Oxford University Press's Blog, page 989
January 6, 2013
Downton’s Secrets
Not long now, Downton fans. The beribboned third season wafts ashore in America today, though if the students I teach are any indication, the younger set (fervent Occupiers, some of them — savor the irony!) have already partaken via illegal means.
Downton Abbey — it’s often been remarked — has scored a greater success among guileless Americans than class-savvy Brits, who know to object to its nostalgia for a world of monkish servility for the many and unfettered plenty for the few. That’s certainly true, so far as the critical reception goes. Where American critics lavished giddy praise (and six Emmies and a Golden Globe) on the show, British reviewers have responded far more stingily. This season even the reliably conservative Daily Telegraph described Lord Grantham as an “anachronistic nitwit.”
The cast of Downton Abbey. (c) Carnival Films. Creative Commons.
Downton’s viewing numbers, though, tell a different story. In the UK, the third season averaged an audience of nine-plus million, or 36% of the country’s viewers. PBS pulled down just over half that number in America, and given that the population of the United States is nearly five times as large as Great Britain’s, it’s not just Americans who are succumbing to a fantasy land of benevolent country grandees and Edwardian millinery.
And so, however righteous Simon Schama’s salvo against the “unassuageable American craving for the British country house” may have been, the charge must also be turned back — fair is fair — to the native audience.
Leaving aside the class angle, let us chew over another aspect of the show that’s hardly provoked any comment. Above all else, Downton Abbey is about a family. Given the triumph of other family-related shows on TV (Modern Family at the head of the pack), Downton’s account of the emotional dynamics of the aristocratic Crawleys is arguably as central to its success as the period frills and furbelows.
Percolating through the first and second seasons of Downton Abbey, and motoring much of the plot, is a Crawley family secret. The Turkish diplomat, Kemal Pamuk, has died in fragrante delicto after romancing his way into Lady Mary Crawley’s bed. A panicked Lady Mary calls in first her loyal maid, Anna, then her mother. At Anna’s suggestion, they decide to move Pamuk’s body back to his own room.
Lady Mary and Kemal Pamuk. (c) Carnival Films. Creative Commons
Little does the trio of plotters realize, however, that their stealthy progress down the corridor has been observed by the scullery-maid Daisy, who eventually tells Mary’s rivalrous sister, Edith, who tells the Turkish Ambassador, who in turn feeds the rumor mill of London Society. Eventually the news comes to Mrs. Bates, the estranged wife of a Downton valet, who threatens to expose the entire incident in the tabloids, forcing Mary (almost) into a marriage of serious inconvenience with the loathsome press baron, Sir Richard Carlisle.
So just how plausible is this story-line?
Far-fetched as the diplomat-in-the-bed incident might seem, Julian Fellowes, Downton’s creator, has claimed that he borrowed it from real-life. In the diary of a great-aunt of a friend of his wife’s is told the tale of a corpse, dead in the act, smuggled down the dim halls of a country house.
That the Countess of Grantham, furious as she might be, would keep her daughter’s secret as her own is entirely believable. That Lady Mary’s father would be left in the dark is not improbable, as women (especially mothers) often managed family secrets, with or without their husbands’ knowledge. That the young housemaid would blurt out the news was, or so the Victorians believed, a dangerous likelihood. “Remember this, husbands, and wives, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, brothers and sisters,” the novelist Mary Elizabeth Braddon warned her readers, “Your servants enjoy the fun.”
The Edwardian Divorce Court from Deborah Cohen’s Family Secrets. (c) Northwestern University Library
But would Lady Edith have exposed her sister? Here the plot falls down. The shame of the one sister would have been felt by the other. More often than not, familial solidarity, especially in matters of morality, was steadfastly maintained, even by siblings who despised each other. However poor Edith’s marriage prospects were, they would have been still worse had her sister’s reputation been ruined. When the official snoopers of the Victorian-era Divorce Court sought to uncover the secrets that petitioners had hidden, they at first imagined that family members would furnish the best evidence. But rare, it would turn out, were the parents or siblings who willingly sent a black sheep to slaughter.
When it comes to the subject of familial dynamics, then, Downton is pure mid-twentieth century melodrama. It caters to our present-day inclinations rather than the historical realities. The closely-guarded skeleton in the closet is nowadays as rare an item of household furnishing as the antimacassar. But for the Crawleys, even the vengeful ones, there was little about the truth that could set them free.
Deborah Cohen’s Family Secrets: Shame and Privacy in Modern Britain will be published by Oxford in the US in March, and by Viking Penguin in the UK in January. She is the Peter B. Ritzma Professor of the Humanities and Professor of History at Northwestern University. She tweets from @deborahacohen and her website is www.deborahacohen.com.
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January 5, 2013
So the world didn’t end? A new cycle
The news was full of claims that the ancient Maya had predicted the end of the world with the winter solstice of 2012.
The solstice went by, and here we still are.
Related to the mistaken claims of those in the news, the ancient Maya and the apocalypse-predictors conceive of time and life in very different ways. Unlike the end-is-coming view, life and time are cyclical in Maya cosmology. An end is a new beginning, as many current Maya spiritual guides have been trying to clarify to the world.
Photo and quote thanks to Agnes Portalewska/Cultural Survival www.cs.org
On the solstice, Alma Temaj, a Mayan spiritual guide from Guatemala, explained the ending and new beginning of a 5,129-year cycle in the Mayan calendar:
In the Maya cosmovision, time is cyclical. Today, the long-count calendar culminates and planets align. It is not the end of the world, but the change of cycles, a new era, a new beginning. For us Maya, its the beginning of a cultural revolution that will enable us to recover our identities, traditions, and cultures. Spiritually, the change in cycles means a renewing of energies. Across Guatemala we are holding ceremonies and making offerings to mark the end of the old cycle and to receive the new era.
The life and work of a sacred Mayan midwife, Chona Pérez, and her Guatemalan Mayan town illustrate a cyclical theory of cultural change and continuity. Chona has built on Mayan birth and spiritual practices that are more than 5 centuries old and she has also adopted Western medical practices and added her own innovations.
New eras re-cycle the practices of prior generations, adapting to current circumstances and adding innovations. This process can be seen in the photo below of two Mayan healers. Sacred Mayan midwife Chona Pérez (with braids, wearing traditional white guipil) converses in the Mayan language with Western medical doctor, Angélica Bixcul (also wearing traditional clothes), as they sip their soft drinks.
