Oxford University Press's Blog, page 624

How well do you know Lao Tzu? [quiz]

This August, we’re featuring Lao Tzu as our Philosopher of the Month. An ancient Chinese philosopher and poet, Lao Tzu is a legendary figure in Taoism. His major work, the Tao Te Ching, is one of the most significant treatises in Chinese cosmogony (narratives about the origins of the universe) – in which Lao Tzu explains his ideas by way of paradox, analogy, ancient sayings, repetition, rhyme and rhythm. He is a central figure in Chinese culture, revered by turns as a deity, historical forbear, politician, intellectual, and religious thinker.

Do you know what ‘Tao’ really means, in which dynasty Lao Tzu is believed to have been born, or even how to spell his name(s)?

Featured Image Credit: ‘China Sunset Hongkong Harbour’, Photo by L-evate, CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay.

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Ghosts of Katrina

Ten years have passed since Hurricane Katrina. New Orleans is in the midst of celebrating a remarkable renewal. I still live in the same apartment that I lived in before the storm. It looks the same, perhaps a bit more cluttered, but the neighborhood has certainly changed. A yoga studio opened up across the street, for which I’m delighted. A handful of art galleries, a new “tapas” place, and a store that sells only swanky reading glasses, have all opened up. It was not necessarily a bad neighborhood before the storm, at least by New Orleans standards, but it has never been as fancy as it is today, and this can be said of much of post-Katrina New Orleans.

Personally, I like it; unlike many people, my rent has not gone up too much and I like living in a posh neighborhood. But it somehow feels false, as if a beautiful new façade has been pasted over the city’s wounds. Dark memories and unresolved questions from the aftermath of Katrina still seem to haunt the present.

My own experience of Katrina was largely vicarious. My cat and I hitched a ride with a friend the day before the storm and headed north. I ended up spending a month with my sister in Kentucky. I did not have much to deal with when I got back; the apartment was fine, and I had a job. In my role as oral historian for The Historic New Orleans Collection, however, I spent the next four years interviewing over five hundred first responders about their experience during the immediate aftermath of the storm. They were involved in dramatic episodes throughout the area, many of which were unreported during the media blitz that followed the storm. Their memories still cling to my own perceptions of almost every neighborhood in the city.

On my way to work each day, I pass under the elevated expressway that skirts the city’s central business district. I remember stories told to me by prison guards who were involved in the evacuation of the parish prison. They discovered a body of a man, who witnesses said had been thrown off the overpass. The guards covered the body and went back to the unfolding crisis within the prison. To my knowledge, this murder was never investigated. A number of years ago, someone had donated to our museum a grisly image of a body under the overpass. Could it be the same man?

Each time I claim my luggage at the Louis Armstrong International Airport, I can’t help but imagine sick and elderly people laid out like baggage on the luggage carousel, which I learned about from members of a medical team working at the airport. They retreated to the airport after they were forced to abandon a makeshift clinic at the New Orleans Arena that was set up to help those who sought refuge at the Superdome. Several of their doctors were physically attacked when the environment around the Dome began to fall apart.

I go to the Arena a few times a year to watch basketball and every time, I remember a powerful narrative given to me by the medical team’s chaplain. His job was to man what they called the “expectant” area: a place for those who were beyond the capabilities of the team to help, and who were “expected” to die. The chaplain prayed with them, held their hands. When asked how many died, he passionately rebuked the generally-accepted claims that only six people died at the Superdome/Arena area; he claimed to have “eyeball knowledge” of many more deaths. His claims were backed up by some of his team members, but to my knowledge there is still no definitive body count.

Soon after I returned to the city following Katrina, I rode my bike down St. Claude Avenue to the bridge over the industrial canal that separates the Upper and Lower Ninth Wards. The whole city was a mess, only a few neighborhoods had been reopened, and most businesses were still closed. This area, however, seemed particularly post-apocalyptic. A shell of a burned-out city bus lay on the median of the street, windows of nearby buildings had been smashed out. It looked like a riot had taken place.

A few years later I did a series of interviews with wildlife agents who participated in boat rescue operations in the area right after the storm, including Captain Stephen McManus and Sergeant James Hagan of the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries.  They saved hundreds of people from rooftops in the Lower Ninth Ward and dropped them off on the St. Claude Avenue Bridge. Once there, they had no place to go, and the crowd became increasingly agitated. According to one of the agents the situation erupted when the crowd overheard an argument he had with another agent over what to do with the body of an elderly woman who had died. As angry civilians pounded on the sides of their vehicles, the agents abandoned the scene as the situation escalated. What happened after they left?

