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Monthly etymology gleanings for June 2014, part 2

By Anatoly Liberman

The terrible word slough


Some time ago, in my discussion of English spelling, I touched on the group ough, this enfant terrible of our orthography; slough figured prominently in it. One slough, the verb meaning “shed the skin,” rhymes with enough. The other is problematic and had a tortuous history. John Bunyan, the author of The Pilgrim’s Progress (the last quarter of the seventeenth century), made the Slough of Despond famous. He was not sure of the word’s written image, and in his book we find They drew near to a very Miry Slough…. The name of the Slow was Despond. It is not for nothing that rough and bough look so much alike. The group ough could develop into a diphthong (many people say dipthong—a habit worth “sloughing”) or yield uff. Someone who has never seen the word clough “ravine” will not know whether is rhymes with bough, cough, or through.

If I am not mistaken, in Standard British English, slough “mire” (and the surname Slough) rhymes with bough, but in American English it rhymes with through. I am not sure because I never hear this word and can rely only on the evidence of dictionaries. The Century Dictionary, published in the United States around the year 1900, says that slough “a hole full of deep mud or mire; a quagmire of considerable depth and comparatively small depth of surface” rhymes with bough, while when it has the sense “a marshy hollow; a reedy pond; also, a long and shallow ravine, or open creek, which becomes partly or wholly dry in summer [Western U.S.],” it is spelled slue, slew, or sloo and rhymes with through. Other dictionaries either state that the variants are interchangeable or give only one pronunciation, namely sloo. Sloo is well-known in British dialects, from where it came to the New World. As usual, it will be interesting to read the comments of our readers from different parts of the English-speaking world. One thing is clear: a snake “sluffs” its skin.

The pronunciation sloo could not be immediately predicted from the noun’s past. In such words, the usual variants are “uff” (rough, tough, and so forth) or “ow” (bough); cough is regular but exceptional. Occasionally both variants coexist, as in enough ~ enow or sough “rushing or murmuring of the sea,” which some people rhyme with enough and others with enow. Sloo goes back to sloh (with a long vowel in Old English). For some reason, final h in this noun could be lost, and, when it was, slo developed like school and other words with long o (that is, with the vowel of Modern Engl. awe). The only analog of sloo I can think of is through, but prepositions are usually unstressed, so that in through the loss of final h in Middle English causes no surprise.

An authentic cluck-ma-doodle. (An impish face carved on St. Mary’s 14th century font, Knaith. Photo by Richard Croft. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons)

How old is the now common British pronunciation foiv for five and the like?


In London, this pronunciation is not very old. At the end of the nineteenth century, Skeat noted that in his youth no one heard it. Dickens’s characters like Sam Weller and Mrs. Gamp (Sairey Gamp), the ultimate Cockney speaker in Martin Chuzzlewit, do not say noin and foiv, though Oi for I turns up in many Victorian novels. It is often contended that Dickens was not a reliable observer of Cockney speech. This accusation cannot be taken seriously: Dickens’s ear for sounds was splendid, as, among many other things, his reproduction of American speech in the same novel and of the Yorkshire accent in Nicholas Nickleby shows. Incidentally, he himself never quite got rid of some peculiarities of Cockney. Foiv for five is undoubtedly dialectal, but it came to London relatively late, probably around the time of Dickens’s death (1870) and is not an ancient feature of Cockney. Its adoption by educated speakers is amazing, but people do not hear what they say, and most are sure that their pronunciation is the same as that of their grandparents. (In my memory, British oh no has turned almost universally into eu neu.)

Ukraine once more.


The place name Ukraine cannot be a cognate of Latvian Ukris, if Ukris is a native word. Ukraina, related to Russian okraina, has a prefix (u- ~ o). The root is krai- “region,” n is a suffix, and -a the ending of a feminine noun. In Ukris, as I understand, ukr- is the root.

Fighting against who? or whom?


I keep cutting out sentences in which writers try desperately to decide whether they should say who or whom. But this is like speaking a foreign language: one can never be absolutely certain that the chosen variant is correct. A caption:

“J.J., right, with sister S., who she had been visiting in XX.”

Someone writing for the Associated Press and quoting Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov (in an English translation):

“The key to toning down the situation in our view is ending military operation against protesters. Then, I am convinced, these people who you call separatists will take reciprocal action.”

And now to the most sacrosanct source of them all, The New York Times:

“The government has offered amnesties before that did not lead to the release of the tens of thousands of people whom human rights advocates say have been detained or imprisoned during the unrest in the country.”

The last sentence is the worst of them all.

To be sure, if the writers had studied a language like German or Russian, or Latin, all of which have cases, they would have understood that there are such things as the nominative, the genitive, the dative, and the accusative. It would have become clear to them that despite the erosion of the who-whom distinction in American English, the educated norm still requires the nominative who and the oblique case whom, except when the Standard has abolished the difference (Who are you referring to?). Or they may have compared he/him with who/whom. But grammar is not fun, as has been repeated many times. So we meet people whom we thought were dead and meet people who we try to avoid.

Folk etymology at large


In my book on word origins, I devoted a few pages to words like frigmajig “a toy; a trifle; anything that moves or works about.” Last week, I ran into a letter to the editor published in 1930. It was about a self-recording barometer with the words click ma doodle on it. According to a story told at Elderline, the inhabitants found washed ashore a body of a man with a watch in his pocket, still going. None of them had ever seen or heard of such a thing. Finally, a wise man residing in the district arrived. He too was ignorant of the object but did not want to confess it and shouted “It’s a Click-ma-doodle! Kill it!” And it was smashed with stones. This is allegedly the origin of the trademark (many seaside towns had or still have barometers with the same words). I am sure that click ma doodle was coined on the model of other dialectal words like frigmajig, but the story (a hundred percent apocryphal?) is not devoid of interest as a record of human ingenuity when it comes to word origins.

