Oxford University Press's Blog, page 848

The relationship between poverty and everyday violence

How do we see poverty? Most people envision global poverty as dirty shacks, hungry children, a lack of schools, and rampant disease. But as Gary A. Haugen, founder and president of International Justice Mission, explains in the videos below, there is another phenomenon hidden beneath the surface. Rather than catastrophic forms of violence in civil war, unrest, or even genocide, insidious forms of violence in everyday life make the poor even more vulnerable. The fear of violence during a walk to school, a simple shopping trip, or a morning store opening slowly destroys individuals and the society. What happens when common people are unable to turn to the police or the courts? In The Locust Effect: Why the End of Poverty Requires the End of Violence, Gary A. Haugen and Victor Boutros uncover a massive international problem and the struggle to make common poor people safe from violence.

How did your experience investigating the Rwandan genocide impact you?

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What is everyday violence?

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What are we missing about the reality of poverty?

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Why is there so much violence against the poor?

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Gary A. Haugen and Victor Boutros are co-authors of The Locust Effect: Why the End of Poverty Requires the End of Violence. Gary Haugen is the founder and president of International Justice Mission, a global human rights agency that protects the poor from violence. The largest organization of its kind, IJM has partnered with law enforcement to rescue thousands of victims of violence. Victor Boutros is a federal prosecutor who investigates and tries nationally significant cases of police misconduct, hate crimes, and international human trafficking around the country on behalf of the U.S. Department of Justice.

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Reflections on war, past and present

By Michael D. Matthews

I am posting this blog on February 6th. My father was born on this date in 1914, just months before the outbreak of World War I. In many ways the state of the world 100 years ago was not so different from today. Political instability plagued Europe, social change driven by advances in technology was sweeping the world, and yet most people felt a sense of security that the world as they knew it was stable. All of this changed with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand on 28 June 1914. Within a month, war swept across Europe. War raged for the next four years on a scale never before seen. At its conclusion, many believed that humans would never again engage in such violent and deadly warfare. It was known as the “war to end all wars.” How could people have been so wrong?

Photo courtesy of Michael D. Matthews

My father probably never imagined that he would serve in a war more widespread and lethal than World War I. Dad graduated from high school in 1932 at the height of the depression. He eventually found steady employment with the Civilian Conservation Corps, a New Deal work-relief program. Having grown up on a farm, Dad easily settled into the work of building trails, improving parks, and fighting forest fires. But on 7 December 1941, my dad’s world changed with the attack on Pearl Harbor. Within a few months, he was in the Army and training for deployment to the Pacific Theater. From 1944 to 1945, he engaged in 14 months of continuous combat. As a combat medic, he no doubt saw some of the worst of the fighting. He was awarded the Bronze Star and other decorations, and returned home along with millions of other soldiers. Then a “baby boom” occurred. He did his part, or I would not be writing this.

I became a military psychologist by profession. Perhaps my dad’s experiences during World War II provided me with a special interest in the military. Or maybe it was seeing the impact the Vietnam War had on friends a few years ahead of me. I have always been interested in the complicated relationship between psychology and war. I was commissioned in the US Air Force in 1980, served as a behavioral sciences officer, and for the past 16 years have worked for the US Army as a research scientist and West Point professor.

For me, the role of psychology in war is fascinating. Looking back to World War I, psychologists played a critical role in developing aptitude tests that could identify special skills that in turn helped the military assign recruits to jobs matched to their abilities. This work was spearheaded by then American Psychological Association president Robert Yerkes, who in the span of a few short months oversaw the development of the Army Alpha and Army Beta tests, forerunners to modern aptitude tests.

Psychologists played an even bigger role in World War II. Besides improving selection tests, they began a more systematic study of the psychological casualties of war, often called “combat fatigue.” Psychologists began to understand the impact of trauma and adversity on human adjustment. The rapidly evolving capabilities of aircraft and other military systems drove the development of a new subfield of psychology, now known as human factors engineering or engineering psychology.

Historian Alan Beyerchen makes the case that the Cold War (which also involved “hot” conflicts, including Korea and Vietnam) should be viewed as World War III. This era of warfare drove significant developments in psychology, including the emergence of posttraumatic stress disorder as an official psychiatric condition, and computational models of human intelligence.

The Global War on Terror, for Beyerchen, represents World War IV. It differs from previous wars in terms of technology, political boundaries, and religious ideology. There are no clear lines of battle. As we learned on 11 September 2001, even the mainland of the world’s most powerful nation is vulnerable to attack. The enemy is not a specific country. Rather, it is a loose network of ideologues spread across continents that pose the greatest threats. There is no clear definition of victory, and no end in sight to this war.

Beyerchen argues that psychology is the most critical science to World War IV. Psychologists are needed to prepare combatants for the skills they need to succeed. It is no longer enough for a soldier to possess basic physical fitness and an average intelligence quotient. We must train our soldiers and their leaders to think faster and better than the enemy, to leverage modern technology to maximize success, to fully understand the nuances of cultural forces in war, and to be more resilient in the face of adversity. Strategic military commanders must embrace new leadership skills and philosophies that match the realities of contemporary war. They must lead us to a political and cultural victory, because there is no definable end state that can be achieved through the use of raw firepower alone.

