian and Lithuanian, and Estonia’s Tommy Cash sang “Espresso Macchiato” primarily in Italian and Spanish. Larger and smaller nations alike chose to sing in national languages. Germany and Iceland, for example, both with long histories of Eurosongs in English, sang in their native languages.

The lyrics of the 2025 Eurosongs tended in greater numbers toward serious subjects, further reflecting the darkening moment. Songs with the comical lyrics that often distinguish Eurosongs did not entirely disappear, but they did not place as well as they frequently do. Sweden’s “Bara bada bastu” (Just Take a Sauna), sung by the Finnish group KAJ and wackily staged in a sauna, was favored to win prior to the Grand Finale, but it placed a fairly distant fourth.

KAJ, “Bara bada bastu,” Official Eurovision video

The field of competitors in 2025 was noticeably smaller: thirty-seven as opposed to as many as forty-three in previous years. Above all, the nations choosing not to compete were in Eastern Europe—Hungary, Romania, Moldova, Slovakia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and North Macedonia—while Russia and Belarus are banned from competing due to the ongoing war with Ukraine. Despite the financial reasons for not competing, the result has been a realignment of European nations with political stakes that resemble an earlier division of Europe into East and West. Just as the first Eurovision Song Contest was a response to the Cold War in 1956, so too do recent Eurovisions reflect the East-West divide in the Europe of a New Cold War.

The European Broadcasting Union (EBU), which is responsible for organizing the participation of nations in its European media empire has long established rules meant to distance the Eurovision from politics. Over the contest’s historical longue durée these rules have been effective to varying degrees, often by requiring that Eurosongs with politically specific lyrics make changes that depoliticize them. Those changes are usually accommodated (e.g., in 2024 when Israel was required to change some lyrics and the title of its entry, from “October Rain” to “Hurricane”), but occasional rejections are not unknown (e.g., Georgia with its 2009 entry, “We Don’t Wanna Put In”).

In 2025, the dividing line between the political and apolitical collapsed, thereby releasing the flood waters of the political. The rules designed to prevent the political could no longer withstand the Realpolitik of a Europe in conflict with itself. At the center of the storm was Israel and the contradictions unleashed by its continued participation while at war in Gaza. Calls for banning Israel because of its conflicts with Palestinians, especially in Gaza, have been growing for years. Palestine has itself launched tentative efforts to participate in the Eurovision, but without luck because of the absence of a national broadcasting network. Protests of Israeli Eurovision participation coalesced in 2019, when the Eurovision took place in Tel Aviv. Palestinian musicians even went so far as to organize an alternative Gazavision in 2019.

In 2025, all forms of pro-Palestinian protest were banned in Basel. Palestinian flags were not allowed, and the negative response of audiences to Yuval Raphael’s performances (booing) were scrubbed from EBU broadcasts. When Raphael placed in the middle of the field after the professional-juries voted, she catapulted to first place after the Israeli government organized a massive popular-vote surge on social media. She led the field until the final announcement of popular voting nudged JJ ahead into first place. In the week following the Grand Finale in Basel, the critical response to the flood of politicking in the Eurovision had swollen to the point that many recognize it as an existential crisis for the Eurovision Song Contest. It either will or will not be a response to the political forces dividing Europe.

Yuval Raphael, “New Day Will Come,” Official Eurovision video

It is my custom each year to end this blog post by giving final voice to a song that has special meaning for me, often because it offers an alternative vision for what the Eurovision Song Contest has been and what it might become. I discover the meaning I seek in these final sonic epilogues through acts of return and remembrance, return to powerful and intimate Eurovision moments of the past, return also to the exquisite beauty afforded by song itself. Accordingly, I remind myself that it is song that lies at the heart of the Eurovision Song Contest. It is song, so the first great theorist of song, Johann Gottfried Herder, reminds us, that “loves the masses” and their humanity. In search of song, I return to Latvia, where the young Herder, living in Riga, may have experienced his first folk songs, and I look to this year’s Latvian Eurovision entry, Tautumeitas’s “Bur man laimi” (Chant of Happiness). To complete the rhetorical framing of this blogpost, I close with the bridge of a song from Latvian folk song tradition. I return to “Bur man laimi” to remember—and to remind us—that the journey into darkness can pave the way to new light.

I didn’t know my own happiness
I didn’t know my own happiness
Until I met my misery

Tautumeitas, “Bur man laimi,” Official Eurovision video

Featured image: the stage of the Eurovision Song Contest 2025 by MrSilesian. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Flunkeys and lackeys two centuries ago

Flunkeys and lackeys two centuries ago

In An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology, I called William L. Blackley’s 1869 book Word Gossip singularly uninformative, and I am sorry for that remark. One consolation is that when we are young and say something inappropriate or wrong, we fear swift retribution. But with age, most of us realize that the chance of being noticed (whatever we publish) is close to zero and lose no sleep over the mishap. Yet I am indeed sorry that I based a negative opinion of a respectable work on the basis of several unfortunate pages and will now discuss a few things that may be of interest to the readers of this blog.

The Reverend William Lewery Blackley (1830-1902) was an active parish priest in Ireland, a well-known (successful!) social reformer, and the author of many books. Unfortunately, I could not find his portrait on the Internet. By way of compensation, we featured an anonymous parish priest in the header. Blackley knew German and French very well and must have had a good command of Swedish. His education as a prospective churchman presupposed a study of Greek and Latin (and most probably, of Hebrew). Incidentally, quite a few British churchmen were linguists. Thus, the great Walter William Skeat was an Anglican deacon, but he could not function in that capacity because of problems with his voice, while being a professor at Cambridge did not require too much lecturing. (What a contrast! Today’s linguists may not be moderately proficient in any language except their own, while professors teach a good deal as a matter of course.)

Word Gossip was “a series of [fifteen] familiar essays on words and their peculiarities” that first appeared in Churchman’s Shilling Magazine and were published in book form in 1869 by Longmans, Green and Co. (London). In the introduction we read: “The kind reception accorded to the matter of the following pages on its appearance this year [1868] in successive numbers of ‘Churchman’s Shilling Magazine’ had induced me to republish it in a collected form.” I am aware of a single review of the book (in the Athenæum), but there must have been others, and perhaps letters from the readers.

