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Beyond God and atheism

Beyond God and atheism

What are we doing here? What’s the point of existence?

Traditionally, the West has been dominated by two very different answers to these big questions. On the one hand, there is belief in the traditional God of the Abrahamic faiths, a supreme being who created the universe for a good purpose. On the other hand, there is the meaningless, purposeless universe of secular atheism. However, I’ve come to think both views are inadequate, as both have things they can’t explain about reality. In my view, the evidence we currently have points to the universe having purpose but one that exists in the absence of the traditional God.

The theistic worldview struggles to explain suffering, particularly in the natural world. Why would a loving, all-powerful God choose to create the North American long-tailed shrew that paralyses its prey and then slowly eats it alive over several days before it dies from its wounds? Theologians have tried to argue that there are certain good things that exist in our world that couldn’t exist in a world with less suffering, such as serious moral choices, or opportunities to show courage or compassion. But even if that’s right, it’s not clear that our creator has the right to kill and maim—by choosing to create hurricanes and disease, for example—in order, say, to provide the opportunity to show courage. A classic objection to crude forms of utilitarianism considers the possibility of a doctor who has the option of kidnapping and killing one healthy patient in order to save the lives of five other patients: giving the heart to one, the kidneys to another, and so on. Perhaps this doctor could increase the amount of well-being in the world through this action: saving five lives at the cost of one. Even so, many feel that the doctor doesn’t have the right to take the life of the healthy person, even for a good purpose. Likewise, I think it would be wrong for a cosmic creator to infringe on the right to life and security of so many by creating earthquakes, tsunamis, and other natural disasters.

Looking at the other side of the coin, the secular atheist belief in a meaningless, purposeless universe struggles to explain the fine-tuning of physics for life. This is the recent discovery that for life to be possible, certain numbers in physics had to fall in a certain, very narrow range. If the strength of dark energy—the force that powers the expansion of the universe—had been a little bit stronger, no two particles would have ever met, meaning no stars, no planets, no structural complexity at all. If, on the other hand, it had been significantly weaker, it would not have counteracted gravity, and the universe would have collapsed back on itself a split second after the big bang. For life to be possible, the strength of dark energy had to be—like Goldilocks’ porridge—just right.

For a long time, I thought the multiverse was the best explanation of the fine-tuning of physics for life. If enough people play the lottery, it becomes likely that someone’s going to get the right numbers to win. Likewise, if there are enough universes, with enough variety in the numbers in their ‘local physics,’ then statistically it becomes highly probable that one of them is going to fluke the right numbers for life to exist.

However, I have been persuaded by philosophers of probability that the attempt to explain fine-tuning in terms of a multiverse violates a very important principle in probabilistic reasoning, known as the “Total Evidence Requirement.” This is the principle that you should always work with the most specific evidence you have. If the prosecution tells the jury that Jack always carries a knife around with him, when they know full well that he always carries a butter knife around with him, then they have misled to jury—not by lying, but by giving them less specific evidence than is available.

The multiverse theorist violates this principle by working with the evidence that a universe is fine-tuned, rather than the more specific evidence we have available, namely that this universe is fine-tuned. According to the standard account of the multiverse, the numbers in our physics were determined by probabilistic processes very early in its existence. These probabilistic processes make it highly unlikely that any particular universe will be fine-tuned, even though if there are enough universes one of them will probably end up fine-tuned. However, we are obliged by the Total Evidence Requirement to work with the evidence that this universe in particular is fine-tuned, and the multiverse theory fails to explain this data.

This is all a bit abstract, so let’s take a concrete example. Suppose you walk into a forest and happen upon a monkey typing in perfect English. This needs explaining. Maybe it’s a trained monkey. Maybe it’s a robot. Maybe you’re hallucinating. What would not explain the data is postulating millions of other monkeys on other planets elsewhere in the universe, who are mostly typing nonsense. Why not? Because, in line with the Requirement of Total Evidence, your evidence is not that some monkey is typing English but that this monkey is typing in English.

In my view, we face a stark choice. Either it is an incredible fluke that these numbers in our physics are just right for life, or these numbers are as they are because they are the right numbers for life, in other words, that there is some kind of “cosmic purpose” or goal-directedness towards life at the fundamental level of reality. The former option is too improbable to take seriously. The only rational option remaining is to embrace cosmic purpose.

Theism cannot explain suffering. Atheism cannot explain fine-tuning. Only cosmic purpose in the absence of God can accommodate both of these data-points.

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Chewing the cud and ruminating on word origins

Chewing the cud and ruminating on word origins

The history of cud may be more exciting than it seems at first sight. Initially (long ago!), I was intrigued when I read the statement by Henry Cecil Wyld, an outstanding language historian, that the origin of cud is unknown. I will return to his statement at the end of the post. Wyld’s The Universal Dictionary of the English Language is the only general purpose twentieth-century dictionary whose editor, most probably, wrote all the etymologies himself. Last week, I suggested that in dealing with the origin of any word it may be useful to look at the word’s neighbors on the page. The neighborhood of cud inspires little hope. The witty Dr. Cuthbert Gordon (1730-1810) prepared a dyeing powder (cudbear) and named it after his name, Cuthbert. Cuthbert may (only may) also be the source of cuddy “donkey.” Finally, there is cudgel, going back to Old English, reminiscent of English dialectal nudgel, German Keule (the same meaning), German Kugel “bullet,” English bludgeon, and quite a few other words of nearly the same sound and meaning. Yet cudgel has been dismissed as being of unknown origin.