Not far from where this all happened, the Saint Roch Market opened this past April with great fanfare. The mayor and other city leaders gave uplifting speeches about the city’s recovery. Proud new vendors presented their wares ranging from sweet and savory crepes to fancy cocktails and cold pressed juices. The market was the crowning jewel of gentrification in that part of the city. A few weeks later it was trashed. A dozen windows were smashed; paint was splattered on the walls along with hateful graffiti.

There is an undercurrent of disenchantment in New Orleans that’s deeper than anger over higher rents and the loss of familiar things. An unspoken contract between people and their community was broken by Katrina. For some, the sense that the city is safe from the sea is gone; there is no real trust that our leaders can prevent the community from slipping once again into chaos; nor is there faith that the truth of events will ultimately be known and justice done. These ghosts of Katrina linger, impacting life in subtle, often uncomfortable ways. It may take a generation to convince some that this recovery is something real and lasting. For them, the city’s renewal may just look like a fresh paint job on an old rickety haunted house.

For more information on New Orleans’ recovery, visit Katrina 10.

Image Credit: “A flooded St. Louis Cemetery No. 2 in New Orleans in the shadow of the Iberville Housing Project and the skyline of the Central Business District” by Chris Mickal. Courtesy of The Historic New Orleans Collection.

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Common infectious diseases contracted by travellers worldwide [infographic]

This summer intrepid travelers everywhere are strapping on backpacks, dousing themselves in mosquito spray, and getting their inoculations — ready to embark on journeys that will take them into contact with some of the most virulent viruses and nastiest bacteria on the planet. Even those of us who aren’t going off the beaten track may end up in close quarters with microbes we’d rather not befriend. Explore some of the most common infectious diseases around the globe and how to identify them in this infographic.

Download the infographic as an interactive pdf or jpg.

Headline image credit: Mosquito. CC0 via Pixabay.

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Take down the wall: a Q&A with Michael Dear

We asked Michael Dear, author of Why Walls Won’t Work, for his input on an issue that has taken the nation by storm: border relations between the US and Mexico. He talks about his observations and experiences, as well as his predictions for the border’s future, in this interview.

Describe your day-to-day experiences of borderland communities.

Most of my travel time is devoted to listening to people, observing, and trusting to serendipity. People on both sides of the border are generally helpful and friendly. Once I got lost in fog on my way to the mouth of the Rio Grande at the Gulf of Mexico, and pair of Mexican cops offered me a ride along the beach in their truck. And they came back later to pick me up! On another less happy occasion, I was detained for a while by Mexican federal police in Ciudad Juárez, because I photographed what they described as an ‘active’ crime scene. My biggest worry was when they took away my passport.

You must expect heightened levels of scrutiny at any border zone. Truth be told, I experienced more unpleasant confrontations on the US side of the line, where so many people are ‘guarding’ the border in official (and unofficial) capacities. Heavily-armed vigilantes on self-appointed missions to protect the homeland always make me nervous.

There are comical moments too, when you simply misjudge a situation. One time, when I was trying to get a hotel for the night in a small Mexican town, the reception clerk was being really awkward, making it more and more difficult to secure rooms. Finally, my Mexican collaborator figured out that we were actually negotiating hard to spend the night at a brothel, where rooms rented by the hour. We moved on, after picking up the shards of our shattered dignity.

Has the border situation changed much in recent years?

I began focused work on the border in the early 2000s, before the US Department of Homeland Security began to fortify the line. After that, the boundary zone became one enormous construction zone. Today, the borderlands seem a lot calmer, in part because construction is essentially over.

On the Mexican side, cartel-related violence is down – though far from entirely eliminated – because President Peña Nieto pursued a ruthless campaign to eliminate cartel leaders. The Mexican economy has performed well, so there is less pressure on Mexicans to migrate, and a downturn in the US economy reduced the number of jobs available for migrants.

At home, the US Congress failed (again) to pass comprehensive immigration reform. President Obama pushed deportation rates to a record high, thereby demonstrating his commitment to securing the border, but he later eased some of the more punitive practices in immigration law. His administration encountered nationwide push-back from communities opposed to involving local law enforcement in support of federal immigration prosecutions. This ultimately caused the collapse of the ‘Secure Communities’ program, which was a centerpiece of both the Obama and Bush administrations.

Image credit: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” Campo, California 2006. (c) Michael Dear. Used with permission.