Unless I receive many queries and comments before 15 July, read the next “gleanings” on 24 September 2014.

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears on the OUPblog each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of blog@oup.com; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.” Subscribe to Anatoly Liberman’s weekly etymology articles via email or RSS.

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John Calvin’s prophetic calling and the memory

By Jon Balserak

What is the self, and how is it formed? In the case of Calvin, we might be given a glimpse at an answer if we consider the context from which he came. Calvin was part of a society that was still profoundly memorial in character; he lived with the vestiges of that medieval culture that’s discussed so brilliantly by Frances Yates and Mary Carruthers — a society which committed classical and Christian corpora to remembrance and whose self-identity was, in a large part, shaped and informed by memory. Understanding his society may help us to understand not only Calvin but, more specifically, something of his prophetic self-consciousness.

To explore this further, I might call to memory that wonderful story told by Carruthers of Heloise’s responding to her friends when they were trying to dissuade her from entering the convent. Heloise responded to them by citing the words of Cornelia from Lucan’s poem, “Pharsalia”. Carruthers explains that Heloise had not only memorized Cornelia’s lament but had so imbibed it that it, as set down in words by Lucan, helped her explain her own feelings and in fact constituted part of her constructed self. Lucan’s words, filling her mind and being memorized and absorbed through the medieval method of reading, helped Heloise give expression to her own emotional state and, being called upon at a moment of such personal anguish, represented something of who she was; they helped form and give expression to her self-identity. The account, and Carruthers’s interpretation of it, is so fascinating because it raises such interesting questions about how self-identity is shaped. Was a medieval man or woman in some sense the accumulation of the thoughts and experiences about which he or she had been reading? Is that how Heloise’s behaviour should be interpreted?

John Calvin by Hans Holbein the Younger. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Does this teach us anything about Calvin’s self-conception? One can imagine that if Calvin memorized and deeply imbibed the Christian corpus, particularly the prophetic books, that perhaps this affected his self-identity; that it was his perceptive matrix when he looked both at the world and at himself. To dig deeper, we might examine briefly one of Calvin’s experiences. One thinks, for instance, of his account of being stopped in his tracks by Guillaume Farel in Geneva in 1536. He recounts that Farel, when he learned that Calvin was in Geneva, came and urged him to stay and help with the reforming of the church. Farel employed such earnestness, Calvin explains, that he felt stricken with a divine terror which compelled him to stop his travels and stay in Geneva. The account reads not unlike the calling of an Old Testament prophet, such as Isaiah’s recorded in Isaiah 6 (it reads, incidentally, like the calling of John Knox as well). So what is one to make of this? This account was written in the early 1550s. It was written by one whose memory was, by this point in his life, saturated with the language of the prophetic authors. Indeed, it might be noted that Calvin claims in numerous places in his writings that his life is like the prophet David’s; that his times are a “mirror” of the prophets’ age. So is all of this the depiction of his constructed self spilling out of his memory, just as it was with Heloise?

The question is actually an incredibly fascinating one: how is the self formed? Does one construct one’s ‘self’ in a deliberate, self-conscious manner? What is so interesting, in relation to Calvin and the story just recounted, is not merely that he seems to have interpreted this episode in his life as a divine calling — so important was it, in fact, that he rehearsed it in his preface to his commentary on the Psalms, the one document in which he gives anything like a personal account of his calling to the ministry in fairly unambiguous language — but that his account should be crafted after the manner of Old Testament prophets descriptions of their callings. That is what is so intriguing and important here. It is true, as I have just said, that he wrote this many years after the event and it seems most probably to have been something which he did exercise some care over. All of that is true. But none of this takes anything away from the fact that Calvin, when he wanted to tell the story of his calling, used imagery from the prophetic books to do so. He could easily have mentioned many things or adopted various methods for explaining the way in which God called him into divine service, but he didn’t choose other methods, he turned to the prophets.

Why did he do this? Surely the answer to that question is complicated. But equally certain, it seems to me, is the fact that his ingesting of the prophetic writings represents a likely element in such an answer. For if, as Carruthers argues, memory is the matrix of perception, then Calvin’s matrix was profoundly biblical and, especially, prophetic. Naturally, much could be said by way of explaining why he interpreted this episode in his life in the way that he did. But the fact that his mind turned towards this prophetic trope says an immense amount about Calvin and the resource by which he interpreted himself and his life.

Jon Balserak is currently Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Bristol. He is an historian of Renaissance and Early Modern Europe, particularly France and the Swiss Confederation. He also works on textual scholarship, electronic editing and digital editions. His latest book is John Calvin as Sixteenth-Century Prophet (OUP, 2014).

To learn more about John Calvin’s idea of the self, read “The ‘I’ of Calvin,” the first chapter of John Calvin as Sixteenth-Century Prophet, available via Oxford Scholarship Online. Oxford Scholarship Online (OSO) is a vast and rapidly-expanding research library. Launched in 2003 with four subject modules, Oxford Scholarship Online is now available in 20 subject areas and has grown to be one of the leading academic research resources in the world. Oxford Scholarship Online offers full-text access to academic monographs from key disciplines in the humanities, social sciences, science, medicine, and law, providing quick and easy access to award-winning Oxford University Press scholarship.

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Capitalism doesn’t fall apart

By Adam D. Dixon

In early April 2014 Greece returned to the sovereign bond market raising 3 billion Euros, following a four-year hiatus. This marked a turning point in the global financial and economic crisis that began in 2008 with the collapse of the subprime mortgage market in the United States and the advanced-economy recessions that ensued. The Greek economy is certainly not healed, with unemployment still exceeding 25%, and a government debt burden still unnervingly high — it is expected to reach 175% of GDP this year. That the Greek government was able to issue bonds to international investors, likely didn’t provide any degree or sense of solace for the many Greeks still struggling to get by.

