Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World

February 2011

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Outbreak: Cholera in Haiti

The recent Cholera outbreak in Haiti reminds us that this is not simply a disease of the distant and unsanitary past. The current outbreak is both unique and typical. Caused by a disease that has a long and devastating history, this Haiti outbreak has much in common with the outbreaks of the nineteenth century and twentieth century. History helps us keep in mind five key factors:

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In Memoriam: Composer John Barry

By Kathryn Kalinak

The world of film lost one of the greats on Sunday: composer John Barry. British by birth, he carved a place for himself in Hollywood, winning five Oscars over the course of his career. He cut his teeth on James Bond films – Dr. No, (1962), From Russia With Love (1963), Goldfinger (1964), Thunderball (1965) – and went on to compose seven more. There was something both elegant and hip about these scores, a kind of jazzy sophistication that connoted fast cars, beautiful women, and martinis, shaken not stirred, that is.

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Infidels and Etymologists

By Anatoly Liberman

Today hardly anyone would have remembered the meaning of the word giaour “infidel” (the spellchecker does not know it and, most helpfully, suggests glamour and Igor among four variants) but for the title of Byron’s once immensely popular 1813 poem: many editions; ten thousand copies sold on the first day, an unprecedented event in the history of 19th-century publishing. Nowadays, at best a handful of specialists in English romanticism

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Frak is a Shibboleth!

127 years ago today the Oxford English Dictionary published its first volume (A to ANT), so I thought I’d pay tribute with the story of how I recently learned the word “shibboleth.”
While rubbing elbows with fancy people at the recent OED re-launch party, I had the chance to meet contributors Matt Kohl and Katherine Connor Martin. Naturally the topic of conversation came to words, and I brought up one I had been using a lot lately: frak (the fictional version of “fuck” on Battlestar Galactica). I explained that I just started watching the show (better late than never, no?) and had been testing “frak” out in conversation to pick up other fans. Matt said, oh that’s a “shibboleth.”

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Why a Democratic Egypt must Dismantle its Military Establishment

By Elvin Lim

Two contested frames are now emerging from the “chaos” in Egypt. Either the popular revolution has created chaos, including looting and the escape of inmates from prisons, or the government has constructed an image of chaos, so that its turn to emergency powers would be justified and necessary.

It is telling, and not a little sad, that both sides are courting the military – a fundamental and embedded institution of Egyptian life and politics. On the one hand, state television in Egypt depicted President Hosni Mubarak visiting an army operations center, showing that he

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Happy Anniversary to the Oxford English Dictionary

Originally estimated to be a ten-year project, the first portion (or ‘fascicle’, to use the technical term) of the Oxford English Dictionary appeared this day in 1884, only covering up to the word ant. It was then clear to James A. H. Murray and his team that the New English Dictionary (as it was then known) would amount to much more than the originally planned four-volume, 6,400-page work designed to include all English language vocabulary from the Early Middle English period (1150 AD) onward, plus some earlier words.

Now, over 150 years after the idea for the OED was born, we’ve relaunched the online iteration of this authoritative and comprehensive record of the English language at http://oed.com/

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