To repeat, the neighborhood of cud holds out little promise to an etymologist. Yet we know that the earliest forms of cud were cwudu and cwidu, the latter being the oldest form. Secure cognates of cwidu ~ cwudu existed in Old High German (Modern German Kitt “cement” is its continuation) and Old Norse, though the Scandinavian noun had a different look (see below). Responsible sources tell us that Latin bitumen “bitumen” and Sanskrit játu “resin, gum” are related to cud. The Latin name of bitumen, as Roman speaker already knew, was borrowed from Celtic. The territory covered by our word is wide: Germanic, Celtic, and Sanskrit, that is, all the way from Norway to India. The ancient root must have begun with gw– or as special books write, gw-.

This is bitumen: linguistically related to “cud” but not good to chew. Image by Feroze Omardeen, CC2.0 via Flickr.

At one time, cud was believed to be related to the word chew. One can find a statement to this effect even in the reworkings of Webster’s dictionary in the nineteen-eighties, but neither the OED nor The Century Dictionary supported this etymology (the OED was especially reserved in discussing the origin of cud and mentioned only the indubitable cognates). Indeed, from the phonetic point of view, cēowan, the oldest recorded form of chew, and cwidu ~ cwudu, cannot be reduced to the same root. Therefore, the idea of their affinity has been given up, even though nothing can be more natural than a connection between a cud and chewing.

It may be that both cwidu ~ cwudu and cēowan, the ancestors of cud and chew, were sound-symbolic or sound-imitative words and in some obscure way reflected the movement of the jaw or rather, rendered the impression produced by that movement, just as crunch, scrunch, and munch reflect the idea of chewing and squeezing. By the way, jaw is a word “of unknown origin,” whereas jowl goes back to ceafl, and its j is late and expressive. For a similar train of ideas, I may refer to two of my earlier posts. One dealt with cheek and jowl (August 31, 2022), the other with kitsch (April 7, 2010).

Cheeks have something to do with chewing, while Kitsch, including its little-known English regional cognate keech (discussed in that post), is related to the name of a rake for removing mud. The result of chewing is some sort of pulp. Hence my idea that chew (from cēowan) and cud (from cwudu), with their initial k-w- ~ kw, were perhaps coined to imitate, however imperfectly, the process of chewing. That such words are, in principle, expressive follows from their history. Strange things happen to them all the time: in jowl, j was substituted for initial ch, and the Old Icelandic cognate of chew is tyggva. Did its t- replace k- under the influence of the word tönn “tooth”? After all, we chew with teeth. Incidentally, chew is related to choke! Chockfull is a rather obscure word from an etymological point of view, but its connection with cheek raises no doubts.

Chewing gum does not yield the most endearing images. Image: public domain via Pexels.

Verbs related to chew and German kauen (the same meaning) exist in several languages, and they also begin with a guttural consonant (g and its descendants). Similar associations arise when we look at words for mud (kitsch). Russian govno “feces” (stress on the second syllable), with exact cognates elsewhere in Slavic, also has initial g. While dealing with the origin of expressive words, one can rarely “prove” anything. But the processes of word formation have hardly changed since the earliest times. By lumping together chew, cud, govno, and kitsch, I deliberately forfeit the shelter of the wall, to paraphrase Plato’s image, that is, give up the safe algebra of comparative linguistics. Yet when that indispensable algebra keeps producing the answer “origin unknown,” as it always does in dealing with sound symbolism and sound imitation, one is probably justified in looking elsewhere.

By way of curiosity, I may cite one more example. German has a very popular word for empty talk, namely, Quatsch. It surfaced in texts in the middle of the sixteenth century. Quatsch is almost a doublet of Kot “feces.” Kitsch has an English cognate or lookalike, namely, keech “fat of a slaughtered animal rolled into a lump,” referred to above. Kot is not unlike such forms as quāt, quōt, and so forth, recorded in medieval German texts. Is Quatsch one of them? And suchseems to have been the common opinion. (English cud and keech may or may not belong to this group.) But I was amazed to find in the latest edition of the main German etymological dictionary (written by Elmar Seebold, a seasoned Indo-European scholar) only one short line about Quatsch: “Sound-imitative, like Matsch [mush, slush], Klatsch [splash].” Seebold also wrote about cud (in the entry Kitt) that the image might be inspired by the sight of chewing resin but did not explain why he thought so.

We have viewed a motley group: Old English cwidu ~ cwudu “cud,” Old English cēowan “chew,” English dialectal keech, English chew (from cēowan), German Quatsch, German Kot, and finally, German Kitsch, borrowed into English and many other languages. Is this group a family or a crowd of similarly attired vagabonds? I invoked a similar image in my previous post. There, I spoke about a bunch of rootless mushrooms on a stump and of children from an orphanage wearing the same uniform. Perhaps some members of today’s etymological ragtag and bobtail did have the same or closely related parents.

Recalcitrant words are like little children. Image: public domain via Pexels.

But to return to our main subject, namely, cwidu “cud.” What should we write about its etymology, apart from listing its old forms and cognates? Rather cautiously, I might risk saying that English cud has an expressive, perhaps sound-symbolic or sound-imitative, origin and is therefore aligned with (but not related to!) chew. Did Henry Cecil Wyld suspect a similar solution? It this why instead of giving a few bits of safe and trivial information, he wrote (quite unexpectedly): “Origin unknown?” We will never know.

Words are like children. Quite often they behave according to expectation, so that the etymologist may abide by the rules. In other cases, they become uncontrollable. Then it becomes necessary to leave the shelter of the wall. Like Eeyore, I am just ruminating.

Feature image by Clay Junell via Flickr. CC2.0.

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Unheard voices: overcoming barriers in women’s music composition

Unheard voices: overcoming barriers in women’s music composition

Until recently, women were regularly dismissed as unable to compose music. In 1894, the French physician Havelock Ellis said, ‘There is certainly no art in which they have shown themselves more helpless’. In 1891, the music critic Eduard Hanslick stated that women were less capable than men of mental achievements. In 1940, the psychologist Carl Seashore blamed the lack of music composed by women on women’s urge to be loved and admired, rather than to achieve.