This story has been repeated across much of the advanced industrialized economies, from the United States to the United Kingdom, from Spain to Italy. We are told that most economies have turned the corner, even if there is some way to go before life feels normal again — hopefully before some other crisis takes hold. Now we can get back to focusing on crises of the longue durée. Will anything be done to reduce wage and wealth inequality? Will labor markets adjust to increasing automation and artificial intelligence? How will we adapt to climate change? Are we prepared for the peak of the baby boom retirement?

Some countries and some regions within countries will certainly fair better than others. There will be winners and losers. This is largely a reflection of the core-periphery model that characterizes the geography of capitalism and its developmental logic. The drivers of economic growth and development are not nation-states, but large regional agglomerations, which often span different countries, and the global production networks and global financial markets that connect them. But what does it mean to be a resilient country or region in an increasingly integrated and interdependent global economy?

The global financial crisis struck a blow to globalization, leading to some speculation that we could see the reemergence of a more fragmented world economy comparable to periods following other major crises (e.g. the Great Depression). For those critical of global capitalism, it was a chance for alternatives to emerge. Yet, if one looks at life in the major world cities or the boardrooms of multinational firms, the powerhouses of global capitalist integration, the remnants of crisis are hardly visible. Capitalism marches onward.

In the last few decades the barriers to cross-border capital flows and trade have been progressively removed, leading to growing opportunities for firms to outsource and offshore production. Moreover, the integration of capital markets has opened up financing possibilities that are global in scope. For multinational firms, and those in the service of multinational firms, history and geography are no longer constraints. Is the core anymore resilient than the peripheries, if they can’t ultimately claim and contain the drivers of growth? Are the winners this time around going to be the winners next time around?

At the height of the Eurozone crisis it was not uncommon to hear suggestions (and even outright demands) that periphery countries (e.g. Greece and Spain) leave the euro. Exit would facilitate recovery, resetting prices to competitive levels with trading partners. And it wouldn’t mean the end of the European project. But Greece nor any other periphery country has left the Eurozone. Even if they wanted to, would they have been allowed? Market expansion and integration is at the heart of capitalism. To be sure, a currency union is not a prerequisite to market expansion and integration.

The countries on the periphery didn’t leave, because they’ve become too integrated with the core. Economies do not start and stop at the political borders of the nation-state, even if the nation-state is still a crucial site of governance and regulation. There is certainly diversity among capitalist economies, reflecting history and geography. But increasing interdependence and integration mutes diversity. Yet, what increasing interdependence and integration means for capitalist diversity is less important than what it means for the losers of capitalist crises. As market expansion and integration is at the heart of capitalism, losers aren’t left to some alternative. They are re-integrated in the fold, even though they may be left on the periphery.

Adam D. Dixon is a senior lecturer in economic geography at the University of Bristol. His research focuses on comparative economic geography, the geography of finance, and the political economy of institutional investors. He is author of The New Geography of Capitalism: Firms, Finance, and Society, co-author with Gordon L. Clark and Ashby H.B. Monk of Sovereign Wealth Funds: Legitimacy, Governance and Global Power (2013, PUP), and co-editor with the same of Managing Financial Risks: From Global to Local (2009, OUP).

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Image credit: “Money coins currency metal old historically pay” by Weinstock. Public domain via pixabay.

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World Cup puts spotlight on rights of migrant workers in Qatar

By Susan Kneebone

As recent demonstrations in Brazil around the staging of the FIFA 2014 World Soccer Cup show, major sporting events put the spotlight on human rights issues in host countries. In the case of Qatar the preparations to host the FIFA 2022 World Cup are focussing worldwide attention on the plight of migrant workers. It estimated that the country needs an extra 500,000 migrant workers to build stadiums and other infrastructure such as a metro system in the lead up to the World Cup. But a report by the International Trade Union Commission (ITUC) predicts that 4,000 migrant construction workers will die in Qatar before the start of the game.

As for much of the Gulf States region, Qatar is heavily dependent on migrant workers. It has the highest ratio of migrants to citizens in the world, with migrant workers making up approximately 88 per cent of the whole population. The majority of migrant workers come from South and South-East Asian countries: Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines. A series of reports has revealed poor working conditions for migrant workers in Qatar particularly in the construction industry and in domestic workplaces and a lack of enforcement of existing protective legal mechanisms.

This situation highlights the global issue of exploitation of low and unskilled temporary migrant workers, also labelled as “foreign workers”. Currently, there are about 232 million migrants globally, of whom it is estimated that 105 million are migrant workers who are displaced by necessity in a labour market which reflects the increasing disparity between rich and poor countries. Unskilled temporary migrant workers are vulnerable because they have no choice but to migrate to work. Such workers are constructed in laws and policies as lacking connection to the host state but rather the responsibility of their home state. They are discriminated in the host state on the basis of their culture and identity, and often regarded as ‘export’ labour at home.

Builders at Work: There are close to one million migrant workers in Qatar, mainly from South Asia. The majority work in construction. Photo by WBUR Boston’s NPR News Station. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 via WBUR Flickr.

The Kafala sponsorship system which operates in Qatar is a symptom of such vulnerability. The Kafala system reduces migrant workers to the status of slaves or indentured property in host country. This system is used to regulate the relationship between employers and migrants, with a work permit linked to a single person, who is often the sponsor. The law provides power and authority to sponsors to prevent migrant workers from changing employers and from the leaving Qatar.

As the Special Rapporteur on the human rights of migrants, François Crépeau summaries:

The kafala system enables unscrupulous employers to exploit employees. Frequent cases of abuse against migrants include the confiscation of passports, refusal to give “no objection” certificates (allowing migrants to change employer) or exit permits and refusal to pay migrants’ plane tickets to return home. Some employers do not extend residence permits for their employees, often because of the fees incurred. This leads to migrants ending up in an irregular situation, with no valid identity card, despite the fact that they are regularly employed. [7]

The recruitment process and charging of excessive fees are other critical issues. Recruitment fees are forbidden by Qatari law, but the reports found that many migrant workers had taken out substantial loans to pay the fees in their home countries and were in long-term debt. Contract substitution is also a huge problem, as the terms of contracts signed in the home countries are often different upon arrival in Qatar, usually with a lower salary and different job description. As migrant workers cannot easily change jobs without the sponsor’s approval and often have recruitment loans to repay, they become highly vulnerable to abuse and less likely to report such violations. In many cases, such practices will amount to human trafficking for labour exploitation or forced labour as the Amnesty International Report, “My Sleep is My Break” explains (pp54-60).

