Oxford University Press's Blog, page 579

The Wiz, then and now

When the late Ken Harper first began pitching his idea for a show featuring an all black cast that would repeat and revise the popular plot of L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, augmenting it with a Hitsville USA-inspired score, he had television in his sights. Securing funding to produce the project for that particular medium proved an impossible task for Harper, who then shifted his attention to bringing a “black cool”-suffused vision of Oz to the Great White Way.

Harper enlisted Julliard-trained musician and composer Charlie Smalls and playwright William F. Brown to create the score and script for his “super soul musical” and, with a bit of luck, chutzpah, and shrewd negotiating, eventually obtained financial backing from Twentieth Century Fox. He later tapped Gilbert Moses III, co-founder of the influential Free Southern Theatre and a 1971 Tony nominee for his direction of Melvin Van Peebles’ Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death, to lead a creative team that included several performing arts luminaries, including choreographer George Faison, costume designer Geoffrey Holder, and lighting designer Tharon Musser.

With most of the important pieces and players in place, planning and casting commenced for a pre-Broadway tryout that would see the musical, pithily titled The Wiz, premiere at Baltimore’s Morris A. Mechanic Theatre, later traveling to Detroit’s Fisher Theatre before officially opening at New York’s Majestic Theatre in January 1975. As is often the case with new musicals, the journey to Broadway would be littered with challenges and obstacles.

Indeed, The Wiz wasn’t nearly the award-winning theatrical juggernaut whose finale song “Home” eventually helped introduce the world to Whitney Houston’s incomparable voice, remaining a favorite among amateur night contestants at the Apollo. Lukewarm responses from audiences were coupled with disagreements among the creative team about vision and staging, as described in a December 1974 article in the Baltimore Afro-American, where Holder was especially peeved about the misuse of his extravagant costumes. This led to the dismissal of most of the original cast, including Oscar-winner Butterfly McQueen, not to mention the replacement of Moses with Holder as director during the out-of-town run. While those changes in personnel brought about much-needed improvements for the show, ticket sales still remained dismal. On opening night in New York, Harper posted a closing notice backstage, however continued to maintain that The Wiz could be a big hit, understanding that he needed to figure out a way to convince more of the spectators for whom the show had been specifically developed for—young, black and pop savvy individuals—that it was worth seeing.

Taking a page from the marketing playbook that kept the Chitlin Circuit thriving in the early decades of the twentieth century and helped make Tyler Perry a household name in the twenty-first century, Harper and his team decided to redouble their efforts at getting black media outlets to hype the show. They also set up a flurry of radio, television, and newspaper interviews for the cast and, with additional funds from Fox, shot a thirty second commercial that captured Dorothy and her friends easing on down the road in technicolor. These changes in tactics had an immediate impact at the box office and just a few short weeks after its demise seemed imminent, The Wiz became one of the hardest tickets to get in New York City.

The musical would ultimately run for more than sixteen hundred performances on Broadway, picking up seven Tony Awards and spawning a hit cast album, national tour, and a Motown Productions and Universal Pictures-produced 1978 feature film along the way. In addition to its bold theatricality and tuneful score, audiences connected with the show’s emphases on the transformative power of community, its simultaneous calls for collective rejoicing for a brand new day, and its celebration of black life and love.

The Wiz’s tale of an adolescent black girl and her marginalized friends rising up to provoke “a different way of living now” and expose power asymmetries has taken on new resonance in a moment where the persistence of racial terror and anti-black violence has escalated; it has become, once again, controversial but imperative to declare that black lives matter. So too has the musical’s unapologetic calls for freedom from fear, illusion, self-doubt, oppression, anesthetization, and annihilation. NBC’s decision to present a revamped production of the musical live on network television, the medium for which Harper had originally envisioned it, feels especially timely. Beyond providing an opportunity to witness the likes of Mary J. Blige, Queen Latifah, Uzo Aduba, Ne-Yo, David Alan Grier, newcomer Shanice Williams, and the original Dorothy, Stephanie Mills, The Wiz Live! offers fresh takes on some of the most iconic roles in the musical theater canon. The primetime broadcast of The Wiz Live! promises to open up important space to consider how we might imagine our world differently. Powerfully, it also promises to remind us that remaking our world is, in fact, a possibility.

