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What’s coming down the pike?

What’s coming down the pike?

During the news coverage of the COVID pandemic, I enjoyed seeing Dr Anthony Fauci on television and hearing his old-school Brooklyn accent, still shining through in his late seventies in words like Pfizer, because, data, here, and that.   

But my favorite expression to listen for was his use of “down the pike” to mean “in the future.” Fauci explained once that “you don’t see for days or weeks down the pike.” Another time he said “before you know it, two to three weeks down the pike, you’re in trouble.” Discussing vaccine testing he said “So we go into phase one, it’ll take about three months to determine if it’s safe. That’ll bring us three or four months down the pike.”

“Down the pike” is an expression I grew up hearing all the time in my home state of New Jersey. And, of course, many people say it besides Anthony Fauci. Joe Biden talks about how government and the private sector should “anticipate and respond to shortages that may be coming down the pike.” If you Google “down the pike” you’ll find it everywhere, even in New York Times headlines like “Is a Trans-Atlantic Pact Coming Down the Pike?” and (with an attempted pun) “Hydrogen Cars, Coming Down the Pike.” You can find occasional instances of things coming “up the pike,” and there is an early twentieth-century slang expression “hit the pike,” meaning “hit the road” or “leave.”

Not everyone is familiar with “down the pike.” Some mislearn it as the semantically plausible “down the pipe” rather than “down the pike.” It’s “down the pike,” but where does it come from?

I had assumed that “down the pike” had something to do with the New Jersey Turnpike, the 117-mile toll highway that runs from New York City to Delaware. The New Jersey Turnpike Authority was created in 1948 and the Turnpike itself was completed in 1951. It’s been collecting tolls ever since, along with the Garden State Parkway, which was completed in 1957.  

There are lots of turnpikes, however, and the word goes way back. The Oxford English Dictionary gives examples from the early 1400s. It originally meant “a spiked barrier fixed in or across a road or passage,” and was used as a defense against attacks by men on horseback.

Later turnpike became extended to the sense of a turnstile to block horses. Samuel Johnson offered this definition: “Turnpike… a cross of two bars armed with pikes at the end, and turning on a pin, fixed to hinder horses from entering.” By the late 1600s, the turnpike was a toll booth of sorts, and a late seventeenth-century Act of Parliament refers to “collecting the said [toll]… by setting up a Turnpike or otherwise.”

Turnpike, or the clipping pike, was often used to refer generally to roads in the nineteenth century, and the expression “coming down the pike” was another way of saying “coming down the road.”

By the late 1800s, figurative senses were emerging and taking hold. An 1898 story in the Dayton Herald had the line “Bowling, if dead, is the liveliest corpse that ever ’came down the pike’, as they say on the bowery.” The quote marks suggest that figurative “down the pike” was a newish expression at the time.

Pike was also used as a synonym for boardwalk or midway, and in 1903 the organizers of the St. Louis World’s Fair announced that the upcoming fair would call its promenade “The Pike,” to distinguish it from Chicago’s Midway. Perhaps St. Louis got the idea from Long Beach, California, which debuted a boardwalk amusement zone called “The Pike” even earlier—in 1902. In any event, St. Louis encouraged visitors to “Come Down the Pike,” and there was later a Broadway musical titled “Down the Pike” whose second act took place at the 1904 World’s Fair.

The figurative sense of “coming down the pike” took hold but remained sporadic in the early twentieth century. A 1905 Portland, Maine, newspaper talked about “nothing but anarchy coming down the pike” and “chaos coming down the pike.” A 1936 issue of the International Stereotypers’ and Electrotypers’ Union Journal which refers to “The fall election… coming down the pike.” Both examples are clearly oriented toward time and events rather than space.   

By the 1950s the sense of “coming down the pike” to mean happening in the future was increasingly common and it took off in the 1960s and 70s, after the completion of the Interstate Highway System.

With language, you never know what’s coming down the pike.

Featured image: the New Jersey Turnpike, 1992, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.5)

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Rethinking the future of work: an interview with Veronica Schmidt Harvey and Kenneth P. De Meuse

Rethinking the future of work: an interview with Veronica Schmidt Harvey and Kenneth P. De Meuse

Veronica Schmidt Harvey and Kenneth P. De Meuse, editors of The Age of Agility, offer valuable insight into the concept of “learning agility” and strategies that promote more effective leadership. They are both experts in the field of leadership practical experience developing healthy skills that help both individuals and organizations to thrive. 

Why is “learning agility” an important trend in organizations? 

There are several reasons. First: the pace of change. Most will agree that the world of work is a turbulent place. It only takes looking back at the COVID pandemic to recognize how quickly our world can be turned upside down! Then we can think of such recent trends as quiet quitting, AI, the virtual workforce, the mental health crisis, and on and on. Consequently, both leaders and organizations are recognizing that survival of the fittest equates to “survival of the agile.” Organizations that cultivate leaders who are learning agile are much better prepared to deal with change.

A second important reason is that organizations need high performing leaders. Challenges with an adequate leadership pipeline consistently show up on surveys as one of the things that keeps CEOs up at night! And the evidence is clear that learning agility is one of the most robust predictors of leadership success as measured by: 

leadership potentialperformance levels of effectiveness promotions advancement international assignmentssalary increases faster speed to competence in a new role

In fact, a meta-analysis conducted by Ken in 2019 found that learning agility is a stronger predictor of leadership performance than IQ, EQ, or job experience. It is not just hyperbole to say that the effectiveness of leadership in organization depends on the levels of learning agility among their leaders.  

Third, we believe the development of learning agility can help in diversifying the leadership pipeline. Research indicates that learning agility when properly assessed does not disproportionally screen out women, minorities, individuals over 40, or other marginalized groups. Organizations increase their objectivity and level the playing field for all employees and applicants alike. Supporting the development of learning agility shows promise for not only expanding but increasing the diversity of leadership pipelines.

“Organizations that cultivate leaders who are learning agile are much better prepared to deal with change.”

Is learning agility a new concept? 

Although agility is a term that is clearly trending, the concept of learning agility does have considerable history. At least dating back to the early 1980s, organizations began to recognize the importance of identifying individuals with the potential to learn from their experiences and adapt to changing circumstances. Dr Morgan McCall and his colleagues at The Center for Creative Leadership published the now-classic book The Lessons of Experience in 1988. Veronica’s own dissertation in that same year focused on how successful leaders learn from their experiences rather than solely in a classroom (Schmidt, 1988).

The specific term “learning agility” was first coined more than two decades ago by Drs Mike Lombardo and Bob Eichinger (2000). They agreed with McCall that a primary indicator of leadership potential is learning agility, aptly describing it as “knowing what to do when you don’t know what to do.” While learning agility is a relatively new compared to some other psychological constructs, it is not simply a “shiny-new-object” that is likely to become irrelevant any time soon.

How would you describe learning agility to someone unfamiliar with the concept? 