The exploitation of “foreign” migrant workers suggests that we have created a new global form of ‘indentured servitude’ or slavery in which others exercise property-like powers or control over individuals. The irony is that the development of individual rights to free and decent working conditions in the nineteenth century ran parallel to the anti-slavery movement. Qatar 2022 offers an opportunity to Qatar to show the global community the need to recognise collective responsibility for migrant workers in a globalised economy, and to put pressure on states and non-state actors to respect the rights of migrant workers.

Dr Susan Kneebone (PhD, MA (Asian Studies), Dip Ed, LLB), is a Professor in the Faculty of Law, Monash University, Australia. She is the author of many articles and book chapters, including author \ editor of the following: Transnational Crime and Human Rights: Responses to Human Trafficking in the Greater Mekong Subregion (Routledge 2012) (co-authored with Julie Debeljak) ; Migrant Workers Between States: In Search of Exit and Integration Strategies in South East Asia 40 (4) Asian Journal of Social Sciences (2012) ; “Transnational Labour Migrants: Whose Responsibility?” in Fiona Jenkins, Mark Nolan and Kim Rubenstein eds, Allegiance and Identity in a Globalised World (Cambridge University Press, 2014 – in press) Chapter 18. Recent publications include: “ASEAN and the Conceptualisation of Refugee protection” in Abass A. and Ippolito, F., et al eds., Regional Approaches to the Protection of Asylum Seekers: An International Legal Perspective (Ashgate 2014) Chapter 13, pp295-324 ; “The Bali Process and Global Refugee Policy in the Asia-Pacific Region” Special Edition of the Journal of Refugee Studies on Global Refugee Policy, 2014.

Interested in learning more about the issues facing migrant workers? Oxford Journals has created a special World Refugee Day virtual issue with a selection of free articles.

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The trouble with military occupations: lessons from Latin America

By Alan McPherson

Recent talk of declining US influence in the Middle East has emphasized the Obama administration’s diplomatic blunders. Its poor security in Benghazi, its failure to predict events in Egypt, its difficulty in reaching a deal on withdrawal in Afghanistan, and its powerlessness before sectarian violence in Iraq, to be sure, all are symptoms of this loss of influence.

Yet all miss a crucial point about a region of the world crawling with US troops. What makes a foreign military presence most unpopular is simply that it is, well, military. It is a point almost too obvious to make, but one that is forgotten again and again as the United States and other nations keep sending troops abroad and flying drones to take out those who violently oppose them.

The warnings against military occupation are age-old. The Founding Fathers understood the harshness of an occupying force, at least a British one, and thus declared in the Third Amendment that “no soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.”

US occupations of small Latin American countries a century ago taught a similar lesson. What was most irksome for those who saw the US marines occupy Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic between 1912 and 1934 was not the State Department’s desire to protect US lives and property. It also wasn’t its paranoia about German gunboats during World War I. It wasn’t even the fact itself of intervention. While some of these occupations began with minimal violence and a surprising welcome by occupied peoples, as months turned into years, the behavior of US troops on the ground became so brutal, so arbitrary, and so insensitive to local cultures that they drove many to join movements to drive the marines back into the sea.

Ocupación militar del 1916 en República Dominicana by Walter. CC-BY-SA-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

It was one thing to subdue armed supporters of the regimes overthrown by the United States in all three countries. Latin Americans often met the demise of those unpopular governments with relief. Besides, armed groups recognized the overwhelming training and firepower of the marines and agreed readily to disarmament. As one Haitian palace guard recalled of the marine landing of 1915, “Everyone fled. Me too. You had only to see them, with their weaponry, their massive, menacing appearance, to understand both that they came to do harm to our country and that resistance was futile.”

It was the violence during “peace” time that turned the masses against occupation. At times marines and their native constabularies hunted small groups of insurgents and treated all locals as potential traitors. Other times they enforced new regulations, replaced local political officials, or militarized borders. And they could do it all with virtual impunity since any of their crimes would be tried by their own in US-run military provost courts.

Abuses were particularly frequent and grave either when no marines supervised constabularies or when a single marine — often a non-commissioned officer elevated to officer status in the constabulary — unleashed a reign of terror in a small town.

The residents of Borgne, in Haiti, for instance, hated a Lieutenant Kelly for approving beatings and imprisonments for trivial crimes or for no apparent reason at all. While in the Dominican Republic, around Hato Mayor, Captain Thad Taylor riled over his own fear-filled fiefdom. As one marine described it, Taylor “believed that all circumstances called for a campaign of frightfulness; he arrested indiscriminately upon suspicion; then people rotted in jail pending investigation or search for evidence.” In Nicaragua, the “M company” was widely accused of violence against children, especially throwing them into the air and spearing them with bayonets. In Haiti, a forced labor system known as the corvée saw Americans stop people, peasants, servants, or anyone else, in the street and make them work, particularly to build roads. The identification of the corvée with occupation abuse was so strong that, years later, Haitians gladly worked for foreign corporations but refused to build roads for them.

Rape added an element of gendered terror to abuses. The cases that appear in the historical record — many more likely went unreported — indicate an attitude of permissiveness, fed by the occupations’ monopoly of force, that bred widespread fear among occupied women. Assault was so dreaded that Haitian women stopped bathing in rivers.