What should be done about the Wall between Mexico and the US?

Border residents speak plainly to me about what they need. The list begins with repairing the extensive damage done to their communities by the wall-builders, and includes restoration of the natural landscapes scarred by fortifications and surveillance apparatus. People want the walls taken down wherever possible, and demand an end to the occupation of their communities by government security forces, now operating deep within US territory.

Borderlanders want economic development and infrastructure improvements. Everybody complains about extended delays at border crossings, so increasing the capacity at the ports of entry is a top priority. It makes perfect sense to encourage the energy and creativity found in so many border towns these days. In Mexico, courageous efforts are dedicated to reclaiming neighborhoods ravaged by drug wars. On both sides, there is tremendous potential for promoting borderland tourism and for supporting small businesses through community development programs.

In a nutshell, border residents want their lives back. Their main desire is to manage their destinies without interference from Washington DC or Mexico City.

Surely there’s a role for federal governments in any ‘post-wall’ recovery?

Federal governments on both sides have the responsibility to deal with national security, drug trafficking, and immigration. In recent years, these geopolitical responsibilities have been foisted on the border zone’s ‘third nation’, which has neither the resources nor the legislative authority to deal with them. It is unrealistic and unfair to dump these national problems onto the laps of border people.

Do you expect federal governments to act on their obligations?

Not anytime soon. In Mexico, Peña Nieto’s administration is caught up in a series of internal crises and scandals that have taken the sheen off his presidency. He complains that border fortifications interrupt the free flow of Mexican exports into the US, but frankly, the only time Mexico heeds its northern border is when economic prosperity is threatened.

In the US, a popular majority favors comprehensive immigration reform, and pressures for change will intensify as the 2016 election nears. Yet Republicans in Congress continue their scorched-earth tactics, rejecting any proposal that doesn’t prioritize more walls and more border patrol agents. The consequent stalemate probably means that major immigration reform is off the table, at least until 2017.

What happens next?

There are many reasons to be optimistic about the future of the ‘third nation’, as my book suggests. Left to their own devices, border residents will always find ways to live together and prosper, as they did in centuries before the Wall or the international boundary even existed.

Right now, I’m heading back to the border to speak to high school students about the deep history of cross-border cooperation. Many young people there have grown up knowing little beyond cartel violence in Mexico, or the arrogant racism emanating from certain people and places in the US.

Featured image credit: US-Mexico border deaths monument by Tomas Castelazo. CC-BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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Austerity and the prison

Greece is not alone in suffering from budget cuts arising from the era of austerity. In the UK, local councils, libraries, museums – all public services have been cut. Criminal Justice has not escaped this cost-cutting. The consequence has been fewer police officers on the streets, less money for legal aid lawyers, and closures of Magistrates courts. Prisons too have been hit; the government has reduced the amount it spends running correctional facilities. This has meant fewer programs and services for prisoners, more austere prisons as well as more work for fewer prison officers.

It’s a strange way to reduce the costs of the prisons. Imagine proposing to cut the costs of Emergency wards by reducing the average amount spent treating each patient. Like prisons, these facilities are overcrowded and overstretched. We also know that too many people present at one of these facilities when they could be treated far more cheaply, more quickly and equally effectively if we had more out-of-hours GP clinics. So health authorities have been creating more community–based services to reduce the caseload going to Emergency facilities.  It’s the same for prisons: the only effective way of reducing costs is to cut the number of people being sent there, by punishing them in other ways.

We could save a bucketful of money by reducing the number of people sent to prison and the average time prisoners spend inside. In the UK, the cost of maintaining an adult in prison for a year is the equivalent of a year in a comfortable London hotel – about 40,000 pounds. The cost of housing a juvenile in prison is even higher. So, if we could cut the number of prison admissions by half, and reduce the average stay inside by six months, we would save hundreds of millions of pounds. This could then be spent on more (and more effective) prison programs to reduce re-offending, or it could be transferred across to another public service. In the health service for example, this would permit the UK to hire hundreds more nurses and physicians. I don’t know about you but I would be happy to chop a few months of the average prison sentence if it resulted in hiring more medical professionals.

Ah, you say, this proposal will mean more crime — and more victims. The statistics tell us otherwise. Re-offending rates of prisoners are higher, not lower, than re-offending rates of offenders punished in the community – on probation or doing unpaid community work. So prison is not a more effective punishment than community penalties. In addition, longer sentences do not prevent crime more effectively than shorter sentences. An 18- month sentence achieves no more crime prevention than a 12 month sentence. Don’t take my word for it: check the official re-offending statistics published by the  Ministry of Justice in the UK or the Bureau of Justice Statistics in the US.

