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Trick or treat – Episode 27 – The Oxford Comment

From baristas preparing pumpkin spiced lattes to grocery store aisles lined with bags of candy, the season has arrived for all things sweet-toothed and scary. Still, centuries after the holiday known as “Halloween” became cultural phenomenon, little is known to popular culture about its religious, artistic, and linguistic dimensions. For instance, who were the first trick or treaters? What are the origins of zombies? What makes creepy music…well, creepy?

In this month’s episode, we sat down with Katherine Connor Martin, Head of US Dictionaries for Oxford University Press, Greg Garrett, author of Entertaining Judgment: The Afterlife in Popular Imagination, Jason Bivins, author of Religion of Fear: The Politics of Horror in Conservative Evangelicalism, and Jim Buhler, co-author of Hearing the Movies: Music and Sound in Film History to broaden our understanding.

Image Credit: “Reaching for Halloween” by Will Montague. CC BY NC 2.0 via Flickr.

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Youth violence

Perhaps one of the most politically unpopular truths about violence is that it is young people who are most vulnerable to it – not the elderly or children, but youth. Global estimates from the World Health Organization are that, each year, 200,000 young people aged between 10 and 29 are murdered, and the majority of these are young men. That age group accounts for 40% of the homicides globally, and homicide is the fourth leading cause of death in that age group.

While this is a worldwide problem, it is particularly acute in low- and middle-income countries. In my own home, South Africa (a middle-income country), Richard Matzopoulos and colleagues conducted a careful investigation of injury-related deaths in 2009, published this year in the Bulletin of the World Health Organization. Using the rates per 100,000, a standard approach to representing public health problems in the population, they found that in the age-group 5-14, there were 3.1 murders per 100,000 population – but in the age-group 15-29, that jumped to 56.7 per 100,000 – more than 18 times higher than the younger age-group.

Death is, of course, not the only consequence of violence, nor is murder the only form of violence. Dating and sexual violence are also prevalent among young people. Injuries, mental health problems such as post-traumatic stress disorder, and behaviours (such as smoking and alcohol use) that put people at risk for other serious health problems, are also common – perhaps even more common – consequences of violence.

Young people are not only most likely to be victims of violence, but also most likely to be perpetrators. Age-crime curves – curves that plot convictions for crime against age – reliably show, in every age and country for which they are available, that crime and violent crime peak in youth.

Together, the facts that youth are most likely to be both victims and perpetrators of violence, and the serious consequences of violence, should make the prevention of youth violence a very high priority for policy-makers around the world. And while the figures I have just given may seem overwhelming, violence – including youth violence – can indeed be prevented. There is now sufficient evidence to guide policy-makers to implement effective prevention initiatives, according to WHO’s latest violence prevention manual: Preventing youth violence: An overview of the evidence.

At first glance, the list of evidence-based, effective interventions seems odd, if one is aiming to prevent youth violence. Some of them, for instance, are aimed at infants (even pregnant women). However, it is clear from developmental science that the propensity for youth violence is shaped by factors at play from conception and throughout development. For instance, babies who are neurologically compromised (such as those who have difficulty concentrating – possibly because their mothers were malnourished, or smoke or drank during pregnancy) and who are born to parents who use harsh, inconsistent discipline, are very likely to grow up aggressive. This coincidence of risk factors is also most likely in contexts of poverty, where children may also be deprived of the early cognitive stimulation that would set them up well for school; where they might attend schools where bullying is rife; where there may be little access to therapy for behavioural problems; and where they might live in neighbourhoods where drugs and guns are easily available, and where gang violence is prevalent.

While this is of course complex, it should not be disheartening: all it means is that every sector of civil society and every government department has a role to play in reducing violence. WHO’s hottest picks for the strategies with the most evidence behind them are:


• Parenting programmes (usually the domain of government departments dealing with child protection)


• Early child development programmes


• Life and social skills development (easily delivered through schools)


• Bullying prevention programmes (another that falls in the domain of schools)


• Therapeutic interventions (offered by schools, social welfare departments, departments of health, or departments of correctional services)


• Hotspot, community- and problem-oriented policing


• Reducing access to alcohol and reducing the harmful use of alcohol (this includes a wide range of strategies, such as increasing taxes on alcohol, and training bartenders not to serve those who are drunk)


• Reducing access to drugs (in the domain of customs, border protection, and the police)


• Reducing access to and the misuse of firearms


• Urban upgrading, spatial modification and the de-concentration of poverty (in the domain of urban planning).

The good news about violence is that it can be prevented; the second piece of good news is that almost every sector can make a contribution to violence prevention. And since most violence is youth violence, violence prevention should begin with a focus on children and young people. The third piece of good news about violence prevention is that these same strategies not only reduce violence, but promote healthy youth development – the development of young people who have social skills and secure relationships, and who do well at school – and who are therefore most likely to become employed, tax-paying adults who contribute to their societies. Violence prevention is therefore not only the right thing to do: it also makes economic sense for governments. What is invested in violence prevention is likely to be saved by reduced costs of violence and increased gains from more employable youth, making youth violence prevention a true win-win.

Featured image: Red Boxing Gloves Hanging on Wall by Royalty-Free/Corbis. CC-BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

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Can we trust religious polls?

Polls about religion have become regular features in modern media. They cast arguments about God and the Bible and about spirituality and participation in congregations very differently from the ones of preachers and prophets earlier in our nation’s history. They invite readers and viewers to assume that because a poll was done, it was done accurately. They produce a veritable flood of information purporting to tell what the typical American thinks and what the hypothetical person believes and does. Flooded with such information, the temptation may be to accept it without further thought — or to regard it with mild highbrow disdain.

