Oxford University Press's Blog, page 671

Making plans for Nigel (Dodds): the General Election and Northern Ireland

Northern Ireland’s part in the General Election, often seen as peripheral, has already attracted more interest than usual. The Democratic Unionist Party’s (DUP) status as Westminster’s fourth largest party has not gone unnoticed – except perhaps by television broadcasters anxious to clinch election debates involving the leaders of much smaller parliamentary parties.

A legal challenge to the broadcasters’ contention that Northern Ireland is a place apart may fail – partly because, well, it is a place apart in its party lists. However, when the seemingly inevitable post-election trading begins, the region may have greater centrality.

The Conservatives or Labour might need the support of the DUP’s eight or, assuming the party wins back East Belfast from Alliance’s Naomi Long (probable, but no certainty), nine MPs. DUP members prefer the Conservatives by a ratio of seven to one over Labour (37% favour neither) and back the party in areas such as Euroscepticism and tougher immigration controls. However, DUP voters include a sizeable section of working-class loyalists (not least in target East Belfast and vulnerable North Belfast) looking for better economic fortune and decent welfare policies. Cognisant of this, the DUP opposes, for example, the bedroom tax. DUP leaders want what they can get.

So the pleasant task confronting Nigel Dodds, Westminster DUP leader (Peter Robinson remains in overall charge despite being ousted as an MP in 2010) might be to open sealed bids from David or Ed for support short of formal coalition. The problem is that the financial plans for Nigel et al have already been made. Shortly before Christmas, the Stormont House Agreement was concluded between Northern Ireland’s main parties and the British government. Whilst the latter’s claim to be offering ‘additional spending power of almost £2 billion’ was risible – more than half was old money or loans – the deal was a significant financial package which the Conservatives or even less austere Labour might struggle to improve. Across the sectarian divide Northern Ireland’s parties have long been adept at spending other people’s money but the Oliver Twist approach must surely have its limits?

What else could be offered to the DUP? Here we enter controversial arenas. Most members (two-thirds) believe ‘homosexuality is wrong’ and that abortion should not be legalised (three-quarters oppose a relaxation of the current restrictions in Northern Ireland). Many of the party’s elected representatives supported devolved power-sharing with Sinn Féin in the 2006 St Andrews Agreement on the basis of the preservation of regional autonomy in matters such as abortion and gay marriage prohibition. Six of the party’s eight MPs belong to the very religiously conservative Free Presbyterian Church (only 3% of Northern Ireland’s Protestants belong likewise) so Westminster interference in these ‘moral matters’ is unlikely to be tolerated. Where activism from Westminster might be welcome is on the issue of parades. Half the DUP’s elected representatives belong to the Protestant Orange Order, stopped from marching adjacent to a nationalist part of North Belfast for the last two years. The DUP wants an independent commission to resolve this dispute. Would Cameron or Miliband concede this?

What of Northern Ireland’s other political parties? Sinn Féin can reasonably expect to defend their five seats, although the party’s majority is a precarious four votes in Fermanagh and South Tyrone. A superb election could net Foyle and North Belfast. Would Sinn Féin ever take seats at Westminster? For some Shinners, abstention is only a tactic, not a fundamental republican principle. Yet even within a much-changed party, swearing an oath of allegiance to a British Monarch might not be the easiest sell for the leadership. It would require a special ard-fheis (conference) decision with a two-thirds majority and is not on the immediate agenda. Even if a ‘countering the DUP at Westminster’ argument is considered, it may not be enough motivation for a party whose priority remains fixed on positions in government throughout the island of Ireland.

So no Ed and Martin (McGuinness) deal then. Where Miliband can look for solid backing is from the SDLP’s three MPs, who should all be returned. Given the SDLP is Labour’s sister party they are firm allies. The Liberal Democrats and Alliance are also sister parties – apart from the latter’s one MP who, problematically for the concept, sits on the Opposition benches. Also occupying those benches is Sylvia Hermon, an Independent seemingly certain to be returned and to offer continuing support to Labour.

We are often told these days that Northern Ireland is ‘open for business’. What seems certain is that, post-election, so will be its political parties.

Article reposted with permission of the author from the Hansard Society, Britain Votes 2015.

Headline image credit: Stormont by Robert Young CC BY 2.0 via Flickr

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6 things you didn’t know about light

Light occupies a central place in our understanding of the world both as a means by which we locate ourselves in nature and as a thing that inspires our imagination. Light is what enables us to see things, and thus to navigate our surroundings. It is also a primary means by which we learn about the world – light beams carry information about the constituents of the universe, from distant stars and galaxies to the cells in our bodies to individual atoms and molecules. The impact of light on the modern world is immense, and often unrealized. For this reason, 2015 has been designated by the United Nations as the International Year of Light – a celebration of light and what is made possible by it.