Image credit: “Prison cell” by AlexVan. Public Domain via Pixabay.

Ah, you say again, but your proposal of shorter sentences will mean offenders will be punished less than they deserve, and less than the public want. Not so; sentence lengths in the US, the UK (and to a lesser extent Canada) are much longer than they are in other western nations like Holland or Germany – for the same crime. How do the Dutch and the Deutsch get away with punishing offenders with other penalties, or imposing much shorter sentences? The answer is that the UK, the US and other high punishment societies have drifted into sentencing policies that result in large and expensive prison populations.

Just reading the newspapers shows you how tough the system is on offenders. Remember the Aussie who jumped into the Thames and delayed the start of the annual Oxford-Cambridge Boatrace a couple of years ago? Did that crime necessitate imprisonment for months? Couldn’t we have devised a better way of punishing him – a fine, plus community work, and a term of probation? Or what about another case in which two young adults had the unwise idea of having sex in a public park on a Sunday afternoon (they were drunk, there’s a surprise). Although they were remorseful afterwards and pleaded guilty, they went to prison. Their conduct was unacceptable, but did it justify imprisonment?

There are many ways of being tough on offenders without having to resort to imprisonment.  We can seize their property – cars; computers, iphones, tvs. Or restrict their travel by suspending their passport – there goes the summer holiday. We can deduct money from their pay every month, or dock their benefits. We can make them work without pay in the community. Of course, most countries have a range of alternative sentences but they simply aren’t used enough, particularly in the high prison countries I have cited.

The current fiscal crisis has forced us to try and get more out of less in all areas of public service. We should use the squeeze on government budgets to rethink sentencing policy, keeping prison for those who are dangerous or who have committed truly serious crimes. Otherwise we are punishing offenders more than is necessary, and paying dearly for it out of our taxes. At the present time, too many offenders are being sent to prison when they could be more effectively punished in the community.

Featured image credit: “Prison” by stokpic. Public Domain via Pixabay.

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60 years of Guinness World Records

On the 27 August 1955, the first edition of the Guinness Book of Records – now Guinness World Records, was published. Through listing world records of both human achievements and of the natural world, what started as a reference book became an international franchise, gaining popular interest around the globe. In celebration of this anniversary of weird and wonderful world records, we’ve selected a few favourites from talented individuals featured in our online products. What will the next 60 years bring us?

Featured image: Earth’s horizon and the blackness of space are featured in this image photographed by an STS-131 crew member on the Earth-orbiting space shuttle Discovery. NASA. Public domain via NASA.

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Ten facts about the steel drum

When you think of the steel drum, you might picture yourself relaxing on a tropical vacation. But did you know that the steel drum was born out of poverty and a local ban on drums? The steel drum originated in the late 1930s on the island of Trinidad and was played as part of a steel band, a percussion ensemble contrived by lower-class rebellious teens. Learn more about the steel drum’s complex history, development, and current form with our ten fun facts below:

The steel drum is a tuned idiophone traditionally made from an oil drum, but today is made of high-quality steel. To make a steel drum, or a pan, the bottom of an oil drum is first pounded into a bowl, then shaped and tuned with hammers to form distinct resonating surfaces.
Steel bands are stylistically versatile, but the most common steel band conventions of melodic phrasing and rhythmic structure are related to Calypso music.
While the first steel bands included instruments such as soap boxes, biscuit tins, and dustbins, modern steel bands include vibraphones, cow bells, congas, bongos, triangles and other percussion instruments.
Drums are made in families: bass pans, rhythm pans, and tenor pans.
A steelpan player on High Street in Trinidad and Tobago. Photo by Shanel. CC by-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
The steel band developed directly out of bamboo stamping tube ensembles, which provided carnival music for the lower-class in Port of Spain after a British colonial law restricted the use of drums with skin heads.
“Band wars” between rival steel bands emerged in Trinidad, complete with street fighting. Membership in a band soon became interpreted as hooliganism signaling creole disdain for European norms.
Manufacturing steel drums is a highly specialized skill. Pans are not standardized, as competition between rival bands fostered innovation in tuning and design.
Winston ‘Spree’ Simon of the John John steel band is credited with making the first pan. In 1946, his band performed Ave Maria and God Save the King for an audience that included the British Governor.
As of 1992, the steel band is Trinidad and Tobago’s national instrument. However, the notion dates from the 1940s when the steel band’s musical transformation was driven by competition between bands as well as by the efforts of progressive middle-class individuals to promote what they viewed as an indigenous art form unjustly maligned by colonial cultural standards.
Popularity of the steel band has grown. They are now plentiful in Caribbean diaspora communities as well as non-Caribbean communities all over the world. While Trinidad and Tobago continues to be the center, countries like Sweden, Switzerland, and Japan are now hubs of steel band activity.