These men, and countless others like them, chose to ignore the many factors which inhibited women from composing, distributing, and hearing performances of their music. These factors included lack of education, the demands of marriage and children, societal pressures (Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote in 1762 that ‘a woman outside of the home displays herself indecently’), limited opportunities for performance, difficulties in getting published, and limited archiving.

Educating women to the same level as men was unusual until relatively recently. The few who were lucky enough to receive a full education included wealthy aristocrats from artistic families, like Duchess Maria Antonia Walpurgis Symphorosa (1724-80) and those who studied privately with ambitious parents, such as Clara Wieck Schumann (1819-96). By the late 19th century, women sought training and validation at institutions, but formal studies were complicated by various challenges: Ethel Smyth (1858-1944) and Betzy Holmberg (1860-1900) both left Leipzig Conservatoire early, finding its tuition unsatisfactory. At the Paris Conservatoire, Louise Farrenc (1804-75) found that composition classes were only for men. Oxford University blocked the Bachelor of Music degree earned by Elizabeth Stirling (1819-95) on learning she was female.

Marriage further impacted women’s composing. Fortunately, the husbands of Amy Marcy Beach (1867-1944) and Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre (1665-1729) allowed them to continue composing, though they forbade them from performing. Maria Agata Szymanowska (1789-1831) divorced her husband after he objected to her career. Betzy Holmberg stopped composing after her marriage.

Robert Schumann’s wife Clara (1819-96) continued composing until his death, but Robert believed his work took precedence over hers, saying that ‘Clara herself knows that her main occupation is as a mother’. Of course, Clara Schumann’s eight children, two miscarriages, her husband’s failing mental health and her career as a virtuoso pianist considerably inhibited her freedom to compose, but her famous statement: ‘a woman must not wish to compose—there never was one able to do it’ also points to another challenge which afflicted many (most?) women composers: the internalising of society’s doubts about their ability.

Women favoured small-scale works for ‘feminine’ instruments: the violin, piano, and harp, so the scarcity of music by women for organ—long considered a ‘male’ instrument—is hardly surprising. Perhaps women yearned for more sonority, colour, and volume, as many of those small-scale pieces transcribe easily; in fact, some are more effective on the organ than on the instruments for which they were written. For example, Louise Farrenc’s ‘Fugue on Two Subjects’ greatly benefits from the organ’s sustaining power and the structural clarity that imaginative registration on two or three manuals brings. Clara Schumann’s Op. 16, No.3 states ‘for piano’, but only by playing the bass notes on the organ pedals can the player cope with the wide stretches and sustain the long pedal-points adequately.

Those of us who care about making women’s voices heard must mourn the loss of so much music from the past; much was unpublished or discarded, and the authorship of published pieces was sometimes obscured by pseudonyms or gender-neutral names. Dozens of unpublished scores by Florence Price (1887-1953) were discovered by chance in 2009 in a dilapidated house. Augusta Holmés first published under a pseudonym; Betzy Holberg published her early works as the gender-neutral ‘B.Holmberg’, and ‘Clement de Bourges’ was only recently identified as Clementine de Bourges (c1530-61).

Women composers today thankfully face far fewer challenges in being published and heard. Yet, as Sara Mohr-Pietsch claimed in a recent article for the Guardian newspaper, 40% of living composers are female, and yet only about 17% of names on music publishers’ lists are female. The balance is slowly shifting in many publishers’ catalogues, as evidenced by new works such as The Oxford Book of Organ Music by Women Composers. However, this situation will only improve if we celebrate women’s music in every way available to us: by publishing, playing, recording, and teaching their music, as well as highlighting both their historic and ongoing contribution to music history, and joining bodies which promote them, such as The Society of Women Organists.

Feature image: Organ musical instrument by Eloy-CM. Getty Images via Canva.

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How well do you know fantasy literature?

How well do you know fantasy literature?

Do you know your orcs from your elves, and your witches from your warlocks? Are you a J. R. R. Tolkien or C. S. Lewis aficionado? Have you read everything by Diana Wynne Jones and Ursula Le Guin? Test your knowledge of the varied world of fantasy literature with this quick quiz!

In Redwall (1986) by Brian Jacques, what kind of animal is Matthias?FoxOtterMouseIn Five Children and It (1902) by E. Nesbit , what caveat comes with each wish the Psammead grants?Each wish shortens the wisher's life by one dayThe wishes turn to stone at sunset The wishes always benefit the wisher's worst enemy tooIn Howl’s Moving Castle (1986) by Diana Wynne Jones, the eighteen-year-old protagonist, Sophie, is put under a curse. What is it?She becomes an old croneEverything she touches turns to ashShe is trapped within a time-loop In which fictional land is The Name of the Wind (2007) by Patrick Rothfuss set?TemerantEarthseaDiscworldWhat is the name of the protagonist in The Horse and His Boy (1954) by C. S. Lewis?EustaceShastaCor of ArchenlandKetterdam is the central city in which book by Leigh Bardugo?Shadow and Bone (2012)Rule of Wolves (2021) Six of Crows (2015)In The Return of the King (1955) by J. R. R. Tolkien, the Battle of the Pelennor Fields is fought to defend which city?ValmarMinas TirithRivendellIn Twilight by Stephanie Meyer (2005), where is Bella Swan from?Chicago, IllinoisPhoenix, ArizonaSeattle, Washington

Feature image by Cederic Vanderberghe via Unsplash, public domain.

