Oxford University Press's Blog, page 952

Monthly etymological gleanings for April 2013

By Anatoly Liberman

Thief again.

One comment on thief referred to an apparently admissible Lithuanian cognate. It seems that if we were dealing with an Indo-European word of respectable antiquity, more than a single Baltic verb for “cower” or “seize” would have survived in this group. I also mentioned the possibility of borrowing, and another correspondent wondered from whom the Goths could learn such a word. Since thief has been attested in all the Old Germanic languages, it belongs to the Common Germanic stock and must have been coined or borrowed before the fourth century, when Wulfila translated the Bible into Gothic. Here it is important to take into account the historical situation. Germanic speakers living several millennia before Wulfila were nomads. Presumably, they would not have been above stealing cattle and horses (with the latter process requiring good, trusted friends) or robbing people. Yet myths reflect this situation sparingly. In Greece (stepping for a moment outside Germania), Hermes became famous because, while a child prodigy of one day old, he stole fifty head of cattle from his half-brother Apollo (their father was Zeus). In Scandinavia, Odin stole the mead of poetry from a giant, and, according to an obscure allusion, Loki stole a precious necklace. Stealing usually presupposed wresting a treasure of cosmic importance from a mighty adversary. We don’t know the age of those tales; the northern myths are hardly very old. Nor have the laws of the nomadic Teutons come down to us. Tacitus’s admiration for the unspoiled barbarians should be taken with a grain of salt, the more so as we have no idea who his informants were. The Old English, Old Frisian, and other similar laws that deal with thieves were recorded centuries after Tacitus. House breaking could not be a common crime among nomads, and keys (very primitive keys) were mainly used for locking doors against stray oxen and such.

I assume that the “Proto-Germans” (Teutons; unfortunately, English has no word like German Germanen) needed special verbs for galloping away on somebody else’s horse, for abducting a bride, and for waylaying people. They might have a verb meaning “to steal” but probably not a noun for “thief in general,” though their more cultured neighbors surely made them familiar with such an important concept. Many ancient languages of that epoch are lost, and the Teutons’ neighbors, apart from the Romans, were often also nomads. It seems odd that thief is all but impenetrable from an etymological point of view. I am usually not in a hurry to suggest a substrate origin for an obscure word, but thief might penetrate Germanic as borrowed slang. However, I agree that this imaginary foreign word about which no one knows anything and which may never have existed (my argument rests on a most shaky foundation!) need not have been low or vulgar or part of thieves’ cant. The situation in a modern Frisian dialect is different: a native noun was replaced with a similar and closely related noun from Dutch. The variants of this word in Old Icelandic would require a discussion too special for this blog.

Handsome is as handsome does: the origin of the construction.

Because of the punning grammar of this phrase it may not be immediately clear that the second handsome is an adverb, that is, handsome is as handsomely does. The word as is not only a conjunction but also a relative pronoun. We arrive at the “translation”: “Handsome is who acts handsomely.” Obviously, there is another pun involved. Handsome means “pleasing to the eye, physically attractive” and “magnanimous, general.” To conclude, “he is worthy of admiration who behaves admirably.” The adverb handsome seems to have been preserved in the Standard only in this idiom. In other cases, much discussed in the literature, adjectives often take over the function of adverbs (“Drive safe,” “Do it real quick,” and the like).

Engl. boy, Danish pog, Finnish pojka, and Estonian poeg.

Everything is unclear about the origin of these words, which are partly the same in Germanic, Romance, Slavic, Celtic, and Finno-Ugric, and this does not augur well for their interrelatedness. They look like belonging to a Common European stock, but the history of their spread remains undiscovered. In Low (= northern) German and Scandinavian, the prevailing metaphor is from “stick” to “boy,” that is, from “a small thick object” to “a small (fat) child.” Some of them begin with b and have n in the middle (for instance, Danish bengel “rowdy”). Here is part of an almost endless list: Danish pog “thick stick” (so in Old Danish), now usually “boy” (in the other Scandinavian languages the meaning is very close or identical, but in Middle Low German pok, with a long vowel, meant “bodkin”), Dutch dialectal pook “poker” (incidentally Engl. poke, verb, may or even does belong here). Later, Low German pok came to mean “weakling, small person,” while päks designates “a short fat youngster,” exactly as does Swiss German Pfuegg. Dutch pook is “poker” and (rarely) “dagger, bodkin.”

The phallic metaphor seems to be all over the place: “short thick stick,” “poke,” and invariably “a male child,” rather than “any child.” In the recent post “Boys will boys,” I discussed Mr. Cousins’s idea. His focus is on Romance, and he believes that the meaning “boy” goes back to “erect phallus.” None of the words he mentioned has ever been drawn into the wide p-k/p-g/b-k/b-g net, and I found his reference to bodkin, presumably a word of Celtic descent, especially interesting, even though its root ends (uncharacteristically) in -d. But I am not sure that the story, in Germanic or Romance, began with “phallus.” The closest cognates, in so far as they do not mean “boy,” mean “stick,” not “penis,” and the sense “erect phallus” may be secondary. The relations of Finnish pojka to Swedish pojke have been the object of some speculation (who borrowed from whom?); Estonian poeg is obviously related to them.