Thoughts (very sensible thoughts) on etymology are strewn all over the volume of 234 pages. However, only the last two chapters deal directly with words of disputed origin. Blackley was aware of the linguistic literature of his time and of some old dictionaries, and since he was fluent in German, he did not miss German books on language history (a rare case in England before the days of Henry Sweet and Skeat, though German colleagues sometimes reproached even Skeat for not paying enough attention to their contributions), but surprisingly, he missed Jacob Grimm and remained unaware of the gigantic progress made by historical linguistics between the 1820s and his time. Therefore, even in 1868 his conclusions were of some interest only to the extent that they did not depend on the progress of Indo-European linguistics.

A prototypical respectable servant: no opprobrium.
Image: Mrs. Seely’s cook book, public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

English (like every other European language) is full of native and borrowed words that appeared in print late, and one does not have to be a comparative linguist to discover their origin. Two such English words are flunkey “man in livery; obsequious person” and lackey “footman, valet.” The words are near-synonyms, and neither (especially lackey) is heard or seen too often. Lackey occurred at one time as a term of political abuse; for instance, the phrase the lackeys of the bourgeoisie was much in use in certain circles. Flunkey surfaced in the eighteenth century, and lackey in the sixteenth.

Both words are “of uncertain origin.” Blackley argued that at one time, they must have been applied primarily to soldiers, or rather mercenaries, for which reason they still “retain a contemptuous signification.” He referred to French flanqueur: “It means one who fights on the flank, a skirmisher.” In English, flunkey first meant “a liveried servant” and only later “toady.” Whether correct or not, Blackley’s guess is reasonable, and our best authorities have nothing to add to it. He also had an alternative hypothesis of the origin of flunkey, which I’ll skip, as well as a few fanciful etymologies of this word, not worthy of mention. Incidentally, those who coined the verb flunk don’t seem to have had flunkeys in view.

Hardly the source of any word for “servant.”
Image: The poetical works of Thomas Hood. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Lackey is a still harder word. Its Romance source began with the vowel a, which perhaps points to this noun’s Arabic origin, a- being part of the definite article. The Arabic home of lackey was suggested long ago, but the true etymon remains hidden. Blackley refused to go to Arabic and cited Latin laqueus “a rope with a slip knot, and especially a noose used for hanging.” The way from “criminal” to “hanging,” he said, is short. He also mentioned German Strick and Strang, both of which so often meant “rope, used to bind and hang criminals” that Strick became a common epithet “for a good-for-nothing dissipated fellow.” 

Blackley derived both flunkey and lackey from the names of despised mercenaries. His etymology of lackey does not go too far, but I find all the old conjectures worth knowing. Though quite often they are obviously wrong, a certain idea or association may inspire a better approach to the problem. Such at least has been my experience. Not all that is wrong is nonsense. The idea that in researching the origin of lackey we should turn to military terms is, most likely, correct, because in the fifteenth century, a certain class of soldiers, especially crossbowmen, was called alagues, alacays, or lacays. Arabic luk‘a means “worthless, servile; slave.” Skeat gravitated toward the Arabic hypothesis but added: “This is a guess; it is much disputed.” Yet this guess sounds no less probable than a direct derivation from Italian leccare or German lecken “to lick.” As mentioned above, our best authorities prefer to say almost nothing about the etymology of lackey, which is a pity.

The last word I’ll mention here, bat-fowling, is unknown to me, and it is probably unknown to most of our readers. The OED cites no contemporary examples. Bat-fowling means “catching birds at night by dazing and then netting them.” Blackley was sure that throughout England (!), “people said bat-folding, and for good reason…. The instrument in question is a net stretched upon a rood frame, consisting of two parts which, when opened out, are about of the same shape as a large paper kite, or a gigantic racket, or bat, and is hinged at the top, the ends at the bottom being in the operator’s hands.” I wonder whether those remarks deserve the attention of our lexicographers. Anyway, reading Blackley’s book is what my students call fun. Very much in accordance with the remarks about bat-fowling, I’ll cite the title of Chapter 1: “On Word Hunting in General.” Word hunting, by day or at night, is a noble pursuit.

Bird-fowling?
Image by Calandrella. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Featured image: Photo by cottonbro studio via Pexels.

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In full swing

In full swing

First, my thanks to those who commented on my previous post. One comment in the busy exchange was negative: the correspondent likes some of those turns of speech I dislike. That’s fine, but I want to defend myself against the reproach that my subject should be limited to etymology. I receive questions from all over the world about usage and occasionally answer them in this blog. The title “Oxford Etymologist” does not tie me exclusively to word origins.

“Vich I call addin’ insult to injury, as the parrot said ven they not only took him from his native land, but made him talk the English langwidge arterwards.”
Image by Zsolt Hegyi from Pixabay.

I have no theory for why people say something like do it real quick and she sings beautiful. German or Yiddish, as the comment suggests? Or a product of natural development? German/Yiddish usage also needs an explanation. Finally, I congratulate our reader who keeps a dictionary of Wellerisms on his desk. Our culture of reading classical literature is dying (none of the hundreds of students I have taught has read The Pickwick Papers). Yet I believe that Dickens will be the last to go downhill.

And now back to my main theme. I received a letter with a question about the etymology of swag “booty; cockiness, etc.” The reader complained that dictionaries have nothing to say about the origin of this word. She is quite right. I discussed sw-words almost exactly a year ago (see the post for June 19, 2024) and will try to repeat myself as little as possible.

In 1992, I wrote a paper, titled “The Dregs of English Etymology.” Among other things, it contained a list of about a thousand words whose origin was said to be unknown in the 1985 edition of The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology. Compiling such a list proved to be a much less straightforward task than I had expected, because the text contains numerous phrases like of uncertain, doubtful, dubious, disputable origin, obscurely related, and so forth. Are they polite synonyms for “origin unknown”?

In any case, the many senses of swag have been traced quite well. Some occurred in the 14th century, while others, like “booty,” turned up in texts almost the day before yesterday. There is no way of deciding whether we are witnessing a long continuous history of one word, or if the sound complex swag was like an empty box, ready to acquire almost any sense with which speakers chose to endow it. Norwegian svagga “to sway” is cited in some dictionaries, but it is a rare (dialectal?) verb, and nothing points to its being the source of English swag. Incidentally, sway also sounds very much like swag.