Researchers have used a number of different definitions. And, like many complex constructs, there are differences in opinion among them. The following two definitions are frequently used: 

“The ability and willingness to learn from experience and then apply those lessons to perform well in new and challenging leadership situations” (De Meuse, 2017) “The self-regulated behaviors, strategies, and habits that enable learning at an accelerated pace, facilitate more agile adaptation to dynamic conditions and result in more effective leadership” (Harvey & Prager, 2021).

Despite multiple definitions, as we describe in Chapter 19 of The Age of Agility, there is considerable consensus among researchers and practitioners alike that learning agility is a “metacompetency.” One can think of learning agility as a “whole body exercise” involving (a) how we perceive things—the perceptual; (b) how we process information—the cognitive; (c) how we regulate our emotions, and (d) how all of these are manifest in our observable behavior. Learning agility is the ability and willingness to learn from experiences and the attitudinal, cognitive, and behavioral flexibility to apply those lessons to perform effectively in current and new leadership roles.

What are the most successful methods of developing agility in employees and organizations? 

As part of writing Chapter 6 for The Age of Agility, Veronica and her colleague Raphael Prager and took a deep dive into reviewing the literature on developing learning agility. As a result, an evidence-based model was that focuses on five sets of behaviors and strategies that can be learned:

Observing includes mindful awareness of situations and experiences as well as the ability to scan and forecast what will be needed in the future.   Doing includes seeking information and experiences, experimenting with different behaviors, and deliberately practicing new ways of responding.  Connecting involves learning with and from others by asking for help, observing role models, learning through coaches and mentors, and seeking feedback.  Thinking includes cognitive strategies such as reflection, understanding the mental filters that may be biasing our actions, approaching situations with curiosity, and adapting a learning mindset.Mobilizing involves learning to set goals, regulate emotions, maintain focus and discipline, and recognize when resilience and periods of renewal are needed.How do we develop and support the next generation of leaders in a more remote world? 

As we explore new ways of working, one of the best ways we can support the next generation of leaders is to accurately identify them by assessing for learning agility along with other predictors of leadership. Then once identified, offer them numerous opportunities to develop their learning agility. It is incredibly empowering to have confidence in one’s own capability to learn what to do no matter what life may throw at you. A colleague Anna Marie Valerio and Veronica recently published an article in the Consulting Psychology journal on “Coaching to Develop Learning Agility.” It is likely one of the most critical things that leadership coaches can do! 

How does increased learning agility impact employees and organizations? 

The negative impact a poor leader can have on a team and in an organization is hard to overstate. The proper application of learning agility can help minimize such mistakes. Moreover, the promotion and hiring of effective leaders (regardless of age, gender, or minority status) sends a powerful signal to all employees that they matter and management has their back!

What do you think the world of work will look like in 10 years?

One thing that is certain is that it will look considerably different than it does today! It is impossible to predict with any precision what those change will be. However, we do feel certain that those leaders with strong learning agility will be better equipped to successfully respond. Perhaps, Alvin Toffler said it best in his book Future Shock (1970), “The illiterate of the twenty-first century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.” And he wrote it more than 50 years ago!

Featured image: Canva

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From deadness to life: how today’s conservative Protestants recovered and adapted the Protestant ethic

From deadness to life: how today’s conservative Protestants recovered and adapted the Protestant ethic

In 1982, William E. Diehl, a devout Lutheran and former sales manager at Bethlehem Steel, published the book Thank God It’s Monday. Diehl’s book sought to help conservative Protestants bridge their day-to-day work and their religious identities. Diehl’s ideas found an audience, and his title itself also proved effective. Another book written by an author with no connection to Diehl appeared in 1990 speaking to the same themes. It too was called Thank God It’s Monday. Other Christian authors followed suit. Since 1982, Christian publishers have released eleven different books titled Thank God It’s Monday.

These books represent only a small portion of the significant surge in books written by conservative Protestants that address work and economics. Several hundred new books on the topic now appear every year, whether written by pastors, laity, business leaders, or theologians. This trend in publishing also coincides with the introduction of eight different national conferences on the integration of faith and work since 2002, as well as new seminary courses, worship songs, and bible study materials speaking to the same theme.

If these trends are any indication, the Protestant work ethic is booming. Religious leaders have devoted renewed energy to ensuring that laity view their work lives through particular theological frameworks. Scholars have begun labeling these recent efforts the “faith and work movement,” a twentieth-century parachurch effort that spans various Mainline Protestant, Black Protestant, White Evangelical, and even some Catholic groups. It would not be accurate to say this movement is representative of all “Protestant work ethics” today: there are numerous orientations toward work contending for cultural legitimacy among various Protestant groups. But we can recognize in the Thank God It’s Monday books and their corresponding subculture a particular effort to steer conservative Protestant groups toward a set of shared ideas about work.

These ideas center on a few main points: work has inherent value, secular work outside the church is not in any way subordinated to “church” work, and the fruits of work can themselves be sacred and eternal. On the surface such ideas appear to resonate with the classical Protestant work ethic conventionally associated with Puritans and their Calvinist forebearers. But we should not miss the fact that the faith and work movement is also reformulating and creatively adapting earlier theological frameworks in order to make them fit with both contemporary work life and with contemporary ideals about work.

“The faith and work movement is reformulating and creatively adapting earlier theological frameworks to fit contemporary ideals.”

For one, early Protestant theology was largely formulated in reaction to the ecclesial offices and authority of the Roman Catholic Church. Martin Luther venerated the “menial housework of a maidservant or manservant” performed in faith over and against the purportedly faithless activity of monks and priests. Work in the world, not in the church, was a valid avenue or “calling” because Christians participated in God’s creating and sustaining activity on earth. Defectors from convents and monasteries would often add to this refrain. As members of Saint Anne’s convent in Augsburg declared in their exit from the convent, “We should not sit around idly, waiting for baked doves to fly into our mouths. Work, yes, work is what men must do, each according to his ability, in service to his fellowman. Idleness is forbidden; there is nothing Christian in contemplation.”

The Protestants who promoted and received this message occupied a very particular economic setting: all labor was largely presumed to function within a more organic web of obligations and hierarchical relations. Luther himself did not see his commitment to egalitarianism as unlimited—it did not override the “given” order of the world. Few lay people, after all, were in any position to pursue their own wellbeing and wealth at the expense of others. Early Reformers, then, saw the Protestant work ethic as primarily championing a spiritual egalitarianism that neutralized ecclesial power and status.

The economic environment had changed by the time the Puritan work ethic appeared on the scene. In the British colonies in North America, the older bonds of feudalism and Christendom had largely faded. Economic developments in the seventeenth century moved an increasing number of workers from sustenance farming into other trades. Industrial jobs related to coal, timber, clothing, and other consumer goods created entirely new modes of labor, with many workers becoming wage laborers whose lives intersected with larger networks of trade. 