As hard as I tried, I could never get Dad to say much about the war. By his account, it was simply a long camping trip with friends. He made it sound like the ultimate “guys” getaway. He never admitted to being in or even seeing combat. It was not until after his death, in 1998, that we discovered his military file with a complete record of his service. I am sure he would maintain that he did nothing special, and that plenty of others did much more, including paying the ultimate sacrifice. In that way, he was like the others in what Tom Brokaw has called the “greatest generation.” In later years, he suffered an episode of major depression. With the perspective of hindsight, I wonder if his combat experiences in World War II contributed to this. We know, based on modern psychiatric practice, that tens of thousands of veterans from Vietnam to Afghanistan suffer combat-stress related disorders, including post-traumatic stress disorder.

My dad fought in a world war, and I train and educate future officers to fight in the current war. I wonder what a child born this year, during the centennial observance of the outbreak of World War I, will experience in his or her life. I imagine we all share the hope that the children of today will face a less hostile and warring world than did my father. Psychology will certainly play a significant role in the next 100 years both in preparing for war, and in helping build a culture of peace.

Michael D. Matthews is Professor of Engineering Psychology at the United States Military Academy. Collectively, his research interests center on soldier performance in combat and other dangerous contexts. He has authored over 200 scientific papers and is the co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Military Psychology (Oxford University Press, 2012). Dr. Matthews’ most recent book is Head Strong: How Psychology is Revolutionizing War (Oxford University Press, 2014).

Note: The views expressed herein are those of the author and do not reflect the position of the United States Military Academy, the Department of the Army, or the Department of Defense.





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The Beatles and New York, February 1964

By Gordon R. Thompson

When Pan Am flight 101, the “Jet Clipper Defiance,” touched down at the recently renamed John F. Kennedy Airport on 7 February 1964, the grieving angst that had gripped the Western world lifted, if just a little. What emerged from the darkness of the Boeing 707’s doorway was something so joyful, so deliciously irreverent that we forgot for a moment the tensions of the Berlin wall, the Cuban missile crisis, and the assassination of a young president. The sigh that North America released felt so deep that it sounded as one big exuberant scream of delight.

That New York served as the Beatles’ gateway to the west and consequently to the world was not chance. A number of factors a decade in the making had inevitably colluded to spark those initial days of pandemonium. By the early sixties, the first transatlantic jet route between London and New York City had become one of the most heavily traveled international routes in the world—and had delivered one New Yorker to view Beatlemania first-hand.

On 31 October 1963, Ed Sullivan sat at London’s Heathrow Airport waiting for Beatles fans to release his flight. Coincidentally, a week later, Beatles manager Brian Epstein was negotiating three appearances by the Fab Four on Sullivan’s weekly Sunday night variety show. The native New Yorker had already been looking for British talent as he pursued a strategy of internationalizing his program, with Belgian nuns, Italian puppets, and others to complement the Catskill comedians he regularly featured. American audiences easily accepted British performers, and so Sullivan had brought singers from London like Cliff Richard and Helen Shapiro. But nothing could have prepared him for the Beatles.

The band had already proved itself in Britain, and Sullivan’s temporary confinement on the Heathrow runway came as fans greeted the band returning from a successful Swedish tour. Time and Newsweek would run stories about the Beatles on 18 November, and American TV newscasters filmed and edited stories on this strange British phenomenon. On 22 November, CBS and NBC ran reports on their morning news programs, but, with the assassination later that day in Dallas, those stories never made the evening news. The Beatles remained a murmur in the background behind a national tragedy.

New York City was, and arguably still is, the news and media capital of America, if not the world. Postmodernists might argue that the dissemination of information has become so decentralized that the world no longer has a media center, but in 1964 Manhattan Island was it. If the Beatles were to enter into America’s media bloodstream, New York would be where it happened.

For most of 1963, Capitol Records in Los Angeles had resisted releasing a Beatles record, even though its British parent company EMI had lobbied otherwise. Capitol was finally pushed into it by the news coverage and by disc jockeys who repeatedly played the British disc of “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” The American company rush-released a version of that record on 26 December. The Beatles would learn that it had reached number one on Cashbox’s charts while they were playing in Paris a month later.

Capitol Records’ Brown Meggs, in conjunction with CBS and United Artists (who had signed an agreement to release the Beatles’ first film), lobbied New York disc jockeys and plastered the city with signs that showed four reddish-brown mop-top haircuts with the tag “The Beatles Are Coming.” Nicky Byrne, Brian Epstein’s head of Beatles marketing in America, also printed t-shirts that some teens received for free. Disc jockey Murray Kaufman played the role of Paul Revere on New York’s WINS radio, which kept announcing how far away the Beatles were, as though they were tracking an ICBM’s trajectory and projected detonation. Area teens and others began migrating toward the airport, feeling they needed to be there.

The Beatles’ first Ed Sullivan Show appearance, on 9 February 1964, signaled a fundamental shift in our cultural center of gravity. American households had locked into their television sets in November to watch the news of Kennedy’s assassination and funeral. Television as a medium had now taken on a quasi-religious role in many households: the electronic oracle in the living room, channeling an era’s zeitgeist. On 9 February, families again gathered to experience this divination from the ether and, after patiently waiting through ads for shaving cream and shoe polish, they were rewarded.

The hundreds in the studio and the millions in the TV audience knew the world had changed for the better; most of North America collectively exhaled for the first time in months. Sullivan’s audience released their anxiety in an expression of the hope that good still had a place in the world and that happiness could be found simply by singing “Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

Gordon R. Thompson is Professor of Music and Chair of the Department of Music at Skidmore College. His book, Please Please Me: Sixties British Pop, Inside Out, offers an insider’s view of the British pop-music recording industry. Gordon Thompson will be speaking at a number of Capital District venues in February. His lecture, “She Loves You: The Beatles and New York, February 1964,” will contextualize that band’s historic relationship with the Empire State. Check out Gordon Thompson’s posts on The Beatles and other music.