Image Credit: “The Wiz, undated” by Kenn Duncan. Used with permission via New York Public Library Digital Collections.

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Do you know your human rights? [Quiz]

In the last two hundred years, the concept of human rights has gained prevalence in society. We can define our rights in terms of freedom of speech, privacy, and to be treated humanely, but where did these ideas come from? When did we first start caring about our human rights and how much has the law surrounding human rights changed in the past few centuries?

Do you think you know your human rights? Test your knowledge with our quiz, based on Andrew Clapham’s Human Rights: A Very Short Introduction.

Quiz and featured image credit: “Shadow”, by LoggaWiggler. Public domain via Pixabay.

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Season’s greetings – Episode 29 – The Oxford Comment

Say goodbye to endless stuffing: it’s time to welcome our most beloved season of wreaths, wrapping paper…and confusion. The questions, as we began delving, were endless. Should we say happy holidays or season’s greetings? Happy Christmas or Merry Christmas? And how should we really spell Chanukah, once and for all? (Hanukkah? Hanukah? Chanukkah?)

After all, who knew the merriest of months would also be the most mind-boggling? In this month’s episode, Sara Levine, Multimedia Producer, sat down with Katherine Connor Martin, head of US Dictionaries, Allan Metcalf, author of From Skedaddle to Selfie: Words of the Generations, and Edmund Weiner, Deputy Chief Editor of the Oxford English Dictionary to solve the season’s most baffling linguistic conundrums.

Image Credit: “Snowmen” by julie. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

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Do you know your NYC food and drink?

Suffice to say that New York City has a smorgasbord of all types of food from all over the world. You want food from the southern coast of mainland China? Or maybe you’re feeling some British pub food? NYC’s got you covered. People have flocked to the cultural conglomerate in pursuit of the American dream, and with all these people from all these parts of the world coming together, cultures were exchanged, adapted, and remixed into something distinctively New York. So what do you know about NYC food and drink? Find out in the quiz below.

Headline Image Credit: Photo by Unsplash. Public domain via Pixabay.

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The Oxford Place of the Year 2015 is…

NEPAL

With the ballots cast and the year winding down, we recognize Nepal as Oxford’s Place of the Year 2015. The country came into the global spotlight back in April, when a devastating earthquake took over 9,000 lives and left hundreds of thousands of people homeless. Months later, critics point at the slow-moving recovery process that has still a far way to go before Nepal can resume normal operations.

Earthquake in Nepal. Photo by Asian Development Bank. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

Diplomatic ties strained when fuel supplies began to dwindle in Nepal, causing food shortages. The Nepali government blamed India for placing an unofficial trade blockade after it passed a new constitution that would result in the underrepresentation of certain groups in governing bodies. With this now-strained relationship, China is taking the opportunity to provide fuel to Nepal instead, a gesture which will inevitably build China-Nepal relations.

It has not been an easy year for Nepal, and it’s unlikely that things will ease up in 2016; because a fault line sits in Nepal between Katmandu and India, the risk of earthquakes always looms large. In terms of the foreign policy issues that Nepal faces, it’s hard to say what will come of it. Building diplomatic ties with any country takes considerable effort, and considerably less to destroy it. Only time will tell what will come of this.

Read up on our Place of the Year archive, and remember to check back for more posts about Nepal and the other contenders. Let us know what you think of this year’s Place of the Year in the comments below, or use #PotY2015 on social media.

Headline Image Credit: Kathmandu from Nagarjuna. Photo by Sharada Prasad CS. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

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Climate change – a very difficult, very simple idea

Planet Earth doesn’t have ‘a temperature’, one figure that says it all. There are oceans, landmasses, ice, the atmosphere, day and night, and seasons. Also, the temperature of Earth never gets to equilibrium: just as it’s starting to warm up on the sunny-side, the sun gets ‘turned off’; and just as it’s starting to cool down on the night-side, the sun gets ‘turned on’. The ‘temperature of Earth’ is therefore as much of a contrived statistic as the GDP of a country. (If the Earth was in equilibrium, that is, if it absorbed and re-emitted the Sun’s radiation perfectly, as a ‘blackbody’, then its rotation would be irrelevant, and the temperature would be a constant 6 ⁰C. Mocking up the effects of Earth’s albedo brings the ‘blackbody’ temperature down to -18 ⁰C, and including greenhouse warming brings it back up to around 15 ⁰C.)