Marines were none too careful about keeping abuses quiet and perhaps wanted them to be widely known so as to terrorize the populace. They repeatedly beat and hanged occupied peoples in town plazas, walked them down country roads with ropes around their necks, and ordered them to dig graves for others.

Brutality also marked the behavior of US troops in the cities, where there was no open rebellion. Often, marines and sailors grew bored and turned to narcotics, alcohol, and prostitution, vices that were sure to bring on trouble. A Navy captain suggested the humiliation suffered by Nicaraguan police, soldiers, and artisans, who all made less money than local prostitutes. He also noted the “racial feeling, . . . which leads to the assumption of an air of superiority on the part of the marines.” In response, the US minister requested that Nicaragua provide space for a canteen, dance hall, motion picture theatre, and other buildings to occupy the marines’ time.

Even the non-violent aspects of occupation were repressive. A French minister in Haiti noted that all Haitians resented intrusions in their daily freedoms, especially the curfew. Trigger-happy US soldiers on patrol also exhibited “an extraordinary lack of discipline and in certain cases, an incredible disdain for propriety.” Dominicans considered US citizens to be “hypocrites” because they drank so much abroad while living under prohibition at home. Reviewing such cases, a commanding officer assessed that 90 percent of his “troubles with the men” stemmed from alcohol. In a particularly terrifying incident, private Mike Brunski left his Port-au-Prince legation post at 6 a.m. and started shooting Haitians “apparently without provocation,” killing one and wounding others. He walked back to the legation “and continued his random firing from the balcony.” Medical examiners pronounced Brunski “sane but drunk.”

Abuse proved a recruiting bonanza for insurgents. Little useful information, and even less military advance, was gained from abuse and torture in Nicaragua. A Haitian group also admitted that “internal peace could not be preserved because the permanent and brutal violation of individual rights of Haitian citizens was a perpetual provocation to revolt.” Terror otherwise hardened the population against the occupation. Many in the Dominican Republic later testified with disgust to having seen lynchings with their own eyes. There and in Haiti, newspaper editors braved prison sentences to publish tales of atrocities.

By 1928, the State Department’s Sumner Welles observed that occupation “inevitably loses for the United States infinitely more, through the continental hostility which it provokes, through the fears and suspicions which it engenders, through the lasting resentment on the part of those who are personally injured by the occupying force, than it ever gains for the United States through the temporary enforcement of an artificial peace.”

Hostile, troublesome, horrifying: the US military in Latin America encountered a range of accusations as they it on believing that it brought security and prosperity to the region. Sound familiar? The lessons of Latin American resistance a century ago are especially relevant today, when counterinsurgency doctrine posits that a successful occupation, such as the one by coalition forces in Afghanistan, must win over local public opinion in order to bring lasting security. Thankfully, it appears that the lesson has sunk in to a certain extent, with diplomats increasingly reclaiming their role from the military as go-betweens with locals. Yet much of the damage has been done, and in the case of drones, no amount of diplomacy can assuage the feeling of terror felt throughout the countryside of Afghanistan and Pakistan when that ominous buzzing sound approaches overhead. It is, perhaps for better and certainly for worse, the new face of US military occupation.

Alan McPherson is a professor of international and area studies at the University of Oklahoma and the author of The Invaded: How Latin Americans and their Allies Fought and Ended US Occupations.

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George Antheil, the bad boy of early twentieth century music

By Meghann Wilhoite

American composer and self-proclaimed “bad boy of music” George Antheil was born today 114 years ago in Trenton, New Jersey. His most well-known piece is Ballet mècanique, which was premiered in Paris in 1926; like Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, from which Antheil seems to have derived quite a bit of inspiration, the premiere resulted in audience outrage and a riot in the streets. The piece is scored for pianos and a number of percussion instruments, including airplane propellers.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Though he died at the age of 58, polymath Antheil managed to accomplish quite a bit in his relatively short life both in and outside the field of music. Here are some highlights:

His name appears alongside the actress Hedy Lamarr’s on a patent, granted in 1942, for an early type of frequency hopping device, their invention for disrupting the intended course of radio-controlled German torpedoes.

In 1937 he published a text on endocrinology called Every Man His Own Detective: A Study of Glandular Criminology . The book includes chapters on “How to read your newspaper” and “The glandular rogue’s gallery”.

His music was championed by the likes of James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Sylvia Beach, W.B. Yeats, Erik Satie, and Pablo Picasso.

Under the pseudonym Stacey Bishop, he wrote Death in the Dark , a detective novel edited by T.S. Eliot, the hero of which is based on Pound.

After spending the majority of the 1920s and 30s in Europe, he settled in Hollywood and wrote , for directors such as Cecil B. DeMille and Fritz Lang (and with such titillating titles as “Zombies of Mora Tau” and “Panther Girl of the Kongo”).

Last, but not least, here is Vincent Price narrating Antheil’s “To a Nightingale” with the composer himself on piano: George Antheil – Two Odes of John Keats – To A Nightingale: Vincent Price, narrator; George Antheil, piano

Meghann Wilhoite is an Associate Editor at Grove Music/Oxford Music Online, music blogger, and organist. Follow her on Twitter at @megwilhoite. Read her previous blog posts on Sibelius, the pipe organ, John Zorn, West Side Story, and other subjects.

Oxford Music Online is the gateway offering users the ability to access and cross-search multiple music reference resources in one location. With Grove Music Online as its cornerstone, Oxford Music Online also contains The Oxford Companion to Music, The Oxford Dictionary of Music, and The Encyclopedia of Popular Music.

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Preparing for BSC 2014

By Caitie-Jane Cook

Thursday sees the start of the British Society of Criminology annual conference, this year held at the University of Liverpool. The three-day conference (10-12 July 2014, preceded by a postgraduate conference on the 9th) will see academics from across the globe come together to discuss an expansive range of topics, from prisons and policing to hate crime and community justice, and I, for one, cannot wait to attend.