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Image credit: The Beatles arrive at Kennedy Airport in February 1964. Public domain via Library of Congress.

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Letters, telegrams, steam, and speed

By Simon Eliot

Oxford was finally linked to the rail network in June 1844. Within a decade or so the railway had become part of the way in which Oxford University Press at all levels conducted its business and its pleasure. One such pleasure was a wayzgoose. Originally a wayzgoose or waygoose denoted an annual feast given by a master printer for his workers, which was usually held on or around St Bartholomew’s day (24 August). This was traditionally regarded as the end of summer, a time after which printers might be expected to work by candle light in the evenings. Later it came to mean any holiday or event funded by employers for their printers and apprentices. On 15 July 1854 there was a wayzgoose outing to Portsmouth courtesy of the G.W. and L.N. Railways, an event which was still unusual enough for the recorder of the day to observe with some relief that they all ‘returned without any accident’. In July 1856 the men from the Bible side took advantage of three-day return tickets (Saturday morning to Monday evening) to London at 4s each that had been negotiated with the GWR; the majority visited the Crystal Palace, by then newly re-sited and expanded at Sydenham in South London. In August 1857 the men exchanged their Saturday half-holiday for a half-day trip to Nuneham Courtenay for the G.W.R. Fete.

The Great Western Railway and the telegraph in 1849 (Illustrated London News, January 1849). From the History of Oxford University Press.

Further up the hierarchy the Press was, by the 1860s, equally dependent on the new railways and other developing communication systems. Bartholmew Price, who was acting more and more as a sort of CEO for Oxford University Press, needed almost weekly advice from his newly-appointed publisher in London, Alexander Macmillan. This advice was of a complicated sort that could not be delivered exclusively by letter, though letters were frequently exchanged. Indeed, the frequency with which letters were collected and the speed with which they were delivered was itself a monument to the Penny Post. However, what additionally was required was Macmillan’s frequent attendance at Oxford and Price’s frequent presence in London. Both men were busy: Macmillan with many other ventures; Price with teaching, college affairs, and other Press business. Neither could necessarily spend a day or more on a meeting and the associated travel, as had been expected of the London-based Bible Partners earlier in the century. Price’s and Macmillan’s letters to each other were full of details about which train to take, and how long they might spend in a meeting before catching the last express service home.

The dependence of Price and the Delegates on Macmillan in the first year or two of their relationship is clear, and the need to arrange precise meeting times pressing:

We have a long list of subjects waiting for consultation with you. Our usual hour of meeting on Tuesday is 2.15. Shall you be here at that time?

The Delegates of the Press will hold the last meeting for the term on Friday next at two o clock.

The amount of business is considerable: and cannot be done without you. We shall also be glad of your assistance in fixing the price of several books which we hope then to order for publication & printing [...]

It will consequently be convenient if you will to Oxford either on Thursday evening or by the first train on Friday so that we may devote that morning to Press work.

In 1863 Macmillan could have caught a noon train which would have got him into Oxford by 1.32 pm, but Price was asking a lot when requiring that the publisher catch the first train on Friday, as that left Paddington at 6.00 in the morning, arriving in Oxford at 8.20 am. Assuming that he travelled first class, it would have cost him 11s.

The speed and frequency of trains allowed Price and Macmillan to run a close, cooperative venture. This would not have been possible much before the 1850s. Macmillan’s own experience had made this clear. Twenty years before, Alexander Macmillan had taken an outside seat on a horse-drawn coach from London to Cambridge to provide support for his ailing brother Daniel. So long and so cold was the journey that Alexander arrived almost as ill as his brother and thus of very little use to him.

The frequency and dependability of the letter post is another thread in the communications web on which the OUP-Macmillan relationship rested, and of which they had the highest expectations. In August 1880, when Price was on holiday in North Wales, he wrote complaining that:

Your letter, forwarded from Oxford, reached me here yesterday, but I was unable to take any action on it then as the Post leaves the place at midday on Sundays.

Demands to be informed ‘by return of post’ or by ‘tomorrow night’s post’ were common, and were often associated with telegrams that followed up letters or which letters superseded. This created a speedy feedback loop for both protagonists, which allowed them quickly to adjust their advice and behaviour in the light of the other’s rapid response. Crises, and there were many in this period, prompted a spate of letters and telegrams – with a frequency and immediacy that was closer to email than one might have expected – as Price struggled to interpret the Delegates to Macmillan, and Macmillan strove to explain the commercial imperatives of a London textbook publisher to Oxford dons.

Simon Eliot is Professor of the History of the Book in the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London. He is general editor of The History of Oxford University Press, and editor of its Volume II 1780-1896.

With access to extensive archives, The History of Oxford University Press is the first complete scholarly history of the Press, detailing its organization, publications, trade, and international development. Read previous blog posts about the history of Oxford University Press.

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Is smell for the dogs?

By Barbara Malt

Dogs are the noses of modern society. They not only track the scent of prey across a meadow but find lost children, sniff out bombs and drugs, and conduct medical diagnosis. Pigs are good, too; we rely on them to hunt down rare and expensive truffles. Domestic cats can turn in an impressive performance, pawing out the last crumb of tuna sandwich at the bottom of a workbag. But humans? To most of us, the sense of smell is something that seems a little primitive. We like things that smell good and shy away from things that smell bad. But we don’t want to think about smell too much. We certainly don’t want to lower our noses to the ground, stick them into containers, or put them on each other.