Photo © Barbara Rogoff 2006
A cyclical theory of change and continuity was offered by Nicolás Chávez, a leading Guatemalan Mayan artist. Chávez explained the process by which Mayan people have fused Mayan and Catholic deities over five centuries. With the arrival of the Spanish, the ancient gods and the earth died, in a process of death and rebirth of the world that has occurred many times across history, from before the arrival of the Spanish to today. Each time that the earth and the gods die, when they are renewed, the gods again attain their power, along with new gods. As he told art historian Allen Christenson, “The saints today have Spanish names because the old earth died in the days of the Spanish conquerors. When the spirit keepers of the world appeared again they were the [Catholic] saints, but they do the same work that the old gods did anciently.”
The process of time and history, in this view, is not linear, with beginnings and ends or ‘progress,’ but rather a cycle. Each individual is born to a particular time and place, continuing some patterns from prior generations, but with the new cycle of each generation renewing the pattern in a spiral of both change and continuity.
The recent solstice completed a grand cycle that began on August 13, 3113 BC, calculated by the ancient Maya with five interlocking base-20 measures of time. In explaining this system, the Collective for the Revitalization of Mayan Science indicated that renewal of this cycle at the solstice is an ennobling time for the revitalization of communities and peoples, all equal in dignity and meriting respect.
Let’s hope that the Mayan predictions — for a recovery and renewal of energies in positive directions — is true. Happy New Cycle!
Barbara Rogoff, a developmental psychologist at University of California, Santa Cruz, examined cultural change and continuities in her recent book, Developing Destinies: A Mayan Midwife and Town. Her previous books include The Cultural Nature of Human Development and Learning Together: Children and Adults in a School Community. Her research focuses on how people learn by observing and pitching in to the activities of their communities, especially in Mexico and Guatemala. Author royalties from Developing Destinies are donated to the Learning Center and other projects in this Mayan town. See a six minute video with historical film clips and photos since 1941 and photos, interviews, and reviews for more information.
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January 4, 2013
Friday procrastination: it’s 2013 edition
People gradually returned to the office this week, but this year in linking goes off with a bang. We have strong showing from Berfrois and Inside Higher Ed to begin. I’m finally getting sick of the 2012 listicles (and I really like those year-end lists). And videos! But first, here’s a picture of some of the books OUPblog received last year despite the fact that we don’t review books on the blog.
Jordan Fraade points out what ‘useful’ degrees advocates of STEM degrees have. (h/t Jessica Pellien)
Physicists explore the rise and fall of words.
Trojan-horse therapy ‘completely eliminates’ cancer in mice.
Art Basel Miami Beach exhibit “Moving the Still” has some awesome GIFs.
The social evolution of the electronic scholarly edition. (h/t @ColumbiaUP)
What books do international writers recommend?
How to organize all the books for 2013.
Christian Dior was the first to name the early evening frock a “cocktail” dress in the late 1940s.
Boilerplate contracts undermine rights people are entitled to by requiring that one party to an agreement give up its legal remedies.
Will Self wrote the ODNB entry for J.G. Ballard.
Click here to view the embedded video.
Travel + Leisure pick their favorite American bookshops. (h/t Knopf)
We had a blog post about alcohol and few people read it. Hmmm.
How to make librarians extremely happy: cat tote bags.
The category of video games known as ‘dating sims’.
Preschool teachers are the Rodney Dangerfields of the teaching profession. (h/t Purdy)
Library Journal listicles: Top Academic Posts of 2012, Year in Review: Top Articles of 2012 (Plus a Free Ebook), Top Digital Shift Posts of 2012, Top 10 LJ infoDOCKET Posts of 2012, and Top LJ Reviews Posts of 2012.
What happens if the bookcases ever become sentient?
This Sebastian Barry reading will make you go read Dubliners again.
Click here to view the embedded video.
Poetry + Paris = instant addition to this list.
Academics and communication with the outside world.
How fast could you travel across the U.S. in the 1800s? (h/t Berfrois)
A guide to writing good abstracts. (h/t @annbot)
Why I can’t copyedit my way out of a paper bag.
You have no choice about what Oxford books you read.
For those at AHA, there are jobs for historians! (h/t @ColumbiaUP)
In other academic job market news, more foreign language jobs. (h/t @ColumbiaUP)
And check out the Twitter stream of the American Dialect Society from their Word of the Year nominations last night. I’ll leave someone else to do the storifying.
Alice Northover joined Oxford University Press as Social Media Manager in January 2012. She is editor of the OUPblog, constant tweeter @OUPAcademic, daily Facebooker at Oxford Academic, and Google Plus updater of Oxford Academic, amongst other things. You can learn more about her bizarre habits on the blog.
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The discourse of the blues
Roger Davis Gatchet
Happy New Year, everyone! The Oral History Review is ringing in 2013 with a second oral history podcast. This week, managing editor Troy Reeves speaks with Roger Davis Gatchet about his Oral History Review article, “‘I’ve Got Some Antique in Me’: The Discourse of Authenticity and Identity in the African American Blues Community in Austin, Texas.” (Vol 39, issue 2). And if that isn’t enough to entice you, there’s also (what Troy assures me is) a really hilarious Weird Al Yankovic joke.Listen to the podcast here:
[See post to listen to audio]
Roger Davis Gatchet is an assistant professor of communication in the Department of Communication at Eastern New Mexico University in Portales, New Mexico, where he teaches courses in popular culture and rhetorical theory. In addition to his academic work on oral history and authenticity, Gatchet hosts the blues program “All These Blues” on public radio station KENW/KMTH-FM, is a contributing writer for Living Blues magazine. He also enjoys cooking and playing blues harmonica.
The Oral History Review, published by the Oral History Association, is the U.S. journal of record for the theory and practice of oral history. Its primary mission is to explore the nature and significance of oral history and advance understanding of the field among scholars, educators, practitioners, and the general public. Follow them on Twitter at @oralhistreview and like them on Facebook to preview the latest from the Review, learn about other oral history projects, connect with oral history centers across the world, and discover topics that you may have thought were even remotely connected to the study of oral history. Keep an eye out for upcoming posts on the OUPblog for addendum to past articles, interviews with scholars in oral history and related fields, and fieldnotes on conferences, workshops, etc.
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Image credit: Image used with permission of Roger Davis Gatchet. Do not reproduce without permission.
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A definition of ‘hobbit’ for the OED
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit… What’s a hobbit and how did J.R.R. Tolkien come by this word? Was it invented, adapted, or stolen? To celebrate the release of The Hobbit film and renewed interest in J.R.R Tolkien’s work, we’ve excerpted this passage from The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary by Peter Gilliver, Jeremy Marshall, and Edmund Weiner.