Herringbone. The big question is whether it comes from the sil or from the sild.

Two minor Scandinavian quibbles.

(1) In touching on the correspondence Engl. thief/Danish tyv, I noted that old th became t in Continental Scandinavia. The question was about a pair like Engl. thou and Swedish du. In both English and Continental Scandinavian, t (from th, voiceless) was regularly voiced in unstressed syllables. This is the origin of d in the definite article and pronoun.

(2) Sil and sild “herring.” The forms I cited (sil and sild) are Old Icelandic, not Danish, so that -d is not mute in the second of them. The modern reflexes of sil have a lengthened root vowel in modern dialects (as Mr. Larsson pointed out), while the reflexes of sild have a short vowel despite the loss of final d. Not that anyone needs proof that -d in Old Icelandic sild was not a mere orthographic sign, but note the pronunciation sil’ (with stød) in Danish, Swedish sill (with ll from ld), and Norwegian sild, which sounds like Swedish sill: with long l in place of ld. And yes, Germanic hun-d “dog” also has d; it is a common Indo-European suffix of animal names.

War of synonyms.

I agree with Mr. Cowan that synonyms crowd out one another both in any given language and between languages, but I was interested in the first case. No two synonyms mean absolutely the same. If their spheres of influence cannot be demarcated with sufficient clarity, at least their frequencies differ, but more often they occur in different stylistic spheres. As to shucks!, all is unclear, and I doubt that it has anything to do with shit, especially because we already have a euphemism for it (shoot!).

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 here, each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of blog@oup.com; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”

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Image credit: tweed textile background with herringbone pattern from a vintage book cover. Photo by marekuliasz, iStockphoto.

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More than virtual: real community, many ways of connecting

By Karen Dill-Shackleford

Mike was a doctoral student profoundly appreciated and esteemed by faculty, peers, staff, and all who came in contact with him. As is typical in our community, Mike was already a successful mid-career professional. He worked in the tech world and brought his expertise to us. He didn’t have a background in research psychology, but in the last year of his doctoral program, his work was published on nine occasions. Nine publications during the last year of graduate school is an incredible feat for anyone. But the heart-wrenching part of the story is that in the last eight months of his doctoral program, Mike also learned he had life-threatening cancer to which he finally succumbed about a month after graduation.

Mike’s family kept a blog of his progress and not long after graduation we learned that the end had come. Some of us attended the funeral in person. One member of our community gave the eulogy—a very stirring story of their travels, work, and time spent together in the program. The funeral was even livecast on the web so those who couldn’t be there physically could attend virtually.

Mike’s virtual wake

In the midst of these events, several of us wanted to commune so we held what amounted to a kind of virtual wake—a video chat with people from all around the country talking about our shared loss and joy of having had Mike in our lives. Several of us wrote eulogies for Mike and shared them with each other online. In mine, I spoke about how my relationship with Mike flashed through my mind like a dream sequence. In it, I remembered Mike and I in various settings: walking on the beach planning research, touring the MIT Media Lab, attending a presentation at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet research, and talking on the phone or Skyping.

People often grapple with the question of what is “real” versus “unreal” in the realm of media and technology. As a media psychologist I study how media use influences our feelings, actions and thoughts, and use media every day to teach a doctoral program that uses a hybrid model of higher education. While we do meet face-to-face (F2F), more often we use other forms of communication to meet virtually.

My students and I text, call, video chat, email, and post in social networking groups.  We discuss research walking the beach, brainstorm together in a seminar, or hold intriguing debates via video chat. Our F2F meetings are what one colleague calls “intense bursts of togetherness.” They’re the kind of thing where you might spend a week in morning-through-night meetings, classes, and social gatherings.  These varied means of communication have a deep reality for us, and through these experiences we are bonded together in unique ways. Our community is a kind of exciting world-within-a-world where we study what we do and we do what we study.

But for now, I’m honored to tell part of Mike’s story, and in some way, Mike’s presence in our virtual community is a legacy of the powerful ways technology can bring us together.

Karen Dill-Shackleford is the author of How Fantasy Becomes Reality and the editor of the Oxford Handbook of Media Psychology. She has testified before the US Congress about media violence and about representations of race and gender in the media. 

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How can we respond to the widespread inadequate understanding of dementia?

By Dr Victor Pace

Dementia is always in the news nowadays. Every day brings a new story: of poor care, of concerns about future numbers, of some new approach to treatment. From something that was never spoken about, it has moved centre stage, stemming from the combined realisation that many of us or our loved ones will develop it as we all live longer, and that the care people with dementia receive is grossly inadequate. This is difficult to remedy as care will become even more expensive as the number of dementia patients grows. Dementia has replaced cancer as the dreaded disease of the twenty-first century.