 

And yet, despite having more polling information than anyone possibly wants or needs, polling companies continue to reel out numbers and percentages, and news media long accustomed to thinking that numbers and percentages are news continue to publicize the results. This is happening despite increasingly serious difficulties in conducting polls and producing valid results. Not only are large majorities of the public skeptical of poll results, they are also unwilling to answer when pollsters call, leaving the reported results in danger of missed and unanticipated errors.

 

The time has come when we must ask ourselves a critical question: can these religious polls be trusted? Take a look at our infographic below, which shows an example from a recent poll that wasn’t exactly as it seemed.

 

 

Featured image: “P002318″ by concep007. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 via Flickr.

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The Anglo-Saxons and the Jews

Anglo-Saxon England may seem like a solidly monochrome Christian society from a modern perspective. And in many respects it was. The only substantial religious minority in early medieval Western Europe, the Jews, was entirely absent from England before the Norman Conquest. Absent in reality, but not at the imaginative level, where the Jews played a substantial role in Anglo-Saxon culture.

Stories of Old Testament Israel were well known and lovingly re-imagined for an English audience. The epic poem Exodus, for instance, presented Moses and the Israelites as a brave band of warrior-companions, implicitly comparing them with the Anglo-Saxons themselves. Alfred the Great’s (d. 899) law code begins with the Ten Commandments, making, perhaps, the laws under which his own people lived an extension and continuation of Mosaic law. The first and greatest historian of the English, the Venerable Bede (d. 735), devoted many of his copious writings to the finer details of ancient Jewish religion, particularly to the Temple in Jerusalem

In the past many argued that the Anglo-Saxons cared so much about the Jews because they modelled themselves on them. Had they themselves not come to and conquered a promised land, Britain, after a long journey? Some scholars have suggested that the early English thought that they were God’s new Chosen People and that an intellectual like Bede actually wrote so that his people would know how to fulfil their elect status as successors to the Jews of old.

Certainly in modern times some of the more, shall we say, eccentric approaches to Anglo-Jewish connections have drifted into such territory. Since the late nineteenth century there have been a few people willing to believe that the inhabitants of England are the ten lost tribes of Israel and that the royal family descends from the House of David. Needless to say, Bede and Alfred were far too good scholars to make such fantastical claims! But I don’t think they thought of themselves as the Chosen People in any non-genetic fashion either.

Rabbis of the Middle Ages from the 1901-1906 Jewish Encyclopedia. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Bede emphasised that the Church to which Christian Anglo-Saxons belonged encompassed both Jews and gentiles; it was therefore a universal body, including all peoples who accepted the one God. The worship of that God was also an ancient tradition: long before the pagan Anglo-Saxons first arrived in England, the Jews had recognised and worshipped Him. Bede passionately evoked a sense of brotherhood between those ancient Jews and his contemporary Anglo-Saxons through a shared religious faith. He told his countrymen that though they were not descended biologically from Aaron, the first Jewish High Priest, they did descend from him “by believing in Him in Whom Aaron also, with the holy people of his time, believed”. The Anglo-Saxons had only begun to accept Christianity less than a century before Bede was born – for them it was a new religion. By writing about the long history of Jewish religion, Bede could show his people that they actually had joined an ancient faith with a great history. The one true God was worshipped in distant lands, in ancient times and by exotic peoples like the Jews: the Anglo-Saxons, he implied, would be foolish to be one of the few peoples not to recognise this God.

Bede was a cloistered theologian; you might think that a cunning politician like Alfred the Great would write about the Jews in a rather more simple and patriotic fashion. But Alfred actually drew a link between his laws and those of Moses for very similar reasons to why Bede connected Anglo-Saxon and Jewish religion. The preface to Alfred’s law code begins with Moses and the Jewish law (and the code is divided into 120 chapters, matching the age of Moses when he died!), but then moves on to the apostles and the rules which they imposed upon gentile converts to Christianity. As the true religion spread amongst many peoples, Alfred tells us, meetings of bishops and councillors came together to apply Christ’s mercy to their laws. Having received Christianity, the English did the same. For Alfred, in other words, the connection between the Anglo-Saxons and Israel was also a connection with all peoples who received the true religion and make good laws; his laws did not replace those of Moses as the God-given rules for an elect nation, but sat in a great tradition which began with Jewish law.

For both Bede and Alfred the Anglo-Saxon interest in the Jews was not about expressing a self-important and insular sense of ‘chosenness’, but about belonging to an ancient and universal community of faith.

Featured image credit: The saints and missionaries of the Anglo-Saxon era : First (and second) series, by Internet Archive Book Images. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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The James Bond songs: Best of the forgotten and underrated

If you’re getting ready for the new Bond movie—and its recently released James Bond song—you might want to sift through the history of this 50-year-old franchise and think about your favorite Bond films and songs. But how many songs do you remember once you get past “Goldfinger” and “Live and Let Die”? We dug into the ones you might not recall, and those we believe deserve another listen. Here are our top 10.

k.d. lang, “Surrender”

Underrated, if not exactly good; forgotten partly because it’s not… memorable. Still, lang did her job and got a raw deal. “Surrender” is heard over the closing credits of 1997’s Tomorrow Never Dies. An earlier demo-version had been solicited as a potential title song, along with loads of demos by other artists, and seemed like the clear winner to everyone but the people who were actually calling shots. It was written by the film’s composer, David Arnold, with lyrics by Bond-song veteran Don Black. The problem? lang wasn’t famous enough. (Didn’t the producers kind of know that when they asked her to submit a song?) “Surrender” itself is slightly spooky, well sung, and altogether competent and ok—much better than the cliché-filled and half-unintelligible Sheryl Crow offering that replaced it.