‘The climate’ is difficult to define: is it a trend over one decade, century, or millennium? What sized region is it defined for? Weather is very variable – how can we go from weather to climate? Furthermore, climate change on human timescales is a very small effect, and the empirical data needed for climate models have large ‘error’ bars. The models themselves have to make many assumptions, and sometimes lead to solutions that are unstable (small changes in the input data lead to large changes in the predictions).

However, despite the above, climate change, more specifically human-induced climate change, is a surprisingly simple idea.

The mathematician and philosopher, Bertrand Russell, summed up mankind’s activities as the rearrangement of matter on or near the Earth’s crust. Russell’s words need refining. The rearranging of matter is done in two different ways: by mechanical devices (such as levers), or by ‘heat-engines’ (such as muscle-power, or combustion engines). (Loosely speaking, anything that ‘farts’ is some sort of heat-engine.) A heat-engine consumes fuel and, by the Second Law of Thermodynamics, ‘always puts out some waste heat.’ Therefore, Russell’s summary should more accurately state: the activities of mankind can be summed up as the rearrangement of matter and the generation of heat. (By the way, ‘waste heat’ refers to direct heating and all other energy losses, not just the production of exhaust gases.)

The only way to reverse global warming is to change the interactions between the Earth and its surroundings…

There is still the question: is this generation of heat enough to cause climate change? Sceptics claim that the activities of people are completely swamped by the immense power of volcanoes, the variability of the Sun’s output, and other ‘natural’ effects. These effects are indeed immense, but note that life forms have affected Earth’s climate in the past (cf. cyanobacteria). Also, while the consequences of the behaviour of any one person are tiny, cumulatively there can be an influence. (In fact, monetarist economic models demand this – people are encouraged to buy things precisely because their individual behaviour affects the economy as a whole.) Finally, there is much evidence of mankind’s influence on the planet in ways not directly related to climate. For example, a ladle-full of seawater from any sea or ocean now always contains some detectable trace of plastic. Even where a material is introduced in miniscule amounts (on the planetary scale), there can be big effects. Witness the use and subsequent control of use of aerosols; this has changed the ozone layer, twice.

Sceptics also argue that natural ‘buffering’ mechanisms keep the Earth’s climate stable – yes, but not if pushed too far. How else has change happened in the past (Ice Ages, etc.)? (An analogy comes from dieting. Go on a weight-loss diet and your body thinks, “Aha, you’re on a fast, switch on the fasting survival-metabolism.” But if you go too far, you die.) If it wasn’t for the finality of it, the present era would be a moment for awe: science textbooks have talked of ‘the surroundings’ or ‘the environment'; now, for the first time, mankind is affecting ‘the surroundings.’

It is agreed that mankind does affect the microclimate (for example, cities are hotter than the surrounding areas) – but is not a whole climate made from microclimates knitted together?

In summary, it would be very surprising if humans were not affecting the climate. Affecting it how? By increasing the amount of global warming – this is what the Second Law of Thermodynamics tells us. According to this Law, so long as our activities concern the planet in isolation, there is nothing whatsoever that we can do to stop global warming (we can merely reduce its rate). The only way to reverse global warming is to change the interactions between the Earth and its surroundings; and this can only be done by reducing the net flux of Solar energy received, by reducing greenhouse gases and/or increasing the Earth’s albedo.

 Headline image credit: EarthAtmosphere-CarbonDioxide-FutureRoleInGlobalWarming-Simulation by NASA/ GSFC. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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The magic of Christmas: it’s Santa’s DNA

Knowledge that we all have DNA and what this means is getting around. The informed public is well aware that our cells run on DNA software called the genome. This software is passed from parent to child, in the long line of evolutionary history that dates back billions of years – in fact, research published this year pushes back the origin of life on Earth another 300 million years to 4.1 billion years ago. This chain of DNA has undergone significant changes. Life has diversified into bacteria, sharks, bees, humans and so much more — 99% of all life is extinct.