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Homer’s Penelope and the myth of the ‘model military wife’

Homer’s Penelope and the myth of the ‘model military wife’

Ostensibly a tale of the adventures of a soldier, Homer’s ancient Greek epic Odyssey also has at its heart the remarkable story of Odysseus’ waiting wife Penelope, who is renowned for her patience and her fidelity. Left behind for 20 years while Odysseus spends ten years fighting in the Trojan War and then a further ten years on his meandering journey home to Ithaca, Penelope is faced with multiple challenges in her husband’s absence. Her story, although it comes from a millennia-old tale set in a mythical past, echoes some of the experiences undergone by military spouses in contemporary society. We can also find in Homer’s Penelope an ancient archetype for the idealised image of the ‘model military wife’ which still persists in the modern world.

In her husband’s absence, the Odyssey’s Penelope is faced with a whole array of emotional and practical struggles, many of which modern-day military spouses might recognise. The poet describes how she has trouble sleeping, worries crowding her mind as she lies in bed at night (Odyssey 19.513-17), and frequently throughout the poem she is to be found weeping, overwhelmed by the grief and stress of her situation. This mythical waiting wife has no idea whether her husband is alive or dead—he is what we might describe today as ‘missing in action’—and if or when he might return home to her. Modern military spouses often talk about the dread of the ‘knock on the door’ bringing bad news while their partner is in a war zone: Penelope too is simultaneously desperate for news of Odysseus but living in constant fear of what that news might reveal. At the same time, she must deal with the day-to-day responsibilities of being home alone: parenting the child, Telemachus, who was a baby when Odysseus left for Troy, and managing the household alone. In this patriarchal ancient society, the absence of the male head of the royal household is felt especially strongly. Nonetheless, there are parallels here with contemporary situations; when a partner is away on active duty, their spouse must often take on domestic responsibilities which would ordinarily be shared.

‘Penelope and the Suitors’ (1912) by John William Waterhouse, via Wikimedia Commons.

Penelope’s already difficult situation is exacerbated by the presence of 108 suitors, who are vying for her hand in marriage—a marriage which would also grant them Odysseus’ kingly power, his possessions, and his estate. It is her response to this situation which cemented her reputation for fidelity in the ancient world; that response also enables her to demonstrate her resourcefulness. In her hope that Odysseus will eventually return, and in order to buy time, Penelope deploys what in the ancient world is a typically feminine stratagem: she tells the suitors that she will choose which of them to marry once she has finished weaving a shroud for her father in law. What her suitors don’t know is that she is unpicking each day’s weaving in secret every night. The shroud trick not only keeps Penelope occupied during much of Odysseus’ absence, but it also represents a life which has been placed on hold while he is away. Both the notion of ‘keeping busy’ as a coping strategy and the feeling of being unable to move forward with their own lives—with career plans or education, for example—while awaiting the return of a serving partner are recurring elements of the first-hand accounts of modern-day waiting wives.

Yet it is not merely some of the day-to-day elements of Penelope’s life that might feel familiar to contemporary military spouses. There is a broader sense in which this ‘myth’ of the model military wife is fundamental to upholding the patriarchal structures which still endure in some military institutions. In modern UK and US contexts, the armed forces still rely heavily on the support of the spouses of personnel. Those spouses are still overwhelmingly female, despite the fact that women and same-sex couples are now eligible for military service. The feminist political theorist Cynthia Enloe, in her 2000 book Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives, set out a lengthy list—which still holds up almost 25 years after first publication—of the ideal characteristics of today’s ‘model military wife.’ This is someone who, among other things, is unfailingly supportive and content for all aspects of her life to be subordinated to her husband’s military role, and who, like Penelope, is both faithful and resourceful in coping alone for long periods of time while her partner is away on deployment.

Moreover, the model military wife is expected to do all of this without complaint. The focus of policy-makers, media reporting, and the military itself, still rests predominantly on combatants themselves. The voices of those whose lives are also profoundly affected by their partners’ career choice are often silenced. Similarly, in the Odyssey Penelope is given little room to share her experiences. Nowhere is this more apparent in the poem than when the couple are finally reunited. Here only four lines (Odyssey 23.302-5) are set aside to summarise Penelope’s story; by comparison, despite the fact that the majority of the poem’s 12,000 lines describe Odysseus’ exploits, 32 lines (Odyssey 23.310-41)—eight times as much space—are devoted to recalling his adventures. If at times the warrior’s wife takes up less space, both in Homer’s poetry and in the minds of the public today, that should merely make us more determined to give her more of our attention.

Featured image: ‘Penelope and the Suitors’ (1912) by John William Waterhouse via Wikimedia Commons

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“Smother,” “smooth,” and the Slavic name of sour cream, with an obscure idiom for dessert

The word smother “dense or stifling smoke” (often with smoke!) has existed in English for about a thousand years. It first competed with smorther (the spelling of the Middle English form has been simplified here) and conveyed an even more murderous idea than today. At present, smother is all about suffocating rather than killing. Dictionaries know a good deal about the history of the verb but little about its origin. Some even call the origin unknown.

It is instructive to have a quick look at the word’s neighbors on the page (this is in general a useful procedure: similar-sounding words may belong together even from a historical point of view) and find out how many of them are equally obscure. Here is a short list: smack “taste” (a Lithuanian lookalike exists, but who cares?); smack “to strike” (of imitative origin; are those really two different words? Isn’t taste something that “touches” or “strikes” our tongue?); smash (perhaps [!] related to smack); smatter, which we mainly remember from smattering and smatterings (most likely, sound-imitative); smear (many cognates, but they are hardly related to a similar Greek word); smell (isolated: no cognates); smelt ~ smolt (a fish name of unknown origin), and a few others. Even the origin of smith is obscure. In any case, something in the initial group sm– seems to suggest the idea of smacking, smashing, smelling, smoldering, and smothering. This is a promising first step, but as always in such cases, no one knows where to go from there.

This fish is called smelt or smolt. Who could give it its name? NOAA Great Lakes Environment Research Laboratory‘s photostream. CC2.0 via Flickr.