The John Barry Orchestra, “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service”

Usually when the Bond-film titles can’t work in song lyrics—Octopussy or Quantum of Solace, anyone?—the songwriters get a pass: they’re allowed to invent the name of the title song. So Quantum of Solace became “You Know My Name” and, though it hardly counts as an improvement, Octopussy’s title song was called “All Time High.” But 1969’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service was different. Legendary Bond-soundtrack composer John Barry, who scored 11 of the films and co-wrote 14 Bond songs, provided an instrumental number that perfectly encapsulates his convoluted-but-lyrical style. An uptempo march, this song has Barry’s trademark stabbing brass, busy strings, and surf guitar, along with then-trendy touches like Moog synthesizer and harpsichord. People who write Bond music haven’t forgotten this song; it gets shout-outs in many later films, most recently the forthcoming SPECTRE.

The Pretenders, “Where Has Everybody Gone”

Toward the end of his tenure at Bond Inc., John Barry did triple duty for 1987’s The Living Daylights. There’s the title song Barry wrote with a-ha, and two songs sung by the Pretenders. This one is the more prominent of the two. Not only does Barry reference it quite extensively in his orchestral score (much more than the a-ha piece, which he doesn’t seem to have cared for), it’s also on heavy rotation on one particular baddie’s playlist. That baddie is named Necros—if you’ve seen the movie, he’s the guy with the slicked-back hair and the very 80s track suit—and “Where Has Everybody Gone” seems to be the only song playing on his Sony Walkman (yeah, remember those?), which also happens to be his favorite murder weapon.

The John Barry Orchestra, “007”

There’s little about the sound of the Bond films that John Barry didn’t influence, for better or for worse. But a funny exception is the “James Bond Theme,” which was written by Monty Norman for Dr. No and orchestrated by Barry. Or at least that’s what we’re legally obligated to say, since any suggestion that Barry wrote the iconic theme tends to lead to imbroglios with the very litigious Mr. Norman. In any event, once Barry went from orchestrator to series composer with From Russia With Love, he decided he needed his own Bond theme. And just like the surf-guitar riff, this one has stuck around. It has appeared in more than a half-dozen films over the years and has been alluded to a lot more than that. Chances are you’ll recognize it…

Patti LaBelle, “If You Asked Me To”

Written by the great Dianne Warren, a key architect of the power ballad, “If You Asked Me To” served as the end-credits song for License to Kill (1989). It’s not exactly forgotten; you can still hear it on quiet-storm radio, Celine Dion recorded a popular cover version, and LaBelle continues to perform it. But it’s a strange case of a Bond song that probably would’ve been more popular if it hadn’t been a Bond song. It certainly doesn’t sound like a Bond song; it sounds like what it really is, a Dianne Warren power ballad performed by a superstar soul singer. LaBelle crushes the song’s poppy bridge and ad-libs the song to a climax with her famous gasp-inducing long notes. We wonder what would’ve happened had this song been promoted the right way. “If You Asked Me To” has something else going for it. In the music video LaBelle wears one of the most over-the-top hairstyles since—well, since humanoids stopped having fur.

a-ha, “The Living Daylights”

Everything went wrong with this one. The Living Daylights was the follow-up to 1985’s A View to a Kill, which had had a super-successful title song by Duran Duran. So the flash-in-the-pan Norwegian band a-ha got chosen basically because they were avid Duran Duran imitators. John Barry, brought in to score his eleventh Bond film, realized there was trouble ahead when he and a small party of Bond-brass fifty-somethings attended an a-ha concert and discovered they were the only audience-members old enough to drive themselves home. The recording sessions were a mess. Barry fought with the huffy Norwegians and decided to never again work on a Bond film. The product of this unhappy collaboration was heard over a ridiculous credit sequence in which the line “and the headlights fade away” is set to an image of—guess what?—a headlight fading away. Then a-ha decided to release their own “definitive” version of the song, scrubbed of Barry’s input. Both versions died on the charts. But the Barry/a-ha version is surprisingly good—a pleasantly cluttered arrangement with lots of little hooks supports a catchy melody that singer Morten Harket just manages to deliver with a kind of charming nervousness. Hey, sometimes recording-studio dustups can make songs better.

Carly Simon, “Nobody Does It Better”

Simon’s 1977 Bond song might not seem underrated. People think it’s pretty good. But it doesn’t usually rank among the greats. That’s probably because you could easily hear it and not think “Bond song.” It doesn’t churn like “Goldfinger” and most importantly its lyrics barely employ the film’s title, The Spy Who Loved Me. Plus it begins so unpromisingly, with that little bit of drunk piano. But if you make it through the opening and stick around until the song’s amped-up final section, you’ll hear the Bond songs at their most sublime and fist-pumpy. In general you’ll hear an of-its-time and compelling sound—very rare among the normally stodgy Bond songs—from a great year in popular music. Not to mention the whole concept of “doing it,” our favorite 70s sex-act euphemism. One cavil: The song’s anthemic ending got sliced out of the film version, even though it appears on all the records. Perhaps the film’s producers didn’t want the movie to be upstaged. In Simon’s words, they weren’t ready for the song “to be so good.”