DNA is information. It determines key traits like eye and hair colour. We are decoding DNA at a fast pace, but still have a long way to go to understand the language of life. The first twelve months of this column, the Double Helix, have been filled with topical stories about how DNA research is shaping science and society. Evidence that interest in DNA is growing in the public imagination can be found almost anywhere – even with Santa.

In this clever school presentation, a student builds the metaphor of a cell being Santa’s Workshop. There are holiday cards for sale that are decorated with Santa’s DNA. The magic of Christmas has also been linked to Santa’s DNA.

Instead of the usual 23 pairs of chromosomes that we all have, Santa has three extra chromosomes. His condition, Trisomy 25, means he also has three unusually large chromosome called “Holly Homolog”, “Redemption of Scrooge Homolog”, and the “Angel of Christmas Homolog”, the first of which is shared with his Elves and reindeer. DNA testing was done on hair follicles found besides the remains of a mince-pie and inside an elf-hat knitted by Mrs Claus that Santa tried on.

Image: Father Christmas, by Hans. Public domain via Pixabay.

The chosen topics of my column, The Double Helix, highlight the diversity of the stories about DNA that are making the headlines. Looking back, 2015 has been the year “of a million genomes.”

The first article appeared in January 2015 and proposed that we are at the start of the Practical Genomics Revolution that will be fully upon us by 2020. This was triggered by the news story that Genomics England had announced plans to create eleven centres of Genomic Medicine to help complete its 100k Human Genomes Project. This post was followed in February by the announcement from Obama about funding for a One Million Genomes project in the USA to support the concept of precision medicine, the idea that we can tailor medical therapies to best suit our DNA. The next two months’ articles explored why we need such mega-sequencing projects and focused on the benefits of sharing data and the types of studies that can be undertaken once huge quantities of DNA data are pooled and freely available.

The May article explored other uses of DNA based on this molecule’s ability to store information and form unusual shapes. June explored the creep of DNA into myriad fields as evidenced by the number of TED Talks about DNA. July paid homage to International Kissing Day and the fact that research shows we trade up to 80 million bacteria in every romantic smooch. August pointed out how internet speculators are buying up domain names related to the DNA revolution – the URL “DNAMatch.com” is for sale for a cool $750k.

September brought the shocking news that Kuwait had instigated mandatory DNA testing for all permanent residents, changing the landscape of national DNA programmes. In October, I chose to focus on the amazing story of how cancerous cells were taken from Henrietta Lacks in 1951 to become the first cells to grow in the laboratory and found a multi-billion dollar industry based on the immortal nature of perhaps the most unusual genome in history. A discussion of “the Angelina Jolie effect” and the role celebrities are playing in bio-literacy and the uptake of genetic testing capped off an exciting year in DNA research.

If this December article had a single focus, it would be the recent publication of a call for a Unified Microbiome Initiative, complemented by a second call to make this effort global. Certainly, 2015 has also been the “year of the microbiome”, the trillions of single-celled organisms that inhabit our bodies. It will likely be one of the highlights of scientific advance in 2016, as research in this fascinating field continues to transform our views of ourselves, medicine, and many other fields.

While Santa’s genome would be of extreme interest, I would actually prefer to see his microbiome. Santa’s microbiome will be a product of his surroundings. It would be more similar to his wife, Mrs Claus, than a random member of the population and it would be quite stable over the months between Christmases if he were healthy. It would have formed in the first two years of life, initiated with his passage through the birth canal of his mother, and if she breast-fed him, bolstered with natural sugars that promote the growth of healthy bacteria.

His reindeer also have microbiomes, like all animals, and he would likely be more similar to them in gut composition than other reindeer – as has been shown in studies of similarities among people and their family dogs. The microbiome has been associated with so many wide-flung attributes today, from obesity, to mood, to a range of other diseases. Maybe it even explains his ability to fly.

2016 will also be about “gene-editing”, one of the hottest topics in genomics this year, especially as significant concerns were expressed over germ line editing with the CRISPR-CAS system.

Perhaps if the field advances far enough, we will be able to write the magic of Santa’s Christmas into all our genomes.

Featured image credit: Abstract lights, via PublicDomainPictures. Public domain via Pixabay.

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You’ll be a man, my son. Part 3

Obviously, I would not have embarked on such a long manhunt if I did not have my idea on the origin of the troublesome word. It will probably end up in the dustbin (also known as ash heap) of etymology, but there it will come to rest in good company.