Some sources state that smother is obscurely related to smolder (smoulder). Few formulas in etymology are more frustrating than “obscurely related.” We are told that though a good deal of resemblance between the words cannot be denied, their kinship is hard to demonstrate. To add insult to injury, a respectable dictionary informs us that smolder is obscurely (!) related to Dutch smeulen (the same meaning). Indeed, in most cases, we easily find English, Dutch, and northern German lookalikes. I am sorry to conjure up the same images in one post after another, but I cannot think of better ones. We are dealing, I believe, with an analog of many mushrooms growing on a stump: they look similar but are rootless, so that the question of kinship is moot. My other ever-recurring image is of a group of children from an orphanage: almost the same age, the same uniform, but not brothers and sisters.

We remember that smother appeared in English as smorther. It resembles smirk, and smirk, we are told, is a fully respectable verb, with a cognate in German, closely related to a Sanskrit word and more remotely to some verbs in Slavic, Greek, and Sanskrit. Perhaps etymology will become less obscure if it gets rid of such vague references to the kinship metaphor. About a hundred years ago, historical linguists reconstructed numerous ancient Indo-European roots. Actually, they only abstracted the common parts of many seemingly related words.

Allegedly, once the root smei– existed, and today we can see it in smile and smirk. The root smē– (with a long vowel) has been recognized in smite, as opposed to smei– in smirk, but no consensus has been reached in the business of ascribing all those words to ancient roots. Curiously, smother lacks any ancient ancestor! It appears that if, in some mysterious sound-symbolic way, the initial group sm– suggested the opening and closing of the mouth in a variety of languages from Classical Greek to Old Norse, we end up with a bunch of obscurely related (!) words from smile to smother, and the idea of a primordial root loses its attraction, especially because a semantic bridge can be built between almost any two words and any two concepts.

Smother also sounds like smooth. Let me repeat: we don’t know whether the words in this motley group referring to smashing, smacking, smelling, and the rest belong together. Even Old English smūgan “to creep” may (or may not) belong here. I think it was William Craigie (a serious and dependable philologist) who suggested that English smooth is not clearly represented in any of the cognate languages. We find this statement in the 1912 fascicle of the OED. In 1966, The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology wrote the same: “…without certain cognates.” A good deal depends on what kind of cognates one is looking for. Students of Dutch and Frisian found numerous words with the root smeu-. In some way, smother may be related to them, but in the works I have read, the sound-symbolic or south-imitating factor underlying smooth and smother is not mentioned.

We can now again look at the verb smite, whose original meaning is to “strike” (we are still “smitten with remorse”). The verb has been mentioned above in connection with the reconstructed root smē– and is discernible in German (now regional) Schmant “cream” and Russian smetana “sour cream” (stress on the second syllable), with cognates elsewhere in Slavic. It is also recognizable from the name of the Czech composer Smetana (stress on the first syllable). The root of all of them may be the same as the one we observe in smooth. I’ll refrain from discussing the technology of making (sour) cream.

IdiomsThese are an ape and a dandy. The two are obscurely related. Free chimpanzee in forest and Mr. Lambkin dressing up in front of a mirror. Public domain via rawpixel.

As in the previous two posts, I’ll finish this one with a glance at an obscure phrase. In Take My Word For It: A Dictionary of English Idioms, I devoted some space to the idiom to pay in monkey’s coin. I should have said more about it. In 1896, a correspondent to Notes and Queries wondered what the derivation and meaning of the proverbial saying is and whether to give one monkey’s allowance is its equivalent. I know nothing about monkey’s allowance, but the next letter referred to a long explanation of the main phrase in E. Cobham Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. Brewer understood the idiom as meaning “to pay in goods, in personal work, in mumbling and grimace.”

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bearded man with back to viewer in a jester’s cap; holds stick in one hand with cloth bundle hanging from the end and slung across his back; walking stick and cat appear on lower half of card; LE MAT printed on bottom border; from a deck of 78 hand-colored triumph playing cards. Original from the Minneapolis Institute of Art.

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A correspondent to NQ, 8th Series, IX, 1896, p. 494, quoted in translation the account given in G-F. P. Saint Foix’s Historical Essays. According to that account, the story originated with Louis IX. We read: “Whoever fetches a monkey into the City for sale, shall pay four deniers, but if the monkey belongs to a Merry-Andrew [a professional clown] be exempted from paying the duty…, by causing his monkey to play and dance before the Collector.” King Saint Louis lived from 1226 to 1270. The Old French text is not quoted in the Essays, and I failed to find the original referred to in this ordinance. The tale may be true, though it has all the features of folk etymology. Monkey’s coin, naturally, suggests deceit. Is the French saying payer en monnaie de singe (singe “monkey”) so old? Such figurative expressions were not typical of the Middle Ages. In any case, the English idiom is certainly a translation from French. The same must be true of the Dutch version iemand met apenmunt betalen. As regards the reaction of native speakers, the Dutch phrase seems to be better known than its English equivalent. The OED does not feature it. I’ll be grateful for any information on the French original and its European kin.

Wexford Friary Window Saint Louis IX King of France by Lucien-Léopold Lobin. CC3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Feature image by U.S. National Archives via Picryl (Public Domain).

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Written in the stars: Prince Hal’s almanac

Written in the stars: Prince Hal’s almanac

Prince Hal addresses Poins in the Boar’s Head Tavern in William Shakespeare’s 2 Henry IV, exclaiming “Saturn and Venus this year in conjunction! What says th’almanac to that?” This is a rare instance of Shakespeare using the word “almanac,” although he does reference calendars and gesture to almanacs as potential props for determining the date, time, lunar cycle, and weather in other plays. In this scene, Prince Hal is not simply checking the date, he is tracking the position of the planets. In Renaissance (and twenty-first century) astrology, a conjunction between planets is a powerful sideral event. In our own moment of revived interest in astrology, Prince Hal’s almanac shows the longer history of using the stars to understand the present and imagine the time to come.