The OED entry for HOBBIT was published in 1976, in Volume II (H-N) of the Supplement to the OED. In December 1969, when this entry was in preparation, the Editor, R. W. Burchfeld, sent a draft of the entry to Tolkien (who had been his teacher), asking for his comments. Tolkien did not reply until the following August: 1970 had turned out to be a year of ‘great pressures for me and domestic distresses’, as he explained in an apologetic letter to Burchfeld. Fortunately there was still time to make use of his comments, which he included in a further letter (cf. Lett. 316) dated 11 September 1970:
Unfortunately, as all lexicographers know, ‘don’t look into things, unless you are looking for trouble: they nearly always turn out to [be] less simple than you thought’. You will shortly be receiving a long letter on hobbit and related matters, of which, even if it is in time, only a small part may be useful or interesting to you.
For the moment this is held up, because I am having the matter of the etymology: ‘invented by J.R.R. Tolkien’: investigated by experts. I knew that the claim was not clear, but I had not troubled to look into it, until faced by the inclusion of hobbit in the Supplement.
In the meanwhile I submit for your consideration the following definition:
One of an imaginary people, a small variety of the human race, that gave themselves this name (meaning ‘hole-dweller’) but were called by others halfings, since they were half the height of normal Men.
This assumes that the etymology can stand. If not it may be necessary to modify it: e.g. by substituting after ‘race’
; in the tales of J.R.R. Tolkien said to have given themselves this name, though others called them…..
If it stands, as I think it will even if an alleged older story called ‘The Hobbit’ can be traced, then the ‘(meaning ‘hole-dweller’)’ could be transferred to the etymology.
This definition, since it is more than twice as long as the one that you submitted and differs from it widely, will need some justification. I will supply it.
The ‘long letter on hobbit and related matters’, in which presumably the ‘justification’ was going to be supplied, was never received, and no more was heard of the ‘investigation by experts’.
The entry which was actually published and now appears (with the addition of Tolkien’s death date) in the OED (Second Edition) reads:
In the tales of J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973): one of an imaginary people, a small variety of the human race, that gave themselves this name (meaning ‘hole-dweller’) but were called by others halfings, since they were half the height of normal men.
THE ORIGIN OF HOBBIT: INVENTED
Are not these the Halfings, that some among us call the Holbytlan? (LR III. viii)
Having as far as he knew invented the word, Tolkien provided an imaginary etymology for hobbit, in order to ft the word into the linguistic landscape of Middle-earth. This was a remarkable feat of reverse engineering, not quite like any of his other etymological exploits amongst the tongues of Middle-earth.
On encountering the Rohirrim, the hobbits notice that their speech contains many words that sound like Shire words but have a more archaic form. The prime example is their word for the hobbits themselves: holbytla. This is a well-formed Old English compound (because Tolkien represents the language of the Rohirrim as Old English). It is made up of hol ‘hole’ and bytla ‘builder’; it just happens, as far as we know, never to have existed in Old English, and if hobbit turned out to be a genuine word from folklore it is most unlikely that this would be its actual etymology.
Tolkien is playfully suggesting that if there had been an Old English word holbytla (its accentuation would have been similar to that of hole-builder) it might well have come down into modern English as hobbit (though actually a more likely form would be hobittle, with a first syllable like that of hobo). But just to complicate things further, in a note at the end of the Appendices to The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien is at pains to explain that ‘really’ the human languages of Middle-earth were quite different from the English and Old English which he has ‘translated’ them into. Hobbit was ‘really’ kuduk and holbytla was ‘really’ kûd-dûkan; but he claims to have devised the English equivalents in order the better to convey the flavour of the world he is writing about.
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THE ORIGIN OF HOBBIT: ACTUAL
The first quotation in the OED entry is the famous first line of The Hobbit: ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.’ It is well known that Tolkien scribbled this sentence on an examination paper he was marking in a moment of boredom (Lett. 163). The word is Tolkien’s most famous coinage–if it is indeed a coinage. His letter of September 1970 to the Dictionary department (quoted above) makes it clear that Tolkien was not entirely certain that he had invented the word, but neither he nor anyone else had at this time uncovered any earlier instance. A correspondent to The Observer on 16 January 1938 had claimed to recall the word from an earlier story, but this could not be traced; Tolkien’s response (Lett. 25) shows that he at least acknowledged the possibility, though he commented: ‘I suspect that the two hobbits are accidental homophones.’ In another letter written in 1971 on the same subject (Lett. 319), he wrote of his ‘unsupported assertion that I remember the occasion of its invention…. However, one cannot exclude the possibility that buried childhood memories might suddenly rise to the surface long after.’
Then, after Tolkien’s death, an example of the word did turn up, in a long list of ‘supernatural beings’ appearing in the so-called Denham Tracts, compiled by the Yorkshire merchant M. A. Denham (1800 or 1801-1859). Denham was an amateur folklorist who published many books and pamphlets, including twenty Minor Tracts on Folklore (1849-c.1854). The majority of these Tracts were collected in an edition prepared for the Folklore Society in the 1890s, and the word hobbit appears in the second volume (1895) of this edition.
The discovery of the word in the Denham Tracts was reported in The Times on 31 May 1977. The article records that Tolkien, when asked whence he had got the name, ‘replied that he could not remember: perhaps he invented it; or “I may have picked it up from a nineteenth century source”.’ (Perhaps Tolkien still recalled that exchange of letters in 1938.) The Times writer rather boldly asserted that this ‘nineteenth century source’ had now been identified as Tolkien’s inspiration. But could Tolkien have read the relevant Denham Tract? It certainly seems an unlikely origin for ‘buried childhood memories’.
The Denham Tracts are a bibliographically untidy collection of texts. It seems that Denham would write a short piece and have it printed in a relatively small number of copies which were then distributed, probably mostly to his own circle. There is no single complete collection in existence, and in any case this would be hard to achieve since it also seems that Denham used to publish rewritten versions of his Tracts.