It seems that the Goths and the Old Scandinavians preserved the early stage of secularizing Mannus’s name (Mannus, let me repeat, was, according to Tacitus, the supreme deity of the Early Germanic peoples). Gothic had the noun gaman (neuter; ga– is a collective prefix) “fellowship” and (!) “partner.” Old Norse man, neuter or feminine (!), meant “bondsman” and “maid; concubine.” Old Norse had lost all prefixes before the earliest texts in that language were recorded, so that man in it can be an exact analog of Gothic gaman.   I suggest that in the beginning gaman referred to a group of Mannus’s worshipers (by the way, the most ancient form of Mannus had one n, and that is why in the earlier posts I sometimes enclosed the second n in parentheses; the origin of that additional n has been discussed at length but need not delay us here).

That the same word sometimes designates a group and an individual will not surprise anyone. I mentioned this fact in dealing with the noun god (originally, only the neuter plural—Old Norse guð “gods”—existed) and in my brief discussion of the origin of wife. Engl. youth “young people” and youth “a young person” is not an isolated case, and in everyday speech we hardly notice the ambiguity. From a long list of such examples collected by historical linguists I can mention Old Engl. leod “people” (a recognizable cognate of Modern German Leute “people”) and “prince.” German Stute “mare” corresponds to Engl. stud “a group of horses kept for breeding; a male horse belonging to such a group”); Romanian feméi, originally “family,” now means “woman.” Latin manes “deified ghosts of the dead” later acquired the meaning “corpse.”

Nor should the neuter, when applied to a human being, look like an anomaly. German Mensch “human being” is masculine (der Mensch), but at one time it had a parallel neuter form (das Mensch; their coexistence is still recognized by the modern language); in one of the Old Scandinavian dialects, þiuþ “man” was neuter (þ has the value of Engl. th in thin).  Grammar “overrides” semantics and sometimes produces absurd results. For instance, in German, in which the diminutive suffix –chen always makes a noun neuter, Mädchen “girl” (a cognate of Engl. maid) is, naturally, also neuter. To be sure, every form of this type should be explained on an individual basis, but the need for special pleading does not invalidate the fact that the name for a single human being can end up as a neuter noun.

Tough luck: no help is to be expected from all the king’s men.

In medieval German, man had numerous meanings, and some of them, such as “man, male, son; brave warrior; lover, fiancé,” are easy to understand, but in courtly poetry “vassal” predominated; compare Engl. all the king’s men. In English chess, every piece except the king can be called man; hence chessman. Although man early acquired the sense “a male,” the German pronoun man (e.g. man sagt “one says”) and its use in jemand “somebody, someone” and niemand “nobody, no one” (-d is a later accretion in both words) are witnesses to the ancient “gender neutrality” of those forms. Engl. woman, a compound of wif and man, meant something like “a person called wif.” English would, most probably, have retained the pronoun man in the function similar to that of German man, but under the influence of French on, as in on parle “one speaks,” it was ousted by the similar-sounding  one, which is amusing, because French on goes back to Latin homo “man.”

Given such facts, I suggest that the development was from “fellowship in Mannus” to “a fellow in Mannus” (“partner,” masculine, female, or neuter by default), further to “human being” and to “a person of low status,” first in relation to the deity, then to the lord: “vassal, slave, concubine, etc.” If I am right, man is a relatively late word, devoid of cognates in the rest of Indo-European almost by definition. “Late” is a loose concept: a runic inscription going back to the beginning of the Common Era already had Man(n)R. Yet nineteen hundred or two thousand years would indeed be a relatively short period in the entire history of Indo-European. Our word’s “young age” may be the reason why its grammatical forms behaved so erratically: man- was declined according to several types. But such fluctuations are not too rare even today. For instance, Modern German has three plural forms of Mann: Männer, Mannen, and Mann (each has its sphere of application).

It will be only fair to say that long before me two great scholars—Jacob Grimm and Friedrich Kluge—came to the results similar to mine, but Grimm did not go beyond stating that, although man at one time meant “servant” (this being its main meaning!), one should not think that Old Germanic people (Germanen) were slaves, while Kluge, who reconstructed the original sense of man as “the progeny of Mannus,” gave up his idea, for he could not resist the temptation of finding an ancient etymon of the Germanic noun and invented an improbable hybrid of man and guma, mentioned in the first part of this series.