Is this your idea of swizzle?
Image by Gerhard Bögner from Pixabay

Swag has as many lookalikes as senses, and this is the main problem with it. Here are some sw-verbs from my list of words of unknown origin (the numbers in parentheses refer to the century of their first attestation in texts): swank (20) “to behave ostentatiously” (apparently, little known in American English); swash (16) “to dash violently, etc.” (said to be sound-imitative like clash, dash, lash, and mash); another swash (17) “inclined obliquely to the axis of the work (in turning),” and swizzle ~ switchel (19) “an alcoholic drink.” The material at my disposal is richer, but going over lists of verbs (mainly verbs) is boring. Anyway, one looks at swing, switch, swipe, swither “to hesitate,” swoon, and quite a few other more or less similar words and gets the impression that all of them refer to some quick or erratic movement and are in some vague way related. There is a special term for groups like sw -, namely, phonestheme. The term was coined by John Rupert Firth, a renowned British scholar.

The presence of the phonestheme cannot be predicted, and the same sound group (here, sw) occurs in words in which it evokes no association with movement. Think of swamp, swan, swain, swear, sweat, sweet, and swine. But what about swap, sway, swim, swirl, and swoon? Sw- does suggest a swinging, swaying movement (hence swag and swagger). There is no law, but a tendency is apparent.

Some connections have to be restituted by historians. Thus, German schwach means “weak,” not “swinging,” but the verb sweken once meant both “to become weak” and “to swing.” Swinging, it appears, led to being weak. While German im Schwange sein “to be in vogue” obviously refers to swinging, German schwanger “pregnant” is believed to be a different word. Why so? Pregnancy is a temporary state, isn’t it? Cannot it then be related to the many nouns and verbs with more or less the same reference?

Having reached this state of uncertainty, we come across swoon. The word has been known since the thirteenth century, and it once had g in the root (the verb –swogan existed). A similar-sounding German verb meant “to sigh.” The origin of swoon is said to be unknown. Really? Perhaps there is nothing to know. If we ignore the details, we may agree that being in a swoon, like being pregnant, is a temporary state! When things are up in the air, the phonestheme sw– comes in handy—unfortunately, too handy.

Even so, we need not treat our discovery with too much suspicion. When our authorities say that the origin of sway is obscure, perhaps we should say that the obscurity is a product of our striving for perfection. The OED quotes a 1598 statement that swagger was “created as it were by a natural Prosopopeia [here: without any known source], without etimologie or deriuation (sic).” I am inclined to say that that’s all there is to it. Swap, sway and swag are, rather probably, rootless sound-symbolic or/and sound-imitative formations, produced “instinctively,” as older scholars used to say. It is now believed that the human language emerged about 230,000 years ago. I am rather suspicious of exact numbers in this matter, but let us agree that the date is in principle realistic. As soon as people learned to produce the sounds needed for expressing their emotions, they began to say something like swap and swag.

Such English words often have cognates in closely related Germanic languages and sometimes in Latin, Greek, and non-Indo-European languages. Their common origin in Scandinavian and English or Dutch and English may mean that they are considerably older than the date of their first appearance in texts. Borrowing is also probable, but the main question is their distant origin, rather than their later history. Here is just one, almost random, example that shows how loose ties among such words may be. A Gothic verb that meant “to rejoice” (Gothic was recorded in the fourth century and is a dead Germanic language) has several related forms. In Old English it meant “to resound,” in Old Saxon, “to roar” (just one step from “rejoice” to “roar” and “resound”), but in Old Icelandic, “to splash.” Splashing is not too noisy. One would not be surprised if such a word acquired the sense “water”! Obviously, there once was a sound-imitative word with the phonestheme sw-, which developed in several ways.

Nothing has changed since the beginning of time.
Image by Hanne Hasu from Pixabay.

Take your swag and go home with the swagger of a winner.

Featured image: Image by Rudy and Peter Skitterians from Pixabay.

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Ten American road trips

Ten American road trips

In the spring of 1791, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, accompanied by Jefferson’s enslaved chef James Hemings, took a road trip. In six weeks, they covered more than 900 miles, travelling through New York, Vermont, Massachusetts, and Connecticut before returning across Long Island. Suffering from various physical ailments and exhausted by the political travails of the day, they sought “health, recreation, and curiosity.” Madison said as long as they were together they could “never be out of their way.” Decades later, he recalled that the trip made them “immediate companions.”

Few rites of passage are as venerated in American culture as the road trip, the journey of discovery to places unfamiliar or unknown. Here are ten noteworthy ones in literature and film in chronological order:

1. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)

Mark Twain knew about travel! In his famous novel, we follow Huck and Jim as they stream down the Mississippi in a biracial journey of discovery and escape. The trip gets a bit complicated in the novel’s third act, but, on the journey, they prove their manhood and confess their feelings for one another. Jim discovers he is free and Huck realizes the road is the only place for him. At the end, Huck continues his travels as he lights out for the Territory.

2. It Happened One Night (1934)

In this classic screwball comedy, Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert find themselves together on a bus heading to New York from Florida. They hitchhike and encounter all kinds of difficulties as they fall in love, even though Colbert is married to a charlatan. Of course, they end up together. The film swept the key Academy Awards categories̶—and it did something else. In one scene, Clark Gable takes off his shirt to reveal he is wearing nothing beneath it. As a result, T-shirt sales in America plummeted.

3. The Grapes of Wrath (book 1939; film 1940)

In John Steinbeck’s stirring novel, the Joad family, victims of the dust bowl and ruthless bankers, are forced to flee their Oklahoma home and head to California. They travel along the legendary Route 66, where they experience cruelty and kindness as they make their way to what they think will be the promised land. Unfortunately, it isn’t paradise, and at the end Tom Joad commits himself to forever travelling the country and serving as an agent of justice. “I’ll be everywhere,” he states.

4. On The Road (1957)

Jack Kerouac’s novel is the one everyone thinks of when it comes to road trips. Much of the book focuses on the travels of Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty. It is a tale of friendship and discovery, written in a stream of consciousness that matches the improvisational genius of jazz, which is a current that runs through the book. The novel has influenced generations of creative artists. Paradise says it best: “Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road.”

5. Travels with Charley: In Search of America (1962)

John Steinbeck makes this list twice. In 1960, aging and feeling that he had lost the feel for America, he embarked on a 10,000-mile journey across the nation, accompanied by his French poodle Charley. Part travelogue, part fiction, he wrote about the people he met. He gloried in the gifts of nature at Yellowstone and agonized over scenes of racial violence in New Orleans. In the end, he was uncertain what he found, and he lamented the loss of an older America. “The more I inspected this American image, the less sure I became of what it is.”