Do you have any other fun facts about the steel drum to add to our list?

Featured image: oberlin steel drum 1. Photo by istolethetv. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

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Creativity and mental health

I am constantly perplexed by the recurring tendency in western history to connect creativity with mental disability and illness. It cannot be denied that a number of well-known creative people, primarily in the arts, have been mentally ill—for example, Vincent Van Gogh, Virginia Woolf, Robert Schumann, Robert Lowell, and Sylvia Plath.

However, the list has been made, in various ways, questionably large. Psychiatric diagnoses of eminent people have been derived not from clinical sources but from general and popular biographies revealing apparent clay feet of creative heroes, unproven gossip and hearsay, and a field called pathography, in which both literary and psychological analysts describe correlations between artists’ psychological constitutions and pathological elements they see in subject matter or characters.

Recent studies from Sweden and Iceland purportedly proved that creativity and severe mental illness were connected. These studies used statistical correlations of large numbers of mentally ill patients with their national census self-reports of following so-called creative occupations, clubs, and courses. Defining creativity in this way includes anyone who copies photographs, enrolls in creative writing courses, or plays and listens to music. Other small statistical studies have purportedly found psychopathology in art students and people attending creative writing classes or, in another popular approach, achieving positive scores on various creativity measures. Such individuals aren’t creative in the same sense as Henri Matisse, Don DeLillo, Maya Angelou, Billy Collins, John Williams, or Steve Jobs, and the large numbers of healthy and proficient writers, artists, composers, and scientists throughout history.

Don Delillo in New York City, 2011. Photo by ADM/Thousand Robots. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Studies using tests or clinical assessments have not proven a connection between creativity and mental illness. Almost all have had methodological and conceptual inadequacies: absent or poor controls, investigator bias, and unreliable testing tools. None have demonstrated validity with respect to actual creative performance. Shared deviations from the normative—unusual and remote associations or preferences, and divergent thinking (as opposed to convergent thinking toward a single correct solution)—perfuse the criteria used.

The confused beliefs and purported findings have primarily arisen because both creativity and mental illness involve deviations, sometimes fairly extreme ones, from normative modes of thought. Symptoms of mental illness differ from normal thinking and behavior, and creativity requires special or uncommon capacities. But there are sharp differences in effects; mental illness symptoms—compulsions, obsessions, delusions, hallucinations, panic attacks, depression, and personality disorders—deviate in stereotyped and frequently banal ways, whereas creativity involves novel and rich results. A common claim is that extreme euphoria and productivity are features of both creative work and bipolar illness. With the illness, however, these features are involuntary, devoid of judgment, and distorted, whereas creative artists’ productivity is purposeful, and euphoria results almost always from exceptional accomplishment. Suffering is an intrinsic component of mental illness but, despite the traditional romantic belief, such disruption seldom contributes to creative inspiration. Suffering for creative people may often come from a mistaken lack of recognition and its consequences, neither direct cause nor effect of mental illness.

A factor in the conundrum, difficult to assess or measure, is the influence of the angst of modern times, the widespread social disruption and anxiety that became overt during the romantic period of the 19th century and continues today. This has cultivated an image of the suffering artist and favored artistic content–alienation, self-obsession, violence and sadism, extreme visual and sound imagery–seemingly connected with mental illness. Artistic expression has come to be considered therapeutic, a term that, though not always used rigorously, conjures up illness and its effects. Some mentally ill individuals have been attracted to the arts where themes and styles provide them with some experiential advantages. All mental hospitals offer art therapy and a number of discharged patients later pursue this activity.

The solution to the conundrum of mental illness in creative individuals lies, I believe, in the nature of the creative processes themselves. If the factors directly producing creations were in some way derived from, or even facilitated, by illness, there would be a necessary connection. However, from many years of objectively controlled research interviews and controlled experiments, I have identified three specific cognitive creative processes that diverge from ordinary thinking but are healthy and adaptive: janusian, sep-con articulation, and homospatial. The extensive measure of individual interview series were carried out and were systematically focused on work in progress with a large number of outstanding prizewinners in the arts and Nobel laureates in the sciences throughout Europe and the United States.