With increasing awareness of the condition has come a slow realisation that people die of and with dementia – and that the last few years of dementia are accompanied by severe physical frailty, which brings with it malnutrition, an increased risk of injury and infection, immobility and incontinence.

How can we respond to the widespread inadequate understanding of dementia? Firstly, we need to admit that many people die of dementia; it contributes to one in seven deaths in England. We need to move away from the tendency to give an optimistic gloss to this condition; with such a common illness, optimism soon wears thin, as most of us have direct experience of what dementia really means. Many years ago, no one spoke of cancer so as not to frighten sufferers with details of inadequate care and gloomy prognoses, but with openness came a focus on care as well as cure. Here, dementia still lags behind: the search for cures is certainly of top importance, but with such a multi-faceted disease, whose roots we now realise start many years before it first manifests itself, it is not likely we will have a general cure soon. It took a hundred years to improve cancer cure rates by half.

Therefore, we also need to concentrate on optimising dementia care. While most people with early or moderate dementia live at home, two thirds die in institutions. And of those living in care homes, four out of five have some degree of dementia. So our care home model must be brought up to date. We need to put right the disastrous changes made in the 1980s, when homes were moved out of the health service and lost the input of geriatricians and other health service staff. Specialists need to go regularly into care homes to educate staff. Currently we only respond after problems occur, and these are often identified late. And we need to reward staff for responding to their instinct to care. This means rethinking the way in which care homes are remunerated. In health the cheapest option is often far more costly, as it stores huge problems for other health services. Nothing is more expensive than something that does not work. So the current pressure for people to die in their own homes and care homes is right, but it needs to be matched with a transfer of funds to develop home care to meet the needs of people with dementia in the twenty first century. We need to respond to the fact that, because we all  live longer, nursing home residents nowadays have more complex medical conditions on top of their dementia than before; and because society is more atomised, they are often more isolated or have families which need skilled support. The medical, nursing, and social care infrastructure needs to develop hugely without the homes losing the feel of being someone’s home.

A second obstacle in effective dementia care is that nursing, and to a lesser extent medical training, is divided into separate physical health and mental health strands. With a condition that so deeply affects both in interdependent ways, this will never work. Those of us who have worked with people with end stage dementia have seen many psychiatric disturbances go unrecognised by general nurses, or disturbed behaviour from pain and other physical problems being put down to psychiatric causes by mental health staff. Our model of training and care provision is not fit for purpose, and until we make it far more holistic, people with dementia will fall between the cracks. Meanwhile, close collaboration between primary care, old age medicine, old age psychiatry, and palliative care is needed. At the moment single specialty silos deliver care slanted to only one aspect of the condition. At the same time, not spotting complexity and responding inadequately could be hugely expensive for the economy, and the human cost would be incalculable.

So what can we all do in the meantime? We can think what we would want our care to be if we could no longer choose, set it down formally as an Advance Directive, and talk to family about our wishes. It is important to discuss the qualities of the care we would most want, so that relatives could find the best fit for us if we should ever be faced with dementia. And if we have relatives with dementia living in care homes, we should try to build personal relationships with the staff, believing that this will also translate into them having more human relationships with our loved one and others in their care. Because only by the human in each of us recognising the human in the other is there any hope that dementia care will become what it ought to be, based on skill and respect for the enduring dignity of the individual.

Dr Victor Pace is a consultant at St Christopher’s Hospice in Sydenham, London. He led a four year project looking after people with end stage dementia and edited Dementia: from advanced disease to bereavement, a medical text in the Oxford Specialist Handbook series.

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Image credit: The word “Dementia”, by alexdans via iStockphoto

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Editing an encyclopedia

By Dr. David Milne

When I was invited to review the second volume of Odd Arne Westad’s and Melvyn Leffler’s The Cambridge History of the Cold War in 2010, I compared the enterprise to Denis Diderot’s Encyclopédie — which I intended both as a compliment and as a criticism.

Sweeping in its coverage, the Encyclopédie aimed to capture the main currents of Enlightenment thinking. Diderot’s intention in editing the volume was “to change the way people think,” yet it didn’t achieve that grand aim. The collection contains an important introduction by D’Alembert, and carries essays by Rousseau, Voltaire, and Montesquieu. But contemporary scholars don’t spend much time poring over its volumes. Rather, they focus on the seminal single-authored books: Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. These books are alive, but the Encyclopédie is locked in a particular place in time. Over the past three years I have served as an editor on the Oxford Encyclopedia of American Military and Diplomatic History. Before accepting the commission, I queried its purpose on similar lines.

Of course, today’s editors face a challenge that did not confront Diderot: how to retain scholarly authority in a Wikified world, to paraphrase the title of William Cronon’s thought-provoking essay in Perspectives published in 2012. Cronon compares the supple and constantly evolving Wikipedia to the ossified Encyclopedia Brittanica, registering a strong conclusion: “I don’t believe there’s much doubt that Wikipedia is the largest, most comprehensive, copiously detailed, stunningly useful encyclopedia in all of human history.”

Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie. Bookshelves in the president’s office, École Nationale des Chartes, Paris. Photo by Marie-Lan Nguyen. Creative Commons License via Wikimedia Commons.

Perhaps Britannica’s board of directors read Perspectives for they closed the print edition of the Encyclopedia the following month. The Los Angeles Times described it as perhaps the “single most powerful symbol to date of our rapidly changing media world, a world in which hard copies of books could become a quaint thing of the past.” Print aficionados of a conservative disposition, like Jonathan Franzen, were stunned. On this lamentable trend toward digitization, Franzen wrote “Someone worked really hard to make the language just right, just the way they wanted it. They were so sure of it that they printed it in ink, on paper. A screen always feels like we could delete that, change that, move it around.”

In light of the foregoing, then, is there any benefit in having a named, credentialed scholar write an entry for a hardcopy Encyclopedia — that most old fashioned of enterprises? I’d say yes, and I have a few examples to justify my optimism. Some of the most interesting articles that I commissioned were written by major scholars, forced to condense a huge body of work into two or three thousand words. So to give just a few examples, Thomas Schwartz wrote on LBJ, Richard Immerman on Eisenhower, Jussi Hanhimaki on Kissinger, Geoffrey Stone on Civil Liberties, Andrew Preston on Religion, and Paul Boyer on “War and Peace in Popular Culture.”

What these scholars chose to omit and include was utterly fascinating. Thomas Schwartz’s monograph, Lyndon Johnson and Europe, is a wonderful study. But upon finishing that book, part of me yearned for more reflection on how LBJ’s success in managing relations with Europe slotted into a broader assessment of his foreign policy record. This is exactly what Tom’s succinct and perceptive entry provides.

To refer back to the Enlightenment, if Adam Smith wrote three thousand words on the taproots of economic growth — combining insight from the entirety of his career — the emphasis might be rather different to that presented in The Wealth of Nations. And it is certain that such a hypothetical essay would be read and studied closely today. Brevity can sometimes deepen the profundity of a particular conclusion. Each contributor has been remarkably successful in distilling the essence of their chosen subjects. It is for this reason, and others, that the Oxford Encyclopedia of American Military and Diplomatic History will stay close to my desk.

Dr. David Milne is a Senior Lecturer in American Political History at the University of East Anglia. A historian and analyst of US foreign policy, he is a senior editor of the Oxford Encyclopedia of American Military and Diplomatic History. View the Melbourne launch of the Encyclopedia, or attend the American Military and Diplomatic History conference at Oregon State University on 7 May 2013.

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The environmental history of Russia’s steppes

By David Moon

When I started researching the environmental history of Russia’s steppes, I planned my visits to archives and libraries for conventional historical research. But I wanted to get a sense of the steppe environment I was writing about, a context for the texts I was reading; I needed to explore the region. I was fortunate that several Russian and Ukrainian specialists agreed to take me along on expeditions and field trips to visit steppe nature reserves.

The scientists took the time to explain to a visiting historian how they conducted their research into the steppe environment: studying the flora, fauna, climate, and soil; monitoring human impact; and above all observing the interconnections between all of these. I learned, a little hesitantly, to identify the main wild grasses and that different types of plants grew on different types of soils. On one expedition, I was even permitted to help collect samples of soil for analysis (and carry them back to the expedition’s van).

On my first visit to the Rostov steppe nature reserve in the arid southeast of the region, I felt disorientated in a landscape of almost unbroken flatness that extended to the horizon with no shelter from the hot sun. Later, I visited more rolling countryside with a high steppe bisected by ravines and the valleys of steppe rivers, including the Don, Kuban’, Volga, and Dnepr. On my last visit, to the Askaniya Nova nature reserve in southern Ukraine, I explored the area of unploughed steppe that has been protected since the end of the nineteenth century and also the woodland park planted at around the same time.

In between the field trips, I was reading about expeditions of  naturalists and scientists to the steppes going back to the eighteenth century. I visited some of the locations they had and compared my impressions with theirs. Like me, visitors from outside the steppe — from the more humid, forested lands to the north and west — at first felt disorientated and exposed in the flat lands with no shelter.

The steppes have few trees (in spite of attempts to plant them), low and unreliable supplies of water (my spring and summer in Rostov coincided with a serious drought), burning hot sun and winds in the summer, but very fertile soil that yielded bumper harvests in good years. The lands to the northwest, in marked contrast, are heavily forested, have abundant supplies of water, especially in the spring when the snow melts, long, cold winters, and not very fertile soil. The steppes were conquered, settled, and ploughed up by people from the northwest who coveted their fertile soil and warmer climate, and expelled the indigenous, nomadic, population.

Not all farmers who worked the land or authorities who governed them appreciated the environment. When things went wrong, which they did periodically, bumper harvests were replaced by dust storms, crop failures, and famines. People agonised over who was to blame. Was it the farmers’ fault for ploughing up the steppe and felling the small areas of woodland? Or were the recurring droughts natural phenomena?