Madonna, “Die Another Day”

Bond fans hate this. They aren’t cheered by the fact that this 2002 entry reached the top 10 on both the pop and dance charts. At the time they mostly thought it was too electronic, not “song-like” enough; that Madonna wasn’t a Bond-appropriate artist; that the film itself wasn’t any good, especially once Madonna-the-actor appeared as a fencing instructor. The song’s two torture videos made things worse: the film’s scorpion-heavy credit sequence looked incredibly CGI-cheesy, while Madonna’s own lavish video cranked up the S&M factor to just about fourteen and a half. But “Die Another Day” opened up the Bond song to electronic dance music, no mean feat. It did so in an incredibly canny way, with some classic EB-303 acid bass, chopped-up real strings, flamenco clacks, voguey silences—and yes, enough genuinely hooky melody to make it work as a pop song. Even Madonna’s voice sounded good once they autotuned it. Equally key, Madonna’s typically less-than-idiomatic lyrics work in service of the film’s main theme: the inability to put words together in a coherent manner—let’s face it, a problem affecting most of the Bond songs—becomes here a way to register the experience of trauma.

Nancy Sinatra, “You Only Live Twice”

To our ears this is one of the classic Bond songs—partly because it captures the oddness and excitement of its musical moment. 1967 was the year of Sgt. Peppers, Hendrix, Aretha, the Doors, the San Francisco sound, and over-the-top pop-soul groups like the 5th Dimension. “You Only Live Twice” throws itself into the swirl of it all and comes out dripping with distorted guitar, faux-Asian xylophone, heavy electric bass, hyperactive strings, and a long, fancy vocal line. It almost didn’t happen. The producers really wanted Nancy’s father Frank, who might’ve taken out a hit on any musical arranger who dared to put xylophone and fuzz guitar up in his face. Thank god, because Nancy totally nails the difficult melody, cementing the idea that the Bond song is truly a female domain. The lyrics? No, they don’t make any sense, but neither does the film, nor the whole concept of “living twice.” It doesn’t matter; this record is really about the sound of its voice and instruments. Composer John Barry’s catchy string arrangement has been sampled and quoted many times over the last couple decades—shamelessly in Robbie Williams’s 1998 “Millennium” and with more subtlety about two-thirds of the way into Cee-Lo Green’s “Bright Lights Bigger City.”

Gladys Knight, “License to Kill”

It took the Bond franchise 25 years to find its way to a legitimate soul/R & B singer. Black music was basically a no-go zone for the Bond films, unless you were in Jamaica or a Harlem nightclub, or you needed some “jungle music” in the Caribbean or some old-timey jazz in New Orleans, or it was 1973 and you were trying to take money from blaxploitation fans. And 1989 wasn’t exactly the best year to try it; by then the grooving rhythm sections had been replaced by drum machines and digital keyboards, African American ballad singers could hardly make the pop charts, and soul music was something you sampled. But Knight and veteran producer Narada Michael Walden knew how to make drum machine-driven soul. Knight overcame her ambivalence about singing lyrics with violent imagery—though if you listen hard you’ll notice she never quite says the word “kill”—and delivered a mostly one-take performance that shows why, almost 30 years after her debut, she remained a major-league diva. Part of the song’s beauty is its opening section, in which Knight ad-libs over a pastiche of the intro to “Goldfinger.” Poor Walden lost a chunk of change over this borrowing; sheisty “Goldfinger” composer John Barry threatened him into sharing songwriting credit. But, you know, Bond songs wouldn’t be Bond songs without some behind-the-scenes drama.

Featured image: SPECTRE Standee Art. (c) Danjaq, LLC, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc., Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. SPECTRE, 007 Gun Logo and related James Bond Trademarks via 007.com.

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The woman who changed the world

Society owes a debt to Henrietta Lacks. Modern life benefits from long-term access to a small sample of her cells that contained incredibly unusual DNA.

As Rebecca Skloot reports in her best-selling book, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks”, the story that unfolded after Lacks died at the age of 31 is one of injustice, tragedy, bravery, innovation and scientific discovery. The story is so gripping and historic, Oprah bought the book rights to make an HBO film about Lacks.

Lacks died in 1951 but a sample of her cells lived. She was not immortal but her killer cells were. Those cells came from a cancer so vicious it could grow outside her body. They were the first cells in history to do so. Her cells thrived in laboratory culture where all others withered, then expired. A past estimate suggested that taken together all the cells that have grown from that initial biopsy would form a chain they could wrap around the earth many times. These immortal cells have divided so many times their collective weight would weigh exceed 50 million metric tons.

George Gey had been fruitlessly trying for years to get human cells to grow in his laboratory. He was hoping to use cell cultures to cure cancer. With a vial of Lacks’ cells, he fulfilled his quest to establish a laboratory model system for cell biology. In turn, this revolutionized medicine and spawned a multi-billion dollar industry.

Since the breakthrough creation of the HeLa cell line, more than 80,000 research articles and 17,000 patents have been published involving their use. Among so many firsts, it was HeLa cells that were shot into space before humans dared venture beyond Earth. Famously, Jonas Salk’s used these cells to fight polio by discovering a vaccine that protected them from this dreaded virus. Launched in 1954, the polio vaccine cost an estimated $35 billion to develop and apply. Economic analysis now reveals that its use in the US saved $180 billion in medical costs, a 6-fold economic return on prophylaxis. More importantly, it eradicated this crippling virus in the US in a single generation taking with it nightmarish fears of lifetime paralysis.

Image: HeLa cells, metophase, telophase, by Doc. RNDr. Josef Reischig, CSc. CC-BY-SA-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

The value of HeLa cells to society is as unquestionable as the story of their creation is contentious. A mother of five from Virginia, Lacks was never consulted. Her cells were effectively stolen. She didn’t have a choice whether or not to share. Moreover, strangers reaped the financial rewards. Lacks lived on a plantation where her ancestors had been slaves. Today, her cells live on in petri-dish homes dotted around the globe in every conceivable type of research lab.

The doctor who examined Lacks is on record as saying the tumour looked extremely unusual. It was purple and bled easily on touch. Its consistency was like grape Jello. The cells isolated from a bit of this tissue grew in liquid cultures with record growth rates. They were as unstoppable dividing in glassware filled with chicken extract as in her body; her autopsy revealed internal organs riddled with tumours.