The janusian process operates in the verbal and logical sphere; the homospatial process in the spatial sphere; and, the sep-con articulation process produces integration. The janusian process consists of actively conceiving and using multiple opposites or antitheses simultaneously. The homospatial process consists of actively conceiving and using two or more discrete entities occupying the same space, a conception leading to the articulation of new identities. The process of sep-con articulation consists of actively conceiving and using concomitant separating and connecting–as with the articulate public speaker who keeps both words and ideas distinct and separate within a connected flow.

These creative processes are goal-directed, productive, and under rational governance–the hallmarks of healthy, adaptive psychological functions. Although they deviate from ordinary thinking and are difficult to use, they are not, like symptoms of mental illness, involuntary and disruptive. Those symptoms tend to block or derail creativity, whereas mental health is facilitating. When a creative person has been or becomes mentally ill, creative production must be carried out during periods of low symptom activity and anxiety.

Jackson Pollock, the father of abstract expressionism, was clinically diagnosed with bipolar illness and alcohol dependence. In the 1930s, he engaged in Jungian analytic therapy, which commonly involves the analysis of drawings. He submitted a large number, all derivative from other artists: surrealists, Mexican muralists, Picasso, and his mentor Thomas Hart Benton. None gave any evidence of his own breakthrough artistic mode. It was not until the summer of 1939, when he was improving and by his own statement devoid of moodiness and anxiety, attending parties where he was the only non-drinker, that he introduced the mode of abstract expressionist painting. He explained these artworks as both obscuring an image and expressing it at the same time, a janusian process formulation developed during his period of remission and low anxiety.

Creativity of all types is a premier form of psychological adaptation because it involves the ability to change and improve all features of the environment. Outstanding creators have strong motivation, self-affirmation, aversion to dogma, flexibility, and affinity for difference and novelty. It is better to celebrate these qualities and the cognitive creative processes than seek creative excellence in mental illness.

Featured Image: “Wheat Field with Cypresses” by Vincent van Gogh. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

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Speak—Spoke and Spoke—Spike

This is my 500th post for “The Oxford Etymologist,” nine and a half years after this column started in March 2006, and I decided to celebrate this event by writing something light and entertaining. Enough wrestling with words like bad, good, and god! Anyone can afford a week’s break. So today I’ll discuss an idiom that sounds trivial only because it is so familiar. Familiarity breeds not only contempt but also indifference.

Why do we say to put a spoke in one’s wheel? This question occupied the attention of some correspondents to Notes and Queries [NQ] from September 1853 to July 1854, and more than a century and a half later I found the exchange worthy of attention. We put a spoke in somebody’s wheel to frustrate the person. But “how can putting a spoke to a wheel impede its progress?” wondered the man who opened the discussion. Before writing a letter, he “inquired of an intelligent lady, of long American descent, in what way she had been accustomed to hear the phrase.” Though a woman and an American, the lady, as we hear, had excellent credentials. Her answer was: “Certainly as help: we need to say to one who had anything in hand of difficult accomplishment, ‘Do not be faint-hearted, I’ll give you a spoke’.”

The OED has several examples for the obsolete noun spoke meaning “good advice” and other helpful things, recorded just around the time when the first British colonists landed in the New World. Spoke “good advice” was, as we hear, used colloquially in American English in 1853 and, according to the OED, the same holds for British English, but this sense was recorded in books exceptionally seldom. The person who consulted the intelligent American lady was evidently not familiar with it, and Webster’s dictionary published around 1853 has no trace of it either. (Does the word spokesman have its strange root vowel from the noun spoke “speech”?) It appears as though the homonymy of the two words resulted in some confusion, and spoke “rod” could sometimes be taken for spoke “helpful speech.” The OED’s earliest citations of the English idiom in both senses go back to the end of the sixteenth century.

He may be a spokesman, but at one time the word for spokesman was speakman.