6. Easy Rider (1969)

The film follows Captain America (Peter Fonda) and Billy (Dennis Hopper) as they travel by motorcycle from Los Angeles to New Orleans. The pair sold cocaine to finance their trip, and drugs, from marijuana to LSD, are part of their journey. In their travels, they experience life in a commune and befriend a lawyer (Jack Nicholson). But they face hostility (the lawyer is murdered) and, in the end, they are also killed. The movie defined an era where the rebellion of youth came to the forefront and the soundtrack forever linked rock ‘n’ roll to the journey on the road.

7. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)

Robert Pirsig’s book became a surprise bestseller, despite being rejected initially by dozens of publishers. It tells the fictionalized autobiographical story of a motorcycle trip he took with his son from Minnesota to California. Along the way, the narrative contemplates various philosophical and psychological issues. What the travelers found was inward, not outward. “Sometimes,” Pirsig writes, “it’s a little better to travel than arrive.”

8. Rain Man (1988)

Awkward pairings are elemental in road narratives. Few are as different as the brothers Charlie and Ray, portrayed by Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman. One is an upscale collectibles dealer and the other is an institutionalized autistic savant. On their car journey from Cincinnati to Los Angeles, Charlie copes with the regimented habits of his brother and comes to appreciate and understand him. In Las Vegas, Ray uses his mathematical abilities to count cards and win big at blackjack. In the end, Ray returns to the institution where he lives, and Charlie promises to see him again, having come to appreciate his brother and realize he wants him in his life.

9. Thelma and Louise (1991)

What starts as a girls’ weekend away becomes a one-way road trip to eternity. Geena Davis (Thelma) and Susan Sarandon (Louise), looking to escape from a domineering husband and deadening job, plan a weekend at a cabin. But after a stop at a roadhouse where Thelma is nearly raped and Louise kills her attacker, the women go on the lam. Along the way, their friendship and confidence grow, but they reach a point of no return as authorities bear down on them. They gas the engine and head toward a gorge. The film leaves the two of them in still frame, forever suspended in mid-air, pointed upward, out and away.

10. The Road (2006)

In this famous post-apocalyptic work, Cormac McCarthy tells the story of a loving father and his young son journeying across a forbidding landscape. There is danger and horror everywhere and the pair struggle to survive. They strive to reach water, and do. But the father dies and the son is left to carry on with another family, who discover him. Father and son had “set out along the blacktop in the gunmetal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other’s world entire.” If each is the other’s world entire, it matters not where you are on the road.

Feature image: Photo by Jaro Bielik on Unsplash.

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Doppelganger names

We often think of personal names as specific to an individual, and sometimes they are. Yet often they are not. After all, the same individual may go by more than one name. Consider secret identities, for example. Superman is also Clark Kent (and Kal-El, his Kryptonian birthname), Wonder Woman is also Diana Prince (and Princess Diana of Paradise Island), and so on. Pen names and stage names are the literary equivalent of superhero secret identities: Samuel Clements becomes Mark Twain, Mary Ann Evans becomes George Eliot, Eric Arthur Blair becomes George Orwell, Marguerite Annie Johnson becomes Maya Angelou, Daniel Handler becomes Lemony Snicket, and Belcalis Almánzar becomes Cardi B. If someone is referred to by their less familiar name, we may not understand who is being mentioned. And, less famously, an individual’s name may have more than one variant, depending on the use of initials, diminutives, marital surnames, or gender transitioning. And in the legal system, there are any number of anonymized or unknown John Does and Jane Does (as well as Richard Roes, Jane Roes, and Mary Moes).

The opposite situation can easily arise as well, and here is where we find doppelganger names. Sometimes different people have the same name or similar ones, creating potential confusion. There are, after all, two Saint Augustines (one the 4th century bishop of Hippo, the other the 6th century monk who became Archbishop of Canterbury), two presidents named George Bush, two William Pitts (the Elder and the Younger), two Oliver Wendell Holmeses (one a physician-poet and one a Supreme Court Justice), two Hank Williamses, and two Frankensteins (the doctor and the monster), among many others. In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, there is a pair of Cinnas, and the poet Cinna is fatally mistaken for Cinna the conspirator.

Doppelganger names have real-world consequences in today’s surveillance-minded world. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the U.S. federal government instituted something called the No-Fly List, which was a list of people prohibited from boarding commercial aircrafts in or into United States. The No-Fly List and similar watch lists are controversial, and one of the points of controversy has to do with so-called false positives. These arise when a prohibited individual or an individual flagged for additional screening has the same name as an unlucky innocent traveler. The late Massachusetts Senator Edward M. (Ted) Kennedy ran into this situation when the name “T Kennedy” appeared on the list. Kennedy was told that the name “T Kennedy” had once been used as the alias of a person on a screening list. The vagueness of the listed “T Kennedy” subjected the well-known politician to repeated travel delays.

The practice of naming boats and ships also sometimes results in different vessels having doppelganger names. A pair of such ships named Peerless was involved in a famous misunderstanding routinely taught in law schools: the 1864 case involved a lawsuit brought by a man named William Raffles against Daniel Wichelhaus and Gustav Busch. Wichelhaus and Busch had made a contract for cotton arriving from Mumbai (then called Bombay) on a ship named Peerless. It turned out that there were two ships called Peerless—and both were travelling from Mumbai to Liverpool, but at different times.

Wichelhaus and Busch said the Peerless intended in the contract was the ship that had set off in October, but their shipment of cotton arrived later on the other Peerless, which had left Mumbai in December. Wichelhaus and Busch refused to pay for the delivery, so William Raffles sued, arguing that the cotton had arrived on the Peerless as the contract stated. However, the English Court of Exchequer declined to enforce the agreement because the reference to a ship called Peerless was ambiguous.

The Raffles case might seem like a unique misunderstanding—a historical oddity—but it was followed by (and cited in) an 1869 Massachusetts case, Kyle v. Kavanagh. This time the dispute was about the sale of property “on Prospect Street” in Waltham, Massachusetts. However, there were two Prospect Streets in the town. The court’s instructions to the jury explained that: “[I]f the defendant was negotiating for one thing and the plaintiff was selling another thing, and if their minds did not agree as to the subject matter of the sale,” they could not be said to have made a contract.

Sometimes a rose is not just a rose.

Featured image: Philippe Awouters via Unsplash.

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The words we use

The words we use

The town where I live has a good newspaper. From time to time, it gives advice to its readers for avoiding language mistakes and for speaking correct English. Today’s post has been inspired by a column by Gary Gilson the Minnesota Star Tribune published about two years ago. It is amusing to compare his advice and the advice I constantly give to my correspondents from all over the world.