Here the king’s men will do anything to save him.

We now have to search for the etymology of the god’s name, but here only a vague guess is possible. Of prime importance is the fact that m-n conveys nearly the same idea in various languages: Korean myång, Chinese manu, Austronesian muani, and many others like them. Among the meanings of this sound complex we find “man, boy; a phallic deity; herdsman; warrior; woman; people” and “kin,” some of them familiar from the material of Germanic. Wilhelm Oehl, to whom I have often referred in my recent posts, considered man a universal baby word. In Indo-European, the syllable man is often connected with the idea of evil spirits, manias, and madness. Manus probably arose in human conscience as a frightening creature; this is the most common scenario in the history of religion. Like some other gods, with time he acquired benevolent features, but, in principle, the ruthless deities of old sent physical and mental diseases to their worshipers, who propitiated them with sacrifices. This subject has also been developed in the series of posts on the origin of god. The syllable man may be a baby word. If so, it first designated a bogeyman with whom to scare little children.

My tentative progression is from a baby word (like boo) to a materialized demon, perhaps producing that terrifying sound, to a supreme awe-inspiring divinity, and to the main god of the ancient Germanic pantheon. People were believed to be his servants, and their group was galled gaman. Any member of the gaman was a “man,” that is, a human being, originally a worshiper of either sex, a servant of the great deity. Much later the meaning was specialized to “a male,” but we still have manholes, even if though they have been renamed sewers, manhunt, manpower, and of course mankind.

Image Credit: (1) “Mannus tre söner, gravyr av Justus Peterson efter en bild av Carl Larsson” by Haukurth and (2) “Page 5 of Denslow’s Humpty Dumpty” by theornamentalist. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons. (3) “Chess Play” by Remco Wighman. CC BY ND 2.0 via Flickr.

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‘If you have no better offer, do come’: Martial’s guide to Roman dinner parties

“If you have no better offer, do come,” 11.52 helps put flesh on the bones of Martial’s Rome (‘you know Stephanus’ baths are right next door…’) and presents the city poet in a neighbourly light. It’s also a favourite of modern foodies in search of an unpretentious sample menu from ancient daily life. Pre-modern lettuce was bitter; the Roman cookery-book of Apicius (3.18.1-3) treats it like its close relative, chicory. It was often served as a freshly-made pickle, like the onion relishes of modern Indian cooking. Lettuce cleansed the palate, whether at the beginning or (in days gone by) the end of a meal, “Lettuce always concluded our ancestors’ feasts. So tell me, why does it introduce ours?” (Party Favours 14).

Still, Romans thought this dinner-party staple could be hard on the digestion (and modern dieticians agree); Apicius includes (3.18.3) a recipe for a pungent date-and-cumin purée to be taken medicinally after dinner, ne lactucae laedant, “to prevent the harmful effects of lettuce.”

Martial clearly has a lot of eggs to use up. They must have been cheap in the Subura that week, because they certainly didn’t come from his little country place (7.31, 7.91, 11.18). Egg-yolks and rue are found together in a sauce for boiled ray at Apicius 9.2.2; bitter rue is a surprisingly frequent inclusion in the great gourmet’s fish recipes, so this is not just Martial trying to cover up a marginal bit of fish, although his tuna is clearly the runt of the shoal. His plan for serving it echoes Apicius’ recommended way with lizard-fish, an unknown species used here to give an idea of size – poach and serve with punchy herbs (lovage and rue), spices (pepper and cumin), honey, vinegar, and the ubiquitous garum, thickened with a little starch. Thai fish sauce and cornflour would be the obvious substitutes for the last two in a modern kitchen. The sweet-and-sour combination of honey and vinegar is instantly familiar to modern Roman diners, who know this style of sharp sauce (made with sugar now) as agrodolce and expect it with unctuous lamb or slow-cooked trays of vegetables.