To most of us, I believe, spokes are put in wheels to thwart rather than promote our undertakings. Who did that terrible thing to real wheels? One of the correspondents who reacted to the query admitted that the phrase could refer to any interference, either for good or evil. “I fancy,” he wrote, “the metaphor is really derived from putting the bars, or spokes, into a capstan or some such machine. A number of persons being employed, another puts his spoke in, and assists or hinders them as he pleases.” But a beneficial spoke was ‘speech, spoken words’, not ‘part of the wheel.’ A constant contributor to NQ, who signed his letters by Q., cited een spaak in t’wiel steeken, the Dutch analog of the English idiom. This fact is worthy of note because the OED suggested that the English phrase was possibly a mistranslation of the Dutch one. But I can see no mistranslation: the two idioms are a perfect match. And do we have to understand that the English phrase is an adaptation of the phrase in Dutch? The astute Q. added that the effect of putting a spoke in a wheel was similar to that of spiking a cannon (that is, of driving a steel spike into the touchhole).

Not only did Q. (I am sorry for mixing metaphors) hit the nail on the head. Unwittingly, he anticipated a linguistic problem. Are spoke and spike related? Those words go back to Old English spaca (with long a as in Modern Engl. spa) and Middle Engl. spik (with long i, as in Modern Engl. peek), possibly a borrowing, but the lending language also had long i (in the same sense, as above). In Old English, long a developed from ai, and ablaut, under whose ferrule we toe the line, allowed ai and long i to alternate in the same root. Consequently, spoke and spike can be cognate. But back to the wheel!

Here are two explanations of the idiom from the real world.

“The phrase must have its origin in the days in which the vehicles used in this country [England] had wheels of solid wheels without spokes…. A vehicle used in the cultivation of the land on the slopes of the skirts of Dartmoor in Devonshire has three wheels of solid wood; it resembles a huge wheelbarrow, with two wheels behind, and one in the front of it…. As the horse is attached to the vehicle by chains only and has no power to hold it back when going down hill [sic], the driver is provided with a piece of wood, ‘a spoke’…for the purpose of ‘dragging’ the front wheel of the vehicle. This he effects by thrusting the spoke into one of the three round holes made in the solid wheel for that purpose.”

A condensed version of this explanation appears in Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (a popular but unreliable reference book), and one can find it repeated by gullible people on the Internet.

The trouble is that the wheel-and-spoke idiom has international currency. We have already seen the Dutch version. The French saying is mettre des batons dans les roues (bâtons “sticks” is the plural form). The Russian phrase is the same: vstavliat’ palki v kolyosa “to put sticks in the wheels” (sticks, not spokes). However, Russian also has a rhyming idiom piataia spitsa v kolesnitse “a fifth spoke in a chariot.” According to one theory, spitsa “spoke” is here a facetious substitute for koleso “wheel” (stress on the last syllable; to a cart a fifth wheel would be an obvious impediment). Do the idioms in French, English, and Dutch have a common source? Even if in most of Europe there were carts like those in Devonshire, it is hard to imagine that they gave rise to the idiom. German lacks an equivalent; in Germany, people “throw a stick between a person’s legs.”

This wheel certainly does not need another spoke.

The other explanation known to me is shorter but probably more to the point: “I have always understood the ‘spoke’ to be, not a radius of the wheel, but a bar put between the spokes at right angles, so as to prevent the turning of the wheel; a rude mode of ‘locking’, which I have often seen practised.” However we may interpret the idiom, spoke in it means “bar” or “stick,” but the questions of its origin and the mode of diffusion from language to language remain.

By way of conclusion, I would like to emphasize a curious detail. Everybody who has studied Old and Middle English knows that, if we understand all the words in a sentence and have unraveled the syntax, we are able to translate the text. We will never run there into expressions like at sixes and sevens, in a brown study, to sow one’s wild oats, kick the bucket, or beat about the bush. If someone kicks the bucket in an old text, it means exactly what it says: there are a bucket and a kicker. Similes are numerous, and so are proverbial sayings, but we find very little figurative language. In Germanic, only Old Icelandic had some metaphorical expressions. For example, in that language one could play with two shields (= equivocate), because one shield would be red (for war) and one white (for peace). Chaucer and his contemporaries are idiomatic to a very small degree, and the great Middle High German poets hardly at all. The explosion of figurative language came with the Renaissance. It was part of a major shift in the mental development of the former barbarians, who finally caught up with the Romans. Strange, that most of our idioms arose late (probably around the time when they surfaced in texts), and yet in most cases we don’t know their origin. Those who have read my post on laughter and the sense of humor will recognize a familiar motif.

Image credits: (1) Vinage bicycle wheel. © boschettophotography via iStock. (2) Spokesperson. © razihusin via iStock.