We know of four versions of the Tract in question. The original version (to which the others refer back) is in fact an article entitled ‘Seasonable Information’ published in the Literary Gazette of 23 December 1848 (p. 849, column 2). It is really no more than a light-hearted joke for the Christmas season, along the following lines: the glossarist and folklorist Francis Grose observes (says Denham) that those born on Christmas Day cannot see spirits; what a happiness this must have been seventy or eighty years ago for those who had the luck to be born on this day, when the whole earth was overrun with them–and there then follows a list of 131 ‘supernatural beings’ of various kinds, beginning with ‘ghosts, boggles, bloody-bones, spirits, demons’, and ending with ‘silkies, cauld-lads, death-hearses, and goblins and apparitions of every shape and make, kind and description’. The list contains beings drawn from both classical tradition and British folklore. Some are very familiar, some are evidently drawn from Denham’s own research, and some appear to be unique to the list. His sources for the lesser-known words are uncertain, but he does share material with such sources as Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584). It is not a scholarly piece but just an opportunity to exhibit the vastness of the vocabulary of supernatural beings.
The second version (1851) is a separate Tract with a title page inscribed: ‘To all and singular the Ghosts, Hobgoblins, and Phantasms, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, These brief Pages are Fearlessly Inscribed, In utter defiance of their Power and Influence, By their verie hvmble Seruaunte, To Com’aund, M:A:D.’ The list is essentially the same but now contains 165 items. The new names have been added en bloc at the end of the list, with a few rearrangements and changes in spelling, and seven quasi-scholarly footnotes. The third version (1853) is similar, with almost the same title page. It contains 198 items and 31 footnotes. The additional new names have been inserted almost, but not quite, at the end of the list, i.e. within the section that was inserted in 1851. The word hobbits is the first word of the new section, which continues with ‘hobgoblins [a repetition: the word is already in the original list], brown-men, cowies, dunnies, wirrikows…’. Unfortunately ‘hobbits’ is not footnoted. The fourth version is the reprint in the Publications of the Folk-lore Society mentioned above, where the word hobbits was first detected. This is in all important respects identical to the 1853 version. A very small number of changes appear to have been made, perhaps by the editor responsible for the republication.
The 1895 version would have been readily available in university libraries accessible to Tolkien (there is a copy in Oxford), and he was interested in folklore. Alternatively, he could have seen a list copied out by one of his friends or colleagues — someone like C. S. Lewis who read all kinds of abstruse writings. If there were any other unusual items in the list which also occurred in Tolkien’s writings, we might suspect that the Tract was the source for all of them; but even though such curious words might have been quite handy for some of his more light-hearted poems, there is no trace of them. There seems to be nothing that tips the scales in favour of the theory that he had somehow come across the word from the Tract.
Even if Tolkien had in fact picked the word up from the Tract, this would only replace one mystery with another, for we do not know where Denham found the word, or what its meaning and etymology are. The other words newly added to Denham’s list do not seem to be traceable to particular sources that might contain hobbit, unnoticed. It is possible that the first syllable hob- is the same as that of the next word in the list, hobgoblin. This element hob (OED: HOB n. 1, sense 2a) has the same meaning as the full word hobgoblin (but is about a century or so older). It originated as a familiar form of Rob, short for Robert (of which Robin, used in the sprite name Robin Goodfellow, is a diminutive). It could be hypothesized that hobbit is a derivative of this word hob; the ending -it could be explained as the diminutive suffix more usually spelt -et, found in midget, moppet, and snippet, and the word would mean ‘a small goblin or sprite’.
Another idea is that it might be a shortening of hobbity-hoy, a variant (quoted by the OED from a glossary of Yorkshire dialect) of hobbledehoy, meaning ‘a clumsy or awkward youth’: of course this is not a supernatural being, but not all Denham’s words actually are. Either of these suggestions requires the assumption that it was a genuine word used by country people and recorded by Denham or an informant of his, but by no one else.
Alternatively, could the word have been suggested to Tolkien by something other than the Tract? There is the distinct possibility that a similar word (not necessarily with the meaning he gave to it) listed in the OED might have lodged, submerged, in his memory. One candidate is the word hobbity-hoy already mentioned. Another is the entry howitz, haubitz, meaning ‘howitzer’, which has the variant spellings (unchanged in the plural) hobbits or hobits, illustrated by the following quotations:
Hobits are a sort of small Mortars from 6 to 8 Inches Diameter. Their Carriages are like those of Guns, only much shorter.
(J. Harris Lexicon Technicum II (1710))
Little Hobbits charged with the various kinds of Fire-Balls.
(G. Shelvocke Artillery (1729) V. 377)
When one recalls that Bilbo meant a kind of sword and was often used in the 17th and 18th centuries as the name of a sword personified, the idea seems quite attractive. However, this is just one more unproven speculation; the real origin of Tolkien’s word remains obscure.
Peter Gilliver, Jeremy Marshall, and Edmund Weiner are the authors of The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary. Peter Gilliver is an Associate Editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, having joined the project in 1987. He is also working on a history of the OED for Oxford University Press. Jeremy Marshall is an Associate Editor of the Oxford English Dictionary; he joined the department in 1988 as a science editor for the New Shorter OED. He was co-author of Questions of English. Edmund Weiner is Deputy Chief Editor of the Oxford English Dictionary; he joined in 1977 to work on the Supplement to the OED. He has written several books on English grammar and usage, and teaches an annual course in the history of English.
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Animal evolution: a new view of an old tree
By Peter Holland
The metaphor of the ‘evolutionary tree’ is powerful. Closely related species, such as octopus and squid, can be pictured as twigs sitting near each other on a small branch, in turn connected to larger and larger branches, each representing more distant evolutionary relationships. Every animal species, past and present, is a twig somewhere on the vast tree of life. But what is the shape of this metaphorical tree? Can we find the correct place for all the twigs, or perhaps even just the largest branches? In short, who is related to whom? To solve this would be to reconstruct the history of animal life on our planet.
Solving the puzzle is not trivial. Even with just a hundred species, there are more possible trees than there are protons in the universe. And of course there are millions of animal species alive today, so the number of possible evolutionary trees is simply unimaginable. Yet remarkable progress has been made.
In 1857, Charles Darwin wrote to his friend Thomas Henry Huxley: “The time will come, I believe, though I shall not live to see it, when we shall have fairly true genealogical trees of each great kingdom of nature.” Darwin did not live to see it. Through most of the twentieth century, biologists argued fervently about the tree of animal life, with every expert having different opinions. For example, many felt that ‘segmented worms’ such as earthworms and leeches must be close relatives of other segmented animals, such as insects and spiders. Perhaps simple-looking animals, such as flatworms and parasitic flukes, were on a branch emerging near the base of the animal tree of life. These were commonly held views, and are still found in many textbooks. They are, however, wrong.