The low-lying Velabrum, between the Forum and the Forum Boarium, was a great place to shop for fresh produce and is still home to a regular farmers’ market; it was particularly known for its smoked cheese, a peculiarly Roman taste (‘that cheese has a kick to it’, Xenia 32). Olives from Picenum on Italy’s north-east coast were a good cheap choice, but any gourmet would reject Martial’s because they are the tail end of the season’s crop (cf. 7.53, where December’s olives are an inferior Saturnalia gift); frost damages the fruit, and the exact date to harvest remains an issue of contention among harvesters today.

Before the Romans, Greek foodies too had prized fish and seafood because they were so tricky to get fresh. Image Creative Commons licence via Pixabay.

“I’ll lie, so that you’ll come,” Martial’s imaginary catalogue samples the upmarket pleasures of ancient fine dining. Before the Romans, Greek foodies too had prized fish and seafood because they were so tricky to get fresh; Apicius devotes two whole books to them. “Rib-eye steaks” is my guess at coloephia, the Greek-named prime cut guzzled by the lesbian bodybuilder Philaenis at 7.67. Sow’s udder could be parboiled and roasted, or stuffed with sea urchin (Apicius 7.2.1-2) – then as now, Romans liked their offal, while chicken was a valued meat: only in very recent times have obscene factory-farming methods made it inexpensive. There was a huge appetite for small wildfowl, which were netted by professional bird-catchers (Apophoreta 217(216)) and bred in aviaries. Thrushes are still a dinner-party treat in rural Latium, where they turn in ranks on a griddle in front of the kitchen fire.

Martial’s ultimate bait is not food, though – or not the food he can afford – but the Muses; his proposal of smart authors relaxing together and sharing their work is straight out of Catullus (e.g. Carmen 50). That he promises not to recite anything himself is no great surprise: Martial does not rate epigram when it is performed aloud to an audience, even his own (e.g. 2.1), preferring instead to see it circulate in books for private reading (e.g. 1.117). Really nothing is known of Martial’s Cerialis as a poet, but the theme of Gigantomachy (war against giants) suggests an epic, perhaps a learned and small-scale one (an ‘epyllion’) after the Hellenistic manner of, for instance, Apollonius of Rhodes; Catullus’ friends wrote micro-epics along those lines, or tried to (Carmen 35). Cerialis’ rustic poems (rura) could be patterned after either the Eclogues or the Georgics of Virgil: I chose the former because their smaller size makes them riper for imitation (we have some by Calpurnius Siculus from Nero’s time).

Image Credit: (Featured image) Market, Creative Commons licence via Pixabay

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Five differences between Canada and the United States

One of the tasks of a Canadian ambassador to the United States is persuading his audiences that Canadians really are distinct from Americans. One ambassador commented that if he asked an audience “The Question”—was there a difference?—Americans would politely say no, not really, and Canadians would say the opposite. Is there a correct answer, and if so, what is it?

1. Wealth

It depends. There is the oldest version of The Question, which is very direct. Asked the difference between Canadians and Americans, the quick response is, “Twenty-five percent.” Yes, Americans are, per capita, richer. The Canadian dollar was recently devalued, and the Canadian dollar is indeed worth seventy-five American cents. So there’s a difference – Canadians have to pony up more to go to Florida. But they get there just the same. On the other hand, the further down the income scale you go, the better-off a Canadian will be compared to the corresponding American. That applies even to the fabled “middle class,” where alarmed American commentators recently noted that Canadians’ incomes and purchasing power surpass Americans’.

2. Language (French)

There is no question when it comes to Canadian French. The most obvious point to make is that native French-speakers in the United States will soon be as extinct as the passenger pigeon, whether in Louisiana or New England. French names, however, survive from Coeur d’Alene in Idaho to Baton Rouge in Louisiana. Canada is a bilingual country, and there can be little doubt that the Canadian-American frontier has helped French in Canada from being swamped like French in Louisiana.

“Canadian Money” by Carlssa Rogers. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr

3. Language (English)

The existence of Canadian English sometimes seems like a distinction without a difference. Three-quarters of Canadians speak English, or at any rate do not speak French, except as a learned, second language. Americans, if pressed, might come up with Canadians saying “oot” for “out” and “aboot” for about, and zed for zee (meaning the letter Z). Canadians are also thought to be addicted to “eh” as a kind of universal interjection.