Over time, scientists came to understand the steppes environment, in particular the origins of its very fertile soils. Over time, moreover, they learned the need to work with the steppe environment, rather than against it, in order better to promote sustainable farming.

David Moon is Anniversary Professor, Department of History, University of York, UK, and the author of The Plough that Broke the Steppes: Agriculture and Environment on Russia’s Grasslands, 1700-1914. He recorded a podcast ‘A transformed landscape: the steppes of Ukraine and Russia’ for the Exploring Environmental History podcast on his methodology. A specialist on Russian history, in recent years his research has focused on environmental history in a transnational context. He combines conventional historical research in archives and libraries with field work in the environments he studies. He has spent much of his career teaching at universities in the north of England and Scotland. He also has extensive experience of both Russia and the USA. While a postgraduate student at Birmingham University, he studied for a year at Leningrad State University in what was then the Soviet Union. He makes regular visits to Russia and Ukraine, including the steppe region, for research and field work. For more information listen to his podcast on the steppes of Ukraine and Russia.

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Image Credits:(1) The steppe at the Askaniya Nova nature reserve. Photo by David Moon. Do not reproduce without permission. (2) The woodland park at Askaniya Nova. Photo by David Moon. Do not reproduce without permission.

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Happy Birthday William Shakespeare!

We are celebrating Shakespeare’s 449th birthday with a quiz! Test your knowledge on the famous bard. Can you tell your poems from your plays? Do you know who his twins were named after, or his exact birthdate? Find out answers to these and much more in our quiz. Break a leg!

Answers can be found by using a combination of the following resources:

(1) The Oxford Scholarly Editions Online (OSEO) “10 interesting facts about Shakespeare” post

(2) The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography article on Shakespeare – free to view until 20 May 2013

Get Started!





Your Score:  
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Oxford Scholarly Editions Online (OSEO) is a major new publishing initiative from Oxford University Press. The launch content (as at September 2012) includes the complete text of more than 170 scholarly editions of material written between 1485 and 1660, including all of Shakespeare’s plays and the poetry of John Donne, opening up exciting new possibilities for research and comparison. The collection is set to grow into a massive virtual library, ultimately including the entirety of Oxford’s distinguished list of authoritative scholarly editions.

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On Earth Day, remembering counterculture environmentalists

By Frank Zelko

Forty-three years have passed since Senator Gaylord Nelson’s teach-in first made its mark on America. Since then, Earth Day has become as regular a fixture on the US calendar as Labor Day and Halloween, albeit without the shopping and candy. As Adam Rome explains in his new book, The Genius of Earth Day, the original event in 1970 mobilized millions of students, teachers, and housewives and brought together a broad, bi-partisan coalition. It seemed that half the population had become environmental activists, at least for a day.

While Earth Day made waves around the US, a few miles across the Canadian border a different kind of environmental activism was taking shape. Its focus was on stopping a very real and potentially destructive wave, one that would emanate from a giant nuclear bomb that the US military was planning to explode on Amchitka, a small island in the North Pacific. In Vancouver, a group of self-exiled American peace activists and draft evaders had begun to mingle with younger Canadians who were part of the city’s burgeoning counterculture. Together they formed a protest group with the evocative, if somewhat cumbersome name, the Don’t Make a Wave Committee, and they started making plans to sail a protest boat to Amchitka the following year to bear witness to the insane ecological destructiveness of nuclear weapons testing.

One of the DMWC’s founders was Irving Stowe, a 54-year-old American lawyer who had become a full-time activist. As he was leaving one of the group’s meetings, Stowe flashed the two-fingered V-shaped hippie salute and mumbled “peace.” Bill Darnell, a young Canadian social worker, spontaneously replied, “Make it a green peace!” Stowe’s wife, Dorothy, recalled that those final two words “lit up the room,” and the group resolved to name their ship the Greenpeace.

Despite an epic attempt, the Greenpeace, an aging halibut seiner the DMWC hired from a local fisherman in Vancouver, never made it to Amchitka. Nevertheless, the campaign gained considerable coverage in Canada. As a result, Irving and Dorothy Stowe, Bill Darnell, and the other activists felt that the DMWC could become a vehicle for a unique new style of direct action protest against environmental destruction throughout the world, particularly in difficult to reach places such as remote nuclear testing sites. So in early 1972, they changed the DMWC’s name to the Greenpeace Foundation. Within a decade, it would become the most well-known environmental organization in the world, with multiple branches in numerous countries and a global headquarters in Amsterdam.

The older generation of American activists, such as Irving and Dorothy Stowe, imbued Greenpeace with the ideas and tactics of the American peace movement, particularly the style of nonviolent protest that Quakers had adapted from Gandhi’s program of civil disobedience against British rule in India. The Amchitka protest, for example, was directly inspired by similar campaigns that various Quaker organizations had mounted during the 1950s, all of which were based on the Quaker idea of “bearing witness” to the injustices perpetrated by the powerful against the weak.