Likewise, smell is something we don’t talk about much. In fact, it seems hard to do. Try to list all the words for smells you can. There’s sweet. Then there’s fresh, musty, and rotten. Before long, you run out. From there, we tend to describe an odor by analogy to some familiar source: it smells like an old sneaker; it smells like my grandmother’s house. That’s a very different situation from color, where most of us can list color words at some length before resorting to analogy to specific objects or experiences. There’s not just red, white, and blue, but mauve, magenta, crimson, maroon, navy, teal, beige, tan, and so on. This jives with our sense that modern humans are visual beings, and an acute interest in smell is something we gave up long ago in evolutionary history.

It could be that there are some modern exceptions to this general trend. People who work in industries that revolve around smell might develop a specialized vocabulary of smell terms. But it turns out that they don’t do that much, either. Their terminology relies heavily on references to sources: citrus, earthy, floral, mossy, woody.

All these observations have led to a consensus that odors are ineffable. They just can’t be expressed well in words. They’re too abstract, too ephemeral, and too distant from the concerns of modern-day humans for our brains to encode them in ways necessary for putting them into words.

But this assumes that what is true for English smell vocabulary is true for everyone. That’s a big assumption. Cognitive scientists Asifa Majid, Niclas Burenhult, and their colleagues have recently found that some non-Western cultures have much richer sets of odor terms. They studied the Jahai, a group of hunter-gatherers who live in a region of mountainous rainforest in Malaysia near the border with Thailand. They found that the Jahai have over a dozen smell terms that are similar in nature to English color words red, blue, green, and so on. The terms consist of single words, and they are not linked to specific sources and can be applied to a wide range of instances.

Now, Majid and Burenhult have asked a further important question: How effectively do the Jahai actually use all these terms? Maybe somehow they invented these terms but don’t have distinct meanings attached to them and can’t use them with consistency. If that were true, then the Jahai are not so different from English speakers after all. Majid and Burenhult traveled to Malaysia to test 10 native speakers of Jahai on scratch-‘n-sniff-type samples of 12 different odors. Their participants were asked to name each odor in Jahai. For comparison, they were shown color chips and asked to name each one. Ten speakers of American English were also asked to do these tasks.

English speakers showed very low agreement on names for odors, and their answers often involved long, idiosyncratic, source-based descriptions like “…It’s like that gum smell like something like Big Red.” In contrast, their color naming was much more consistent and relied more on non-source-based single words like red. This supports the popular beliefs about English.

The results for Jahai were different. There was much more agreement on odor naming for the Jahai than for Americans. In fact, for the Jahai, odors showed as much agreement as color did. Jahai speakers used single-word, non-source-based names for odors just as much as they did for colors. So for the Jahai, odors are no more ineffable than colors. As Majid and Burenhult put it, odors are expressible in language as long as you speak the right language.

That means that our assumptions about the relation of the modern human mind and brain to odor need to be rethought. Our Western, industrialized society may not care so much about smell. We may not think much about smell or talk much about smell. We might even think that talking about smells is sometimes yucky. But it’s not because human minds or brains have reached a point in their evolution where we just can’t deal with smell. Smell is not just for the dogs.

Barbara Malt is a Professor of Psychology at Lehigh University. She is the Associate Editor of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition and a co-editor of Words and the Mind: How Words Capture the Human Experience. She is interested in language, thought, and the relation between the two.

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Image credit: dog’s snout. macro. shallow DOF. © yoglimogli via iStockphoto.

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Monarchy and the end of the Commonwealth

By Philip Murphy

In November 2013, the Commonwealth was preparing for a highly controversial Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in Sri Lanka, which the Canadian prime minister had already threatened to boycott on the grounds of the abysmal human rights record of the host state. In an article I published at the time, I touched on the contrast between the pre-eminent position the Queen had obtained within the Commonwealth since the 1990s, and the organization’s own lackluster performance over that period:

‘A former prime minister of New Zealand once famously described the Queen as “the bit of glue that somehow manages to hold the whole thing together”. Increasingly, however, the Commonwealth resembles a dead parrot which relies on that glue to keep it upright on its perch.’

This particular passage was not terribly well received by London’s small but devoted band of Commonwealth enthusiasts (who sometimes resemble the more orthodox members of the old Communist Party of Great Britain in seeing each apparently terminal setback for their cause merely as a chance to reaffirm their unshakable faith that it will ultimately prevail). Yet it neatly, if rather provocatively, summarized one important point. By the mid-1970s, as the Commonwealth seemed to be set on a genuinely radical trajectory – its attentions focused on the campaign against white minority rule in Southern Africa – the link with the British royal family had become something of an embarrassment. Both the Commonwealth Secretariat and the British Foreign Office were distinctly nervous about anything that might highlight this connection fearing it would offend republican susceptibilities and serve as a reminder of the organization’s imperial origins. By contrast, in recent years the link to the Queen has been actively promoted, a tacit admission that from the point of view of most of the world’s media it is now the only news-worthy aspect of the Commonwealth.

David Cameron in Jaffna, Sri Lanka, 2013.