Light is a remarkable thing. It is able to fuse atoms together at extraordinarily high temperatures to enable new modes of energy generation and at the same time to cool atoms down to the lowest temperatures imaginable – a few tens of billionths of a degree above absolute zero. Yet it might surprise you to know that what light actually is was only really properly understood less than a hundred years ago, and even now we are ekeing out new insights from our current understanding. It’s a great story, reaching back into the ancient world, with a global cast of contributors, from Euclid in Athens and Al-Hazen in Baghdad, conceiving the idea of light rays, to Ted Maiman in Los Angeles and Shuji Nakamura in Tokushima developing lasers, by way of Thomas Young in London and Albert Einstein in Bern showing the wave/particle duality of light. In each case, new understanding (say of refraction) has led to new applications (such as eyeglasses for correcting vision). It’s amazing how short is the path from discovery to technology when light is involved.

The Northern Lights may look impressive, but some of the most incredible effects of light are those we don’t see. Image: Aurora Borealis. Public domain via Pixabay.

Here’s just a few things that people are using light for today:

The Internet is powered by light. Light has an immense capacity to carry information, and can be guided along thin strands of glass called optical fibers. In fact, fiber broadband telecommunications allows thousands of billions of bits of information per second to be streamed into your home. The most precise clocks in the world rely on light. Timing is central to navigation and to commerce. The most precise way we know to measure time is by looking at particularly stable electron motion in atoms. Lasers allow us to connect the specific frequencies of this motion into frequencies that are used for time standards, thus making possible better GPS systems. The best tools for cutting fabrication of metals and other materials are often laser beams.  Things as diverse as stents for stabilizing blood vessels and surface patterning for more efficient solar cells are made by laser machining. Lasers weld together many of the structural components of modern automobiles and slice up silicon wafers into computer chips. The shortest controllable events made by humans are pulses of light. The current record is a pulse of less than a billion-billionth of a second in duration, which is used to look directly at electrons moving around in atoms and molecules by using it as a sort of stroboscope. The strangeness of the quantum world is exemplified by light. Scientists are able to generate particles of light – photons – that have properties that are very strongly correlated – such as their color and timing. In fact, these correlations are much stronger than anything we can imagine if we took separate photons with definite colors and arrival times. And even more strange is that it is possible to use these correlations between photons to build a completely secure communications system. The tiniest objects can be manipulated using light. Laser beams can hold onto small particles, from plastic beads down to atoms, and move them around. These “optical tweezers” enable single molecules to be studied for biophysical applications, make it possible to hold onto single cells to see how they stick together and to perform “micro surgery” on them, and to monitor the environment by analysing very small quantities of aerosols, for example.

This is just a small sample of how light is used in the laboratory and in everyday life. Despite having studied light for millennia, we are still learning new things about it, and new ways to use it. 2015 is going to be a great year for light!

Featured image credit: ‘Steel Wool Produces Light’, by 5zal Photography. Public domain via Pixabay.

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Making sense of mathematics

Mathematics is used in increasingly sophisticated ways in modern society, explicitly by experts who develop applications and implicitly by the general public who use technological devices. As each of us is taught a broad curriculum in school and then focuses on particular specialisms in our adult life, it is useful to ask the question ‘what does it mean to make sense of mathematics?’. Each of us will have personal needs to make sense in appropriate ways.

Initially ‘making sense of mathematics’ means what it says, namely to use our senses to organize the patterns we see and to make sense of the operations we perform in arithmetic. As we grow more sophisticated we use language to become more precise about the properties of geometrical figures and of numbers in arithmetic that lead on to algebra and beyond. Making sense of mathematics builds on our experiences and can take us on into a variety of different contexts in adult life.

Sometimes this means making sense of a particular situation and making a mathematical model by formulating principles that arise from the nature of the situation. At the very highest level, Newton thought very deeply about moving bodies and homed in on simple properties that led to his laws of motion. Einstein imagined a thought experiment sitting on a train moving at nearly the speed of light to produce his theory of special relativity. Stephen Hawking thought about the expanding universe to think back in time to when the universe began with a big bang.

For most of us, as our understanding of mathematics grows, we begin with everyday ideas and notice patterns that can be understood in mathematical ways. For instance in the arithmetic of whole numbers, we might multiply the same number together several times, say 2x2x2 and write it down as ‘two to the power of three’, symbolized as 23. Then we see that multiplying 23 by 22 is (2x2x2)x(2×2), so that 23+2 = 25 and we recognize the pattern that may be expressed algebraically as xm+n = xmxn that works for any number x and any whole numbers m, n.

Then we make a leap: what happens if we use this observation in the case where m, n are negative numbers or fractions? This gives new possibilities such as x1/2+1/2 = x1 suggesting that x1/2 is the square root of x. It leads to a more powerful development in mathematics that is valuable for some but can cause serious problems for those who think of xn as multiplying n copies of x together: this does not make any sense if n is a fraction or a negative number.

Such changes in meaning happen more often than we may realize. For example, in dealing with simple arithmetic, taking something away gives a smaller answer. But when negative numbers are introduced, taking away a negative number gives a bigger result. Squaring a non-zero number gives a positive result, but introducing complex numbers gives i2 =–1.