The theme for this year’s conference is Crime, Justice, Welfare: Can the Metropole Listen?, with participants aiming to “examine the counter-hegemonic potential of criminology, […] explore how it might give ‘voice’ to those that stand outside the dominant narratives of the metropole, [and challenge the] practices that serve to marginalise different ways of thinking about, and engaging with, an alternative criminological enterprise.”

With an expansive programme of sessions to be staged in the award-winning and Grade II listed Foresight Centre, the conference is sure to be a highlight in the 2014 criminology calendar. Here are some of the key sessions we’re looking forward to and we think you should be too:

Keynote speeches from Professors Raewyn Connell (University of Sydney), Chris Cunneen (James Cook University), and Didier Fassin (Princeton University)
Border Criminologies – Mary Bosworth chairs a session addressing links between immigration, trafficking, and cross-border detention
Police Culture and Diversity – A roundtable discussion on contemporary developments in diversity, 15 years on from the MacPherson Report.
Launch of the BSC Victims Network – an event to mark the formation of the BSC’s sixth specialist network in March 2014, which sets out to bring together those who have interests around victims of crime and social harm, survivors, and resilience.

The British Society of Criminology conference isn’t the only thing in Liverpool that has a lot to offer. For those with some time to spare outside the conference, make sure that you make the best of the city named European Capital of Culture in 2008.

If a conference session has piqued your interest, or you’d like to fit in some last minute research, scour the shelves of the Liverpool Central Library, home of the famous Picton Reading Room and fully renovated in 2013. Of course, you can’t mention Liverpool without The Beatles – take a trip to the Casbah Coffee Club, where it all began, or learn all about the Fab Four at The Beatles Story dockside museum. Or, you could find out more about the city itself at the Museum of Liverpool, winner of the Council of Europe Museum Prize for 2013.

Find out more about the conference by visiting the official website or visiting the British Society of Criminology’s official website. Those on Twitter can keep up-to-date with the conference by following the official account @livuni_bsc2014 and hashtag #bsc2014. Conference attendees can visit the OUP stand for the duration of the conference to pick up copies of the British Journal of Criminology and to claim an exclusive delegate discount on a range of titles.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Caitie-Jane Cook, otherwise known as ‘CJ’, is Marketing Executive for Law titles at OUP.

Oxford University Press is committed to developing outstanding resources to support students, scholars and practitioners in all areas of the law. OUP publishes a wide range of law journals and online products. Follow our law teams on Twitter at @OUPIntLaw, @BStonesPolice, and @blackstonescrim @OUPCommLaw, to find out more.

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Image credit: Liverpool Museum and Library, by Chowells. CC-BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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The #BringBackOurGirls rallying point

By Isaac Terwase Sampson

The Boko Haram (BH) terrorist group, responsible for the abduction of over 200 school girls in north-eastern Nigeria, has been Nigeria’s prime security threat since 2009. Although the group has carried out innumerable acts of terror in Nigeria since 2009, its abduction of more than 200 girls at Government Girls Secondary School Chibok, on 14 April 2014, outraged the world and gave it reinforced international currency. The global and Nigerian Muslim community has since distanced itself from Boko Haram’s violent ideology. In the face of current cosmopolitan campaign to rescue the Chibok girls, which is christened #BringBackOurGirls (#BBOG, #BBG), the question that dominates public discourse in the aftermath of Chibok abduction is whether #BringBackOurGirls as an isolated phenomenon, or the increasing de-legitimisation of Boko Haram’s extremism by Muslims generally, would serve as a rallying point against violent extremism in Nigeria, or rather reinforce the historic sharia question that has threatened peaceful co-existence in the country since independence in 1960. For those unfamiliar with Nigeria’s religious politics and relations, the following cursory background would suffice as clarification.

Hudreds of people gathered at Union Square in New York City on May 3 to demand the release of some 230 schoolgirls abducted by Boko Haram insurgents in Nigeria. Photo by Michael Fleshman. CC BY-NC 2.0 via fleshmanpix Flickr.

Boko Haram in the Context of Nigeria’s Religious Politics

In most parts of northern Nigeria, Islam and sharia predated the post-independence Western-secular system that was bequeathed to a unified Nigerian state at independence. Uthman dan Fodio’s jihad of 1810, which captured the Hausa states of northern Nigeria, brought about the establishment of an Islamic central authority under the Sokoto caliphate. Since dan Fodio’s jihad was aimed at establishing a theocratic state, Islam inevitably became a state religion in these captured Hausa states. Although the British colonial authorities protected the theocratic political order they met in these emirates for reasons of imperial convenience, they nonetheless introduced a legal system that modulated the sharia order. Notwithstanding this interference, Islam and sharia survived colonial invasion in these states. Although the sharia legal order was relatively modulated to protect the British and other European merchants, its application on the natives remained significantly strong. This arrangement remained so until it became obvious to the British that an Islamic political/legal order would not serve the commercial interest of Western merchants, particularly after independence. With this concern in mind, the British orchestrated a reversal of the sharia order, and cajoled the Muslim north into accepting a relatively secular system at independence, an arrangement that was christened “the Settlement of 1960”.

The settlement of 1960 was a pact between the British colonialists, as arbiter, the northern and Southern Animist-Christians on the one hand, and the Muslim north on the other. It was aimed at establishing a secular legal order side by side a modulated Islamic legal regime. It is intriguing to note that whereas the Christian community initially opposed this settlement for the fear of a covert Islamization agenda, the northern Muslim community was at first supportive of it. But the respective positions of the Christian and Muslim communities were to be reversed shortly after independence. The Christian community turned around to favour the settlement of 1960 while the northern Muslim community became avidly antagonistic to this arrangement.