Nothing that has happened since the book went to press has given me any reason to revise the gloomy prognosis in its final pages. The Sri Lankan CHOGM was the public-relations disaster that many of us had predicted. The Canadian prime minister, Stephen Harper, carried out his threat to boycott the meeting. The prime minister of Mauritius, whose country was due to provide the venue of the next CHOGM, not only followed Harper’s example, but actually withdrew his offer to host the 2015 summit. Manmohan Singh, the prime minister of India, the Commonwealth’s most populous nation, also bowed to domestic pressure not to travel to Sri Lanka. Perhaps the most troubling fact for supporters of the Commonwealth, however, was that the majority of heads of government failed to attend the 2013 CHOGM, either out of principle or simply because they judged that there were better uses of their time. Even the British Prime Minister, David Cameron, who did attend the summit, made a point of travelling to the Tamil-dominated north of the island where, in front of the press, he met some of those who had suffered and lost relatives in the country’s brutal civil war. In the process, he skilfully defused some of the criticism that had been levelled at him in the UK over his decision to go to Sri Lanka. But having spent his time essentially digging himself out of the political hole that the Commonwealth had constructed for him, it seems unlikely that the experience did much to enhance his confidence in the organization. The Queen herself had neatly side-stepped the controversy, having announced earlier in the year that as part of a general review of her long-haul travel commitments she would not be flying to Sri Lanka (a perfectly plausible get-out-of-jail-free card for a woman of 87, but one that might still have seemed slightly suspicious to those familiar with her firm contention, over many decades, that it was her ‘duty’ as head of the Commonwealth to be present at CHOGMs). Instead, she sent Prince Charles as her representative, in what appears to be part of conscious strategy by the Palace to prepare the way for his ultimate succession to the headship (a role which is not formally hereditary).

In the wake of the fiasco of the Sri Lankan summit, anyone unaware of the Queen’s profound personal commitment to the organization might have expected her to avoid the subject of the Commonwealth in her 2013 Christmas Day broadcast. Instead she devoted roughly as much space to it as she did to the birth of her new great-grandson, invoking the Commonwealth’s ‘family ties’ and ‘common bond of friendship’. The rhetoric of Empire/Commonwealth as a family had been a staple of royal Christmas broadcasts since George V first began the tradition in the 1930s. Many would regard this simply as a myth designed to sanitize the grim reality of imperial domination which has survived the collapse of colonial rule. For the Queen herself, however, it remains of profound personal significance. Readers who believe that the Commonwealth still has a positive contribution to play in international affairs might well view as positively heroic her role in defending the organization, even at times of crisis. Those critical of the Commonwealth’s record and skeptical of its continuing value, and certainly those who feel that a hereditary monarch has no legitimate role to play in shaping the politics of a democracy are likely to be far less impressed. For in promoting the idea that the Commonwealth was in some sense ‘above’ politics, the Queen has indeed been an active player in post-war international affairs. And she shows no signs of intending to abandon this cherished cause.

Philip Murphy is Director of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies and Professor of British and Commonwealth History at the University of London. He graduated with a doctorate from the University of Oxford and taught at the Universities of Keele and Reading before taking up his current post. He has published extensively on twentieth century British and imperial history and the history of the British intelligence community. His latest book is Monarchy and the End of Empire.

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Image credit: British Prime Minister David Cameron is coming out from a shanty home in Sabapathi Pillai Welfare Centre in Chunnakam, outside Jaffna town on 15 November 2013. By UmakanthJaffna. CC-BY-SA-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

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Grove announces its Second Annual Spoof Article Contest

By Anna-Lise Santella

A Grove spoof article

It may be the middle of winter, but April Fool’s Day is only two months away, and that means it’s time to start planning your entry for the Second Annual Grove Music Spoof Article Contest!

Spoof articles have been part of Grove’s history for several decades—it seems that our authors have always had an inclination toward humor. You can read about the history of spoof articles in Grove. Last year’s contest brought us many outstanding entries, the top four of which were published on the OUPblog. Keith Clifton’s winning entry on spurious soprano, Stella Del Marinar, may also be found on its own special page at Grove Music Online.

If you think you have what it takes to fool the Grove editors, here are the rules:

Submission Guidelines:

Articles must be no longer than 300 words, including any bibliography or works lists you might choose to include. There is no minimum length. Entries that do not adhere to the length limit will be folded, spindled, and rejected.
Articles will be judged by a mix of staff and outside judges including Grove Music’s Editor in Chief Deane Root, Editor Anna-Lise Santella, and a guest to be named later.
Judges will consider the following criteria:

Does the article adhere to Grove style?
Is it entertaining?
Could it pass for a genuine Grove article (maybe if you forgot your glasses and you were squinting at it)?


Submissions must be sent by email sent to editor[at]grovemusic.com as follows:

Subject must read “Grove Music fake article contest-[title]” (e.g., Grove Music fake article contest-Ear flute).
Body of the email must include the title of the article and your full name and contact information (street address, email, phone)
The article must be included in an attached document. It must not include your name. This is to facilitate blind judging. Use your article’s title as the document name (if your article includes punctuation that can’t be in a document title, replace the punctuation with a space). You may send as many as three articles, but please send each submission separately. No more than three entries will be accepted from a single author.

All submissions must be received by midnight on 28 February 2014. Manuscripts received after that time will not be considered.

The winning article(s) will be announced on 1 April 2014 on the OUPblog.
The winner will receive $100 in OUP books and a year’s subscription to Grove Music Online. The winning entry will be published on the OUPblog and also at  Oxford Music Online  where they will appear NOT as part of the dictionary, but alongside the historic spoof articles on a special page.
Fine print: We reserve the right not to award a prize if we feel the submissions do not meet our criteria. All submissions become the property of Oxford University Press. Additional terms may apply.