Advanced Theoretical Physics, by Marvin (PA) CC by NC 2.0 via Flickr

As mathematics becomes more sophisticated, natural mathematics, based on our human experience and imagination needs to take account of new ways of thinking. A new kind of formal mathematics evolves that is encountered by students in pure mathematics at university. Mathematics in a particular context is presented in terms of assumed properties (axioms) from which other properties are deduced (as theorems). Many such theories have already been invented: group theory, vector spaces, mathematical analysis, algebraic number theory and so on. Undergraduate pure mathematics introduces these theories and involves the student in making sense of the deductive practices to build a coherent theory in each topic. This has the advantage that properties proved as theorems now remain true not only in familiar situations but also in any new situation where the axioms are satisfied.

Making sense of formal mathematics is not just a one-way process that starts with axioms and proves theorems that can be used in applications. It also works in the reverse direction. Special theorems (called structure theorems) may be proved to show that a given axiomatic system has properties that can be sensed visually through drawing pictures and operationally using operations formulated in the axioms. This links formal theories back to natural ways of using our human senses and operations, now operating at a more sophisticated level supported by the formal theory.

Making sense of mathematics in applications — in physics, engineering, economics, business studies, weather prediction, and so on — involves translating the particular characteristics of the context and formulating mathematical models to solve problems and to construct more sophisticated theories with new applications.

Currently we are experiencing an amazing explosion of technology that grows in sophistication at an enormous pace. Pure mathematics builds ever broadening formal theories, requiring more subtle theoretical foundations to support ever-widening branches of theory and practice. As the tree of mathematical knowledge grows greater superstructure, it also needs to strengthen its foundational roots.

Sense making in mathematics as a whole is therefore not a static state of understanding. Each of us needs to find our own way of progressing in mathematics for our own purposes. Sometimes this may involve learning what to do to cope with a given situation, however, in the longer term it is more profitable to make an effort to make sense of mathematics in successive new contexts. This may involve sufficient insight to operate in a given social environment, to deal with a particular topic in a technical context or a formal interest in pure mathematics. Mathematics as a whole builds from our human perception and operation, becoming more sophisticated through the development of language and formal theories that evolve in both theory and practice.

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Kurt Cobain, making comedy of commercialism

The release of Brett Morgen’s documentary Montage of Heck has inspired new discussions of the legacy of Kurt Cobain, the Nirvana frontman who upended popular music before committing suicide in 1994. Few artists have straddled the line between nonconformity and commercialism like Cobain. Consider the three-album arc of his band’s life: though Nirvana boasted of producing its debut album Bleach for $600, Cobain became a Generation X icon by releasing its follow-up, Nevermind, on a major label, and by having a hit single, “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” that dominated MTV. In a deliberate effort to undermine his rock star image, Cobain enlisted underground producer Steve Albini to record the band’s angrier, noisier third album, In Utero, but he relented when his label asked to remix the singles to make them more radio friendly. “He found himself in a vexed position,” writes Nicholas Rubin in his new essay on Cobain in the American National Biography, “a rock star railing against the rock star trip, attracting acolytes he scorned as part of the sexist and homophobic strain of rock culture he despised.”

Speaking on Cobain’s ambivalence toward success and stardom, Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic told GQ magazine in 2011, “Kurt wanted it and he didn’t want it.” But, Novoselic continued, “You could bust Kurt, too. He’d contradict himself and he’d laugh. He knew it.” Indeed, Cobain had a biting sense of humor, an aspect of his personality often overshadowed by his dark lyrics, his heroin addiction, and his grisly death.

This sense of humor inspired Cobain and his bandmates to use corporate appearances that they and their peers would otherwise consider distasteful as platforms for satire and criticism. They played the game, but they bent the rules. In 1991, for instance, Cobain and Novoselic were interviewed on MTV’s Headbangers Ball, the heavy metal show known for big hair bands like Warrant and Trixter, acts that Nirvana’s success would hasten into irrelevance. Cobain wore a ridiculous yellow dress. “It’s Headbangers Ball,” he deadpanned, “so I thought I’d wear a gown.”

Nirvana around 1992. By P.B. Rage CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Cobain wore his politics once again when Nirvana appeared on the cover Rolling Stone in 1992. The magazine had tried to get an interview with Cobain in 1991, but he initially refused. “We wouldn’t benefit from an interview,” he wrote in a letter, “because the average Rolling Stone reader is a middle-aged ex-hippie turned hippiecrite, who embraces the past as ‘the glory days’ and has a kindler, gentler, more adult approach towards the new liberal conservatism.” While this letter is an incisive critique of dinosaur rock culture and middle-of-the-road political sensibilities, Cobain never sent it. Instead, he agreed to the interview, seemingly betraying his own views. For the cover photo, however, Cobain solidified his anti-authoritarian image by wearing a t-shirt that read “Corporate Magazines Still Suck.”

Perhaps Nirvana’s finest moment of music industry mockery came on 27 November 1991, two months after the release of Nevermind, when the band appeared on the British television institution Top of the Pops. Accustomed to touring with likeminded groups such as Sonic Youth and the Melvins, Nirvana surely felt a little out of place on a show that in 1991 featured the likes of Bryan Adams, Amy Grant, and Right Said Fred. Predictably, the band would perform “Teen Spirit,” which had just debuted on the UK singles chart at number 9, between songs from Diana Ross and Michael Bolton. But they would have to participate in the Top of the Pops tradition of miming their instruments to a prerecorded track. Only Cobain’s vocal would be live.