In the 1990s, a new source of data emerged that has changed our view of animal evolution theory. There is a set of genes used by all animal cells and these genes accumulate mutations to their DNA sequences over time. The more closely related two species are, the more similar their DNA sequences. With new technologies it is possible to find the DNA sequence of hundreds of genes, from hundreds of species, and amass vast data sets for comparison between species. In the light of this new information, many of the old arguments have melted away. And the DNA sequences give a remarkably consistent picture. It seems we can now describe the “fairly true genealogical tree” of animal evolution, stretching back over half a billion years. We can deduce that soon after the origin of the first animals, most likely simple balls of cells, several major evolutionary branches separated. One branch lead to sponges, one to comb jellies, one to a little-known group called placozoans, one to jellyfish and sea anemones, and one to the first ‘bilaterians’. You and I are bilaterians, as are worms, snails, insects, and millions more: these are the animals with front and back, top and bottom, and left and right. The bilaterian part of the animal kingdom then split into three huge branches: the Lophotrochozoa (including snails, segmented worms, and many more), the Ecdysozoa (including insects, spiders, nematodes and more) and the Deuterostomia (for example, starfish, sea urchins, and vertebrates). The vertebrates branched and branched again; giving ever smaller groups of closely related species, until eventually we found our own place in the great tree of life. Nestled among the apes, monkeys and other primates, we sit on a mammalian branch along with, perhaps surprisingly, the rats, mice, and rabbits.
Why does knowing the tree of life matter? There are practical applications, because knowing which animals are closely related helps if we wish to extrapolate findings between species, for medical research, for instance. But there is a wider, more fundamental reason. Having the tree of life provides the essential framework for understanding biology. We can now compare anatomy, physiology, behaviour, ecology, and development between animal species in a more meaningful way than ever before. We can see how characters changed along each branch of the tree of life. In short, we can now start to build a picture of the pattern and process of animal evolution.
Peter Holland is the author of The Animal Kingdom: A Very Short Introduction. He is Linacre Professor of Zoology and Head of the Department of Zoology at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford. After a degree in Zoology and a PhD in Genetics he has spent the last 20 years undertaking research into the evolution of the animal kingdom, focussing primarily on the genetic and developmental differences between animal groups. He has published over 150 research papers on animal development and evolution.
The Very Short Introductions (VSI) series combines a small format with authoritative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written by our expert authors, these books can change the way you think about the things that interest you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about. Grow your knowledge with OUPblog and the VSI series every Friday!
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Image credits: Charles Darwin’s 1837 sketch, his first diagram of an evolutionary tree from his First Notebook on Transmutation of Species (1837): public domain via Wikimedia Commons. Vertebrates image by Bob the Wikimedian: creative commons licence via Wikimedia Commons.
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January 3, 2013
From cigarettes to obesity, public health at risk
Public health officials and academics identified cigarette smoking and related disease as the nation’s number one killer and foremost driver of health costs in the 1980s. At that time overeating and obesity were not major problems, yet they may soon cause more disease, deaths, and health care costs than cigarettes. Food addiction, which may explain part of the epidemic, is slowly and finally “catching on”. It’s been controversial, with some scientists dismissing it out of hand, so like any hypothesis, it needs additional tests.
If overeating is due to food acquiring drug-like or tobacco-like brain reinforcement properties, then the current globesity and overeating-related health crisis might have lessons to learn from tobacco. For example, taxes on tobacco products have been the single most important prevention tool in reducing smoking. Based on food addiction hypothesis, higher prices might also reduce soda consumption. A review suggested that for every 10% increase in price, consumption decreases by 7.8%. An industry trade publication reported even larger reductions; as prices of carbonated soft drinks increased by 6.8%, sales dropped by 7.8%, and as Coca-Cola prices increased by 12%, sales dropped by 14.6%. It follows that a tax on sweetened beverages might help consumers switch to water or more healthful beverages. Such a switch would lead to reduced caloric intake, and less weight gain.
Changing the attitudes and behaviors of the public combined to reduce smoking and smoking-related health care costs and suffering. Changing access to cigarettes by elimination of cigarette vending machines, raising the price per pack to decrease numbers of cigarettes or packs/day smoked, crafting PSAs to reduce smoking initiation, and training medical professionals to intervene and not look the other way, all helped reduce smoking.
Age of onset and exposure can change genes, and make use and addiction more likely. We know that early exposure to tobacco via second-hand-smoke, either in utero or in early life greatly increases the risk of life-long tobacco use and addiction. In the 1990s, children’s intake of sweetened beverages surpassed that of milk. In the past decade, per capita intake of calories from sugar/HFCS-sweetened beverages has increased by nearly 30%. Beverages now account for 10–15% of the calories consumed by children and adolescents. It is likely that food addiction models can be used to explain early exposure and changes in preference becoming fixed and persistent for life. An extra can or glass of sugar or HFCS sweetened beverage consumed per day increases the likelihood of a child’s becoming obese increases by 60%.
Our efforts to manage and treat overeating and obesity might benefit from addiction methods and experience. We could develop realistic food addiction models and test new treatments. Would animals self-administer food or food constituents, avidly, with bingeing and loss of control? Yes. Our work (and Bart Hoebel’ s before) clearly demonstrates that sucrose and fructose corn syrup are self-administered as if they were drugs and that an opiate-like abstinence syndrome could be produced by detoxification or antagonist administration. Sugar stimulates its own taking causes craving, wanting, withdrawal, and can motivate and change our behavior.. If the food addiction hypothesis were relevant to the human condition, these animal models could be used to test new medications. New treatments developed for overeating and obesity were previously shown to be effective in addiction medicine.
These new treatments approved by the FDA include phentermine plus topiramate and bupropion plus naltrexone. Topiramate has been used with success in alcohol dependence, bupropion in nicotine dependence, and naltrexone in opiate and also alcohol dependence. While early, these treatments are important tests of the addiction hypothesis and harbingers of more progress in the future. With addiction medicine and food addiction model systems, we may develop treatments which change food preference and not just appetite.
Food addiction may explain some, but certainly not all obesity. The Yale Food Addiction Scale may be used to screen patients for addiction-like pharmacological and psychological interventions. Medically-assisted smoking cessation efforts were enhanced once treatment advanced from simple nicotine replacement or detoxification, to the brain and the neurobehavioral attachment to cigarettes. With an addiction hypothesis that included dopamine, we discovered the efficacy of bupropion and then Chantix. Thus, rather than a successful short term treatment rate of less than 20%, we routinely helped 30% of smokers. Still, addiction-inspired public health measures rather than medically-assisted treatment were responsible for most of the successful cessation efforts, early intervention, and prevention.