Almanacs were widely used in Shakespeare’s England to consider astrological matters, recount past events, take note of the present position of heavenly bodies, and imagine future times, weather, and celestial movements. In addition to the essential monthly calendar that lists feast days and charts the movements of the stars, almanacs often include historical chronologies of biblical and national history, tide tables, latitude charts, lists of England’s kings since 1066, suggested timelines for planting and harvesting crops, distances between cities and ports, schedules of the university terms, medical and veterinary advice, and predictions concerning matters of weather, health, and politics. Almanac users would purchase a new copy each year for up-to-date calendars, predictions, and astronomical and astrological information. The day-to-day functions of marking time in an almanac are notably saturated with political meaning because they organize everyday time with respect to the nation’s past and present rulers.

Prince Hal’s call for an almanac is simultaneously mundane—almanacs were common Renaissance books—and extraordinary in that calendars did not take this specific material form during the actual Prince’s lifetime. On the Renaissance stage, this multi-temporal almanac could have been the issue for the current year, i.e. 1599. The printed booklet would contain information about the Prince’s future, including the dates for the reigns of Henry IV and Henry V. The Prince’s future is, of course, always a part of the past to the audience in the playhouse, but it would have also been part of the past in the pages of a printed almanac prop. Prince Hal calls for an almanac to determine the present position of the stars, but he would hold in his hand a printed book that documents his future and, in turn, encapsulates the tensions of representing past futures of the monarchy on the stage. 

A perplexing scene is unfolding in the tavern when the Prince seeks out an almanac to metaphorically help him decipher it. Doll Tearsheet sits on Falstaff’s lap while Prince Hal and Poins spy on them and provide color commentary on this unlikely coupling. The Prince wants to know if the astrological symbols of elderly Saturn (Falstaff) and lovely, perpetually beautiful Venus (Doll) are forecast to be both visible in the heavens at the same time in an almanac because it might explain the amorous tableaux he sees before him.

Today, astrology enthusiasts are more likely to turn to an app than an almanac to consult the position and influence the stars might have on their near or long-term future. Over the past decade, interest in astrology, and businesses providing astrological services, have both steadily grown. Traffic and profit peaked during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. As Hilary George-Parkin puts it in a 2021 BBC article, “Perhaps it’s no wonder that so many people who weren’t interested in astrology before are turning to the stars for guidance. For much of the world, the past year has been one of few earthly comforts – hugs have been scarce, jobs have been lost and every day brings news of more human suffering.” Writing in The Washington Post in 2023, Sydney Page reminds us that “Research has shown that people are more likely to be drawn to divinatory practices in times of tumult and uncertainty.” Uncertain times encourage us to imagine possible futures, guided by the stars and other means.

Shakespeare may also have been alluding to tumultuous times when he wrote Prince Hal’s jest: a notable conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter in 1583 that was thought to have predicted the English victory at Tilbury in 1588. Margaret Aston argues that this historical conjunction underpins Shakespeare’s reference to almanac astrology because of how extensively the 1583 Saturn and Jupiter conjunction was discussed in print in Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles—an important source text for the play—as well as other contemporary sources. According to prophetic interpretations, this conjunction predicted an annus mirabilis that would arrive in five-years time, and English astrologers and intellectuals alike argued that the events of 1588 fulfilled that prophecy. Shakespeare, moreover, was writing his chronicle plays about England’s medieval past during the Elizabethan succession crisis, a long-term, slow-moving panic about the future of the English throne during the reign of a virgin queen who refused to marry or publicly name her heir. Staging futures past and realized, aided by almanacs and astrology or other modes of speculation, provided a model for thinking ahead along lines of succession, however unstable. National futures, not only prospects of love and affection, might be foreseen in the movement of the stars.

Feature image: Prophetic almanac. 1832 edition. CC4.0, via Wellcome Collection gallery.

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Rhetorical “um”

Rhetorical “um”

“Uh” and “um” don’t get much respect. What even are they? Toastmasters International calls them “crutch words.” Speech teachers and verbal hygienists deride them as mere disfluencies to be stamped out. And while people can certainly overuse them, ”uh” and “um” fill the pause while speakers organize their thoughts, search their vocabularies for the right word, or compose a complex bit of phrasing. 

But there is a lot of linguistic research on the function of “uh” and “um,” some of which suggests that listeners pay extra attention to the language that follows a filled pause, understanding the pause to signal a word or phrase carefully chosen. If you are interested, the research on “uh” and “um” is presented in readable form in two excellent books: Michael Erard’s: Um: Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean, published in 2007,and Valerie Fridland’s Like, Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English, published in 2023. 

Reading Fridland’s book, I came across another use of um that I had not previously thought about: “Um” shows up in writing as a word meaning “wait a minute.” Fridland gives a couple of examples mined from Gunnel Tottie’s corpus study of journalistic “um”: “Obama is, Um, More Seasoned” and “Um, Senator…” What’s going on?” 

In the Washington Post headline “Obama is More, Um, Seasoned” the “um” serves as a set of scare quotes, suggesting that seasoned is not the only way to expressed the former President’s gray hair and implying that the writer intends a bit of genteel euphemism.

And in the quote from economist Paul Krugman, “Um, senator,” is a way of disputing an immediately preceding quote from then-Senator Richard Shelby. The “um” says “wait a minute, here’s what really going on.” In these examples, “um” does not signal hesitation. Rather it is a rhetorical device to indicate a certain attitude toward one’s own words or someone else’s. 