The cast of Puritans that drew sociologist Max Weber’s attention—Richard Baxter, John Cotton, Cotton Mathers—were then speaking to a different world than that of the Reformers. Weber’s 1904 The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism tracks the crystalization of Puritan teachings that frame work as a means to cultivate Godly character, avoid sin, and love others. These Puritan thinkers saw their task as steering between the Scylla of idleness—a threat gaining anxiety in light of new consumer luxuries luring Christians toward self-indulgence—and the Charybdis of selfish ambition. Puritans promoted a posture of tempered zeal for work activity. John Cotton called for “diligence in worldly business” accompanied by a “deadnesse to the world.” Every “lively holy Christian” must ultimately be “deadhearted to the world” and set one’s heart on eternal matters. Historian R.H. Tawney summarized this Puritan notion of calling as essentially a bugle-call summoning the faithful to a “strenuous and exacting enterprise” taking the form of a “long battle which will end only in their death. 

“Today’s leaders decry any arrangements that sequester and venerate ‘Sunday’ faith over and above ‘Monday’ life.”

Today’s faith and work movement has largely discarded calls to to deadheartedness and preparations for death. More common are invitations to a fuller and more integrated life. This message frequently relies on metaphors of farming or gardening. A 1974 book by evangelical art critic Udo Middelmann writes that man’s original purpose was represented in the “creative work” of tilling in the Garden of Eden. The message is clear: creative work remains our calling today. A 1979 Intervarsity Press book by Anglican bishop John Gladwin also compares all work to Adam’s initial tilling of the garden, declaring such effort to represent “the Creator’s pattern for human life.” Such work expresses the “creativity which God gave us at creation.” Popular faith and work speaker Andy Crouch echoes these earlier voices in his 2013 book Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling:         

Like our first parents [Adam and Eve], we are to be creators and cultivators. Or to put it more poetically, we are artists and gardeners…The gardener tends what has gone before, making the most of what is beautiful and weeding out what is distracting or useless. The artist can be more daring; she starts with a blank canvas or a solid piece of stone and gradually brings something out of it that was never there before.

Such messages invite secular workers to conceive their trades and daily activities as engaged in discovering and then creatively corroborating with the divine purposes of the created order. Participating in such purposes offers a bullwark against any transactional or instrumental approaches that view work as “just a job” to be endured.

A variety of theological resources feed into this newer Protestant ethic. Some leaders draw on a sacramental (and thereby not disenchanted, as Weber predicted) vision of reality that denies the strict separation of grace and nature. Others turn to the work of Dutch journalist and politician Abraham Kuyper and his salvific vision for all life spheres, which declares the world not irredeemably profane or secular but potentially ordered for redemption. Other writers simply point to the many biblical characters whose working lives are described in sacred scripture, whether Adam, Joseph, or Daniel in the Old Testament, or Jesus himself. If they could perform work pleasing to God outside of formal religious structures, so can we.

These resources allow faith and work leaders to preserve the early Refomers’ zeal in reconfiguring the sacred and the secular. Today’s leaders decry any arrangements that sequester and venerate “Sunday” faith over and above “Monday” life. Secular workers are not “second-class citizens” to full-time missionaries or clergy, these leaders insist. Work activity is religious activity. One organizational leader describes his mission as helping laity see that their “primary place of worship is Monday and not Sunday.” Another leader commonly declares, “God is as present in your workplace—as present in Google—as he is in your church.” Work framed as worship then renders irrelevant the charge of excessive devotion to work. Work devotion is merely another form of religious devotion.

“The economic and social world of today is in many ways the mirror image of the Reformers’ world.”

The novelty of this vision becomes more visible when we consider the particular world in which this message is promulated. The economic and social world of today is in many ways the mirror image of the Reformers’ world. Whereas the Reformers sought to sequester from an encroaching ecclesial authority a realm of “secular” work deemed worthy and good in and of itself, today’s leaders confront a mode of work-centric capitalism that makes demands of all life-spheres, including religion. In his 1964 work One Dimensional Man, Herbert Marcuse saw this organizing of society as not necessarily expelling religion but in fact making room for transcendent visions that ceremonially affirmed existing practices. Struggling to maintain a place in this world, however, would be religious forms not reduced to subjective states and non-interfering commitments. It is these religious forms that now vie for legitimacy in defining what constitutes a “good” and “successful” modern life.

Faith and work leaders, to their credit, do not set out to affirm and thereby reinforce demanding work cultures and unrelenting careerism. They aspire to engage a population of Christian laity struggling to find spiritual or personal meaning in their work. But as leaders have themselves begun to recognize, their audience is disproportionately drawn from career-centered, knowledge economy workers. These workers already derive a great deal of personal and existential significance from their work identities. The Atlantic writer Derek Thompson has gone so far as classifying the dominant form of work devotion among this population as its own religion—workism. Today’s faith and work message in many ways serves Christians residing in close proximity to this workist religion, providing tools to mediate between one’s identity as a conservative Protestant Christian and deep devotion to work and career.

Little of this development would likely surprise Weber. Weber already saw at his time of writing the dwindling influnce of spiritual exhortations to temper or restrain economic behaviors. In the wake of such exhortations, religious energies were instead translated into a compulsion to perform work with greater zeal and discipline. The ethical directives of religion, if they are preserved, are thinned out into what one faith and work leader critically calls “adverbial” ethics. This instructs Christian workers to work excellently, diligiently, industriously, etc. Weber quotes a sixteenth-century monk whose assessment of the new Protestant asceticism proves applicable today: “You think you have escaped from the monastery; but everyone must now be a monk throughout his life.”

In the broader landscape of American Protestantism, these ideas represent just one of many options circulating among religious leaders and the laity. Other orientations toward work and participation with secular institutions also vie for legitimacy, whether the far more global Prosperity Gospel, the politically-charged Dominionist orientation, or more materialist understandings of divinely blessed meritocracy. The faith and work movement’s continued viability likely depends on some portion of the knowledge economy workers preserving their ties with the white American evangelical identity that crystallized in the twentieth century. Such a future is far from a foregone conclusion. 

But sustained interest in the consecration of work in late capitalism is not going away anytime soon. The “Thank God It’s Monday” mantra has now taken up residence as common signage commonly dotting the hustle-celebrating workspaces of WeWork offices. While it is difficult to predict what theological, spiritual, or otherwise cultural orientations will consecrate work in the future, connecting work with larger purposes will likely prove a lasting element of environments that exert demands on workers’ time, energies, and affections.

Featured image is in the public domain

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The company we keep

The company we keep

Observing how various words for “friend” originate and develop is a rather curious enterprise. Some etymologies are trivial, that is, they have been known for a long time and are undisputed. Such is, among others, the case of friend. Any good dictionary will tell the same story. The last two letters of friend (-nd) are a trace of an old present participle. In English, present participles end in –ing (a barking dog, flowering wilderness, and so forth), but at one time, the ending of this part of speech was –and. The other Germanic languages still have some easily recognizable traces of –and (cf. German kommend “coming” and so forth). The root of friend is also transparent to the language historian: it once meant “to love” (so already in Gothic, a fourth-century Germanic language, which has come down to us in a rather full form). In Old English, the word did mean “lover.”

Do we love our relatives? It depends. In a society in which kinship determines people’s behavior, love (the sense of belonging, loyalty, devotion, and many other feelings) has numerous “pre-modern” shades. In any case, Icelandic frændi means neither “friend” nor “lover” but “kinsman, relative.” Those who believe that English spelling will gain greatly if reformed may note that friend and fiend are spelled alike and yet do not rhyme. Fiend is also an old present participle. It once meant “hating; hater.” So much for the origin of friends and friendship.