Smoking-related disease caused 400,000 deaths per year in the USA plus an additional 40,000 deaths due to second-hand smoke. Until recently little effort was directed at preventing smoking or treating smokers, although we treated the lung cancers, stroke, erectile dysfunction and other diseases caused by smoking. With all this progress, all of the health savings related to smoking cessation will soon be replaced by obesity-related costs. Are these two events related? As smoking and addiction is associated with decreases in eating and weight, a nation detoxifying from smoking addiction should be expected to become overweight. Until recently, with the scientific support provided by food and addiction models, we have not applied the same lessons learned from tobacco to overeating and obesity.
Proposals for food taxes have been made and calculations formulated of revenue-benefits based on our experiences with tobacco taxation. Even when these fail, the public and health experts have to think through the idea that fruits and vegetables are more costly than fatty, sweet, fast foods. Using taxes on ingredients such as added sugar and fructose corn syrup would decrease exposure according to addiction models. This might make Coca-Cola and other sodas return to sucrose as in Mexican or Kosher Coke. Reducing portion size, while supported by cigarette experience with numbers of cigarettes per pack and purchase limits, is a weaker intervention than other approaches. Now we see food labels and calorie postings. This educates everyone as they consider is it worth the calories and do they have the time and energy to exercise away the calories ingested. Exercise is important, and promotes health, but is not a stand-alone obesity treatment or management strategy. Stigmatizing the overweight with added health premiums and workplace incentives has not worked well in the past. Blaming the patient, creating shame and guilt, doesn’t do much to inspire treatment efficacy.
Obesity has changed the width of the seats in airplanes, dress, and trouser sizes. It has also made high cholesterol, high blood pressure, high blood sugars, knee and joint pain, and other obesity-related problems routine in medical practice and treatment. Over the past three decades, rates of obesity have increased in the United States and elsewhere, so that now more people are obese and in need of treatment than ever. New approaches, evidence-based approaches, like those that have been used successfully to develop novel public health and treatment approaches for tobacco, alcohol, and other addictions are needed.
Mark S. Gold, MD is the co-editor of Food and Addiction: A Comprehensive Handbook with Kelly D. Brownell. He is the Donald Dizney Eminent Scholar, Distinguished Professor and Chair of Psychiatry at the University of Florida. Dr Gold is a teacher of the year, researcher and inventor who has focused for much of his career on the development of models for understanding the effects of tobacco, cocaine, opiates, other drugs, and also food, on the brain and behavior. He began his work on the relationship between food and drug addictions while at Yale working with addicts in withdrawal. He has worked for 30+ years trying to understand how to change food preferences, make eating and drugs of abuse less interesting or reinforcing at the brain’s dopamine and other reinforcement sites. Kelly D. Brownell, PhD is professor of psychology, epidemiology, and public health at Yale University and is director of Yale’s Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity. Dr. Brownell does work at the intersection of science and public policy. The Rudd Center assesses, critiques and strives to improve practices and policies related to nutrition and obesity so as to inform the public and to maximize the impact on public health.
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Image credits: (1) Young mother and her baby, sleeping in bed. Photo by SvetlanaFedoseeva, iStockphoto. (2) Shrimp cocktail elegantly served in a martini glass accompanied by a glass of white wine. Photo by sbossert, iStockphoto.
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The Dirty Dozens
English has two great rhyming slanguages, cockney rhyming slang and the dozens, the African American insult game. We’ll leave the parsing of cockney phrases for now and examine the dirty, bawdy, and wonderful world of verbal street duels. While its origins lie in “yo’ mama” jokes, this is language meant for music, as rap and hip-hop today can attest. Here’s a taste with an excerpt from Elijah Wald’s The Dozens: A History of Rap’s Mama.
Gilda Gray, a Polish dancer and singer known as the “Queen of the Shimmy,” had set Broadway on fire that year with her blues singing, and when she was interviewed by the New York Herald she quoted the chorus of “The Dirty Dozen” as an example of the numbers she was featuring in her show. She explained that it had “a wayward sound” and added a comment that, if accurate, suggests a secondary meaning of the title: “I don’t suppose there’d be room enough to give all twelve verses.”
The Herald reporter described the song’s lyrics as “incomprehensible,” and wrote that “the singer fairly froze an atmosphere of red lights.” Indeed, Gray’s whole performance was limned in terms that accentuated its primitive sensuality. Her songs were “a form of art new to Broadway… for as the carvings of Dahomey and the totem poles of Alaska are art, crude, even repulsive tho it is at times, so the ‘blues’ are a form of art, an expression of the moods of a certain class of individuals.” The New York Sun’s Walter Kingsley similarly typed Gray’s blues as “the little songs of the wayward, the impenitent sinners, of the men and women who have lost their way in the world… the outlaws of society.”
Despite such knowing commentary, neither Gray nor the reporters seem to have been aware that “The Dirty Dozen” was connected with an insult game or referred to anything but a large, poor family. The first evidence of our kind of dozens crossing over to Euro-American pop culture is from 1921, when the pianist and composer Chris Smith published “Don’t Slip Me in the Dozen, Please” under the imprimatur of his own Smith & Morgan company. Born in 1879, Smith was touring in African American musical shows by the turn of the century and had a major national hit in 1913 with “Ballin’ the Jack,” a song based on the dance whose “vulgar contortions” the Indianapolis Freeman critic attacked. His dozens song began with a scene-setting verse that included the first printed explanation of the title phrase:
Brownie slipped Jonesie in the dozen last night
Jonesie didn’t think it was exactly right
Slipping you in the dozen means to talk about your fam’ly folks
And talkin’ ’bout your parents aren’t jokes.
Jonesie said to Brownie “Really I am surprised
If you were a man you would apologize,
If you refuse to do what I’m telling you to do
I’ll swear out a warrant for you:
Chorus:
It makes no diff’rence who you are
Please don’t talk about my Ma and Pa
Talk about my sister, my brother and my cousin
But please don’t slip me in the dozen.
Talk about my past or my future life
Talk about my first or my second wife,
I’m beggin’ ev’ry human on my bended knees
Don’t slip me in the dozen, please.”