Number One on his and my list is the use of buzzwords. People are formulaic creatures, they like cliches as much as being fiercely individual. Some phrases are unavoidable. We cannot substitute anything for Good morning, thank you very much, please sit down, don’t worry, and their likes. It is less obvious whether we should say have a nice weekend every time we part on Friday. But the real problem is with important-sounding phrases that once were new but have lost their freshness from overuse. When I am promised unswerving support or a thought-provoking story, I no longer expect either assistance or excitement.

Have a nice day: formulaic but pleasant.
Image via Pixabay, public domain.Interdisciplinary and happy.
Photo by Alina Skazka, public domain.

Likewise, when I write letters of recommendation for my former students, I wonder whether I should say that their research is interdisciplinary. The epithet has been trodden to death and means nothing. Though it takes years for a budding scholar (sorry for this phrase) to master the chosen area and though not everybody succeeds, at twenty-eight, one is supposed to be a giant astride at least two oceans. But if I don’t mention the applicant’s interdisciplinary greatness, this will be noticed and remembered! Everybody is interdisciplinary, and everybody needs a job. I weep but walk in step. Rest assured: my recommendations are always thought-provoking, and I promise my proteges unswerving support.

Not only epithets like glamorous, fascinating, and mature have been worn thin. Even worse are some adverbs. One shudders at abominations like free gift, future prospects, final outcome, exact opposites, and the most precious gem of them all: honest truth. Those who cannot be smart often try to look or sound smart. One of the ways of impressing an interlocutor is to speak long and say little. At this point in time is of course weightier than now or at present, and utilize eclipses the modest monosyllabic use.

Language changes, and the avant-garde variety always sounds like an abomination to the cultured group. When all pedants die out, the “progressives” begin to guard their norm, which has now become conservative! Here is a curious example. In German, gut means both good and well, that is, adverbs lack a suffix like –ly. But I have heard someone saying on the radio: “She sings beautiful.” My neighbor suggested that we ride real quick. This is pure German. To be sure, fast is both an adverb and an adjective (we drive a fast car fast). Is English progressing in the direction of German? Perhaps.

One example I cited in some older post, but my students keep reminding me of this phenomenon. “The mood of the stories are gloomy.” Judging by this ineradicable feature of even graduate students’ style, American English has established a rule: make the verb agree with the closest noun, rather than with the subject. Should we bother? Yes, for the time being. But one day, this usage may become the norm. Incidentally, here is a sentence from a paper by a distinguished British philologist: “The small corpus of nineteen… epigraphical inscriptions… do not correspond very well, in either the date or their geographical distribution…” I understand the British collective in my family are early risers, and the couple were seldom seen together, but the corpus are? Yet I am more troubled by sentences like “They invited my wife and I,” because I cannot explain what analogy produces such phrases. However, we do say “Yes, this is me” and don’t worry.

One of the oldest chestnuts is: “I insist on Mrs. Smith appearing.” Obviously, it should be “Mrs. Smith’s.” But the tug of war between those construction has been going on for two centuries (at least). A grammarian will have no trouble parsing either variant. Yet the speaking community has never had any interest in linguists’ opinions.

A special problem is language and social engineering. Every time I write is not and does not, the computer suggests isn’t and doesn’t. Who programmed it to promote the conversational variants of such forms? I am immune to my computer’s bidding, but many others, especially insecure foreign speakers, will probably obey the command. I wince at constructions like “When someone asks you for help, never send them without assistance.” This usage was imposed on us for two reasons. “Him or her” is bulky,” and the older him is sexist. Yet I constantly see sentences like “It is the viewer’s opinion that matters, and we cannot ignore her reaction,” as though her is less sexist than his. Medication is expected to cure, rather than kill.

My final example has been trodden to death. Everybody fights the phrase very unique. The correspondent of the newspaper I referred to as an inspiration of this essay began his notes with the appeal: “Avoid very unique!” Some people don’t understand that unique means “one of a kind” and take it for a synonym of rare. The misunderstanding is sad, but in the history of language, such events cause astounding changes. Words for “bad” begin to mean “good,” and the other way round. Everything depends on whether any given speaker prefers to be conservative and resist change or is happy to swim with the current. If one day, unique loses its ties with the idea of uniqueness, the avant-garde usage will become neutral. Incidentally, the adverb very is rarely needed. It, too, has lost its freshness, and that is why people often say very, very. Ours is a community of overstatement. Editors used to call very a four-letter word, which it certainly is.

This is a unicorn. It is very unique.
Virgin and Unicorn by Domenichino, circa 1602. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

NOTE. During the summer months, the blog will keep appearing but not always with the same regularity as usual.

Featured image: sampling of types of dictionaries used in proverb studies by Pete unseth. CC-BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

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How to speak truth (or a reasonable facsimile) to power

How to speak truth (or a reasonable facsimile) to power

One of the earliest depictions of the human form, painted on the wall of a cave in the Iberian Peninsula, seems to show a man with his middle finger extended. The gesture is probably not in this instance the near-universal sign of contempt it has become, but it may nevertheless serve as a reminder that the urge to make our feelings known has a long history. Today, that urge expresses itself most fully in our need to tell our leaders when we think they are wrong, a practice commonly known as “speaking truth to power.”

But getting up the courage to do so is only half the battle. As our recent election cycle has shown, getting power to listen is a whole other matter. Leaders across the political spectrum tend to surround themselves with people who share their views, and the resulting echo chamber simply drowns out other voices.

So how does one do it? The Bible has a couple of examples.

In Genesis, the patriarch Abraham gets God to think twice before wiping out Sodom, the original Sin City. He does it by haggling. “Wilt thou also destroy the righteous with the wicked? Peradventure there be fifty righteous within the city,” he asks. When God agrees to spare the city if fifty righteous individuals can be found, Abraham cautiously but firmly starts bringing the number down. What about only 45, he asks. Or 30? How about 20? 10? Each time, God agrees to the new number, and we are left to believe not a single righteous person could be found in that moral cesspool.

A more earthly example comes from the Second book of Samuel, where the prophet Nathan publicly shamed King David for wrongfully arranging the death of Uriah the Hittite so that he could take the voluptuous Bathsheba as his wife. Ostensibly seeking the king’s justice, Nathan shared a story about a rich landowner who nevertheless seized his neighbor’s only ewe for a feast. When David predictably exploded over this rampant injustice, Nathan sprang his trap, telling the king that this was what he had done when he lusted for Bathsheba. Even though Nathan had tricked and humiliated David, the king responded, “I have sinned against the Lord.”