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Great Expectations: novel vs. miniseries adaptation

Because Great Expectations is one of many literary classics, it’s a popular candidate for adaptations into a number of movies, television series, and even a musical. After finishing this season’s Oxford World’s Classics reading group season, I obsessed over the characters and Dickens’s literary finesse– nothing was out of bounds of curiosity. The adaptation that caught my attention the most was BBC’s television miniseries that broadcasted on PBS in the US. In only three hour-long episodes, we’re granted a delightful adaptation of the novel. After binge-watching the series, I’ve compiled a few of my comments on the 2011 adaptation compared to the novel. But beware: spoilers lie ahead!

The missing time element

When we first follow Pip into Miss Havisham’s eerie home, the Satis House is seemingly frozen in time; the clocks are all stopped at twenty minutes to nine. But the show never makes a mention of the significance of 8:40AM, not even so much a hint or b-roll footage of a stopped clock. The forced stoppage of time highlights Miss Havisham’s unhealthy obsession over the past. Without that time element, we only get a glimpse of how deeply affected Miss Havisham is by Compeyson’s betrayal.

The lack of Biddy

Personally, I enjoyed Biddy in the novel, and while the adaptation did quite well without her character, I thought there was quite a lack of gentle firmness that she ultimately represents. Biddy is Pip’s first teacher and is, in a sense, his first “benefactor”. She teaches him to read and write without expectation for any repayment, and when Mrs. Gargery was injured, Biddy took charge of the house while Joe kept at the forge.

Some call Biddy the “anti-Estella”, and there is some credit to the claim. Biddy was not overly beautiful in the way Estella was, but her solid character, intelligence, and compassion for others gave me someone to cling onto empathetically (arguably, most people probably would identify with Biddy before Estella). She’s a strong character that could have done so well to round out the adaptation, but alas, Biddy never had a fair shot.

Joe’s “defensive and disappointed father” persona

Something about Joe’s character in the BBC adaptation didn’t quite sit well with me. He was scornful of Pip’s leaving home and refusing to become a blacksmith, but I suppose realistically, that would be a father’s natural reaction. The Joe in the adaptation alienates Pip, which is a huge leap from the Joe in the novel, who would give Pip his unconditional love so long as Pip accepted him.

For the purposes of the adaptation though, Joe was portrayed especially well. He’s much more confrontational with Pip than in the novel. I couldn’t help but feel a pang of hurt when, after Pip’s first few visits to Satis House and Pip begins to change his behaviors, Joe says, “Don’t know who I’ve got sitting in front of me sometimes.” Their relationship is strained throughout the series, which, given that Biddy isn’t there to leverage high-strung emotions, makes way for great dramatics.

Cold, cold Jaggers

After finishing this season’s Oxford World’s Classics reading group season, I obsessed over the characters and Dickens’s literary finesse– nothing was out of bounds of curiosity

Perhaps one of the more disappointing portrayals in the adaptation, Jaggers was terribly cold towards Pip. I was looking forward to the dinner at Jaggers’s house with Herbert Pocket, Startop, and Bentley Drummle. In the novel, Jaggers actually takes an interest in Drummle’s character, showing us a more human side of the lawyer. But in the adaptation, he’s quite brutal; in fact, he admonishes Pip at one point, barking at him, “Curiosity killed the cat. And nature can be most brutal.” We never get any other side of Jaggers other than his cold left shoulder and his cold right shoulder.

Antagonism of Orlick

One of the aspects I thought the novel lacked but that the adaptation did quite well was portray Orlick as the annoying, villainous pest. I didn’t grasp quite the same level of horridness of his character until closer to the end of the novel (when Pip is tricked into entering the lone house in the middle of the marshes) when Orlick reveals to Pip he had hit Pip’s sister. But throughout the adaptation, we see Orlick lurking in the corners when he isn’t arousing conflict with Mrs. Gargery or Pip.

Literary adaptations have a rather tall order to fill; in addition to meeting the standards of those who have read the book, these adaptations must also make as much sense as possible to someone who’s never picked up the book. On top of that, certain plot points must either be adjusted or removed altogether, which is sure to ruffle some feathers.

Admittedly, I’ve plenty more notes on the differences between Great Expectations the novel and the miniseries, but overall it’s done a fair job of telling a story of a boy who unexpectedly came into fortune and how it ultimately plays to his downfall.

Have you watched this adaptation? If so, what did you think of it? Are there aspects you really enjoyed or disliked? Let us know in the comments below.

Headline image credit: Great Expectations by Todd Anthony. (c). BBC via PBS.com.

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