A friend in need.
Via Pexels (public domain)

Another trivial case is fellow. Fellow certainly belongs with the subject announced in the title: compare fellow traveler and good fellow “an affable person.” The word came to English from Scandinavian. Icelandic félagi is a compound: fé means “property, money” (English fee is its distant cousin), while –lagi is related to English lay (as in to lay something). Consequently, a fellow is a person who lays down money with someone in a joint undertaking. The word bears some similarity to companion, except that companion is a borrowing from French, rather than Scandinavian. The Romance roots of this word are obvious: com– “together” and panis “bread” (a companion is therefore “one who breaks bread with another”). My students have never heard the phrase boon companion “good companion.” In older books, this phrase usually means “someone with whom one drinks and makes merry” (for example, we can remember Tony Lumpkin and his boon companions in She Stoops to Conquer), and there is no reason why it should be forgotten.

Sharing food will now take us to the noun mate. We have received and welcomed linguistic guests from Scandinavian and French. It would therefore be wrong to ignore Low German. Enter mate. The word (ge)mate, from gamato-, had the prefix ga- ~ ge-, denoting association, and the root discernible in English meat. Meat once meant “food,” as it still does in sweetmeats and green meat (two other items of the English vocabulary my students fail to recognize), from the root “to cut,” as in German messen and (!) English mete out. Thus, we again end up in a friendly company of food sharers.

A few more notes about this mess. The word mess, of French origin, first meant “a serving of food; dish.” In the eighteenth century, it could refer to “mixed food for an animal.” The familiar sense “medley; jumble; a state of utter disarray” appeared later. The root of mess can be seen in Latin mittere “to send out” (as in e-mit and mess-age). In a way, the noun messmate is a tautological compound like pathway. Both parts mean approximately the same: here “food-food,” rather than “someone with whom ones shares food.”

In the company we keep, three words are more serious etymological puzzles: crony, chum, and buddy.

Crony turned up in books in the 1660s. Samuel Pepys knew the word, and so did Stephen Skinner, the author of the 1671 etymological dictionary of English (the second ever). Both Pepys and Skinner were Cambridge men, and crony, long before it acquired the modem negative connotations, meant “roommate” (at Cambridge). In the entry for 30 May 1665, Pepys speaks of the death of Jack Cole, “who was a great chrony (sic) of mine.” The only reasonable derivation of crony seems to be from Greek Chronios “contemporary,” from Chronos “time.” The use of Greek and Latin words at British universities and public schools was commonplace. Pepys’s spelling of the word with ch probably shows that this is how he too understood the word, even though at that time and later, “elegant” (Greek or Latin) spelling variants were customary. To be sure, by Pepys’s time, the word may have been used for decades and been garbled more than once. Therefore, the current etymology looks acceptable but not certain. The once suggested derivation of crony from some cognate of the verb croon is nonsense.

A fellow traveler makes a long journey short.
Via PxFuel (public domain)

Chum, the Oxford counterpart of crony, became known from printed texts at almost the same time as crony. (Does it follow that both were, after all, recent seventeenth-century coinages? If so, why did they suddenly come into being?). Both were slang, and those who discussed them two hundred years later sometimes apologized for dealing with such low terms: at that time, slang was a synonym for filth.  “I confess I rather like the word, though not a few of those born in the [eighteen]-forties, at least, seem disposed to call it slang” (from an 1895 letter). E. B. Brewer, the author of a once tremendously popular 1870 book on the origin of words and idioms, defined chum as “bedfellow.” It is unclear where he found this gloss, but every two students at old Cambridge and Oxford did indeed share a bed.

Cicero and Tacitus used the Latin word con-taberna-lis (literally, “someone sharing a taberna,” roughly “tavern”) with the sense “comrade” (incidentally, a comrade is also a person sharing a camera “chamber” with someone). But contabernalis could hardly have been “Englished” into chum. Even less probable is the derivation of chum from Latin cum “with.” Those old suggestions deserve little consideration.

In 1896, the great Walter W. Skeat offered his etymology of chum. He cast doubt on the derivation of chum from chamber-(fellow), suggested cautiously in the OED, and indeed the path from chamber to chum “does not run smooth.” Skeat found the following entry in the 1767 very well-known Bremen Dictionary: “[In my translation]: “Kumpan, abbreviated as Kump, associate, companion, comrade; College socius, consors. Engl. chum.” He believed that chum was not only a gloss on but also a borrowing of German Kump and explained how the change may have happened. He reconstructed a devious way from Kump to chum. Yet if people could alter chamber into chum, they could do the same, and much more easily, with Kump. But why should British students have borrowed a German slang term? Though that is again not improbable, the reconstruction remains guesswork. With time, Skeat probably lost enthusiasm for his hypothesis, because he did not even include chum in the latest edition of his Concise Dictionary. Thus, today, we can remain chummy, without knowing why we use the word everybody knows (not a rare case in etymology in its relation to life).

The story of buddy is long, and I’ll leave it for the next blog post, but I hasten to thank our readers for their corrections, conjectures, and comments on cowardly custard. (Sorry for the alliteration!). I also have to inform them that I am off to a conference of the Dictionary Society of North America in Boulder, Colorado. This is my first trip “abroad” since the beginning of the pandemic. Therefore, the buddy thriller will appear a week later than scheduled. The long wait will, I hope, whet everybody’s appetite for more tales in the series of One Thousand and One Etymologies.

Featured image: “Chronos and his child” by Giovanni Francesco Romanelli, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

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Privacy and the LGBT+ experience: the Victorian past and digital future [podcast]

Privacy and the LGBT+ experience: the Victorian past and digital future [podcast]

Scholars continue to explore the role of sexuality in private lives—from the retrospective discovery of transgendered people in historical archives to present questions of identity and representation in social media—with the understanding that those who identify as LGBTQ+ have always existed and have fought tirelessly to advance their rights.

On today’s episode of The Oxford Comment, we discuss LGBTQ+ privacy through both historical and contemporary lenses. First, Simon Joyce, the author of LGBT Victorians: Sexuality and Gender in the Nineteenth-Century Archives, shared his argument for revisiting Victorian-era thinking about gender and sexual identity. We then interviewed Stefanie Duguay, the author of Personal but Not Private: Queer Women, Sexuality, and Identity Modulation on Digital Platforms, who spoke with about digitally mediated identities and how platforms, such as social media and dating apps, act as complicated sites of transformation.

Check out Episode 83 of The Oxford Comment and subscribe to The Oxford Comment podcast through your favourite podcast app to listen to the latest insights from our expert authors.

Oxford Academic (OUP) · Privacy and the LGBT+ Experience: Victorian Past, Digital Future – Episode 83 – The Oxford CommentRecommended reading

You can read the introduction from Simon Joyce’s book, LGBT Victorians, which reimagines and complicates our understanding of the Victorian period by thinking about how British thinkers and writers assessed and responded to larger international movements, including European sexology, the poetry of Walt Whitman, and late-century French erotica. Joyce also wrote about “LGBTQ+ Victorians in the archives” on the OUPblog last fall. 