Abraham and Nathan were special cases. As patriarch and prophet, respectively, they had acquired the right to exercise what Greek and Roman scholars called parrhesia, literally, “frankness,” or “freedom of speech.”

More ordinary folks had a problem, as the Greek philosopher Plato discovered when he travelled all the way from Athens to teach the ruler of Syracuse in Sicily how to become a philosopher-king. When Plato said that being a king or slave made no difference to a true philosopher, that ruler decided to try out the idea by selling Plato into slavery. (Legend has it that Plato used the money raised to pay his ransom to found the Academy.)

Under the Romans, public speaking became a primary skill, especially when it came to getting a favorable response from the emperor. As a result, a fairly large number of speeches, and handbooks on how to deliver a successful one, survive. Here are some simple rules that can be distilled from these works.

Rule one: know thyself

This maxim, carved into the walls of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, serves as a reminder that demeanor is important. As Plato learned, speakers who talk down to their listeners are likely to be dismissed as holier-than-thou prigs. So, it’s more effective to offer one’s advice, like Abraham, with a dose of modesty.

Rule two: know thy audience

Better even then know thyself is know thy audience. If a given leader has a history of saber-rattling and plans to start a new arms race, this is probably not the best time to propose a National Endowment for the Arts.

In a democracy, We the People are the ultimate court of public opinion, and in this instance, emotion is often more effective than reason. Greed was all it took to get the ancient Athenians to launch their disastrous expedition against Syracuse, while Mark Antony, in his Funeral Oration for Julius Caesar, used anger to “let slip the dogs of war.” Fear works, too. Just ask the hordes of murderers, rapists, and pedophiles waiting to unleash Armageddon on our borders. Catchy, imperative phrases can be highly effective if they encapsulate a strong emotion. “Build the wall!” and “drain the swamp!” are good examples. “Build Back Better,” not so much.

Rule three: make it win-win

Terrible things happened to David after he was rebuked by Nathan, but in a strictly political sense his willingness to accept the charge (rather than, say, putting Nathan on an enemies list) established David as a legitimate ruler, and not a tyrant. Similarly, that saber-rattling ruler who would never hear of an endowment for the arts might actually listen to someone who pointed out that the pen can be mightier than the sword.

Rule four: flattery is good, finesse is better

In the fourth century, Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea, author of an influential life of Constantine the Great, was present when a speaker dubbed the first Christian emperor a saint and told him he would surely continue to rule in the afterlife. Constantine, who cultivated a public image of prayer and humility, exploded, and that speaker was never heard from again. A speech of Eusebius’s own survives, and a modern reader might be forgiven for thinking the bishop was being just as flattering, but in fact he chose his words much more carefully. Taking note of Constantine’s well-known penchant for public applause, for instance, Eusebius claims, “The cheers of the crowds and the voices of flatterers he holds more a nuisance than a pleasure, because of his stern character and the upright rearing of his soul.”

Eusebius shows he had mastered the trick that the conspirator Decius centuries later would explain in Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” as the ability to deliver such praise while seeming not to: “But when I tell him he hates flatterers, / He says he does, being most flatterèd.”

Do such rules matter in our postmodern age, when truth itself seems to be up for grabs? We are not as unique as we like to think. Two millennia ago, Pontius Pilate asked, “What is truth?” If a skilled speaker had been on hand, the subsequent course of history might have been very different indeed.

Featured image: ‘The School of Athens’ by Raffaello Sanzio, c.1509-1511, via Wikimedia Commons.

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Pride isn’t arrogance; it’s love

Pride isn’t arrogance; it’s love

Shae Washington, a Black queer Christian woman, struggled to reconcile her sexuality and her spirituality. Her church had always taught that you cannot be both Christian and queer. After years of praying about her struggle, one day she heard God say, “I have already set you free on the cross. Why are you still in the closet? Come out, be who I created you to be.” That day, when Shae chose to trust God’s authority over her own certainty, she said she felt a tremendous peace from God. That peace kept her grounded as former friends now demanded she show them where in the Bible it said this was okay and as church members charged her with arrogance for elevating her own experience over years of tradition.

Shae was among those living on the frontlines of the so-called culture wars—conservative Christians who are also LGBTQ+. Some of the things that make a lot of their lives hell make a lot of other people’s lives hell, too, in less direct ways. We all gain by understanding their situations. As we think about pride this month, the lives of LGBTQ+ conservative Christians can help us to see the link between pride and humility, and how both are necessary for love and justice. Knowing that you are a human being, worthy of love, is the kind of pride that a lot of straight, cisgender people take for granted. It is often denied to LGBTQ+ people. That is the pride we celebrate during Pride Month. As Shae’s story illustrates, many LGBTQ+ Christians find it is their humility that helps them recover or develop a healthy sense of pride: the belief in their fundamental worthiness of love and belonging.

Many LGBTQ+ conservative Christians have had loved ones cut them off from all connection out of fear that they are not just sinful, but dangerous to those they love. They are accused of “turning their backs on God,” even though many have begged and pleaded with God to take away the feelings that they thought made them unworthy of love. Still, many LGBTQ+ Christians stay connected to their faith communities, and more and more are being honest about who they are and engaging with their churches. LGBTQ+ Christians who are also people of color may need church as the one place where they find the support they need to survive living in a racist world from week to week. But unlike straight, cisgender people who may have church support groups to help with their marriages or families, LGBTQ+ people may not feel welcome to talk about their intimate relationships or find support for how to navigate them. And in predominantly white LGBTQ+ spaces, they may be free to express their sexual and gender identities, but might endure racism. Their stories make clear that it’s hard to flourish when you have to hide parts of yourself, and that we thrive when we are unconditionally loved and accepted as whole people. But getting there can be a tough road.

Looking at life from LGBTQ+ conservative Christians’ perspective, we see how actions that look like love might not actually be loving. In our research, we heard about a dynamic we call sacramental shame, where churches required LGBTQ+ members continually to feel and display shame—an emotion that signals they know they are unworthy of love—as a sign that they have not rejected God. This requirement was often shrouded in the language of love, “we love you, but we hate your sin,” and in expressions of affection and care. Being gay, bi, or trans was compared to being a murderer, or cheating on a spouse, or embezzling funds—all things that violate other people’s trust and break relationships. Yet the same people who taught that God could forgive people for these things also taught that being LGBTQ+—which is generally involuntary and doesn’t actually hurt anyone—makes a person uniquely unworthy of God’s love. When you treat being LGBTQ+ itself as a sin—the worst sin—you treat your own understanding of gender and sexuality as greater than God’s love, as a commandment more important than the Ten Commandments (which, Jesus said, all boil down to loving God and neighbor).