The resulting spectacle is as hilarious today as it was two decades ago. Novoselic spun his bass around his neck and tossed it in the air (a favorite move of his) as he jumped around the stage. Drummer Dave Grohl, the future Foo Fighter and alt-rock celebrity, alternated between pointing his sticks to the sky and playing the wrong drums. Cobain stood at the front, wearing sunglasses and smiling foolishly, using his left hand to strum his guitar out of rhythm with the song and covering the fretboard with his entire right hand in lieu of playing proper chords. He took full advantage of the live microphone, singing in an overdramatic low register reminiscent of Morrissey and changing the first line of the song from “Load up on guns, bring your friends” to the cheerful “Load up on drugs, kill your friends.” His voice distorted as he swallowed the mic into his mouth. The production soon descended into chaos, with Grohl’s bass drum crashing to the floor as the crowd and the band danced together on stage.

Nirvana was not the first band to pull this stunt — the Stranglers, Public Image Limited, and The Smiths had all put on farcical television performances in the late 70s and early 80s — but, as is often the case when it comes to Nirvana, to focus on originality misses the point: though they may not have done it first, they did it best, and they did it at exactly the right time. Nirvana’s Top of the Pops performance was a microcosm of Cobain’s career and his appeal — catering to the mainstream to blow it apart, repurposing punk rock performance and ideals toward a gigantic new audience of alienated youth who gobbled it all up, even if many of these new fans heard the guitars but missed the message.

Heading image: Memorial to Kurt Cobain in Aberdeen, Washington by MïK Watson. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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Does a person’s personality change when they speak another language?

During the first run of my Coursera course on the bilingual brain, a student asked whether changing languages leads to people changing personalities. Considerable discussion ensued about this on the forums. My initial answer was that language was a marker of a set of circumstances and as such was likely to be accompanied by a shift in context. This change in personality could also be observed in people who are in different personal situations. You might think of the shy person who becomes much more extroverted when talking to family or close friends. Alternatively, we could think about someone who acts in one manner with his co-workers but acts very differently when having a drink with former college dormmates. Another student then asked whether culture might play a role.

That is, language per se does not change someone but rather, a person may adopt the particular aspects of a culture. Culture can play a very large role in people’s behavior. Visits to Northern parts of Germany stood in stark contrast to the boisterous moods I saw on Wednesday afternoon in Bavaria during the summer. I was similarly struck by how withdrawn and serious people seemed in Lisbon. I had always equated Portuguese with the openness of the Brazilian people that made me wonder if culture could eliminate introversion all together. Puzzled by the idea that someone would want to be alone all the time, a Brazilian told me that in his country an introvert would most likely hang out at a party and speak to a few people in the corner while the extrovert would be drawing attention to himself or herself in the middle of the room. Lisbon seemed serious and sedate compared to Brazil. Even the accent was less melodic. But the language was for the most part the same.

As I thought about it more, I realized that language might serve as a form of context that triggers certain memories. One interesting analogy comes from work with deep-sea divers. Divers often seem to forget what happened to them underwater. Follow up work on this observation has found that when divers are taught a list of words underwater they are better at recalling more of those words later underwater than they are outside water. The opposite was also true. They exhibited better memory for words learned above water when they were asked to remember outside of water. Hence, a particular context serves to elicit memories relevant to that context. In this view, memory is driven by a set of cues that elicit certain responses from us.

Memory might also serve to cue different memories in a slightly different way. In a classic study, memory was enhanced by the particular context that is used during learning. For example, if participants pay attention to the case of a word (upper or lower) or meaning of a word while learning they could more easily process a list of words that matched the context of learning after a delay. Once again the format of learning cues was the preferred format for remembering.

From a memory point of view, language and/or culture can be thought of as a set of cues that elicit certain types of memories. It is entirely plausible that when exposed to these different cues people may actually shift what they remember. But the effect of change is not specific to bilingualism. It just happens that culture and/or language is a very explicit marker of this change. So maybe everyone changes depending on the context they are experiencing at the present moment. Bilinguals, engaged by context dependent memories, might just notice it more.

Featured image credit: Baixa in Lisbon, Portugal. CC0 via Pixabay.

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Which Shakespeare performance shocked you the most?

Inspired by Stanley Wells’ recent book on Great Shakespeare Actors, we asked OUP staff members to remember a time when a theatrical production of a Shakespeare play shocked them. From eye-gouging in King Lear to a musical adaptation of The Merry Wives of Windsor, from puppet Hamlet to an all-male cast version of The Taming of the Shrew, we discovered that some Shakespeare plays have the ability to shock even the hardiest of Oxford University Press employees. Grab an ice-cream on your way in, take a seat, and enjoy the descriptions of shocking Shakespeare productions below.