The younger generation of predominantly Canadian activists was equally important in shaping Greenpeace’s values, tactics, and priorities. Chief among them was a chain-smoking, acid-dropping, I Ching-reading journalist named Bob Hunter. Hunter shared the ecological apocalypticism that characterized much of the environmentalism of the era. He fervently believed that the only way to save the world from destruction was to foment a consciousness revolution that would completely alter the way that humans viewed themselves in relation to other species on the planet. This new consciousness would reflect the holistic worldview of ecology—at least the kind of popular ecology with which Hunter was familiar—and would help humanity reach a stage of sustainable co-existence with the rest of nature.

Hunter felt that the North American counterculture, with its openness to alternative worldviews, its embrace of Native American spirituality and other forms of holistic thought, and its rejection of crass consumption, was already well on the way to achieving the new consciousness. But how could the values held by a relatively small minority reshape the entire world? The media—and particularly television—was the key. Hunter was a devotee of Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian communications scholar who developed such enduring concepts and aphorisms as “the global village” and “the medium is the message.” By using the mass media as a vehicle for what Hunter called “mind bombing,” groups like Greenpeace could help fast-track the countercultural consciousness revolution throughout the world. While revolutionaries of the past had required armed struggle as a means of achieving their ends, the modern mass communications system provided a “delivery system” through which the agents of the new consciousness could “bomb” people’s minds, creating new archetypal images and reframing standard narratives of human progress. Television, Hunter argued, could be “targeted with complete accuracy to strike at a point precisely two inches behind the victim’s eyes. No bullet flies so fast, so far, with such unerring accuracy. Not even a hydrogen bomb can affect so many people at once.”

This combination of mind bombing and bearing witness was subsequently employed against French nuclear testing in the South Pacific, Soviet and Japanese whaling, and numerous other environmentally destructive activities around the world. Greenpeace’s small cadre of professional environmental activists alerted millions of people to environmental problems that were often remote and hidden from public view. Eventually, they created a powerful international NGO with branches in over 40 countries. Subsequently, Greenpeace diversified its repertoire. Its activities now also include sponsoring scientific studies and environmentally-friendly technology, as well as political lobbying. When combined with the judicious use of mind bombing, Greenpeace’s environmental activism still exerts a degree of political influence, albeit at the cost of a more bloated administrative structure than Irving Stowe or Bob Hunter would have liked.

Earth Day and Greenpeace offered two very different models for raising environmental awareness. Earth Day was based around mass participation and focused on local issues in people’s communities. Its goal was to create an environment conducive to widespread political reform at all levels of government. The Greenpeace model, by contrast, relied on a small cadre of activists to carry out spectacular direct action protests, frequently in remote regions or against difficult targets, in the hope that the striking visual images would embarrass the perpetrators of environmental crimes, as well as generally altering people’s perception of humanity’s relationship to its environment.

Despite its global profile, Greenpeace has never really been a social movement. True, it has a substantial worldwide support base, but it is largely a checkbook membership. For most supporters, participation involves sending money to finance the activities of professionals. Thus the evolution of a more corporate structure, with its attendant hierarchy and managerialism, has in many ways strengthened Greenpeace’s ability to carry out its work. Hunter’s dream of a consciousness revolution has been diluted, but Greenpeace remains a reasonably effective NGO, particularly in Europe and Australasia, where its profile is higher than in the US.

Like Greenpeace, Earth Day is today also a global phenomenon. But is it a successful one? Rome argues that the subsequent professionalization of Earth Day, with its top-down directives, its governmental seals of approval, and emphasis on marketing at the expense of concrete participation, diluted its effectiveness. Unlike Greenpeace, Earth Day started as a broad social movement; it had little to gain from professionalization. Perhaps it’s time take Earth Day away from the politicians and marketers and give it back to teachers, students, and local communities.

Frank Zelko is Associate Professor of Environmental Studies and History at the University of Vermont. He is the author of Make it a Green Peace!: The Rise of Countercultural Environmentalism, which has just been published by OUP.

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Workplace mobbing: add Ann Curry to its slate of victims

By Maureen Duffy

Journalists want to report the news not be the news. But in the case of Ann Curry, the former Today show co-host who was pushed into stepping down from the co-anchor slot last June, she has become the news. New York Times reporter Brian Stelter’s recent feature article about morning television and the toxic culture at NBC’s Today show provides more than enough information to conclude that Ann Curry was a target of workplace mobbing.

Whatever your personal opinions of Curry and her work, she was clearly mobbed out of her Today show job. Workplace mobbing is a process of humiliation and degradation of a targeted worker with the purpose of removing that worker from the workplace or at least from a particular unit of it. It is a dark side of organizational life, involves co-workers ganging up on the target, and includes management’s involvement through active participation in the mobbing or through failure to stop it once it becomes known to them. Mobbing in the workplace includes a characteristic course of events that were first described by Heinz Leymann, the psychiatrist who conceptualized the problem in the 1980s. Let’s look at what Stelter reports as having happened to Ann Curry through the framework of this pattern of events representative of workplace mobbing.