There is a particular harm that is caused by treating someone like their capacity to love is dangerous. It can make people feel like monsters. We heard from people for whom life had become completely unlivable because they felt unworthy of human connection and God’s love. They kept friends at arm’s length out of fear that getting too close would condemn them both to hell.

When someone has been treated this way, and comes out of it recognizing that they are not monsters but human beings, they feel alive again. That is pride: knowing that they are worthy of love and belonging, with their gifts and flaws, simply because they are human. In contrast to arrogance or hubris, we call this “relational pride.” Relational pride is taken for granted by many cisgender and heterosexual Christians, because no one ever questions that they deserve love. Knowing they are worthy of love only seems like arrogance to those who think LGBTQ+ people are uniquely unworthy. And yet they accuse LGBTQ+ people of being the arrogant ones.

Relational pride is not the opposite of humility, but its counterpart. Humility is a realistic knowledge of your gifts as well as your limitations. Humility enables us to admit that we might be wrong even when we feel pretty certain; it keeps us honest about our humanity, that none of us is all-knowing and that we need to learn from each other. Shae’s humility allowed her to be open to the possibility that she might be wrong about what she had always thought about gender and sexuality. It allowed her to trust God’s message that she is worthy of love, just as she is. What looked like arrogance to fellow church members was an act of submission to God, taking the harder path of being who God was telling her she was made to be. Shea’s humility led her to a healthy sense of pride—the joy of knowing she is worthy to give and receive love.

Humility also helps those who have devalued LGBTQ+ Christians to reconsider. Conservative Christian parents, pastors, and friends tell stories of the moment they realized that maybe they didn’t know everything about human sexuality and gender. That maybe they didn’t fully understand what the Bible was really saying. They showed humility, which led them to prioritize love over certainty.

Conservative Christians often say their job is to love others, not try to bring about social justice. But there is no love without justice. When we love other people, we are humbly open to learning from them and growing through our connection. We listen to them when they tell us we’ve been hurting them, and because we love them, we work to stop hurting them. Love also means listening when people tell you that your organization’s—or country’s—policies are hurting them, because of their sexual orientation, or gender, or race, ability, or because the policies themselves deprive them of things they need to live. Helping them to thrive might mean working to change those policies—out of love.

We on the left can also be arrogant, dismissing those we disagree with as backwards or even evil. To be sure, there are some pretty evil things happening in the world right now. It can be harmful to try to empathize with someone who treats you as if you shouldn’t exist. But trying to understand the fears behind their actions—when we can do so without personal harm—can help us all to find a way forward, to a society in which people are all treated as worthy of love and care not just from their friends and family, but by institutions and policies. Humility and pride foster solidarity—a relationship of love that works for justice.

Featured image by Jason Leung via Unsplash.

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Does the media we consume impact our emotions?

Does the media we consume impact our emotions?

There’s a saying in Western philosophy, echoed in some other philosophical traditions globally: “the end of labor is to gain leisure.” It’s a reminder that for all of the toil and turmoil that we engage in our daily lives, the fruits of such labor come in securing a means to pursue our own self interests. Such a claim is a cornerstone of contemporary theorizing on psychological well-being, from Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to Deci and Ryan’s self-determination theory. 

Perhaps I’ve taken this phrase a bit too literally, as I’ve devoted the last two decades of my life to the serious and rigorous study of entertainment and leisure, especially through media technologies. Although I’m unsure if we’ve collectively moved the needle on debates regarding the perils and pearls of an increasingly mediated daily existence, one thing is clear: media have, do, and will continue to play a critical role in how we manage our feelings and dispositions. 

The premise is both elegant and simple: our emotions and moods fluctuate throughout the day as we cope with myriad stressful or monotonous events, and we rarely have control over the many things causing our noxious mood states. However, one thing we have a great deal of control over (usually) is the media content we consume. In the 1980s, some of the earliest media psychology scholars proposed the theory of affect-dependent stimulus arrangement–what later became known as mood management theory. If we presume that some of the most common noxious mood states include frustration and boredom, we can start to see how different media content might be useful for disrupting moods. For example, research using television, films, and music found that stressed people benefit best from slower-paced content with a more relaxing tone, and bored people benefit from somewhat the opposite: action-packed content that requires a bit more attention.

We found these same effects with video games but with one really important caveat: gaming can also back-fire. How is that possible? Video games require a lot more attention to play, because they are interactive–the player has to monitor and respond to the action as it unfolds. Because of this, video games were especially good at disrupting boredom, but games that are too difficult ended up being an additional source of stress, which ended up stressing out already-stressed people. In a sense, we found that video games have the potential to be especially potent for mood repair, but too much challenge disrupted the effect. 

Studies like these are important because they remind us that entertainment media are quite functional in our day-to-day lives. Although it might seem that we’re just playing around and “amusing ourselves” in ways that pull us away from worldly concerns, it’s also the case that our psychological well-being depends on our ability to recover and be resilient–these latter notes being the focus of the latest scholarship into media-induced mood repair. Of course, others have found that some of mood management’s predictions don’t always hold up. For example, there are times where people do want to ruminate in noxious moods; such as when reflecting on the loss of a loved one or getting focused for a major event or competition. Yet even in these theoretical challenges, we see an enduring truth: we engage with media in ways that help us satisfy our needs. 

So rather, maybe we are just playing around, but there are good and useful reasons for doing so. Other theories of functional media use include uses and gratifications theory (that we have deliberate motivations for our media selections, with intended and unintended consequences) and the broader suite of selective exposure theories (of which, mood management is conceptually aligned with). 

In an increasingly mediated and hybrid society, it becomes even more crucial that we observe, describe, and explain our complex relationship with media content. Functional approaches do this by avoiding moral panics over presumed negative influences and instead, they step back to try and understand the role media plays in daily life. Such approaches are equally capable of understanding negative and positive influences (for example, the stressful impact of video games, or the broader discovery of “unintended consequences” through uses and gratifications theory), which makes them especially robust. 

Soon, we will be launching the latest journal of the International Communication Association, Global Perspectives in Communication. The primary focus of GPC is to provide an additional top-tier outlet for communication scholarship, and to do so in an open-access environment so that we can remove barriers to globally relevant scholarship. “Global” in our name is less about a specific focus on intercultural or international scholarship but rather, meant to be an open invitation to a journal built globally from the beginning: from our reviewer pool and editorial board to the many different regions and perspectives that we expect to be represented in our issues and volumes. We hope that if your own scholarship takes you into the study of human communication–from interpersonal interactions to massively mediated systems–that you’ll consider GPC as an outlet for this work. 