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Which Shakespeare performance shocked me the most? I think that honour would have to go to Trevor Nunn’s King Lear at the Courtyard Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon (2007) starring Sir Ian McKellen in the title role. The thrust stage made the performance feel very intimate, and I was taken aback by the intensity of the production – an on-stage hanging, wonderful storm effects including torrential rain and deafening thunderclaps, and of course Sir Ian McKellen’s ‘notorious’ full frontal nudity! To this day it is still the most powerful performance of a Shakespeare play I have seen.

– Julie Gough, Associate Marketing Manager

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I couldn’t really say I was shocked to see The Taming of the Shrew performed with an all-male cast at the RSC in Stratford, as I’d known it before I went, but it certainly put a new light on the outdated gender roles of the play, shocking the audience into seeing the cruelty behind the humour.

– Simon Thomas, Marketing Executive, Oxford Dictionaries

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When I was at school we went to see an RSC production of The Merry Wives of Windsor: The Musical, with Judi Dench as Mistress Quickly and Simon Callow as Falstaff. I think it got terrible reviews for being too silly, but I thought it was hilarious! Seeing such famous Shakespearian actors in a thigh-slapping, jolly, bawdy musical was so much fun and radically different to any Shakespeare production I’ve seen before, or since – I loved it. Somehow we managed to get backstage after the show and we met the whole cast. Judi Dench borrowed my pen to sign our programmes – I treasured that pen afterwards!

– Amy Jelf, Marketing Assistant

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I’ve seen King Lear a number of times and I never cease to be shocked by the eye gouging scene. The last performance I saw was by the Guildford Shakespeare Company, Gloucester’s leg convulsed and twitched in pain. You didn’t see the gouging but you felt the pain! In the Sam Mendes and Simon Russell Beale version at the National Theatre they decided to kill off the Fool. Not only that, they had Lear beat him to death in a blind rage. What is so shocking is you don’t see it coming. Nor do you actually see it. It happens in a bath tub so all you can see is Lear’s club get increasingly bloody and the Fool’s bloodied, out-stretched hand. It makes you realise that Lear is still a dangerous and controlling man even with his advancing dementia.

– Miriam Higgins, formerly Music Hire Librarian

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I was stunned by the stark brutality of Rupert Goold’s spellbinding Macbeth at the Geilgud theatre in 2007. Patrick Stewart delivered an extraordinary performance in the title role and his transformation – from a sensitive soldier who stumbles at the word “murder” to an insecure monster talking flippantly of slaughter – was horrifying. The scene where Kate Fleetwood’s Lady Macbeth imagines dashing out her child’s brains affected me deeply at the time (I was seventeen). If I saw it now, I fear it would only shock me mildly. Much like Macbeth himself, time has made me impervious to such horrors!

– Katie Stileman, Junior Press Officer

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I remember stumbling upon a puppet adaptation of Hamlet towards the end of a tiring, yet enjoyable, day at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2010. I remember little about the play but I do remember being shocked by the first scene in which we see the Ghost. The puppet of the Ghost came floating over my head as I sat in the front row of the cramped theatre. I’d like to say I didn’t scream as much as the children sat next to me. But that would be a lie.

– Daniel Parker, Social Media Marketing Executive

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Featured image credit: RSC Theatre, Stratford, by ‘Feeling My Age’. CC-BY-2.0 via Flickr.

 

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Monthly etymology gleanings for April 2015

Last month was a disaster: I confused the Wednesdays and then wrote 2014 for 2015. A student of the Middle Ages, I often forget in which millennium I live, so plus or minus one year does not really matter. We say: “The migration happened six or seven thousand years ago.” This is the degree of precision to which I am accustomed. And do many of us care whether something happened in 1614 or 1615? Shakespeare died in 1616; the rest does not matter. Anyway, the error was immediately noticed, mildly derided, corrected, and atoned for. Leaving “crime and punishment” behind, I should mention the fact that every now and then people discover the earlier posts in this blog and ask questions about things written years ago. This is gratifying; apparently, not all galaxies disappear in the supervoid.

Who died in 1616?

Some queries inspired by the past notwithstanding, in the course of the last four weeks strawberries, brass tacks, and paddy wagon have attracted most attention. I have nothing to add to what I wrote on strawberries, and I agree that the idea of brass tacks remains unclear. Stephen Goranson quoted “coming down to the brass.” To be sure, brass has always been understood as something particularly solid and loud. Consider the brass and the top brass in the military, among others. It is the tacks that puzzle everybody, including John Larsson. By contrast, Goranson’s examples of paddy wheelbarrow change the focus on paddy wagon. Obviously, the collocation had a prehistory missed by previous researchers; however, paddy still seems to refer to the Irish.

Irregular verbs

Quite a few of my letters come from school and college students who ask questions about the changes in the history of English, long since explained in manuals and textbooks. I answer them privately because I don’t think the readership of this blog can be interested in such matters, but occasionally I devote some space to them in the “gleanings.” So here is my answer to a correspondent from Indonesia. He wonders why the past of go is went and the past of leave is left. I am well aware of the fact that outside the English-speaking world verbs are not divided into strong (like write—wrote—written) and weak (like rob—robbed—robbed or reap—reaped—reaped) but into regular and irregular. Thus, do—did—done, put—put—put, say—said—said, lose—lost—lost, along with go—went—gone, and all the strong verbs (those whose principal parts show vowel alternations, as in write, bind, come, etc.) are dumped together for pedagogical purposes. This system makes perfect sense to a learner, but, when we begin to ask how certain forms happened to arise, the classification of verbs into regular and irregular breaks down.