By the time this song appeared, Smith had formed a partnership with the singer Henry Troy, another show business veteran who had toured England in 1905, formed an act with the composer and pianist Will Marion Cook in 1907, and in 1909 became a sideman to the most famous African American performer of that era, the musical comedian Bert Williams. It is not clear when Smith and Troy teamed up, but by the late teens they had crossed over to white vaudeville, and an ad from 1923 described them as “perhaps the best known and most popular Colored artists on the Keith circuit today.” Given the earlier mention of dirty dozens routines in black theaters, the explanatory lines in their song were presumably intended for Euro-American fans, and the sheet music was specifically targeted at that audience, showing a white singer and pianist on its cover. Smith and Troy recorded “Don’t Slip Me in the Dozen” for the Ajax record label in 1923, with Troy reciting the lyric in a mournful style reminiscent of Williams’s comic masterpiece “Nobody.” After the final chorus, he murmured: “I just can’t stand it. It’s my cup. It’s my bucket. It’s my little red wagon,” and the duo went into a skit that briefly illustrated their theme:
TROY : Look-a-here: Didn’t you say last night that my father was stung by horseflies?
SMITH : Yes, I said that, yes. What about it?
TROY : Well, I suppose you know what a horsefly is, don’t you?
SMITH : Oh, I know what a horsefly is.
TROY : What’s a horsefly?
SMITH : Why, a horsefly ain’t nothing but one of them old dirty flies what hangs ’round the stables and skips over the horses and bites the jackasses.
TROY : Hey, wait a minute! Do you mean to insinuate that my father was a jackass?
SMITH : No, no, no, no! Course I know your old man. Know him good. He’s a blacksmith. But you know, it’s kind of hard to fool them horseflies.
We are a long way from Jelly Roll Morton’s Chicago dives, and Smith and Troy’s whitewashed “Dirty Dozen” is typical of the way African American traditions have regularly been reshaped to suit mainstream commercial needs. Within a half dozen years, another “Dirty Dozen” song would make the phrase more popular than ever, but the bowdlerizing had already begun.
Elijah Wald is a musician and writer who has toured on five continents and written thousands of articles for newspapers, magazines, and album notes. His ten published books include The Dozens: A History of Rap’s Mama, Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues, How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n’ Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music, and The Blues: A Very Short Introduction. He has taught blues history at UCLA and won multiple awards, including a 2002 Grammy.
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Neuroscience in education
In the past ten years, there has been growing interest in applying our knowledge of the human brain to the field of education, including reading, learning, language, and mathematics. Teachers themselves have embraced the neuro revolution enthusiastically. A recent investigation in the US-based journal Mind, Brain, and Education showed that almost 90% of teachers consider knowledge about brain functioning relevant for the planning of education programmes.
This has resulted in the development of a number of new practices in education: some good, some bad, and some just crazy. Too often, people with the clout to make decisions about which practice is potentially profitable in the classroom setting, ignore evidence in favour of gut feelings, the authority of ‘gurus’, or unwarranted convictions. In short, opinions rather than data too often inform implementations in schools. Hence we have had theories suggesting that listening to Mozart can boost intelligence, foot massages can help unruly pupils, fish oil can boost brain power, and even the idea that breathing through your left nostril can enhance creativity! Sadly, it is often scientists themselves who promulgate unsubstantiated procedures.
We shouldn’t ignore the good practices and innovations in education thanks to the developing neuro revolution. A popular example might be the neuroscience data suggesting a strong neural link between fingers and numbers. This is testified by the observation that 6 year old children who are good in recognizing their fingers when touched will later also be better at arithmetical performances. However, more often than not “the good” classroom developments are actually centered around more mainstream cognitive findings. One such finding, named spaced practice, has been replicated many times; it shows that distributing learning over time is more efficient than massing it all together. For example, if students stockpile learning just before an exam, they may do well enough, but if they want to retain the material in the long term, then retrieving it via multiple tests is much better.
Inevitably, we are drawn to discussing “the bad” developments: one of our favourite examples is the use of ineffective coloured lenses to aid reading. This and several other unproven “aids” are potentially damaging the whole idea that knowledge of the mind-brain may contribute to efficacious educational practice. And of course much of current enthusiasm for neuroeducation involves ugly mistranslations of excellent research into an educational arena. Take for instance the misapplication of the well developed theory of reading (the so called dual-route theory) which has been caricatured and wrongly applied in education to justify an ideological stance from teachers preferring a whole-reading (or holistic) approach at the expense of phonics-based teaching. Briefly, the dual-route theory says that single-word reading can be accomplished through a route of letter to sound conversion (phonics) or through a route of direct visual recognition (whole word reading). It does not say that both are equally effective in teaching children to read. Indeed, several studies have demonstrated that phonics is a more effective method; yet the holistic approach to learning to read rages in the classrooms.
The neuro- prefix is very fashionable nowadays, and neuroeducation is just one of the myriad offsprings. Neuroscience offers an invaluable contribution to assess, diagnose, and perhaps manage pathologies, including pathologies of learning in children and adolescents. However, neuroscience as such has so far proved to have little to offer to everyday, normal education. The discipline which has most to offer is instead cognitive psychology, and from this comes some of the “good” that scientists could endow education with. Some of the findings from cognition are solid and counter-intuitive; for example, retrieval practice that, though receiving little support by pedagogists, has proved effective in improving pupils’ learning. This practice is based on the finding that retrieving material through several testing enhances learning of that material more than studying it over and over again.
The psychology of learning could prove efficacious in an educational context. However, science should never be prescriptive; it offers possible windows of knowledge which may or may not be applicable or relevant in specific contexts such as the classroom. There are no ready-made recipes when it comes to mastering the relevance of brain functioning to teaching today. The last thing teachers need is to be superficially trained in neuroscience, but they should certainly watch this space.
Sergio Della Sala is a Clinical Neurologist, Professor of Human Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Edinburgh, UK. He is co-editor with Mike Anderson of Neuroscience in Education: the good, the bad, and the ugly, and editor of Cortex. His research focuses on the cognitive deficits associated with brain damage.
Mike Anderson is a Professor of Psychology and Director of the Neurocognitive Development Unit at the University of Western Australia. His research focuses on the influence of the developing brain on intellectual functions in children.
Image credit: Photograph of boy studying by Lewis Wickes Hine, ca. 1924, via Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, National Child Labor Committee Collection, [image number nclc.05276].
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January 2, 2013
Drinking vessels: ‘tankard’
One drinks to the coming New Year, and one drinks while remembering the old one. Besides, some do it according to the Gregorian calendar, while others prefer the Julian one. As could be expected, the end of the world has been delayed and life continues. I was touched by the kind words from our regular correspondents; over time they have become my good friends. Although I cannot provide them with drinks (distance learning is possible, but no software has yet been invented for distance drinking), I am ready to go on with my series “Drinking Vessels.” Now that we have dispensed with bumper, the turn of tankard has come around.