Featured image by Samsung Memory via Unsplash.

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A vicious beehive

A vicious beehive

One more Spelling Bee is behind us, and one more benighted youngster took the cake. In the final round, he spelled the word éclaircissement “making an obscure subject clear” correctly. He is thirteen years old, he has been playing this game for seven years, and he was the runner up in 2024. According to his statement, he spent five to six hours daily on weekdays and seven to eight hours on weekends studying the dictionary for unfamiliar words. Moreover, he has been practicing this thing for the last seven years, that is, almost since his kindergarten days. I am of course sorry for the kid, because I am not a fan of child abuse and because I know that one can be young only once. Rather long ago, I already spewed my contempt and ire at Spelling Bee, and I remember that my pamphlet did not produce the slightest stir. But as Cyrano de Bergerac said on a different occasion: “One does not always fight to win.” That is why I’ll once again return to Spelling Bee, Spelling Reform, and Walter William Skeat.

Obviously, people associate this bee with our great honey gatherers.
Image by Rossiter Pics. CC by 2.0 via Flickr.

Learning the spelling of the words one will never use or even encounter looks like an unprofitable occupation. I suspect that the hero of this year’s contest does not read or speak French (there was no time to learn it). What then is the use of knowing the word éclaircissement? He also spelled Chaldee, Symlin, olona, and adytum correctly. The website says that after winning the prize, he collapsed with excitement and fatigue. And the admiring people who would not hurt a tadpole watched and applauded.

English spelling is irrational and tough, but why should our youngsters know how to spell olona? Wouldn’t it have been more profitable to read Shakespeare, Dickens, and Mark Twain (not of course for five or six hours a day) and come across all kinds of unfamiliar language in them: obsolete but interesting nouns and verbs used in the days of Queen Elizabeth I, the British slang of Artful Dodger, and some medieval vocabulary occurring in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court? What a feast of words! Our winner could have learned French and even Latin, or (since he knew how to spell Chaldee) even Hebrew.

English speakers are poor spellers (and for good reason), and considering the fact that most schools in the United States do not teach grammar, this fact should not surprise anyone. My undergraduate students need a semester to learn the difference between the present and the past participle and the mysteries of subordinate clauses. But spelling stopped bothering them long ago, because today, the spell checker does all the work for them. It dutifully changes the inveterate occurance to occurrence and sometimes knows the difference between principle and principal. A spelling bee might sound like a clever idea in the early twentieth century, but nowadays, it has degraded into an ignoble sport. Let me add that this is my opinion, and if someone happens to express indignation at being exposed to it, all the blame goes to me, rather than to Oxford University Press, on whose site this blog appears every Wednesday.

Looking for the words no one knows how to spell.
Image: a needle in a haystack by Sad loser, CC-BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The first Spelling Bee seems to go back to 1908. Below I will discuss a booklet on Spelling Reform, published almost at that time (in 1906). By the way, the origin of bee in spelling bee has never been explained to everybody’s satisfaction. Bee is a word of unknown etymology. It first surfaced in the US at the end of the eighteenth century and meant “a social gathering.” Perhaps it is the same word as the name of the insect: bees, as everybody knows, are great “gatherers.” In Derby, Whitby, and their likes, –by once meant “town; dwelling.” By(e) “cowstall,” with its variant bee, is still known in British dialects. Could this bee mean both “gathering place” and “the company gathered in it,” like court and forum? Just guessing.

Before the First World War, it seems that English spelling would soon be reformed, partly because several famous people supported the idea. On May 2, 1906, Walter W. Skeat gave a talk at the British Academy, and in the same year, a brochure with that speech was published by Oxford University Press. He explained why English spelling is so erratic and what progress philology had made by the beginning of the twentieth century. In 1908 (again the same date!), The English Spelling Society was founded. It advocated “simplified spelling,” The society still exists and is quite active. Today, philology enjoys no prestige, courses in the history of language (even of the English language) have fallen into desuetude, and a graduate student interested in this subject will find neither an adviser nor a job. But English spelling is still a nightmare to millions of native speakers and foreigners.

Below, I’ll only list Skeat’s suggestions, without discussing them. There are twelve of them. Skeat followed Henry Sweet, another great contemporary of his. 1. Abolish silent e, where it is useless (spell hav, giv, abuv, cum “come,” solv, freez, adz, ax). As we know, adz and ax are accepted variants in the US. 2. In the same spirit, write litl, promis, activ, therefor (in today’s spelling, therefore and the rare therefor are different words). 3. The use of ea for short e is absurd and troublesome. Write medow, brekfast, hed, as well as lepard, jepardy (the horror of it! Our beloved Jeopardy!), and also peeple. 4. The use of ie for ee is unhistorical and should be discontinued. Thus, acheev, beleev, cheef, feeld.

5. The Tudor (fifteenth-century) form oo should be restored in words like improov, looz, moov. 6. Norman scribes, while producing their manuscripts, had trouble with um, but there is no reason why we should avoid cumfort, cumpany, cum “come,” munk, muney, and cuver. 7. Skeat suggested curage, cuzin, flurish, and touch. His spelling labor, honor, harbor will not shock anyone in the US, but some of Skeat’s contemporaries feared looking like Americans. Times change (don’t they?), and some people change with them.

I’ll skip 8 and go directly to 9. Get rid of useless double letters. Thus, eg, od, ful, stif, batl, wrigl, traveler. (Needless to say, traveler is now the only American spelling.) 10. Skeat suggested abolishing b in debt, lamb, limb, numb, and thumb. 11. Ache and anchor should become ake and anker. 12. Here are a few verbal forms: puld, lookt, slipt.

At the end of his presentation, Skeat, as always, berated the ignorance and laziness of his countrymen, be it in language history or phonetics. I wonder what he would have said if he found himself in a modern college. He had no illusions about the future, and yet he thought he saw a glimmer of hope in some actions at Oxford and Cambridge. Of course, he could not predict that soon after his death in 1912, the world would collapse and, in a way, never recover. But we are still alive, and English is now a world language. Millions of children at home and in the great world around learn English and curse wright (God forbid, not write or right!), doubt, choir, and occurrence. Have I made myself clear? Was my éclaircissement lucid enough? If so, I am happy, because never in the world would I have been able to win the most modest prize in a deadly fight against bees.

Featured image: giant honey bee by Dinesh Valke. CC-BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

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