The go—went problem has already been discussed in this blog. (See the post for 9 January 2013, “How come the past of ‘go’ is ‘went’?”). The Old English for leave was læfan (with long æ)—læfde (past tense, singular)—gelæfed (past participle). In Middle English, the long vowel yielded long e (that is, a vowel like long German or Italian e, not the vowel understood by long e in Modern English), which underwent shortening before two consonants, while final d was devoiced after f. The result was left. In the infinitive, the development proceeded undisturbed; hence leave. If the shortening and devoicing had not occurred, leave would have remained “regular” and rhymed with heave—heaved—heaved, whose history is far from simple, but it will not delay us here.

Coming or going home? Accusative or dative? “Go home” and its Russian counterpart

The question was about the origin of home in go home and of domoi in Russian idti domoi (the same meaning). Our correspondent’s etymology is correct. Home in go home is an old accusative, later interpreted as an adverb. Russian domoi is an old dative of dom “home,” domovi, with the loss of v. Domovi and very similar forms of this dative are extant in some Slavic languages.

Nonexistent foreign etymons

I have received two related questions. (1) Have I considered Hebrew as a solution to the etymology of aloof? and (2) Could there have been a Greek root of amaze? The answer is “no” to both questions. Hebrew alluf “chief judge” comes nowhere near Engl. aloof, and the history of the Germanic word has no place for any Semitic etymon. Greek suggests itself in thinking of amaze, because mazes and labyrinths are associated in our memory with Ancient Greece. Yet the word is not Greek.

Change of meaning and usage

A correspondent drew my attention to the semantic shift in the word illicit: “In the 1800’s, the word illicit often referred to trading or love affairs, but today the word is usually related to drug use.” This is a common case. Words tend to narrow (or broaden!) their sphere of application. Half a century ago, translations of medieval romances still spoke about gay knights (that is, the knights wearing beautiful clothes and ready for adventure). Everybody knows what happened to this phrase after the word gay stopped being a synonym of vivacious and merry. Not too long ago, it was possible to say a queer look, a queer turn of speech, and so forth. I am sure today most people would use strange or odd in this context. I still remember the time when one could complain of an obnoxious person who molests his neighbors. At present, no one prohibits this usage, but the statement would be misunderstood. Did the gentleman in small-clothes next door “molest” Mrs. Nickleby, or was he a very great nuisance?

From two other letters: “Please discuss the current trend whereby disconcerting is being replaced with concerning, also taken back instead of the current taken aback,” and “People don’t know how to use the word nonplussed correctly. Most folks use it to mean ‘unaffected’ when it means ‘perplexed’.” I would like to pass on those remarks to our readers. I have no evidence of the replacement of concerning with disconcerting because I have never encountered this monster. With regard to aback, I can only guess that some speakers take it for a back and get rid of the “article.” The situation with nonplussed probably has an easier explanation. People constantly use words of whose meaning they have only a vague idea. Naturally, they misuse them.

An angry comment had it that woman doctor is demeaning, while female doctor is fine. I don’t quite see the point. When we are interested in finding out what is wrong with us, rather than in the sex/gender of a physician, we ask for an appointment with “a doctor.” No more information is required or needed. Other than that, both female doctor and woman doctor add the same detail important only for statistics.

Adverbially speaking

Diane Ezer ran into my old post on adverbs and shared her observations on this vexed subject. She noted that strangely enough sounds fine to her, while funnily enough seems to be mostly British. In British newspapers, she constantly sees adverbs like gobsmackingly and howlingly, which an American would hardly use. (I wonder whether my favorite phrase screamingly funny sounds too British where I live. My spellchecker highlighted the first two -ing adverbs but let screamingly “unmolested.”) Like me, she finds he sings beautiful unacceptable, but I wonder whether just this phrase has not become some sort of idiom. I first found it in a paper by an undergraduate and was shocked, but not too long ago I heard it on the radio: “Didn’t she sing this song beautiful?” The letter mentions and rejects Mark Twain’s recommendation to avoid adverbs. I think Mark Twain fought what I, following the example of good editors, call adverbialitis (the “queer” term is my own coinage). “She actually came late,” “She definitely denied this assertion,” “The performance was clearly (obviously) second-rate,” “He is simply ignorant of the main facts,” and so forth. In writing, such words are useless fillers, disguising the lack of arguments by emphasis.

The ugly head of the unsplit infinitive

Split infinitives and spilled milk are no longer worth crying about. The judicious path in most endeavors is to stay slightly behind the fashion. May those who want to always be on the cutting edge and to not look too prim and proper enjoy the edge’s sharpness. Splitters of the world unite!