Read the prologue from Stefanie Duguay’s book, Personal but Not Private, which explores how queer women share and maintain their identities across social media platforms despite overlapping technological, social, economic, and political concerns. You can explore more of Duguay’s research at the Digital Intimacy, Gender, and Sexuality Lab, where she serves as director.

Learn more about the origins of Pride in the introductory chapter of Out in Time: The Public Lives of Gay Men from Stonewall to the Queer Generation by Perry N. Halkitis.

Explore LGBTQ+ online identity mediation in our Open Access articles:“Walled cosmopolitanization: how China’s Great Firewall mediates young urban gay men’s lives” by Lin Song and Shangwei Wu in Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication (March 2023)“Gay employees on social media: Strategies to portray professionalism” by Lucas Amaral Lauriano in Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication (March 2023)“Performing a Vanilla Self: Respectability Politics, Social Class, and the Digital World” by Mikaela Pitcan, Alice E. Marwick, and Danah Boyd in Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication (May 2018)“Predictors of self-harm and suicide in LGBT youth: The role of gender, socio-economic status, bullying and school experience” by V. Jadva, A. Guasp, J. H. Bradlow, S. Bower-Brown, and S Foley in Journal of Public Health (March 2023)

Featured image: Frederick Park and Ernest Boulton as Fanny and Stella, 1869. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Multicultural evangelicalism: what is it and why should anyone care?

Multicultural evangelicalism: what is it and why should anyone care?

One of the many tragedies of the religious currents swirling around the capitol insurrection and the amplification of white Christian nationalist discourse in American politics and public life is the cementing of evangelicalism with whiteness and Trumpism in the minds of many Americans. 

To be sure, the association is not without warrant. Though increasingly diverse, evangelicalism remains a majority-white religion in the United States. White evangelicals have continued to overwhelmingly support Trump. White evangelical racism is real. And while more than half of all white Americans support or sympathize with white Christian nationalism, white evangelicals are the strongest supporters of white Christian nationalist perspectives and policies in the US.

But neither, however, does the association tell the whole story. The conflation of evangelicalism with whiteness and MAGA Republicanism erases the witness and experiences of Black, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, and white progressive and multicultural evangelicals for whom white Christian nationalism is anathema. 

It is a well-known fact that evangelical Protestantism has overtaken mainline Protestantism as the predominant form of Christianity in the United States over the past fifty years. While approximately 60% of white Protestants in the US identify as “born-again or evangelical Christian,” the number is even higher for Black Protestants. Approximately two-thirds of Black Protestants identify as “born-again or evangelical Christians.”  

Among Latino Protestants, over three-quarters identify as born-again or evangelical Christians. Approximately two-thirds of all Hispanic Protestants in the United States are charismatic or Pentecostal, as are approximately half of all Hispanic Catholics. Overall, a slight majority of all Hispanic Americans identify as Catholic, while approximately one-quarter identify as Protestant. Hispanic and Asian American evangelicals are among the fastest-growing segments of American evangelicalism. Approximately 5% of American evangelicals are Native American, other, or mixed race. 

“Approximately one-third of all evangelicals in the United States are people of color—constituting 8% of the total US population.”

Overall, approximately one-third of all evangelicals in the United States are people of color—constituting 8% of the total US population. And like nearly all demographic groups in the US, American evangelicalism is becoming increasingly multiethnic and multiracial. Among American evangelicals under the age of 30, only one-half are white, while one-half are people of color. Globally, Black and brown majority-world Christians and evangelicals now significantly outnumber those in the United States and Europe. Combined with white liberal, progressive, holistic communitarian, #NeverTrump, and dissenting evangelicals, one-third to one-half of all evangelicals in the United States are multicultural evangelicals—10% or more of the total US population.  

Why should anyone care about multicultural evangelicalism?

So, why should anyone care about multicultural evangelicalism? One answer: there are a lot of multicultural evangelicals, and their social and political identities diverge significantly from the stereotypical white conservative evangelical Trump loyalists and MAGA Republicans who dominate headlines and have, for many Americans, turned the word “evangelical” into a racial (white) and political (Republican)—rather than religious—label.  

“Multicultural evangelicals recognize that ethical democracy is impossible without racial justice.”

In addition to sheer numbers, another reason to care about multicultural evangelicalism is that it represents an alternative vision of the relationship between evangelical Christianity and democracy in America, one that—unlike white Christian nationalism—is consistent with pluralistic, multiracial, and ethical democracy.  

For example, multicultural evangelicals recognize that ethical democracy is impossible without racial justice. In Los Angeles, multicultural evangelicals fight environmental racism in low-income Hispanic neighborhoods as part of racially and religiously diverse coalitions of grassroots democratic community organizers. In Atlanta, multicultural evangelicals live and work alongside residents of low-income majority Black neighborhoods to close the racial wealth and opportunity gap through Black homeownership, quality affordable housing, job creation, educational programming, and political advocacy. 

“Multicultural evangelicals recognize that ethical democracy is impossible without support for religious, cultural, and political pluralism.”

Multicultural evangelicals also recognize that ethical democracy is impossible without support for religious, cultural, and political pluralism. In Oregon, multicultural evangelicals participate in ecumenical, transpartisan political advocacy to advance anti-poverty, health care, and environmental protection legislation. In Portland, multicultural evangelicals help lead secular and multifaith asset-based community development initiatives, participate in interfaith dialogues across deep religious and political divides, and organize massive public service collaborations to support local public schools and neighborhoods. 

Multicultural evangelicals recognize that ethical democracy is impossible without economic justice and opportunity. In Boston, multicultural evangelicals participate in community organizing and development work as intentional residents of low-income neighborhoods while creating “economic discipleship” resources to mobilize economic redistribution and justice advocacy. In Los Angeles, multicultural evangelical residents of low-income Black and brown neighborhoods organize for educational, environmental, and economic justice and opportunity in their communities.  

“Multicultural evangelicals recognize that ethical democracy is impossible without economic justice and opportunity.”

While some multicultural evangelicals are across-the-board progressives or political liberals, others are mosaic multiculturalists who combine a bricolage of conservative and left-liberal perspectives across various dimensions of difference and disagreement in American public life. Many multicultural evangelicals occupy a contradictory cultural location between the secular left and religious right, at odds with the binary political grammar and deepening partisan polarization of contemporary US politics and public life. It is multicultural evangelicals, with the help of their socially reflexive religious and secular partners, who are best positioned to challenge white Christian nationalist and anti-democratic expressions of evangelical Christianity in the United States. They do so by showing how evangelicals can and do work with others across race, class, religious, and political lines to achieve common good solutions to public problems, without abandoning their own distinctive convictions and identities or demanding that others do so. Ethical democracy requires no less. 