Rhetorical “um” has been around for a while: looking back at New York Times headlines, I found examples from as early as 1957: “As to Christmas Presents They Want, Women Are Found, Um, Inconsistent.” Like Obama’s being “seasoned,” the “um” suggests euphemism. The same goes for the 1969 headline about the decline of a New Left magazine “The Ramparts Story: . . . Um, Very Interesting.” The “um” suggests that “very interesting” does not quite capture the full situation. And a 1999 Boston Globe story noting that actor Ben Affleck had fallen asleep while attending a performance of Shakespeare said, “The Oscar winning screenwriter and actor seemed to be, um—how can we put this delicately?—meditating during most of the first act.”

Gunnel Tottie of the University of Zurich searched databases and found hundreds of examples of written “um” or “uh” in journalistic texts from 1990 to 2011. What’s more, there is a difference depending on whether “um” comes at the beginning of a sentence or later, before a particular word or phrase. At the beginning of a sentence “um” tends to challenge a preceding idea, while before a word it challenges that usage. Check out these examples, from Tottie’s article:

And if you’re building a kit cabin … it’s tempting to believe it will be easy. Um … reality check time. (Outdoor Life 1994)

… former boxing champ … Holyfield agreed to show his dancing, um, skills. (USA Today 2000)

In the first, the “um” tells you that cabin-building is not so simple. In the second, it suggests that Holyfield is a bad dancer.  

The much-maligned “um” is not just a verbal stumble or filler. It’s also written word as well, with an evolving, complex usage.

Featured image by Hümâ H. Yardım via Unsplash.

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Policy meets politics on the frontiers of world urbanization

Policy meets politics on the frontiers of world urbanization

At a time when funding for urban infrastructure and the promotion of an overarching global goal—the hard-won SDG 11—have catapulted cities up the international policy agenda, it’s hard to believe that urban issues could ever have been considered marginal.

In relation to much of Africa, however, until about 15 years ago urban development challenges were quite a fringe concern in both policy and academic research. Many governments on the continent—particularly in Eastern Africa, where a suite of countries were governed by regimes whose rebel origins lay deep in the rural peripheries—viewed city-dwellers either with indifference or active hostility. International donor agencies ploughed funds into rural development, and later into aspatial ‘social’ sectors such as education and health. Meanwhile, the renewed interest from China in Africa in the early 2000s was largely seen as being focused on natural resource extraction.

This all changed from around 2010. The intense refocusing of international attention on African cities has sometimes been taken for granted as a natural consequence of the continent’s urbanisation, and of evolving international aid and investment priorities. Yet the focus on external and demographic drivers can obscure how this reorientation has been shaped in strikingly diverse ways by different political contexts.

Against the background of this ‘urban turn’ in twenty-first century Africa, my book Politics and the Urban Frontier explores how domestic politics and power struggles harness the demographic force of urban growth, alongside diversifying flows of international finance, to produce very different kinds of cities. I explore this in a set of countries in East Africa (specifically, Ethiopia, Rwanda and Uganda), which I argue is the global urban frontier: the region with the lowest proportion of people living in urban areas, but also on average the fastest rates of urbanisation. Globally-sanctioned ideals of urban progress have been central to urban development in this region, yet their fate in any given city is partly determined by how they become entangled with other political and economic agendas.

What’s missing in ‘global’ urban policy debates?

The kinds of blueprints that have often been promoted for cities in low-income countries (think of the vogue for ‘self-help’ housing schemes in the 1970s, the prescriptive urban ‘good governance’ reforms dominating the 1990s, or the supposed panacea of land titling since the early 2000s) are rooted in certain generic assumptions about how cities work. These policy approaches are steeped in ideas of private property, infrastructure planning, and capitalist social relations that are largely rooted in industrialised countries elsewhere. African cities are often seen by foreign donors and external investors as substandard versions of the urban norm: low-income, dysfunctional nearly-cities that can be ‘lifted’ with the application of enough funds and the right regulatory frameworks.

Yet cities are not just bundles of land, regulations, and economic resources. They are also fundamentally political arrangements of people and things, and in much of the world in the twenty-first century they are shaped by three intersecting variables, about which conventional urban debates say little.

Yet cities are not just bundles of land, regulations, and economic resources. They are also fundamentally political arrangements of people and things.

First, cities are conditioned by shifting geopolitics, both in terms of regional dynamics of trade, movement, and diplomacy, and in terms of the diversifying forms of international finance on offer from donors and creditors. These financial flows, which wax and wane in response to geopolitical conditions, provide scope for bargaining and deal-making over big investments in and around capital cities, where national government priorities jostle with urban ones.

Second, cities are increasingly subject to dynamics of resurgent authoritarianism—but the nature and impact of this varies by country, given different levels of prior democratic institutional development and very different distributions of power among urban social groups. These differences affect how easily a governing regime can crush urban social opposition and repress city-level institutions.

Third, and related, cities are sites of intensifying quests for political legitimacy by governments seeking to build and hold urban power in the context of competing socioeconomic demands. In East Africa, postcolonial legitimacy to govern has often been sought among the rural majority. This is no longer adequate in the face of rapid urban growth. Urban legitimacy is now a central concern, even for authoritarian regimes—but precisely which urban groups matter most, and what needs to be done to court their support, will differ substantially by context.

Cities, then, are geopolitical hubs in which leaders and governing coalitions draw international flows into localised bargaining processes, in pursuit of (often authoritarian) urban power and legitimacy—not just globalising sites of ‘travelling’ urban planning visions and ideals of entrepreneurialism. The latter aspects of cities—which are no doubt important—have received much greater attention than the former. Politics and the Urban Frontier is part of an attempted rebalancing.