Anna-Lise Santella is the Editor of Grove Music/Oxford Music Online. Her article, “Modeling Music: Early Organizational Structures of American Women’s Orchestras” was recently published in American Orchestras in the Nineteenth Century, edited by John Spitzer (U. Chicago, 2012) and you can also read her recent article on the American women’s orchestra movement on University Press Scholarship Online. When she’s not reading Grove articles or writing about women’s orchestras, you can find her on twitter as @annalisep.

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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The post Grove announces its Second Annual Spoof Article Contest appeared first on OUPblog.

                Related StoriesWhat does opera have to do with football? More than you’d expectWhy we should dive deep into studying music historyEponymous Instrument Makers 

Bickering and bitching

By Anatoly Liberman

Respectability in etymology is determined by age: the older, the better. The verb to bicker has been known since the fourteenth century, while the verb to bitch “complain; spoil” is a nineteenth-century invention. On the other hand, the noun bitch occurred already in Old English, so that it is not quite clear which of the two words—bitch or bicker—should be awarded the first place. Be that as it may, I am interested in bicker, a verb of poorly understood origin. I have written about it before but never accorded it a post in this blog. Also, my “definitive” theory is new.

Skinner, the author of the 1671 etymological dictionary of English, offered numerous sensible conjectures. He wondered whether bicker goes back to Welsh bicra “fight” (he wrote bicre) or the verb pickeer, which he may have understood as “fight with pikes.” This verb meant “skirmish, maraud” and surfaced later than bicker. Yet Skinner’s idea was sound, as was his suggestion that a native origin of bicker looks more attractive. The Welsh etymon holds out little promise (the same is true of Macckay’s Irish beuc ~ beic “roar, bellow,” which he cited alongside becra), because the origin of bicra has not been ascertained with sufficient clarity, and tracing one obscure word to another equally obscure one is a procedure never to be recommended. For a long time it was taken for granted that if a hard English word resembles a similar word in Irish, Welsh, or Cornish, the path must have been from Celtic to English, and Macckay even believed that most of English vocabulary developed from Irish roots. Later the opposite, equally extreme, view prevailed (only from English to Irish and Welsh). Today we prefer to investigate the claims of each candidate for the etymon individually. All things considered, it appears that Welsh bicra “fight” is a borrowing of English bicker “skirmish,” rather than the other way around.

However, a dogmatic reference to Welsh remained unchanged for two centuries. One can still find it in the 1890 edition of Webster. A more realistic hypothesis connected bicker with such English words as pick, peck, and beak. Some such verbs and nouns have close counterparts in French and elsewhere in the Romance languages. Others don’t and have never been accounted for. Why, for instance, peak and pine? To complicate matters, pick and peck can be sound imitative formations in which nothing prevents initial p from alternating with b. The woodpecker goes peck-peck-peck, and perhaps this is what we really hear, though perhaps it is a product of our imagination (Russian speakers hear took-took-took, while Germans say toi-toi-toi, for example, when “touching or knocking on wood”).

For a long time I thought that bicker should be connected with bitch, because bickering resembles yelping at one another. Inasmuch as this idea had not occurred to anyone else, I felt very proud of it. I was partly supported in my reconstruction by the onomatopoeic Russian verb laiat’ “to bark.” Its reflexive form laiat’sia (literally, “to bark at one another”) means “to exchange insults; bicker” and nothing else. The late coining of Engl. bitch “complain” seemed to confirm my guess. The Old English for bitch was bicce. As happens to many words for “dog,” the origin of bicce poses problems, but they can be ignored in the present context. From a semantic point of view, the derivation of bicker from bicce leaves nothing to be desired: bickering can be easily understood as another sort of bitching.

But doubts beset me with regard to phonetics. Bicce was pronounced with what is technically known as palatalized k. Try to say something like bikkye (incidentally, the Icelandic cognate of bicce is bikkja), but without -y-, and you will get a notion of what palatalized k means. In English, this k later turned into ch; hence bitch (never mind t before ch: which and witch have the same final consonant, and so do bitch and beach). Just how early the change of palatalized k to ch happened is a matter of debate. In the English-speaking world, students are taught to pronounce bicce as bitche, which I think is wrong. But even if the change happened in Middle rather than Old English, it occurred before the verb bicker came into existence (unless it was current very much earlier than the time of its first attestation; this is possible but cannot be proved). Given my etymology, bicker should have been bitcher. So I reluctantly gave up my “insight” (nowadays, even the humblest of us have only insights and visions).

Tracing bicker directly to pick, peak, pike, peck, and their likes fails to explain its meaning. To be sure, the suffix -er produces frequentative and iterative verbs (chatter, clatter, fritter, and so forth), but bickering does not convey the idea of continual fighting, pecking, or picking; that is, bicker is not a remote synonym for nag. Bickering requires two actors. Long ago, Dutch bikken “cut, chip a stone” was cited in connection with Engl. bicker. It has cognates in Old and Middle High German but does not shed new light on the English verb, for we have already seen pick, beak, and the rest. However, close to it stands Dutch bikkelen “to play with bickelstenen,” that is, “play with knucklebones” or “jacks.”

Here we find ourselves witnessing the game of bones, which was called bickelspil in Middle High German. This would not have taken us too far, but for one word in Tristan by the great Middle High German poet Gottfried von Strassburg. In his survey of the contemporary literary scene (the early thirteenth century), he speaks disparagingly about a poet (or perhaps the poet) who expects to win a laurel wreath by jumping merrily, hare-like, over the word heath and resorting to bickelworte (plural). Bickelwort has never been explained in a satisfactory way, though no one doubts that a gamester’s term is meant. Most probably, Gottfried alluded to the vulgar blabbering of the canaille, as opposed to the lofty diction of poets, whose art appealed to “noble hearts.” Such gamesters, he implied, play, while hurling swear words at one another, and resort to low slang. They bicker.