Featured image by Scott Webb on Unsplash (public domain)

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On specters and spectacle: tales of two Eurovisions, Liverpool-Ukraine 2023

On specters and spectacle: tales of two Eurovisions, Liverpool-Ukraine 2023

Phantoms from the past, ghosts of the present, specters of the future, all gathered on 13 May to haunt the Eurovision Song Contest, cohosted in 2023 by the United Kingdom in Liverpool and by Ukraine in the spectral spaces of a Europe divided by war, but singing in concert under the banner, “United by Music.” Two Europes and two Eurovisions were on full display, each summoning its many specters in the chorus of the nation at its most spectacular: three minutes of song, dance, and theater in the most widely-viewed annual cultural event in the world.

One Eurovision was the temporary safe space of competition among a community of nations. The annual run-up to Eurovision Week in Liverpool unfolded according to well-worn tradition, the internet flooded with videos from national song contests and their winning entries, the full range of genres from intimate love songs to no-holds-barred extravagance. Fans would gather in Liverpool in the thousands (estimates claimed ca. 100,000, a figure significant only because of its symbolic excess).

The other Eurovision was Ukraine, the nation as a whole rather than a host city, a place of precarity, whose life as a European nation was under siege. The annual run-up to Eurovision Week in Ukraine was one of war and suffering, of pride in the long history of Ukrainian sovereignty to which song and music had borne witness, chronicled by the Ukrainian entries in the Eurovision over the past two decades, three first-place finishes among them, most recently the 2022 winner, Kalush Orchestra’s “Stefania.”

The tale of two Eurovisions in 2023 is the story of a Europe riven by the conflict between East and West, unsettled by migration and unabated refugee crisis, and staggered by the threats of rising fascism, antisemitism, and anti-LGBTQ politics. Europe has been here before, and far too often. So, too, had the Eurovision Song Contest, first established in 1956 at the height of the Cold War, and on the eve of the Soviet military intervention in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and the establishment of the European Commission, the precursor of the European Union. The phantoms of the past are all-too-familiar, the specters of the future once-again-threatening. 

This year’s competition witnessed a substantial retreat in the number of nations competing, only 37 after a decade and a half when the numbers hovered between 42 and 43. Recently competing nations choosing not to enter this year came entirely from Eastern Europe: Belarus, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Hungary, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Russia, and Slovakia. There are many explanations for the retreat of Eastern European nations—Russia was banned from entering—but the most common one claimed that costs for smaller nations were prohibitive. The investment in sending a national team to the Grand Prix are not insignificant, but smaller nations in Western Europe routinely manage them, among them San Marino (population 33,745) and Luxembourg when it re-enters the Eurovision next year.

There is much about the two Eurovisions in Ukraine and Liverpool in 2023 that seems hard to reconcile. Though I have written about the Eurovision Song Contest since the 1980s, from the multiple perspectives of ethnographic fieldwork, close analysis of the songs themselves, and active integration of Eurovision courses into university curricula in the United States and Germany, I am unable, in 2023, to write about the two Eurovisions as one big party, conjoined by kitsch and camp. The phantoms and the ghosts are too haunting. Public celebration takes on more spectral meaning in the Ukrainian Eurovision when public curfew sends viewers to their homes and shelters after 8:00 pm.

At the Liverpool Eurovision the desire to celebrate by no means disappeared. It was the spirit of celebration that lifted the Swedish popstar Loreen to first place after she garnered the largest number of votes from the professional juries in each competing nation for her song, “Tattoo.” As she had in 2012, when she won the Eurovision in Baku, Azerbaijan with “Euphoria,” Loreen brilliantly captured the magic of the Eurovision stage with a Eurosong par excellence. When I wrote about her in my 2012 blogpost, I claimed that, as a child of Moroccan immigrants in Stockholm, Loreen (Lorine Zineb Nora Talhaoui) “represents the New Europe, with a multiculturalism and religious diversity that undoes the nationalism of the Old Europe.” In the 11 years since her first Eurovision—much rejoiced as the first woman to do so, and on the fiftieth anniversary of Sweden’s greatest Eurovision victory, ABBA’s “Waterloo”—Loreen’s performance relies on an earlier history, comfortably situated in the Liverpool Eurovision.

The favorite of the public voting was, however, not Sweden’s Loreen, but Finland’s Käärija, whose “Cha Cha Cha” successfully cobbled together the Eurosong’s tried-and-true formulae of over-the-top spectacle, with a refrain of countless iterations of “cha cha cha,” to which ecstatically entertained fans in the Liverpool arena and on the internet could sing along. Käärli’s public could not, in the final moment, outweigh Loreen’s media professionals.

The spectacle of the Liverpool Eurovision was plentiful, and yet the specters of the Ukrainian Eurovision were present, and painfully so. These were the specters that drew me to the other Eurovision, the one haunted by the phantoms tearing apart Europe along its very borders. These were the ghosts of misogyny and physical violence. The Czech entry—and my overall favorite—Vesna singing “My Sister’s Crown,” placed tenth in the Grand Finale, singing proudly of the resistive power of sisterhood, every verse framed by the couplet, “My sister won’t stand in the corner / Nor will she listen to you.”

It was the call to listen that most powerfully opened the spaces of the Eurovision that took place in Ukraine on 13 May 2023. We were reminded that song and sound draw us to places we cannot be, spectacle transformed to oracle, amplified by the beauty and horror of the sirens, past and present. If we watched one Eurovision on the stage in Liverpool, the sounds of the other Eurovision in Ukraine refused to be silent. I had the good fortune to watch the Grand Finale with my friend, colleague, and visiting professor at the University of Chicago, Olha Kolomyyets, who holds a professorship in ethnomusicology at the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv, Ukraine. Even as the spectacle in Liverpool was broadcast, the air raid sirens in Ukraine were sounding through Olha’s cellphone, fully in disharmony with a contest professing “Unity in Music.” The ensuing Russian missile attacks, not least among them a strike on the home city of Tvorchi, the two singers of the Ukrainian entry, Ternopyl, immediately prior to their performance. It is to Tvorchi, then, whose song, “Heart of Steel,” placed sixth in Liverpool, that I give the final words for the Eurovision in Ukraine:

Don’t be scared to say just what you think,

‘Cause no matter how bad, someone’s listening.

Featured image: Tvorchi performing the song “Heart of Steel” on stage by Michael Doherty via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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The asexual awakening: Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami

The asexual awakening: Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami

What is a woman? This is the central question that Kawakami’s novel, Breasts and Eggs, addresses from every angle. The main character, Natsuko, an aspiring writer, is preoccupied with her body and the gendered and sexed bodies of those around her. She considers the lopsided and transactional nature of relations between men and women in her society. “Free labor with a pussy,” as one woman puts it (249). At the heart of this novel is women’s struggle for financial independence and the legacy of poverty and low-paid work, including in the nighttime entertainment business, which poor single mothers hand down to their daughters. Natsuko’s sister, Makiko, for example, is paid to keep men company in bars in order to encourage them to rack up their drinks tab. Natsuko notes that her sister is “living pretty much the same life as our mom” (20). The novel never loses sight of the poverty invoked in its striking first sentence, “If you want to know how poor somebody was growing up, ask them how many windows they had” (11).