Although many factors account for northern Muslims’ opposition to the settlement, the most significant factor is the sharia debate that ensued during the constitution-making process of 1976-78. At the constitutional conferences, there was considerable mobilisation by northern political and religious leaders for the entrenchment of sharia in Nigeria’s legal system. Unfortunately, the Muslim north suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of Christians in their quest for the establishment of sharia. This bitter defeat meant that northern Muslims had lost most of the incentives that made the Settlement of 1960 attractive to them in the first place. Among other consequences, the sharia debate marked the beginning of vigorous and sustained activism by northern Muslims for an Islamic state, or much less, an Islamic legal, economic, and social order within the Nigerian state. This activism has taken both liberal and radical approaches. Whereas the intellectual and political classes continue to pressure the state for Islamic determinism, the Islamists and rustic northern Muslim folk often express this quest in violent ways.

The Islamic revivalism that followed the sharia debate of 1976-8, inspired the emergence and proliferation of radical Islamic sects and spurred the influx of radical Islamic clerics from neighbouring states and Senegal, into northern Nigeria. Within this period, acts of religious violence were often encouraged or ignored by state authorities in northern Nigeria. Consequently, religious violence became a common feature in this part of the country, as Christians became objects of religiously-motivated attacks at the least provocation, either directly or vicariously. For instance, the US invasion of Iraq in the 1990s led to pervasive attacks on Christians and their worship centres in northern Nigeria. In 2003, a Danish newspaper cartoon, which allegedly disparaged Prophet Mohammed, led to mass killing of northern Christians and destruction of their Churches and property. In the aftermath of 9/11 bombing in 2001, Muslims celebrated in Northern Nigeria and vandalized Churches in the process. More recently, Christians in northern Nigeria were subject of attack from Muslims, when US planes attacked Libya during the Arab Spring. The Boko Haram sect emerged in the context of this continuum of Islamic activism, which endorsed violence as one of its operational tools. Its ideology was therefore weaved around the establishment of an imaginary puritanical state governed by sharia. Fortunately or unfortunately, Boko Haram’s interpretation of kafir (heathen) transcends the simplistic description of “non-Muslims” and encompasses those Muslims who don’t subscribe to its fundamentalists brand of Islam.

Would #BringBackOurGirls Reverse this Tendency?

Paradoxically, Boko Haram which emerged as an ‘Islamic sect’ has taken its defence of Islam overboard, killing in the process moderate Islamic teachers, preachers, and other Muslims who deprecate its fanatical brand of Islam. Its indiscriminate attacks over the civilian population also do not distinguish Christians from Muslims. Specifically, Boko Haram’s policy of targeting moderate Muslims has become a significant paradox of sorts, given that it is a product of the overarching sharia struggle in northern Nigeria. With the unfolding of its extreme and caustic brand of Islam, the group has not only denounced the legitimacy of the Islamic leadership in Nigeria, it has declared them and other moderate Muslims as kafir and enemies of Allah. As #BringBackOurGirls draws global attention to Boko Haram specifically, and violent extremism in Nigeria generally, the global and Nigerian Islamic community have continued to condemn their activities, describing their activities as criminal un-Islamic. Both the Secretary General of the Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC) and the President of Nigeria’s Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs have said so. However, many questions have been asked of the recent de-legitimisation of Boko Haram by the Muslim community: Is the condemnation of Boko Haram by Muslims inspired by a genuine concern over violent extremism or borne out of its indiscriminate attacks against Muslims? Would Muslims in northern Nigeria, continue to condemn the activities of individuals or groups who express extreme and violent tendencies in the name of Islam? Would any attack on Christians and their property be condoned or ignored in the future?

In the aftermath of the #BringBackOurGirls, two schools of thought have emerged.

There are those who opine that Boko Haram insurgency is a prelude to greater religious upheavals in northern Nigeria, if northern Muslims are neither allowed the liberty of having an Islamic state nor practicing sharia in its orthodox fashion. Those who hold this viewpoint argue that the Muslim community would not have genuinely distanced itself from Boko Haram, if its targets were solely Christians. They also contend that the general discord between liberal and fundamentalist Islam in the Middle East has not deterred the support for an age-long global Islamization agenda that is funded from this region. Relating this to the Nigeria situation, the logic is that Islamism or violent extremism would not deter the historic sharia activism in northern Nigeria hence the need to revisit the sharia debate.

Persuasive as these arguments may sound, I hold a contrary view. In my estimation, the Boko Haram and Maitatsine Islamic sects have clearly demonstrated that Islamism (rigid and extreme adherence to Islamic tradition and its violent expression) is totalitarian and provides no room for liberal adherence to Islam. Secondly, due to its anti-modernisation character, no state desirous of progress tolerates violent extremism. Saudi Arabia, which is the cradle of Islam, has zero tolerance for it. Moreover, the northern elite, who supported Islamic activism in the past, has become its biggest victim. As the northern economy crumbles under Boko Haram’s campaign of violence, the elite who hold the highest stakes in the economy are equally the biggest losers. They have also realized that there is no ideological discipline for men in arms, as they are bound to resort to violent crime for economic reasons. It is in realisation of these facts that the northern Governors admitted in their meeting in February 2014, that Boko Haram has destroyed the north economically, socially, and politically.

For these and many other reasons, I hold an optimistic view that #BringBackOurGirls would not only lead to the rescue of the abducted girls, it marks the beginning of the end of Boko Haram insurgency — but most importantly, the end of religious intolerance and violent extremism in northern Nigeria. #BringBackOurGirls presents an opportunity to Christians and Muslims in northern Nigeria to rally against violent extremism by treating the indiscriminate killing and destruction of property as criminal acts and not acts of religious deference. I believe these two religious communities would embrace this opportunity as was recently demonstrated in the city of Kaduna, where they united to wade off Boko Haram attackers.

Isaac Terwase Sampson is the author of “Religion and the Nigerian State: Situating the de facto and de jure Frontiers of State–Religion Relations and its Implications for National Security” (available to read for free for a limited time) in the Oxford Journal of Law and Religion. He is a Senior Researcher at the Centre for Strategic Research and Studies, National Defence College, Nigeria. He joined the Centre in 2006 from the Ministry of Justice, Kogi State, where he served as a Senior State Counsel.