So I suspect that Engl. bicker is an import from Middle High German or rather from the Low Countries. It must have been a slang word, initially associated with the type of exchange or behavior one could hear and see in a tavern, where people played bones or dice, fought, and bandied words, not always of the friendliest type, as we too know from the way games of chance are played. This etymology answers our main questions. It explains why bickering needs more than one party and why its linguistic register is and has always been low. In the beginning, Engl. bicker meant “skirmish, small altercation.” This is exactly what one could expect.

The verb denoting “chip; cut with a pointed weapon” may have been sound imitative or borrowed from French. When dealing with such words, one never knows where they originated. “Make throws” developed from “cut with precision; engrave” and was appropriated by players at bones and dice. In German and Dutch, the suffix of iterative and frequentative verbs is -eln. In English, it was regularly replaced with -er. It left its initial sphere and acquired broader implications, though perhaps we are missing some of its original uses. Today, when people bicker, they only exchange venomous words. Gottfried’s bickelworte shows that this meaning was already known in the verb’s homeland.

If anybody knew how sorry I am to let my sleeping bitch rest in peace!

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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Image credit: Women playing knucklebones. Detail from Children’s Games by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Kunsthistorisches Museum. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

The post Bickering and bitching appeared first on OUPblog.

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Scenes of Ovid’s love stories in art

If alive I offend the living and dead I offend the dead, throw me from both zones:


change me.


—Ovid, “Myrrha”, Metamorphoses

The poet Ovid plays a central role in Roman literary history and culture. Best known for his Metamorphoses, a 15-book mythological epic, and his collections of love poetry, particularly Amores and Ars Amatoria, Ovid’s poetry has greatly influenced Western art, and his works remain some of the most important sources of classical mythology. From Perseus’s killing of Medusa to the story of Venus and Adonis, the heroes, gods, nymphs, and characters of the classical world are brought to life. From Jane Alison’s new translation, Change Me: Stories of Sexual Transformation from Ovid, here is a slideshow of scenes from Ovid’s stories in art.




Tiresias
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“In greening woods one day he’d seen a pair of snakes entwined and struck them with his walking-stick—then changed from man to woman.”
(bronze, forming handle of drawer or door, Roman)

Myrrha
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“If alive I offend the living and dead I offend the dead, throw me from both zones:
change me."
(terracotta, 3rd BCE)

Scylla
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“She stands amid raving dogs that were once her poor hips.”
(terracotta relief, 5th BCE)

Glaucus
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“I used to be human but, it’s true, addicted to ocean, for my work was with the sea.”
(red-figure cup, 510–500 BCE)

Adonis
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“Adonis pierced the boar with a slanting thrust.”
(red figure cup, 500–475 BCE)

Atalanta
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“I won’t be had unless beaten in a race. So race with me.”
(mosaic, late 3rd or early 4th CE)

Hyacinth
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“The two stripped off their clothes, slicked their skin with sleek olive oil, and set off to compete with the discus.”
(red-figure cup, 5th BCE)

Proserpina
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“Dis controlled his temper no more: he spurred the frothing horses, swung his royal sceptre, and plunged it deep in the pool’s sunken bed.”
(marble sarcophagus, c. 140–150 CE)

Salmacis
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“She just bathed her lovely self in her pond, often drew a boxwood comb through her hair, and gazed in her glassy pool to see what looked best.”
(red-figure amphora, 6th BCE)

Europa
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“She clutches his horn with one hand and his back with the other. Her shivering
veils flit in the wind...”
(marble, early mid-2nd CE)

Perseus and Andromeda (and Medusa)
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“He was so entranced by the image he saw that he almost forgot to keep beating his
wings.”
(fresco, last decade of 1st BCE)

Perseus and Andromeda (and Medusa)
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“While she and the snakes were deeply asleep he swiped the head from her neck...”
(red-figure pelike, 475–425 BCE)

Actaeon
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“They cluster upon him, muzzles deep in his flesh, and tear apart their master.”
(red-figure bell crater, about c. 470 BCE)

Arachne
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“The two set up in separate stations and stretch fine threads upon twinned looms.”
(black-figure lekythos, 550–530 BCE)

Amores 1.4
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“So your man will be at the dinner party, too. I wish it were his last supper.”
(Roman mosaic, 2nd CE)

Tristia 2.519
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"My poems have often been danced for a crowd.
(Roman mosaic, 3rd CE)

Jane Alison is author of Change Me: Stories of Sexual Transformation from Ovid. Her previous works on Ovid include her first novel, The Love-Artist (2001) and a song-cycle entitled XENIA (with composer Thomas Sleeper, 2010). Her other books include a memoir, The Sisters Antipodes (2009), and two novels, Natives and Exotics (2005) and The Marriage of the Sea (2003). She is currently Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Virginia.

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“Before he lived it, he wrote it”? Fleming Episode 1

By Nicholas Rankin

The first thing you see on the screen in the new TV mini-series Fleming is Ian Fleming’s own claim that his James Bond novels were based on reality: “Everything I write has a precedent in truth.” Just before the credits we get the drama’s own slightly different claim: “Based on a true story. Some names, places and incidents are fictitious and have been changed for dramatic effect.” Between the two statements is a fast-paced 45-minute farrago that is about 45% fantasy to 55% fact, and very entertaining if you’re not too picky.