Well, it depends. Canadians on the West Coast sound like West Coast Americans. Canadians in the Maritime Provinces sound like New Englanders (or used to, before television homogenized accents in both countries). The pronunciation of out and about has been exaggerated as a difference, and the use of “eh” is usually considered a class thing, an indication of education and social status. The most distinctive accent is in Newfoundland, but there is considerable dispute whether Newfoundland English can be considered “Canadian.” (Newfoundland was separate until 1949.)

4. Stodginess and Innocence

Sometimes Americans consider Canadians to be the original stodges. Canadians are, in a word and a half, “tight-assed,” and possibly also “half-assed” and clueless. They are respectable but dreary, or comically inept – like the portrayal of the Mounties in cartoons (Dudley Do-right is the best-known Canadian character) or the dim-witted Mounties in the 1987 movie, The Untouchables. More recently the movie Argo (inexplicably an Academy-award winner) gave the same characteristics to the Canadians who rescued Americans from Tehran in 1979. Admittedly, sometimes Canadians are also virginal and doe-eyed, as in Mary Pickford, the iconic actress of the 1920s. But then Mary Pickford was considered to be American and her Canadian origins, while not secret, were not stressed by Hollywood publicists. It is sometimes believed that Ronald Reagan got his favourable (favorable) impression of Canadians from Mary Pickford.

Canadians on the other hand regard Americans as wild and woolly, self-seeking, impossibly individualistic, materialistic, boastful, vulgar and – you guessed it – clueless. When Canadian sociologists get to work all these characteristics reappear, but dressed up in the sacred language of academese. The riposte to the Canadian stereotype of Americans is two words: “Rob Ford,” the cocaine-snorting, bellowing and extremely photogenic ex-mayor of Toronto. Or, if you like, there is also Justin Bieber. As for the respectable end of Canada, all one need do is imagine the legions of Americans who score high on the respectability scale. It is tempting to say that when you gaze across the border in either direction you are actually not seeing the other side – you are looking in a mirror.

5. Conservative Americans and Liberal Canadians

This difference is so silly that it barely merits comment – which is to say that reams of books have been written on the subject. Politics and political ideas have always crossed the frontier from the time when monarchical Americans brought their faith in George III to the Canadian wilderness in 1783. Canadian and American politicians behave much the same and the political agendas in both countries are remarkably (or not so remarkably) similar. The greatest perception of difference arose in the 1970s and 1980s when the United States veered toward Reaganism and Canada continued liberal. But that was a matter of phase. In the 2000s Canada moved to the right while the United States under Obama moved, if not to the left, at least to the centre (center).

On the other hand the existence of two sovereign nations has occasionally meant that one country is a refuge for people fleeing from the other. Canada’s first Americans, in 1783, were political refugees, and for the next eighty years Canada was also a refuge for liberated slaves and from the 1830s to the 1860s, the terminus of the Underground Railroad. There were draft-resisters in the 1960s, and Americans disenchanted with George W. Bush in the 2000s. We do not know how they felt when Canada acquired an ultra-conservative government in 2006.

The American pollster Andrew Kohut has argued that the real differences between Canada and the United States are regional and not national. That is, Canadians and Americans in adjacent regions are likely to resemble each other – New England and eastern Canada, Washington and Oregon and British Columbia (but perhaps not Alaska). This seems to be a reasonable observation. I would add that liberal Americans have more than a passing resemblance to liberal Canadians, and conservative Canadians to conservative Americans, worshiping at the shrines of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher – a sign, incidentally, that both countries are indebted to their transatlantic progenitor, Great Britain.

It is true that once they arrive, Canadians can go undetected in the United States, often for long periods.

Canadians look like Americans – and everybody else, in an age of migration. They dress alike, with certain seasonal differences. The American prairies extend north to Canada, the Great Lakes are shared water, and even the Appalachians have a Canadian spur.  The film Chicago (2002) was actually filmed in Toronto, which frequently masquerades as a whole variety of American cities.

The notion that Canada and Canadians resemble the United States and Americans will only take you so far. After all, Dick Cheney has just published a book bearing the proud title Exceptional and it is not an autobiography, but rather an argument for the uniqueness of the United States.

Image Credit: “Good Neighbours” by Jamie McCaffrey. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

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