Today was losing market share, critics were saying the show was stale and that there was no chemistry between the co-hosts Ann Curry and Matt Lauer. Understandably, management was concerned. Their solution, however, is a classic error of logical type. Blame an individual — in this case, Ann Curry — for what was obviously a much more systemic problem. (Precipitating event or situation)

Once “the problem,” had been identified as Ann Curry, management’s next step, according to Stelter, was to mount a campaign to get rid of her and they even had a name for it, “Operation Bambi.” (Targeting of a worker for elimination and involvement of management or administration)

Curry was subjected to a series of hostile, negative acts that by most people’s standards would be humiliating and hurtful. Stelter reports the making of a blooper reel that showed Curry’s worst on-air moments and blunders, the gathering of staff to watch a particular on-air gaffe and presumably to talk about it, the collection of boxes of Curry’s belongings in a closet as if she had already left, control room staff making fun of Curry’s clothing choices and “generally messing with her,” and the comparison of a yellow dress that she wore to Big Bird and photo shopping her head on to Big Bird’s image and then asking staff to vote on which one wore the yellow outfit best. (Unethical communication about the target and series of negative acts)

Such negative acts, tailored to the particular work environment, are characteristic of workplace mobbing and serve several functions. They separate and exclude the target from the rest of the workplace, telegraph to other workers that the target is “damaged goods,” and encourage a general ganging up on the target. Once the target in a workplace mobbing has been cast as “other,” and as “less than” it’s much easier to further objectify that person and treat him or her callously. The negative acts can go on for months, as seems to be the case for Ann Curry, or even years as has been the case for others who have been mobbed in the workplace. It doesn’t take much imagination to appreciate the human toll of psychological and physical suffering that such ongoing hostility and abuse causes. (Isolation and exclusion of the target, more ganging up, and resulting escalation of mobbing)

On 28 June 2012, Ann Curry emotionally announced her departure from the Today show. It was clear to anyone watching her announcement that she was in pain and that she was not happy about leaving. The mobbing of Ann Curry was entirely successful. She was now gone from the Today show. Stelter notes that the executive producer led a group of Curry’s co-workers in a toast to her departure at a nearby restaurant only hours after her announcement that she was stepping down. Such cheering and celebrating after a successful workplace mobbing is common and fairly predictable. (Elimination from the workplace)

For most people who are victims of workplace mobbing, an unfortunate and common workplace event, the aftermath is difficult at best and disabling at worst. Income is lost, health and retirement benefits can be lost, reputation is damaged, professional identity is compromised as is the victim’s career trajectory, family and friendship relationships are strained, and the lingering traumatic effects of the interpersonal abuse and social exclusion at the heart of workplace mobbing can persist for a very long time. It is no surprise at all that Stelter reports Ann Curry as having described her experience as “professional torture.” Heinz Leymann called workplace mobbing “psychological terrorism.”

Ann Curry’s multi-million dollar salary may make the financial side of being a victim of workplace mobbing a lot easier for her than it is for most victims. I would assume, though, that her salary doesn’t ease the psychological and emotional pain she has had to endure and that is most likely her legacy from having been mobbed. While Ann Curry may not like the position of being the news, the story of how she was a victim of workplace mobbing is important. The stories of many others who have been victims of workplace mobbing but who are not public figures might more fully be understood through hers.

Maureen Duffy is a family therapist, educator, and consultant about workplace and school issues, including mobbing and bullying, and is the co-author of Mobbing: Causes, Consequences, and Solutions and the forthcoming book, Overcoming Mobbing: A Recovery Guide for Workplace Aggression and Bullying. Read her previous blog posts “Seven ways schools and parents can mishandle reports of bullying” and “Excluded, suspended, required to withdraw.”

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Obrigado por participar da Semana da Biblioteca Nacional

Obrigado a todos que participaram no período de acesso gratuito à Oxford Reference e ao OED pela Semana da Biblioteca Nacional. Tanto o OED quanto a Oxford Reference oferecem algum conteúdo gratuito adicional para o público e ambas estão disponíveis para teste gratuito por um período de 30 dias (Bibliotecas podem enviar por e-mail solicitações de períodos de teste gratuito para library[dot]marketing[at]oup[dot]com).

A Oxford Reference é o lar da publicação de referência da Oxford que reúne mais de 2 milhões de verbetes, muitos dos quais ilustrados, em um recurso pesquisável de plataforma única.

Conteúdo gratuito na Oxford Reference inclui:

Linhas do tempo Oxford Reference – Explorando a história
Citações Oxford Essential – Descubra quem disse o que e quando em
‘Você sabia?’ feed – Inscreva-se para receber fatos interessantes entregues diariamente a você
Artigos em destaque – Descubra o que o jornalista e ex-político Matthew Parris pensa sobre a importância das palavras na política, ou o que Garrett Oliver, cervejeiro mestre da The Brooklyn Brewery e autor do livro Oxford Companion to Beer pensa sobre a evolução da enciclopédia e natureza convincente do conteúdo de referência.