This ‘immortality’ is due to the extreme nature of the mutations that transformed ‘her’ DNA into ‘HeLa DNA’.

In 2013, the genome of HeLa cells was published. Chromosome are misshapen by large insertions and deletions of DNA, duplicated and genes fire of haywire messages. Such mistakes suppress the genes responsible for normal cell death and ignite those for unbridled cell-division. The project confirmed just how drastically her genetic machinery had been transformed, giving further clues to the origins of features of cancerous cells.

But again, permission had not been sought. The flagrant lack of consent ignited uproar. The authors of the study were forced to retract the genome sequence from the public domain. The National Institute of Health stepped in and brokered a deal creating a genomic data policy that involved the Lack family in deciding how her data could be used. Now her genome is also paving the way towards ethical sharing of genetic information.

In her book, Skloot includes a touching account of a fellow researcher saying Gey went to Lacks’ bedside on her deathbed and explained how he’d used her cells. Lacks was apparently pleased according to the story. Uncorroborated by any other witnesses, Skloot leaves readers to draw their personal conclusions.

This triggers thoughts. Imagine for another moment this gentler, fairer, and most positive scenario. What if Lacks had been able to choose to share? How might such an encounter have played out?

Perhaps, Lacks, whom friends called Henny, known as the neighbourhood mother, might have paused when Gey explained the importance of her cells growing in culture to think about other young mothers who might be saved if her cells helped cure cancer.

Or stop for a moment to consider the opposite outcome. What if Lacks had been consulted about gifting her biological legacy to the world and chose to have her cells destroyed. Today there are countless cell lines, but hers has the biggest legacy.

Lacks died before the structure of the double DNA helix was discovered. Still, by ceding her cells to the public, in time, by default she would have unknowingly become the most altruistic ‘genomic sharer’ in history.

Surely, it is only wishful thinking aching to heal a broken past to imagine such a positive exchange took place. Yet, perhaps imagining this hypothetical scenario will inspire individuals with the choice to willingly grant their genomes to consider doing so.

Certainly, we have to thank Lacks for being a pioneer in taking her health into her own hands. She was the kind of brave woman who would self-diagnose her own cancer and get herself to a hospital. After noticing inter-menstral bleeding, she found the tumour on her cervix herself. In her day, cancer was hushed up and only talked about in secret, if at all. She suffered great pain leading up to her early death, but the family talked of unbearable stomach aches.

She received treatment at Johns Hopkins, which Skloot reports was the closest hospital that would treat her. Only 65 years ago, hospitals wouldn’t treat non-whites, and if they did, only in segregated wards. Instead of outrage, Henrietta felt grateful.

We owe her for her dignity, courage and persistence; its consequences changed our world.

Featured image credit: HeLa cells, metophase, prophase, by Doc. RNDr. Josef Reischig, CSc. CC-BY-SA-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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Etymology gleanings for September 2015

It so happened that I have been “gleaning” the whole month, but today I’ll probably exhaust the questions received during the last weeks.

Perpetuum mobile

From a letter: “I have been told Norwegians would say ‘forth and back’ rather that ‘back and forth’ since it was logical for them to envision going away, then coming back.” The Norwegian idiom is fram og tilbake, that is, “forward and back.” Logic has probably nothing to do with it. The human mind discovers the world, while language describes and classifies it. Since the classification of things is up to the observer, the results differ from “dialect” to “dialect.” In this case, the movement in two opposite directions has to be stressed, while which of them comes first does not seem to matter. Back and forth may sound more “logical” than to and fro or fram og tilbake, but this impression is an illusion. Compare a few more anthologized cases when the practice adopted by the speakers of a language strikes outsiders as superfluous or illogical.  Special words for watch and clock (and there also is sundial) are a luxury we could have dispensed with; it is probably enough to have one word for the instrument showing time, for don’t we watch the clock and are stuck with the word o’clock? The division of our extremities into leg/foot and arm/hand, as well as different names for finger and toe, is another subtlety, which is practical or burdensome, depending on one’s point of view (compare the desperation of dictionary makers when they have to define toe, which ends up as “a finger,” or more resourcefully, “digit on the foot.” Anthropological linguistics revels in such cases.

When pigs fly

This is one of many idioms expressing an impossible situation and meaning “never” (compare when hell freezes over). For some reason (and here’s the rub) pigs have been chosen as the least probable candidates for levitation, though cows or sheep, for example, are equally unlikely candidates for this process. By contrast, winged horses are ubiquitous in mythology. I have a few items on the phrase about pigs in my database but nothing on its origin. The variants pigs could fly, with or without the addition if they had wings, and the universally known when pigs grow wings have also been recorded. Pigs are in general common characters in the most unexpected idioms.

Touch wood

Toi-toi-toi?

“Origin unknown.” Alas. The body of literature on touch wood is considerable. In my opinion, all of it misses the point, because it invariably deals with the nature of the superstition, while the question is about the phrase. Many “gestures” for warding off evil and averting bad luck, such as spitting three times (with the possible addition over the left shoulder) exist, and the “ritual” often has an accompanying text: t’fu-t’fu (Russian: this is what is said while spitting), toi-toi-toi (German, while knocking on wood), and the like. But linguists try to discover the origin of words and sayings, of course to the extent that those reflect the phenomena of the real world. There can be no doubt that contact with wood had an apotropaic effect. The trouble with the saying touch wood and its American variant knock on wood is its multilingual popularity: in French one says toucher du bois, in Spanish tocar (en la) madera, in German auf Holz schlagen, in Swedish ta i trä, and so forth. The phrase is obviously a migratory item, and we don’t know its center of dissemination. Also, in texts both touch wood and knock on wood surfaced only a little more than a century ago, even though touch wood is part of what is or once was said in playing tag and other chasing games (tiggy-touch-wood), a fact that proves the idiom’s relatively old age, for the vocabulary of children’s games tends to preserve many otherwise forgotten words and phrases.