In her curiosity about sex and bodies, through dialogues and internal monologues, Natsuko explores many complicated issues in detail. For example: breast enhancement, her sister’s obsession at age 39; breast and nipple color; plastic surgery; menstruation; impotence; fertility; infertility treatment; ovulation; sperm donors; unhappy marriages; child sex offenders; sexual predators; and absent and abusive fathers, like her own.

“In a deeply feminist process, Natsuko listens closely to her body’s likes and dislikes.”

Natsuko, at 30, listens closely to her body’s likes and dislikes. In this deeply feminist process, Natsuko defends herself, body and soul, from unwanted advances, unwanted advice, and disapproval from family, friends, and acquaintances, including her editors. Despite the sexual possibilities around her, Natsuko does not participate in any type of sexual activity. Natsuko had a much-loved boyfriend when she was young, but she hated having sex with him. Yet the novel’s radical and intimate subjects lead us to expect her sexual awakening and fulfillment, whatever form it might take.

Confounding expectations for sexual self-realization, Natusko declares to a fellow-writer and single mom: “I want a kid so bad” (312). Now 38, Natsuko is suffering from writer’s block and a mid-life crisis: struggling to write her next novel, painfully aware of her solitude, drawn to kids. She explains to her friend, “And I can’t have sex… […] Emotionally, I think. I don’t know, I’m not sure. I just don’t want to do it. I’ve done it before, when I was younger […] I just wanted to die” (312).

Natsuko underlines and questions her distaste for sex at different points. “Sometimes I wonder if I’m really a woman,” she continues, “I know I have the body of a woman. I have breasts like a woman, I get my period like a woman” (312).  And later, “Am I really a woman?” (316). Such speculation peppers the novel—including the bathhouse episode—and recurs in the work of women writers across time and space. In Between Then and Now, written almost 70 years ago by the recently re-translated Italian writer, Alba de Céspedes, Irene says: “‘What do women do?’ I wondered, for, in spite of my relationship with Pietro, I had a feeling I belonged to another sex” (123).

“Disentangling desire from sex and gender, Natsuko affirms the integrity of her non-desiring body.“

Financially stable but finding sex repugnant, Natsuko considers artificial insemination, which is not available to single women or lesbian couples. Romantic possibilities surface when Natsuko develops a deep connection with a man, Aizawa, a doctor she meets while exploring the medical, ethical, legal, and social issues around sperm donor conception. After Aizawa expresses his interest in her, Natsuko wonders, “Was I still incapable of having sex? […] I had convinced myself that sex would never work for me. What if things had changed?” She touches her vagina, but “this went nowhere […] Nothing worked […] I stood there, pondering the question of sex.” She wonders, “What’s wrong with that part of me staying the way it’s always been? […] Why did caring about someone need to involve using your body? All I wanted was to have this conversation with Aizawa” (376).

Disentangling desire from sex and gender, Natsuko affirms the integrity of her non-desiring body. She asserts her asexuality alongside her right to motherhood. With Aizawa’s help, she circumvents legal restrictions to artificial insemination by pretending she and Aizawa have a common-law marriage. Natsuko reimagines single motherhood not as an imposition, as it was for her mother and sister, but as a choice. Natsuko’s exquisite body-specific fulfillment comes in the final pages of the novel, in childbirth, in a narrative, physical, and cosmic climax. About her newborn daughter, Natsuko says in wonder in the novel’s last lines, “Where were you? You’re here now. I watched her, this new baby girl, letting her cry into my breast” (430).

Read Tommasina Gabriele’s latest article: “Queering the Textual Politics of Alba de Céspedes’s Prima e dopo” in Forum for Modern Language Studies, available on Oxford Academic.

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More short words, or negation of the negation

More short words, or negation of the negation

In late spring and summer, when the days are long, I am often overwhelmed by the desire to write something about the shortest words in Modern English. At one time, I discussed if, of, and, in, both, and (very briefly) yet. See the posts for 2 August and 9 August 2017, and 27 July 2022. The reason I am seized by such an unnatural desire is the almost total obscurity of such words. Open the most detailed etymological dictionary of any Indo-European language and look up in, on, at, to, of, and their cognates: you will find long lists of short forms but no origin. Some pronouns, especially she, have been discussed many times, but the discussion invariably turns round their later history.

Now take any of our negations. All over the Indo-European map, the main word begins with n. What is in this sound that invites denial, refutation, or repulsion? Unable to answer this question, I decided to turn to some negative prefixes and began with the word ignoble. Latin nōbilis meant “(well-)known, excellent, highborn” (the range of meanings was broader than in the Modern English adjective noble), while īgnōbilis referred to people of low birth, undistinguished, and insignificant. Note that the first vowel of the Latin word is long (ī). Once, the prefix was the familiar in: compare such adjectives as inadequate, inappropriate, inefficient, and so forth. The original form must have been in-gnōbilis (theroot in it is the same as in gnostic), but in the heavy group ingn-, the first n was lost, and the preceding vowel, by way of compensation (as it were) lengthened. Or perhaps the heavy cluster ngn with its two n’s flanking g was dissimilated. The same sound change accounts of the form of ignorant and ignominious.

Photo by Sonny Sixteen via Pexels (public domain)

In other positions, the process of assimilation is so obvious that we need no reference to historical phonetics to recognize the origins. Such transparent forms are illegal, improper, and irreversible, as opposed to indifferent. Many Latin words ended up in Middle English by way of Old French. That is why enemy (from Old French enemi, with one n) begins with en-, while inimical “hostile” looks perfectly Latin. (An enemy is not an amicus “friend.”)

The sound of n prevails in negations. English once had ne-, corresponding to Latin nē, as in nefarious (from ne– + the root of fas “rejection of divine command”) and in Nemo, familiar thanks to the famous captain: it goes back to nē + homo “nobody.” (Those who remember Jules Verne’s book The Mysterious Island know that the real name of this fictious character was Prince Dakkar.) Being so short, ne tended to attract all kinds of barnacles. Thus, in the earliest Romance languages, p and c clung to it. We can still see the slightly transformed remnant of that c in negate, neglect, and negotiate. The syllable neg- goes back to nec-, and the roots of the aforementioned verbs can be seen in Latin aio “I say,” lego “I gather,” and otium “leisure, ease.” The consonant g is an insertion. 

At present, the English negation is no, from nā, an old contraction of ne + ā[image error] As though English had too few negations, it borrowed nei “nay” from Scandinavian. There, it was a compound made up of ne + ei “ay, ever,” that is, a reinforced negation. German nein, though it means “no,” corresponds exactly to English no one or none. The word not is a later form of naught, which is the sum of ne and aught (as in for aught I know). Likewise, Russian net “no” is the sum of ne and a short phrase meaning “is here.” The more synonyms we have, the more nuanced our speech becomes and the harder it becomes to make small distinctions. Compare you are not a man and you are no man.

The ayes have it.
Photo by European Parliament, via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

A curious word is German kein, used attributively, for example, kein Mann “no man.” It emerged as nih-ein, occurred also in the form (ni) dehein (with the obscure syllable de-), and meant “some,” rather than “no.” Today, it means only “no,” and if we want to say “no book,” the only way to say it in German is kein Buch. Its k-, from h-, has not been explained to everybody’s satisfaction. Very short words have to fight for their existence and sometimes change according to puzzling rules.