Urban analysis as political work

Focusing on East Africa, the book develops a detailed analytical framework to explain differences in urban trajectories between three cities that face many similar socioeconomic and demographic pressures, and similar flows of ideas and finance. It aims to explain why we see a stark contrast between a sustained commitment to top-down master planning processes in Kigali, accompanied by drive towards high-end service sector-led development, in contrast with a long-term ‘anti-planning’ political culture in Kampala where major urban infrastructures are fragmented and targeted as sources of private gain. Meanwhile, Addis Ababa has seen huge investments in the kinds of large-scale mass transport and housing projects that never get off the ground in the other two cities (though these have taken on a life of their own, due to widespread use by social groups for which they were not initially designed). These differences between the cities are above all rooted in power relations, rather than economic might or depoliticised notions of ‘state capacity’.

Why does all this matter? Aside from academic rebalancing, the book’s argument aims to enhance understanding about which kinds of urban investments will be taken seriously in a given context, and which may collide with political dynamics that mean they founder or twist into radically new directions during implementation. Having the analytical tools to better understand the political agendas and conflicts that underpin urban policy in a given context is essential if the international push towards more inclusive urban futures is to produce results in actual urban places. But attention to the politics of urban development is not just about tailoring urban interventions to political contexts to enhance implementation. It’s also about recognizing how such interventions can either bolster or reconfigure existing power relations, and therefore influence politics itself in a particular place—for better or worse.

There is a lot at stake in Africa’s urban century. We have seen the forms of radical socio-economic polarisation, spatial segregation, and authoritarianism that are possible in cities across the world. Indeed, many African cities were created this way during colonialism, and have struggled to escape this shadow. As the continent becomes an increasingly urban, it is vitally important that investors, donors, analysts, and advisors, who often see themselves as providing technical assistance, realise they are doing fundamentally political work—and not always in the ways they intend.

Featured image by Daggy J Ali via Unsplash (public domain).

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African American religions and the voodoo label

African American religions and the voodoo label

In 1932, an African American man named Robert Harris killed his tenant on a makeshift altar in the back of his home in Detroit, Michigan. Harris, who was allegedly part of Detroit’s burgeoning Black Muslim community, described the murder as a human sacrifice to Allah.

Harris was put on trial for murder; however, following some bizarre courtroom rants during which he referred to himself as a “king” and the murder as a “crucifixion,” Harris was declared insane and sent to an asylum. Even while reporting on his delusions and his confinement in the asylum, newspapers throughout the United States published stories referring to Harris as the leader of a “Voodoo cult” that practiced human sacrifice.

Although the authorities knew that Harris had a history of threatening to harm his wife, his children, and his social worker and that his actions were the result of mental illness, they detained leaders of the Allah Temple of Islam—the Muslim community to which Harris allegedly belonged—asking them about their beliefs regarding human sacrifice. They allegedly ordered the Temple’s leader, Wallace Fard, to leave Detroit. Elijah Muhammad took over following Fard’s departure and changed the temple’s name to the Nation of Islam. He also moved their headquarters to Chicago. These name and location changes were designed to shake off the negative reputation that the community had developed following the Harris case. Nevertheless, the first scholarly article about the Nation of Islam, written in 1938, was titled “The Voodoo Cult Among Negro Migrants in Detroit.” Additionally, claims that Fard had promoted human sacrifice resurfaced when the Nation gained notoriety during the Civil Rights era and was a way to discredit the work that they were doing.

The founders of the Nation of Islam are not unique. Many African American religions have been labeled as “voodoo” by outsiders and have been falsely accused of barbaric practices.

The history of “voodoo”

The term “voodoo” is deeply rooted in anti-Black racism. Specifically, the term first came into popular use during the US Civil War and was used to argue that Black people were superstitious by nature and would “relapse” into barbaric practices if not controlled by white people through slavery. After the Civil War ended, similar arguments appeared in a variety of US newspapers, reporting the “primitive” practices that had supposedly become popular since the end of slavery. The authors argued that such practices proved that Black people were not ready for citizenship, the right to vote and hold public office and other rights extended to them by post-war constitutional amendments.

Over the following decades, the term “voodoo” evolved and was no longer used simply as a broad term to refer to Black spiritual practices in the US. By the late 19th century, “voodoo” was also a gloss for African based religions in other parts of the Americas. In particular, false allegations that Black people in Cuba and Haiti were engaged in voodoo-related human sacrifice and cannibalism were common around the turn of the 20th century. Such stories often reflected on the horror of such things happening so close to the US and the need for an American military presence to quash these practices. 

Biases remain in the 21st century

The negative perceptions of “voodoo” did not end in the 20th century. They are regularly reinforced through news reports, television, movies, and other sources. Like the founders of the Nation of Islam in the 1930s, the bizarre actions of a single mentally ill individual are often attributed to entire Black religions or communities. Recent cases that have been described as “voodoo” include a mother who set her six year old daughter on fire, two women who caused third degree burns to a five-year-old while trying to cleanse her of “demons,” and a man who stabbed his dog thirty-seven times then stuffed it in a suitcase and left it to die.

In other cases, it would go without saying that such senseless acts of violence have no place in religious ritual. However, all these cases were attributed to “voodoo” and linked to Afro-Caribbean, especially Haitian, religious beliefs and practices. Such incidents have a negative impact on devotees who have felt compelled to hide their religion for fear of persecution after such cases are reported in the media. In at least one case, it led a Christian bishop in Massachusetts to denounce “voodoo” before a cheering crowd of hundreds of people. Despite the well-publicized cases of several mentally ill individuals, African American religions do not engage in human sacrifice, cannibalism, or any related acts. However, after more than 150 years of rumors and stereotypes, the term “voodoo” has little life outside of such racist myths about it that were developed to support slavery and imperialism. Aside from a small community of people in New Orleans, devotees of African American religions typically do not use “voodoo” to refer to their own faith. Nevertheless, outsiders continue to mislabel a wide variety of African and African American religions, especially Haitian Vodou, as “voodoo” and attribute barbaric practices to them. These misconceptions cause great harm to devotees who suffer discrimination and violence at alarming rates.

Feature image by Tracy Lundgren via Pixabay.

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