God, bigot, and gadget

God. The title above sounds like cabbages and kings but owes nothing to O. Henry. I will only respond to some questions and comments. True, if the word god has something to do with the Germanic verb for pouring (Danish gyde, German gießen, and so forth), several possibilities of connecting them exist. But they need not be cognate (see the posts on god), though supporters of conflicting opinions about the origin of this word fight for their chosen derivations with the fervor worthy of a religious war. The Persian look-alike mentioned in one of the comments (I referred to it too) should certainly be disregarded, because it was coined too late for being a congener of god. As for Wulfila, who had to use a noun designating the Christian god and chose guþ, that is guth, he was hardly influenced by the word for “good,” because the vowels do not match (the adjective had long o, as in Engl. or). Compare Engl. bull and bawl. Hardly anyone would think of them as particularly close. Also, one has to explain the acceptance of the noun by the speakers of the other Germanic dialects.

Bigot. The word bigot has often been connected with the word for “mustache,” a point discussed in the post on that word, and, if our correspondent is interested, I can give her a reference to a long article on bigot (in German) with pictures of a luxuriant mustache. This etymology is probably wrong.

Gadget. Stephen Goranson found a slightly earlier date for this word than what is given in the OED. He has some reason to believe that the idea of connecting gadget with glass making is correct. I hope he will publish his findings in the comments to this blog.

Valerie Yule on Spelling Reform

‘The final goal, no matter what it is, is nothing; the movement is everything’. Such is the slogan of the revisionists, etymologists, and hamsters.

Valerie Yule, an active member of the Spelling Society, posted a comment with blood-curdling statistics. In a study of literacy among twenty “high income” countries, the United States ranked 12th (this, I might add, is better than the situation in mathematics; however, we are certainly high among the nations offering “Math Anxiety” courses). 50% of adults cannot read a book written at an eighth grade level (this is not too bad either; by way of compensation, they can read the texts they send one another every minute; this makes them engaged citizens and saves our society from the accusation of elitism). The more one reads those numbers, the more depressed one feels. The document sounds like the opening chapter of the Pickwick Papers: horses bolt, boats overturn, boilers burst, 45 million are functionally illiterate, illiteracy costs American taxpayers an estimated twenty billion dollars a year, three out of four people on welfare can’t read, and so it goes. Clearly, Spelling Reform will cure at least some of those ills. Valerie Yule suggests that we omit all surplus letters and change all misleading letters. I think there are two hitches here. First, ALL surplus letters are too numerous to eliminate in one swell swoop: consider wright, knead, full, beauty, thumb, as opposed to rite, need, the suffix –ful, duty, and drum. Second, the suggestion to introduce ì, è, and ò has, to my mind, no chance of being accepted by the Spelling Congress (scheduled to take place in 2016) or the public. If, among the prevailing chaos and despondency, there is one good thing about English orthography, it is the absence of diacritics in it.

Image Credit: (1) “When Pigs Fly?” by Mike Miller. CC BY SA 2.0 via Flickr. (2) “Little Girl” by Unsplash. Public Domain via Pixabay. (3) “Rocky’s Workout” by PINKÉ. CC BY NC 2.0 via Flickr.

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Great Power: a ‘bridge too far’ for India?

Think of it. India was there when the Pharaohs ruled Egypt. It interacted with the Ancient Mesopotamian empires on the Tigris and the Euphrates.  India was the mystery Alexander of Macedon set out to conquer. Indian spices and precious stones, finely woven cottons and silk, and peacocks, were the luxuries and the exotica craved by Imperial Rome in the age of the Caesers. Much of Southeast and offshore Asia had Hindu kingdoms, and absorbed Indic values and culture, even as Tibet, Central Asia, China, and Japan came under the thrall of Buddhism emanating from the subcontinent. The Ramayana lore so forms the cultural core of countries in this “Farther India” that the 800-year old Thai monarchy still has its historic capital of Ayuthhaya, an ancient form of Hinduism is still practised in Bali, Indonesia, and the adventures of the great Monkey King with mythical powers journeying to the “Western Kingdom” – India – remains the stuff of traditional stories dear to the people of China. So, India is and has always been a civilizational presence and cultural magnet. Alas, that is a far cry from being a great power in the modern age.

Except India, its civilizational imprint aside, has all the attributes of a great power. It has prime strategic location enabling domination of the Indian Ocean, supplanting the Atlantic Ocean as the most strategically important waterway. India’s peninsular landmass jutting out into the sea is, as many have noted, like the prow of an immense aircraft carrier, permitting Indian naval assets and land-based air forces to maintain a grip on the oceanic expanse and choke off adversary forces foraying into “the Indian lake” at the Malacca, Lumbok and Sunda Straits in the east and, in the west, the eastern ends of Hormuz and Suez, and prevent a land power such as China from accessing these proximal seas.

India has a burgeoning economy and the largest, most youthful workforce in the 18-35 age-group, promising the manpower to make India both a manufacturing powerhouse — the “workshop” to the world — and the richest, most extensive, consumer market. Further, the country has been a “brain bank” the world has long drawn on – an endless source of talented scientists, engineers and financial managers from institutions, such as IITs, IIMs, and IISC that are now global brands, helping India to emerge as a knowledge power (in information technology, pharmaceuticals, engineering research and development, and “frugal engineering”). India, moreover, is a stable if raucous democracy, and boasts of one of the largest, most apolitical, professional and “live fire”-blooded militaries anywhere. So, why isn’t India a great power yet?