The Oxford Journal of Law and Religion publishes a range of articles drawn from various sectors of the law and religion field, including: social, legal and political issues involving the relationship between law and religion in society; comparative law perspectives on the relationship between religion and state institutions; developments regarding human and constitutional rights to freedom of religion or belief; considerations of the relationship between religious and secular legal systems; empirical work on the place of religion in society; and other salient areas where law and religion interact.

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Five questions for Rebecca Mead

Each summer, Oxford University Press USA and Bryant Park in New York City partner for their summer reading series Word for Word Book Club. The Bryant Park Reading Room offers free copies of book club selections while supply lasts, compliments of Oxford University Press, and guest speakers lead the group in discussion. On Tuesday 8 July 2014, Rebecca Mead, author of My Life in Middlemarch, leads a discussion on George Eliot’s Middlemarch.

What was your inspiration for choosing Middlemarch?

I first read Middlemarch at seventeen, and have read it roughly every five years or so since, my emotional response to it evolving at each revisiting. In my forties, I decided to spend more time with the book and to explore the ways in which it seems to have woven itself into my life: hence my own book, My Life In Middlemarch.

Did you have an “a-ha!” moment that made you want to be a writer?

Not exactly, but getting my first story published in a national newspaper at the age of eleven in a contest for young would-be journalists—and getting paid for it—must have been a motivating factor.

Which author do you wish had been your 7th grade English teacher?

The best book I can think of that gets into the mind of a thirteen or fourteen year old is Huckleberry Finn, so please may I have Mark Twain?

What is your secret talent?

I used to be able to charm children with my ability to walk on my hands. Then I had my own child, and ever since my balance hasn’t been what it used to be. Luckily, my son doesn’t require charming.

With what word do you most identify?

“perhaps”

Rebecca Mead is a staff writer for The New Yorker. She is the author of My Life in Middlemarch and One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding. She lives in Brooklyn.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics on Twitter and Facebook. Read previous interviews with Word for Word Book Club guest speakers.

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Image credit: Rebecca Mead. Photo by Elisabeth C. Prochnik. Courtesy of Rebecca Mead.

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Casey Kasem and end-of-life planning

By Edward Zelinsky

The sad story of Casey Kasem’s last illness is now over. Casey Kasem was an American pop culture icon. Among his other roles, Mr. Kasen was the disc jockey host on the legendary radio program, American Top 40. He was also the voice of Shaggy Rogers of Scooby-Doo.

Unfortunately, for many Americans Casey Kasem is now known as the subject of a bitter dispute between his widow Jean and his children from his first marriage. In the face of Mr. Kasem’s debilitating dementia, Mrs. Kasem wanted to continue medical care while his three children from his prior marriage had concluded that care was pointless and should be discontinued. Mr. Kasem’s children prevailed in the California courts based on a document Mr. Kasen had signed in 2007. Life support was accordingly withdrawn and Casey Kasem died shortly thereafter.

At one level, it is surprising is how rarely we hear today of such stories of conflict over end-of-life care. Cases involving Nancy Cruzan, Karen Ann Quinlan, and Terri Schiavo were once prominent in our public discourse.

An unheralded accomplishment of the American political and legal systems is the largely successful privatization of end-of-life health care decisions. Through documents variously denoted as living wills, health care proxies, medical powers of attorney, and health care instructions, an individual while mentally competent can plan for the end of his life. Central to such planning is the designation a medical decisionmaker and the specification of the criteria to be applied by such decisionmaker if an individual becomes incapable of making medical decisions for him- or herself.

Macro of a living will document. © zimmytws via iStockphoto.

These planning procedures, while not panaceas, have largely ensured that end-of-life decisionmaking will be made, not in courtrooms, but where such decisions belong: by the dying individual’s designated loved ones.

Two important lessons emerge from the Kasem family’s unfortunate experience. First, spouses are not automatically medical decisionmakers for each other. Spouses should formally designate each other as medical decisionmakers, if that is what they want.

Unfortunately, debate over same-sex marriage has confused matters, leading many individuals to erroneously believe that, simply by virtue of marriage, spouses are automatically each other’s medical decisionmakers. They are not. For example, Michael Schiavo’s status as husband did not guarantee him the right to make medical decisions for his wife Terri.

It is sensible to require that spouses must formally designate each other as their end-of-life medical decisionmakers. To take the most obvious case, suppose that spouses are estranged and that a healthy spouse will gain financially through an inheritance on the death of a wealthy, ill spouse. We would not want the healthy spouse in this setting to terminate medical care unless the ill spouse had signaled that that was what he wants. Or, to take a more benign situation, spouses may love each other but still think that other persons, e.g., the children from prior marriages, will be better decisionmakers under the stress of an end-of-life situation.

The bottom line is that spouses should execute the formal instrument of their respective state, however that instrument is designated, if they want each other to be health care decisionmakers. Marriage, by itself, is not legally sufficient to make spouses medical decisionmakers for each other.

The second lesson of the Kasem story is that, even if all of the proper documents have been signed, terminating medical treatment at the end of life is a difficult and painful decision. For example, one commonly used formula specifies that medical treatment should be withdrawn when an individual’s condition is “terminal.” Unfortunately, the physicians advising in end-of-life settings do not always agree when a conditional is “terminal.” If consensus exists, it is still painful to withhold medical care even if an ill individual previously authorized such withholding while he was healthy and competent to decide.

Casey Kasem left Americans with wonderful memories. His parting contribution to the American people was to remind us of the need for proper end-of-life planning and to demonstrate that, even with such planning in place, medical decisions at the end-of-life can be painful and difficult.

Edward A. Zelinsky is the Morris and Annie Trachman Professor of Law at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law of Yeshiva University. He is the author of The Origins of the Ownership Society: How The Defined Contribution Paradigm Changed America. His monthly column appears on the OUPblog.

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