O OED é um dos maiores dicionários do mundo e autoridade reconhecida na evolução do idioma inglês, acompanhando o uso de mais de 600.000 palavras durante os últimos 1.000 anos através de 3 milhões de citações. O OED define:

como uma palavra tem sido usada
de onde ela veio
quando ela se tornou parte do idioma inglês
como seu significado mudou com o tempo e ao redor do mundo

Ele ilustra estas definições citando mais de 100.000 textos modernos e históricos, desde literatura clássica como peças de Shakespeare a roteiros de filmes e televisão como Buffy – A Caça-Vampiros, como também testamentos, livros de culinária, blogs e outros.

Conteúdo gratuito no OED inclui:

A palavra do dia – Assine e receba uma nova palavra e definição todos os dias
Histórias de palavra
O OED atrai
Inglês em uso – Considere diferentes formas de inglês por lugar (regional e internacional)
Modelador do inglês

Assinantes do OED também podem acessar o Historical Thesaurus do OED em www.oed.com. Este recurso único permite que você explore as riquezas do idioma inglês por tema, e mapeie o progresso linguístico no tempo de um objeto, conceito ou expressão escolhida.

Exemplos de perguntas que você pode responder com o OED:

É uma palavra específica de Londres ou da Austrália?
Quais foram as novas palavras para falar sobre corrida de cavalos em 1700?
Quais palavras rastreamos de volta a Shakespeare?
Qual década apresenta mais palavras relacionadas a futebol registradas primeiro?
Quais são os 93 substantivos que têm sido usados para chuva na história do inglês?
Quem contribui com a mais antiga evidência conhecida para mais palavras em inglês, Chaucer ou Milton?
Como as mudanças sociais são refletidas na linguagem, desde as 250 palavras relacionadas à motorização datadas de 1900-09, e o número de palavras relacionadas a filmes entre 1920-1939?

Obrigado mais uma vez a todos por nos ajudar a celebrar bibliotecas semana passada.

First sponsored in 1958, National Library Week is a national observance sponsored by the American Library Association (ALA) and libraries across the country each April.

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Gracias por participar en la Semana Nacional de Bibliotecas

Gracias a todos los que participaron en el periodo de acceso gratuito a Oxford Reference y al OED para la Semana Nacional de Bibliotecas. El OED y Oxford Reference ofrecen periodos de prueba gratuitos adicionales y ambos se encuentran disponibles por 30 días. (Las bibliotecas pueden escribir sus solicitudes para periodos de prueba gratuitos a library[dot]marketing[at]oup[dot]com ).

Oxford Reference es el lugar por excelencia para encontrar las calificadas publicaciones de referencia de Oxford, y reúne más de 2 millones de entradas, muchas de ellas ilustradas, en un recurso único multibúsqueda.

El contenido gratuito de Oxford Reference incluye:

Líneas de tiempo de Oxford Reference — Explorando la Historia
Citas esenciales de Oxford — Descubra quién dijo qué, cuándo y cómo lo dijeron
‘¿Sabía qué?’ –  Regístrese para obtener datos interesantes diariamente
Artículos Destacados — Averigüe lo que piensa el periodista y ex político Matthew Parris sobre la importancia de las palabras en la política, o lo que Garrett Oliver, maestro cervecero del Brooklyn Brewery y el autor de Oxford Companion to Beer piensa de la evolución de la enciclopedia y la naturaleza del contenido de referencia.

El OED es uno de los diccionarios más grandes en el mundo y rastrea la evolución y el uso histórico de  más de 600,000 palabras en los últimos 1,000 años a través de 3 millones de citas.

El OED define:

cómo un apalabra ha sido utilizada
de dónde vino
cuándo entro por primera vez al idioma inglés
cómo su definición ha cambiado a través del tiempo y alrededor del mundo

Ilustra estas definiciones citando más de 100,000 textos históricos y modernos, desde la literatura clásica cómo las obras de Shakespeare a guiones de películas y televisión, como Buffy the Vampire Slayer, hasta blogs, testamentos, libros de cocina y más.

El contenido gratis del OED incluye:

La palabra del día – Regístrese y reciba un apalabra y definición nueva cada día
Historias de Palabras
El OED Appeals
Inglés en uso — Considere las diferentes formas del inglés por lugar (regional e internacional)
Transformadores del Inglés

Suscritores al OED pueden acceder el tesauro histórico del OED en www.oed.com. Este recurso único le permite explorar la riqueza del idioma inglés por tema, y trazar el progreso lingüístico a través del tiempo de un objeto escogido, concepto o expresión.

¡Gracias nuevamente a todos por ayudarnos a celebrar las bibliotecas la semana pasada!

First sponsored in 1958, National Library Week is a national observance sponsored by the American Library Association (ALA) and libraries across the country each April.

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