If you want to know the origin of tankard, you are advised to look it up in some of our best reference works. In The Century Dictionary (CD), you will read: “…origin unknown. The notion that the word is from tank ‘a pool of deep water, natural or artificial’ is wholly untenable.” The first edition of the CD appeared in 1889, before the birth of armored cars on caterpillar wheels. Henry Cecil Wyld’s The Universal Dictionary of the English Language was published in 1932. Like CD, it contains excellent etymologies and says the following about tankard: “…origin uncertain; perhaps connected with tank.” Enlightened by this information, we can now start from scratch.
As early as 1266, the Latinized form tancardus turned up in a British source. In a 1317 inventory of golden and silver vessels from Florence, two grandi tancardi and two piccoli tancardi are mentioned, which means that tankards have not always been large. In French, tancquard surfaced only in Rabelais, so at least two centuries later. Old Dutch tancquaert, which graces the pages of many English dictionaries, is misleading, because the word has not been attested until the early Modern Dutch period (the digraph ae designates long a, as in Engl. spa). Given the order of the forms at our disposal, tankard looks like a genuine English word, genuine not as meaning that it is of Anglo-Saxon descent but that it was coined in England. Its structure makes one think of the elements tank (the root) and the suffix -ard. However, tank had not been recorded in English until the seventeenth century, and despite Wyld’s and many other people’s suggestion could not be the etymon of tankard, as Skeat pointed out long ago. The suffix provides no clue to the word’s origin. The home of -ard was Old High German, from where it spread to Old French. In Modern English it is mildly productive and turns up in both French borrowings (bastard, coward, and the like) and native words, such as drunkard (a nice dialectal noun is dizzard “blockhead”). The origin of some words ending in -ard, including buzzard and blizzard, has been a matter of involved speculation, while leopard has no suffix at all.
Tankard does not have to be tank + ard; it may be tan- + -kard (or -card). A modern tankard contains a quart, and more than one scholar has derived the name of the vessel from the volume of the liquid that fills it to the brim. Tri-quart? This is not a good idea. Tri- would be hard to change into tan-, and we should not forget the piccoli tancardi of the Florentine inventory: piccoli (plural) means “small,” and, to make matters worse, why three? Also, the French spelling with final -d complicates the connection between -kard and quart. Or perhaps tan- is from tin-, which is from French étain “tin,” unless it is from étang, the French reflex of Latin stagnum “pool”? The last etymology is not too different from the one that traces tankard to tank + -ard, because in at least two languages of India (the country from which tank came to England) tank “pool” has possible Sanskrit antecedents. Among some impressive-looking etymological dictionaries of English some are unoriginal and often unreliable. Such is, for example, the work by Ernest Klein. He says about tankard: “From tant quart,” that is, “only a quart.” Perhaps he borrowed this etymology from one of his predecessors, but I have not seen it anywhere else. Unfortunately, Yoshio Terasawa copied it in his English-Japanese dictionary. Stay away from hasty products and dissociate tankard from both tank and quart.
This is a tank, and THIS IS A TANKARD.
Charles Mackay, my constant target of regretful derision, suggested that tankard had come from Irish Gaelic teann “stretch forth” and caraid “friend”: “…the etymology would point to the same original idea as that of the English loving cup, a goblet stretched forth in friendship or affection, for friends to partake of.” This conjecture, of the same order as bumper from bon père, is fanciful and doesn’t explain why the medieval British term should have come to English from Gaelic. Equally unconvincing were attempts to reduce tankard to sound imitation, as though from twang. One should of course beware of dismissing anything Skeat said as unacceptable, but the etymology he offered in the first edition of his dictionary (1882) has little to recommend it. He derived (tentatively) tankard from Swedish stånka “large wooden can; tankard” (before him, Wedgwood looked for a Norwegian source of tankard). As a parallel, he referred to Engl. standard “a standing bowl.”
Drinks have frequently been used as a form of punishment. Consider students’ emptying a sconce at Oxford and Cambridge. Some victims have been obliged to drink a huge quantity of intoxicating swill at one gulp (Peter I of Russia enjoyed this entertainment; he was a great czar). To add an element of hilarity to public humiliation, the construction of the vessel might prevent it from being stood on its bottom. The best proof that such glasses existed is the word tumbler “footless goblet,” which needs little help from etymologists to tell its story. But just as we are puzzled by the Irish heritage of tankard in Mackay’s explanation, we wonder why a Swedish word should have become so popular all over Europe. If borrowed from the Vikings, it would hardly have been Latinized and made its way to Italy. Skeat had moderate trust in his etymology from the start but never quite gave it up.
The author of the first English etymological dictionary (1617) was John Minsheu. He derived tankard from Latin cantharus (originally a Greek word) “chalice; tankard,” by metathesis (cantha- to tanka-). The coincidence is indeed striking. Minsheu’s etymology was known very well. Skinner (1671), Junius (1743), Todd (in Johnson-Todd, 1827), and Eduard Mueller (1867) endorsed or at least mentioned it, and it emerged in The Gentleman’s Magazine in 1768. That is why I was surprised to read in Skeat that, when all is said and done, the best hypothesis can be found in Webster-Mahn (1864): tankard is probably an alternation of cantharus. What gross injustice! Mahn replaced Webster’s Armenian-Hebrew derivation with Minsheu’s, and Skeat couldn’t possibly be ignorant of the authorship of the cantharus-tankard idea. Apparently, he wrote the entry in a hurry.
Minsheu’s idea is clever. Switch around cantha- and tanka-, add a suffix, and you will get tankard. Similar examples of metathesis are not too few, but why should the change have occurred in this word? I will quote Ernst Weekley’s suggestion (with abbreviations expanded). “I take it [tankard] to be a jocular metathesis (? due to the fame of the Crusader Tancred), of Latin cantharus, … suggested by the personal name Tankard, once common and still a surname…. A similar metathesis is seen in Norwegian, Danish hopper, pox, for earlier pokker.” So be it. The names of vessels often go back to personal names, as Weekley indicated. Perhaps tancardus, from cantharus, was the result of ignorance, perhaps it originated in the language of topers, who seldom speak distinctly and are prone to cracking silly verbal jokes, or they might have toasted Tancred much too often and got it all wrong. But isn’t it instructive that three centuries after Minsheu we are bound to admire his perspicacity and acknowledge his wit? Tankard, nearly rhyming with drunkard, may have nothing to do with cantharus, but even more probably it does.
Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Themas 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 credits: (1) Toy Army Tank with Camouflage Paint Scheme Isolated on White. Photo by yusufsarlar, iStockphoto. (2) beer. Photo by Chepko, iStockphoto.
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