We will probably never know why the sound of n allied itself to negations in Indo-European, and this is a pity, for there must have been something in this consonant that suggested the opposite of unity, attraction, and agreement. Reference to sound symbolism fails us here, as it always does when linguists try to see a direct connection between the articulation of consonants and the meaning of words in which they occur.

However, we observe that n is not the only actor in the game of negation. In Old Icelandic, the adverb ei meant “ever.” English aye (“yes; ever”; cf. the ayes have it) is a borrowing of it. But the other ay meant “not” (thus, simply a verbal sign of reinforcement?) and as a rule, occurred with the particle –gi. Eigi became ekki and, like eigi, stayed in the language. The universally used Scandinavian negation (ei, ej) corresponds exactly to Finnish and Estonian ei, and as could be expected, two hypotheses compete. One defends the Finno-Ugric origin of the Finnish and Estonian word; the other equates it with the Germanic one. In any case, the coincidence is remarkable.

Andrey Gromyko, a Soviet diplomat of the cold war epoch, known as Mr Nyet, because he regularly used the Soviet veto in the United Nations Security Council.
Photo: RIA Novosti archive, image #404643, Sizov (CC-BY-SA 3.0)

Suffix-like words are called enclitics. Germanic, so rich in negative words, also had several negative enclitics. One of them was –gi, discussed briefly above. It varied with –ki, but the meanings often fluctuated between negative and indefinite, which makes sense, because the line between negation and doubt and even between strict and qualified negation is easy to cross. (Hence the problem of ne and ni in Russian. It drives learners crazy, because those two unstressed words sound very much alike. An even worse horror is that ne and ni are sometimes spelled together with the word they modify, and sometimes separately.)

In Germanic, negative enclitics were rather numerous. Sometimes they corresponded to Latin –que, which meant “and”(!). They abounded in the oldest stages of the language, and poets enjoyed them. One such short particle was Old Icelandic at. Its etymology, cited in dictionaries, carries little conviction, and here we may ignore it and only note that the poets of that period loved multiplying negations. For example, né (é designated a long vowel) might occur before the verb and -at at the end of it. Incidentally, –at also has analogs in Finno-Ugric. The rule prevalent in Modern Germanic that requires only one negation in a sentence is relatively late, and those people who still say I don’t know nothin’ are unaware of the norm imposed on the Standard. Incidentally, in Russian, the English sentence I don’t know anyone anywhere, if translated literally, would sound as “I don’t know nobody nowhere.” Obviously, the more, the better.

Our tour of negations in this blog post was a mere introduction to a complicated subject. The great question is how speakers learned to negate their statements, and we wonder at the variety of the means they invented. We also wonder why the sound n- figures so prominently in the process. Apparently our statement “no means no” had many nuances at the dawn of civilization.

Featured image by cottonbro studio, via Pexels (public domain)

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Black Methodists, white church

Black Methodists, white church

The Black Church has served a variety of functions in Black communities. The church offers a separate space where Blacks have asserted a distinct and affirming cultural identity, nurtured a faith to sustain them under oppression, and fostered the development of group leaders. The Black Church is not monolithic, but whatever form it takes, the crucial characteristic is its autonomy from white control. Coming out of slavery, when masters used Christianity in an effort to instill submission and docility, Blacks seized on their new-found freedom to break away and form their own churches. What to make, then, of the choice made by hundreds of thousands of former slaves to join the white-dominated Methodist Episcopal Church? That is the question I explore in A Long Reconstruction: Racial Caste and Reconciliation in the Methodist Episcopal Church.

The Methodist Episcopal Church was the northern branch of Methodism following the schism of 1844, but the Civil War opened an opportunity for them to reenter the South. Although the African Methodist Episcopal and African Methodist Episcopal Zion Churches drew more members, the success of the MEC was nonetheless impressive and surprising. The ability to acquire church properties and the educational opportunities offered by the Methodist’s Freedmen’s Aid Society were important draws, but Blacks were also attracted by the denomination’s purported commitment to “the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man.” Living out that ideal, however, was fraught with challenges, not least because the MEC had also drawn in a large number of white southerners who had been Unionists but hardly racial egalitarians.

In many ways, the experience of Black members in the MEC was not that different from other Black Churches. At the congregational level, there was never a great deal of racial mixing, and for the most part, both races were fine with that. A distinction was drawn, however, between voluntary separation and enforced segregation, which Blacks and their white allies decried as racial caste. A national controversy erupted when the Freedmen’s Aid Society bowed to pressure from their southern white members and established Chattanooga University as a school “for whites.” The MEC’s 1884 General Conference enacted contradictory policies in response to the outcry. On the one hand, local administrators were given considerable leeway in their admissions policy, while at the same time it was decreed that “no student shall be excluded from instruction … because of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” In effect, Church policy offered support to schools for whites as long as they were kept white by means other than excluding Blacks.

The aspirations of Blacks in the MEC came to rest largely on the hope that fellowship with whites within the Church’s institutional hierarchy would enable them to gain respect and recognition. Yet they were constantly reminded that they lacked the institutional autonomy enjoyed by the African Methodist denominations and thus dependent on white patronage and denied opportunities for advancement. That dilemma was at the heart of the issue of separate annual conferences. Annual conferences were typically responsible for managing affairs in a particular region, but as soon as the MEC began expanding southward, they moved to separate Blacks into their own conferences. When this policy was initially implemented in the border states, it was widely accepted because Blacks were heavily outnumbered and overshadowed by whites, so separate conferences offered an opportunity to find their own voice and raise up their own leaders. Farther south, however, in places like Louisiana and Mississippi, separate conferences were more controversial and struck many as a capitulation to racial caste.

Of all the issues that bedeviled the denomination’s stance toward its Black members, the most enduring and aggravating was the issue of electing a bishop of African descent. The schools of the Freedmen’s Aid Society produced leaders who, by the 1890s, could make a strong case for their elevation to the episcopacy. Foremost among them was J.W.E. Bowen. Bowen had been born into slavery and risen from poverty to become one of the most educated Blacks in the country. He had begun a long career as professor of historical theology at Gammon Seminary in Atlanta, and he had gained some prominence as a stirring orator and skilled organizer through his involvement in the 1895 Cotton States and International Exposition. Three times Bowen’s name was put forward as a candidate, and each time the white vote at the General Conferences fell short. The major impediment was the rule that bishops exercised “general superintendency” over annual conferences, meaning that a Black bishop could potentially have authority over white churches. It was only after Blacks had essentially surrendered on that issue that two Black bishops were finally elected in 1920.

Blacks in the MEC always found white allies, but they faced headwinds at a time when political commitment to civil rights was evaporating and sectional animosities waning. The Methodist Episcopal Church was the nation’s largest Protestant denomination and reflected a cross-section of racial attitudes. When the goals of racial reconciliation and sectional reconciliation proved incompatible, the denomination proved all too willing to draw the color line. That outcome demonstrates again why most Blacks chose to join their separate Black Churches.

Featured image: public domain via  The New York Public Library .

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