India is bereft of national vision and self-confidence. It has the will to security but not the will to power. This is manifested in the absence of strategy, policies and plans to make India a great power. An over-bureaucratized and fragmented system of government unable to muster policy coherence and coordination hasn’t helped. The resulting incapacity to think and act big has led New Delhi to take the easy way out and emphasize soft power, when historically nations have become great by acquiring self-sufficiency in armaments and using military forces for strategic impact.

But the Indian Army, that during colonial times won an empire for the British and sustained a system of “distant defence,” with its ramparts extending seawards in the arc Simonstown-Hong Kong, and landwards from the Gulf, the Caspian Sea to the Central Asian khanates, has been reduced to border defence becoming in the process as stick-in-the-mud and passive-defensive minded as a strategically clueless government.

The irony is that an impoverished, resource-scarce, India of the 1950s, strode the international stage like a giant – leading the charge against colonialism, racism, and championing “general and complete disarmament”, assuming leadership of the Third World-qua-Nonaligned Movement, and emerging as the balancer between the super power blocs during Cold War. It was also the time Jawaharlal Nehru articulated an “Asian Monroe Doctrine” backed by Indian arms and, by way of classical realpolitik, seeded a nuclear weapons programme and a cutting edge aerospace industry that eventuated in the Marut HF-24, the first supersonic combat aircraft designed and produced outside of Europe and the US.

Just how far India has fallen off the great power map may be gauged by the fact that some 50 years after the Marut took to the skies the country is a conventional military dependency, relying on imported armaments and with its foreign policy hostage to the interests of the vendor states. And, far from imposing its will in Asia, New Delhi has become a pliant and pliable state, accommodating US interests (on nuclear non-proliferation, Iran, Afghanistan) one moment, adjusting to the demands of a belligerent China the next.

Far from earning great power status the old fashioned way by being disruptively proactive and, in Bismarck’s words, by “blood and steel”, the Indian government sees it as an entitlement, as recognition bestowed on the country by friendly big powers. Never mind that such position gained at the sufferance of other countries is reed-thin, as the recent move by a supposedly friendly US to join another friendly state Russia and China in opposing India’s entry into the UN security Council showed. The fact is India, albeit elephant-sized, remains a marginal power with a small footprint and, in real terms, commands little respect in the world. For such a recessive country, great power will always be “a bridge too far.”

Featured image: “Traditional and Modern – Kochi – India – June 2008″ by Adam Jones CC BY SA via Flickr.

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Sex, hygiene, and style in 1840s Paris

The young woman who inspired Dumas’s La Dame aux Camélias and Verdi’s Violetta in La traviata conceived at least once in the course of her 23 years. At the time she was in her late teens. During the five years that followed the birth of her baby, between the ages of 17 and 22, she prospered as the leading courtesan of the most glamorous city in Europe. The word ‘courtesan’ is a euphemism for an upper class prostitute, a paid woman who doubled as a trophy exhibit at the theatre and opera. The world of chic Parisian sexuality in the 1840s was simultaneously covert and ostentatious: the more brilliant the appearance of the courtesan, the grander the reputation for wealth and generosity of the buck or ‘lion’ who owned her just then. Only rich and famous men could afford women like Marie Duplessis whose wardrobe and apartment, paid for by the men who kept her, added up to a fortune.

After the grand shows and premieres in town, it was time for the final act of the evening. In La Dame aux Camélias Dumas does not leave much to the imagination when the two young men fetch up in the apartment of Marguerite Gautier (aka Marie Duplessis). Admittedly, the cruder parts of his account concern the narrator’s friend. While he is attending to the young courtesan, who is having a tubercular coughing fit, his friend is having sex with her middle-aged pimp in an adjacent room. This is Dumas’s way of deflecting the rawness of paid sex from his heroine while leaving us in no doubt about what is involved for all parties concerned.

Boulevard de la Madeleine, Paris. Marie Duplessis’s boudoir was the first window from the left (above ‘Soldes’) on the first floor. Photo courtesy of René Weis. Used with permission.

Marie Duplessis had a number of prominent sexual liaisons between 1842 and 1846. Under the circumstances it seems almost incredible that she should only have become pregnant once. Contraception as we know it wasn’t available then while at the same time she couldn’t afford to conceive: pregnancy would inevitably spell the end of her sexual career and diminish her erotic value thereafter. Courtesan mothers were not in demand, which is why she pleaded with the few people who knew about her baby not to reveal her secret. If women wanted to stay in the ‘business’ after motherhood it would be as pimps at best. Marie Duplessis’s own chaperone, one Clémence Pratt, was the mother of a teenage daughter at the time of their business arrangement. After a life in prostitution Madame Pratt had reinvented herself as a moderately successful Parisian fashion designer while doubling as Marie Duplessis’s manager, a lucrative sideline.

When Marie’s belongings were sold off after her death, her apartment was packed with respectable Parisian women who wanted to see for themselves. The room that attracted most interest was her boudoir and the adjacent ‘cabinet de toilette’, which intervened between the boudoir and her bedroom. What the auction catalogue describes as cabinet de toilette we would term a luxury en suite bathroom. But of course there was nothing like that in the period. While 1840s Paris boasted an impressive number of high rise stone apartment blocks, like the one that she inhabited at 11 Boulevard de la Madeleine (see illustration), none of them had any plumbing for toilets, showers, or baths. All human waste generated in these huge buildings needed to be disposed of in chamber pots, emptied by maids, while fresh water for ablutions was delivered on a daily basis by water carriers.