“Good,” “god,” and “good-bye”

A freshman (unfortunately, I have no clue to the person’s whereabouts, for nearly everyone is now from either gmail.com or yahoo.com, a terra incognita indeed) knows that god and good are unrelated but wonders why good-bye is said to be an alteration of God buy’ye. At one time, as my database shows, the etymology of good-bye was the object of a heated controversy. But it seems that in the original phrase good was substituted for God under the influence of good day, good night, and the like. “Etymology,” the student writes, “is my passion.” Given this premise, our correspondence, I hope, will never dry up.

Image credits: (1) The Sanders portrait of William Shakespeare. Current owner, Lloyd Sullivan. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. (2) Frog on potty. © microdon via iStock.

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Nature vs. nurture: genes strongly influence survival to the oldest ages

In our study analyzing data from the New England Centenarian Study, we found that for people who live to 90 years old, the chance of their siblings also reaching age 90 is relatively small — about 1.7 times greater than for the average person born around the same time. But for people who survive to age 95, the chance of a sibling living to the same age is 3.5 times greater — and for those who live to 100, the chance of a sibling reaching the same age grows to about nine times greater.

At 105 years old, the chance that a sibling will attain the same age is 35 times greater than for people born around the same time. However, this does not mean there are many 105 year old siblings running around. Because getting to such an age is so incredibly rare, just 10 sibships out of a 100 that contain a 105 year old will have another sibling living to that age.

These much higher relative chances of survival likely reflect different and more potent genetic contributions to the rarity of survival being studied, and strongly suggest that survival to age 90 and survival to age 105 are dramatically different phenotypes or traits, with very different underlying genetic influences.

In this study, we analyzed survival data of the families of 1,500 participants in the New England Centenarian Study, the largest study of centenarians and their family members in the world, based at Boston Medical Center. Among those families, we looked at more than 1,900 sibling relationships that contained at least one person reaching the age of 90.

Biking by PublicDomainImages. CC0 via Pixabay.

These findings advance the idea that genes play a stronger and stronger role in living to these more and more extreme ages and that the combinations of longevity-enabling genes that help people survive to 95 years are likely different from those that help people reach the age of 105, who are about 1,000 times rarer in the population.

Other studies of the determinants of survival to older ages have not found evidence of a powerful genetic effect I believe because they are not being precise about what they call aging, life span, longevity, or even exceptional longevity. For the longest time now, based upon twins’ studies in the 1980s and early ‘90s, various scholars have maintained that 20 to 30 percent of longevity or even life span is due to differences in genes, and that the remainder is due to differences in environment, health-related behaviors or chance events. But the oldest twins in those studies only got to their mid- to late-80’s. Findings from our and other studies of much older (and rarer) individuals show that genetic makeup explains an increasingly greater portion of the variation in how old people live to be, especially for ages rarer than 100 years.

There is considerable inconsistency in the gerontological literature concerning definitions of aging, longevity and life span. The casual use of these terms leads to confusing claims regarding heredity and non-replicated genetic studies. Many researchers equate the term ‘longevity’ with ‘old age,’ and neither term is adequately specific.

Because genes play a much stronger differentiating role in living to 105-plus years, studies of such individuals are much more powerful in discovering longevity-related genes than studies of people in their 90s. Therefore my co-authors and I call for investigators who are studying the determinants of living to the oldest ages to be precise in describing the rarity or percentile of survival that study participants achieve.

Featured image credit: DNA by PublicDomainPictures. CC0 via Pixabay.

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Man’s best friend: companion or animal?

Most scientific inquires, referring to animals en masse, neglect the idea of individuality among animals. However, disregarding this academic approach, many people view their animal companions as family members. Dogs, often called ‘man’s best friend,’ are no exception.

Despite this old saying, science had generally neglected research on dogs until the end of the 19th century. At that time, both phylogenetics (looking at the history of animals by the means of genetic tools based on the study of the DNA sequence), and sciences associated with the study of behaviour (such as comparative psychology, animal behaviour, or ethology) realized that dogs offered a unique possibility not only for understanding the biology of this species but the history of humanity.

Early interest in dogs, which actually still stirs heated debates, focused on the time and location of domestication. A study led by Charles Vila suggested that dogs may have been domesticated 100,000 years ago, much earlier than estimated by archaeological evidence. Today, most researchers agree that this date was probably an overestimation and that the reality lies closer to 16,000 to 32,000 years. Even so, that would be at least 5-6,000 years before other animal species began on the route of domestication.

Why did it happen? Early dogs may have not provided any physical benefit for the archaic human; there is little evidence for any early gain in having dogs around. Instead, various theories assume that dogs may have been domesticated to offer social companionship, partly because humans have an extraordinary inclination to care for others. We may never find out what made early humans allow wolves’ descendants into their lives, but it is clear that a dog is still considered a social partner; a companion providing emotional and social support to his or her owners.

‘Personality’ by Family Dog Project. Used with permission.