The Fleming script-team, creator John Brownlow and co-writer Don McPherson, have pillaged the biographies of the real Ian Fleming by John Pearson, Andrew Lycett, Ben Macintyre, and myself for bones of truth, then made up the rest as they attempt to blend the fictional James Bond with the real life Ian Fleming. So Fleming is dream-stuff; it looks naturalistic, but it is not realistic. Characters are caricatures, actions are metaphors for inner states. It’s a redemptive story of becoming: ”How the war turned a wastrel into a world-famous writer.”

Ian Fleming (Dominic Cooper) writing the latest Bond novel with Ann (Lara Pulver) at his side in Fleming. (c) BBC America

We start in 1952, in a kind of watery subconscious, under the warm Caribbean, where a honeymooning Ann Fleming (Lara Pulver) is snorkeling in a red bikini. Her fit new husband Ian Fleming (Dominic Cooper) threatens her with his phallic spear-gun, but skewers an octopus — referencing his last story, ‘Octopussy’ — instead. We next see Fleming with a typewriter on the verandah pounding out the final bitter words of Casino Royale: ”The bitch is dead now.” In the bedroom, Ann pronounces his first book “Pornography, pure and simple.” “He’s not me!” protests the tyro author. “He’s you as you’d like to be, your fantasy,” she says. “Not in the way you’re thinking,” he replies, slowly tying her hands behind her back on the bed. His manuscript pages riffle on the floor. Ah, Bond and bondage… Fleming evidently has its eye on all those women who bought Fifty Shades of Grey.

We flashback 13 years to 1939. Dominic Cooper looks exactly the same age in 1939 as he is supposed to be in 1952, but that’s the point of casting someone who made his name in The History Boys; instead of looking like a melancholy Roman, as the real Ian Fleming did, Cooper portrays a pugnacious boy arrested in adolescence. He’s not really impersonating Fleming, remember, in this dream-world, but embodying the Ur-Bond. He’s a physical risk-taker, a disrespecter of age and authority, “the worst stockbroker in London,” a serial shagger and flirt, a night-clubbing lounge-lizard, a connoisseur of dirty pictures, a boozer with a gold medal for continual cigarette-smoking. In short, he’s a hero for every lad with poor impulse control, and catnip to ladies who like bad boys.

In real life, Ian Fleming had no father to restrain or guide him. (Major Valentine Fleming MP was killed in the Great War a week before Ian’s ninth birthday.) In Fleming he is still under the thumb of M for Mother, the bossy widow Eve Fleming (Lesley Manville, excellent as always). A key transformation scene begins with Eve bursting into Ian’s amorous boudoir, carrying a painting by her lover Augustus John. She’s accompanied by her first-born son, Ian’s older brother Peter Fleming (Rupert Evans), who, in this dream-world, is reduced from a witty warrior to a wet worrier. Mother galls her second son by calling him “a disappointment.” “I’m not my father, I’m not my brother,” he yells back. “What are you?” she demands. “—-ed if I know,” he replies. Eve bustles off to tell Winston Churchill that the son of his late friend needs a proper job.

The real story is more interesting. Ian Fleming’s recruitment into British Naval Intelligence had nothing to do with Churchill, who was still in the political wilderness in the summer of 1939. The move began with Admiral “Blinker” Hall, the spymaster whose skilful exploitation of the Zimmerman Telegram helped bring the United States into the First World War. Hall had come out of retirement on the eve of another world war to coach the new Director of Naval Intelligence, Admiral John Godfrey, and advised him to look for a smooth “fixer” from the City of London to help him. Montagu Norman, the Governor of the Bank of England, hand-picked Ian Fleming a stockbroker who had worked for Reuters in Moscow, for the job.

In Chapter 2 of Ian Fleming’s Commandos I describe how Admiral Godfrey first met Fleming over lunch at the Carlton Grill on 24 May 1939, and liked the cut of his jib. They were also “drawn to each other as surrogate family. Godfrey had three daughters but no son; Fleming had three brothers but no father… Now, four days before his thirty-first birthday, Ian Fleming had found his patron.”

This is very far from the dream-world of Fleming. There Dominic Cooper is seen skulking in a London library, surreptitiously buying a first edition of Mein Kampf from a Nazi, when detectives surround him and take him to a gothic cellar where he is interrogated about his interests in fascism. “My name is Admiral John Godfrey” intones the actor Samuel West, stepping from the shadows in naval uniform. “Your name came down from Churchill.” Credulity crumbles further. The real Admiral Godfrey — the basis of M in the Bond books — was twenty years older than Fleming, and always clean-shaven. Sam West’s Godfrey wears a magician’s sinister beard and doesn’t look much older than 35-year-old Cooper, certainly far too youthful to be called “the old man.” Fleming’s Godfrey is not a dad, but a mate.

All the other men in Fleming are similarly weak; Ian has to be sole cock of the walk, surrounded by clucking hens. He sleeps with Muriel Wright (Annabelle Wallis) in her tight motorcyclist’s leathers, and he snogs Lara Pulver in her gorgeous yellow dress as the first bombs of the Blitz blow the windows in. It’s the women who are strong and a female audience that the mini-series wants to draw. “Hell of a story” says the attractively butch Wren, 2nd Officer Monday (Anna Chancellor), “but was it true?”

“I may have enhanced one or two of the details,” says the roguish playboy. More thrilling lies are promised for the next episodes.

Nicholas Rankin is the author of Ian Fleming’s Commandos: The Story of the Legendary 30 Assault Unit which is publishing in paperback in March. Follow him on Twitter @RankinNick.

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