Under the circumstances general bodily cleanliness and sexual hygiene in particular posed considerable challenges, as indeed did the airing and, probably, perfuming of spaces used for purging. From the auction catalogue of her belongings, which is understandably discreet on this, it would seem that Marie Duplessis had acquired what we would recognize as a sit-down toilet, shielded inside a commode. It was the only substantial item in her flat that she had purchased herself. In reality this would have been an elaborate piece of furniture with, inside it, a covered seat above a form of chamber pot. Her rich lovers and patrons evidently expected the highest sophistication from courtesans like her in return for the vast sums they expended on them. It appears that in this most intimate respect, as in more public ones, Marie Duplessis led the field by sheer stylishness. Her instinctive class was what drew her lovers to her. Many of her admirers in Paris granted that she was far from being the city’s most beautiful woman while almost all of them, women included, noted that she was the most graceful courtesan in town, and one of the city’s most generous women.

Featured image: “Paris” by Moyan Brenn CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

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Leadership for change

Change is constant. We are all affected by the changing weather, natural disasters, and the march of time. Changes caused by human activity—inventions, migrations, wars, government policies, new markets, and new values—affect organizations as well as individuals. Threats and opportunities call for change. But how organizations change depends on leadership, the knowledge and philosophy of leaders, and their ability to engage followers. They can direct change just to improve the bottom line, or they can also change organizations to improve the wellbeing of customers, collaborators, and communities.

Leadership is a word and concept that has been argued as much as any organizational term. One reason why is that there are different kinds of leaders in terms of personality, role, and behavior. A definition may fit one type but not others. Another reason has to do with the definition of good leadership. The word ‘good’ can mean either effectively good or morally good. Leaders can be effective but morally bad when, (like Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin) their purpose is control, conquest, and destruction. Effective and morally good leaders, like Abraham Lincoln and Nelson Mandela, inspire collaboration for the common good, for a higher moral purpose. They stimulate and support independence, dialogue, and responsibility rather than conformity, tribalism, and exploitation.

Of all the definitions proposed, the one definition of a leader that seems to me unarguable is: a leader is someone with followers. If you have followers, you are a leader, and if you do not have followers, you are not a leader, even if you have a formal position of authority. Leadership, then, is a relationship between leaders and followers. But this relationship has varied in different cultures and organizations. In some contexts, the leadership model has been autocratic. In other contexts, it has been collaborative.

Leaders of change in the age of knowledge work have to be different from autocratic or bureaucratic leaders. They need followers who want to collaborate and innovate. To gain collaboration, leaders may have to change how people think as well as what they do. They may need to encourage the doubters, infuse the belief that people can change an organization’s future and provide the tools to make it happen. No leader of a complex organization can do this alone. Leadership of change in the age of knowledge work and learning organizations requires different types of leaders working together.

Image credit: White King _1311655 by pianowow. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

In contrast to leadership, management has to do with administering processes and control systems, like planning, budgeting, evaluating, and measuring. It has to do with completing tasks rather than engaging followers. Managers can share their responsibilities or hand them off to others. Most tasks and responsibilities of management can be delegated to teams, like those in the Morningstar Company in California, where employees are self-managed. The Economist reports that some companies have begun delegating management functions to machines.

In the past, managers usually knew their subordinates’ jobs better then they did. In knowledge organizations, where many subordinates are experts who know more about their job than their bosses do, managers need leadership skills to develop collaborative teams. In some large companies, team members are located in different places. Management needs to be shared, and leadership requires exceptional communication skills.

In contrast to management, leadership is a relationship that can’t be given away. If people follow you because they want to follow you, you cannot hand over that relationship to someone else. To achieve positive change, organizations need both management and leadership, but they don’t necessarily need managers.

The Context of Leadership

Leadership depends not only on qualities of mind and heart, but also on context. In one context, someone may be a leader and not so in another context. It’s a mistake to describe the qualities needed for leadership without indicating the context. The context for leadership includes two main factors:

the challenges facing a leader;
the values and attitudes of followers.

Like other primates, we have a tendency to form hierarchies because of our drive for mastery, which can become a drive for power over others. But to satisfy our need for dignity, we prefer egalitarian organizations. We recognize that leadership may be needed and we sometimes idealize leaders for a while, especially when they appear to be helping us respond to a challenge. But idealization can turn to contempt when people decide a leader is no longer useful, or has even become a danger to them.

In tribes of hunter-gatherers, leaders were needed for hunting and war parties, but once the action was over, they were not allowed to hold on to authority. If they tried to retain command, they were ridiculed, shamed, and even ostracized. In more mordern times, peasant villagers see no need for leaders. The family is an independent unit that resists outside interference. There is little need for change.

Some worker-owned cooperative organizations don’t need leaders. Like peasant villages, decisions can be made by committees of owner-workers. In the open-source software community of hackers who develop Linux and Apache systems, unpaid project leaders emerge to decide on features, when to release software, and when to pass on the baton. It’s a more modern version of a hunter-gatherer community. They will only follow leaders when threatened.

Leadership qualities that serve in one context may not in another. In the 1980s, managers and administrators, not leaders, ran the large companies and the government agencies with which I worked in. These bureaucracies were governed by rules and regulations, designed to keep things moving on a predictable path. Leaders were rare and viewed with suspicion, because they questioned policies and recruited followers who became disruptive insurgents.

In the current context, leaders are needed not only to foresee threats and opportunities, but also to envision an ideal future and engage collaborators to realize it. To succeed, they must be able to gain partners, both within and outside of their organizations. However, the impact of these organizations on employees, customers, communities and the environment will depend on the philosophies articulated and practiced by leaders, the purpose and values that shape the organizational culture, and direct decisions about products and practices.

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