Scientists studying the behaviour of dogs also aimed to find out what made them so special. They have argued that in order to become a member of the community of humans, dogs had to acquire the potential for displaying functionally human-like behaviour; “functionally,” in this case, means that the behaviour of dogs is compatible with what is shown or expected by people. For example, if the owner wants to make the dog go to a specific location, he or she may use a pointing gesture, which is actually considered a specific form of human communication. Because dogs react to the communicative actions of the humans and go to the indicated place, we can say that dogs show functionally human-like behaviour. Most dogs living in human homes acquire this behaviour spontaneously without the need of specific training. and their performance is similar to that of 1.5 year old infants. Moreover, very young dogs follow the pointing gestures of humans at a much younger age than intensively socialised wolves. Compared to wolves that might also learn this gesture by the time they are adults, dogs seem to be better prepared by their specific history of domestication, showing a higher interest in human behaviour and communicative activities.

Actually, there is still a great need for research on dog behaviour. Dogs play an important role in the family, despite people knowing so little about the needs and desires of the animal. Research may clarify the function of the bond between people and dogs. Rather than making generalisations such as, “dogs are just like wolves” or “dogs are children in fur,” continued research may help provide a more accurate and objective understanding about dogs. For instance, recent research has found that dogs have functionally similar emotions to humans, and that they also care about the emotional behavior shown by us. At the moment, we cannot be sure whether dogs can understand the emotions of humans, but they are able to notice differences in our face, such as recognizing if we are happy or angry.

Behavioural research on dogs may turn out to be very beneficial for both dog trainers and owners who want to have a closer social relationship with their dog. The effectiveness of new training methods based in social learning has been well-documented by researchers. Being social animals, dogs have a biological tendency to learn by observation, meaning that this skill can be capitalised by modern training methods.

The last 25 years have significantly increased our knowledge about dogs, their history, and their social skills. This will, without question, strengthen the dog-human bond, increasing the welfare or both species. Those who devote the necessary time to understand their dogs will be able to rely on an unconditional friend that also enjoys being part of a strong social alliance. At some point, academics might even see a reason to change their mind and stop seeing dogs just as a group of animals, but rather as a bunch of individuals.

Image Credit: “Lycaon pictus” by Tarique Sani. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

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The euro zone leadership suffers from cognitive closure

If you want a person to pay-off his debts, don’t fire him first.

The euro zone has still not recovered from the global depression of 2009. A major cause is the idea that every member should solve its own problems by lowering prices on all markets, and by reducing the influence of the government. Lower prices stimulate the exports to other countries, which would result in the beginning of a genuine recovery.

Because the interrelationships between the various member-economies are quite strong, and the influence of the big euro zone on the global economy is significant, this policy advice has failed so far. How come leading countries, such as Germany and The Netherlands, are so blind for the economic consequences of their policies? How come they don’t see that enduring wage decline and unemployment rise have severe psychic and social effects? The lessons of the 1930s appear to have been forgotten.

Since the 1980s, the Western world has faced a strong classical-liberal revival. When we compare the educational programmes in economics, as taught in high school and at universities, we see the emergence of an near-monopoly for the neoclassical perspective. It is based on the idea of an economic and rational actor, who also regards relationships between people as of economic nature. In almost all textbooks this paradigm is the only one discussed – without explicitly explaining this set of axioms. On this basis, economists are empirically testing theories, which are based on that paradigm.

‘Yes and No’. Image courtesy of Piet Keizer. Do not reproduce without permission.

By carefully analysing the neoclassical paradigm, we discover that the typical economic problem of scarcity of natural resources is isolated from the typical psychological problem of irrationality and the typical sociological problem of a lack of status, which is derived from particular group memberships.

An extensive study of a whole series of psychological and sociological perspectives shows that an integration between the three primary human sciences, which are economics, psychology and sociology, leads to more realistic analyses of economies or parts of it. In good as well as in bad times irrational persons group together and develop subcultures, which justify behaviour, which ruins markets and (government) organizations. Psychological analysis shows that irrationality refers to the propensity of individuals to protect their vulnerable Self by ignoring fundamental criticism. Willpower is used to justify rather than to criticise unrealistic views, attitudes and behaviour. Immorality is not something consciously wanted. It is the result of the irrational drive to justify behaviour, which works out bad for many people – mostly people, who belong to a different group. Social divides within a group – let’s say the group of academic economists – are solved by exorcising critical members. They are ignored or thrown out so as to cleanse the group, and restore social equilibrium.

Within the euro zone there is a social divide between North and South. The North is economically performing better than the South, and is prepared to help the South under the condition that they implement neoclassically orientated policies. Since these policies are flawed, the results of the support appears disastrous. This economic process affects social relationships negatively. Southern countries are seduced to ask for help from non-Western powers. Northern countries talk about exits: a Grexit, for instance. These are dangerous developments, which can be avoided if classical liberal economists would open their minds and listen to economists, who approach economic problems differently. In a democratic society with an open economy, pluralistic science is a necessity. For economists, it means that students should be educated in a whole series of approaches, which differ significantly in terms of methodology. Then a scientist can choose how to approach a particular practical problem rather than solve all problems in one and the same way. Economists, do it multidisciplinary!

Headline image credit: EU Flagga by MPD01605. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

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