Well, now that the National Book Awards winners have been announced, and congratulations to all the winners, it’s time to share which lucky OUPblog readers will be getting free books in the mail!

In first place with five points was Shawn Miklaucic who gets the big prize, the Historical Thesaurus of the OED.

In second place with two points was Jilly Dybka who will receive a Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus.

In third place with one point was Christopher Elias who will get a copy of Garner’s Modern American Usage (3rd edition).

A great big thank you to everyone who participated and to all the fabulous authors who wrote books we enjoyed this year.  2009 was chock-full of great literature and we can’t wait to read what you publish next year!

Happy Friday to all.  It has been a crazy week, what with our Word of the Year announcement and all.  So sit back, relax, and procrastinate your Friday away.  You can tell your boss I said it was okay.

On growing up with Joan Didion.

Some books to look for in the upcoming months.

Undercover with a Michelin inspector.

Nine foods named after people.

Business versus academia, a cartoon.

A fast food flow chart (say that five times fast!)

Out to sea.

Water on the moon!

Illuminating the Lilliputian.

Junot Diaz on writing.

What Jason Epstein ate.

Do books need trailers?

Charles R. Macedo is a partner at Amster, Rothstein & Ebenstein LLP, and the author of The Corporate Insider’s Guide to US Patent Practice, which provides a basic understanding of patent practice in the United States as it relates to both obtaining and enforcing patents. Macedo’s practice specializes in all facets of intellectual property law including patents, trademarks and copyrights.  In the article below he looks at “patent worthiness.”  Read his other OUPblog posts here.

Speed Dating is not the only issue that our nine Justices of the Supreme Court raised on November 9, 2009 to determine what types of processes should be entitled to “patent worthiness.” Justice Scalia wanted to know why, if the patent laws were intended to cover broad processes, weren’t there any patents filed in the 1800s relating to training horses.

At the time, as Justice Scalia rightly observed, the American economy was completely dependent on horses. In fact, during the late 19th Century commerce came to a standstill when approximately 99% of all horses in America contracted equine influenza. According to Greg Sabin’s February 13, 2009 article, “Nightmare on Wall Street: 4 Other Times Our Economy Tanked“, at the height of the pandemic “as many as 20,000 businesses failed, a third of all railroads went bankrupt, and unemployment spiked to almost 15 percent.”

Not surprisingly, as Justice Scalia suggested, there were many U.S. Patents issued in the late 1800s that taught different methods of training or breaking horses:

* U.S. Patent No. 247,296, to G.W. Blake, entitled “Harness” (patented September 20, 1881);
* U.S. Patent No. 381,745, to H. C. Woodnutt, entitled “Device for Assisting in Training Horses” (patented April 24, 1888);
* U.S. Patent No. 453,727, to H. Sample, entitled “Apparatus for Treating or Taming Horses” (patented June 9, 1891);
* U.S. Patent No. 478,513, to C.C. Kelly, entitled “Apparatus for Training Animals” (patented July 5, 1892); and
* U.S. Patent No. 545,228, to J.W. Green, entitled “Horse-Breaking Apparatus” (patented August 27, 1895).

While admittedly none of these patents claimed a method of training or breaking a horse, they all obtained patent protection for such methods by claiming the apparatus to do it.

There are various explanations of why these patents claimed apparatus instead of methods:

* In the 1800s, most patents were drafted in the form of apparatus or system claims, and not method claims, although the law allowed for method claims in the form of “arts.”
* It was much easier to detect infringement of an apparatus that was sold than to detect a method of performing acts. Thus, not surprisingly, one would be less likely to invest in method claims.
* Perhaps more importantly, the law was in flux as to what type of method claims were available. For example it was not until 1909, in Expanded Metal Co. v. Bradford, 214 U.S. 366 (1909), that the Supreme Court made clear that patent eligible method claims did not merely need to have chemical transformations, but could also include mechanical transformations.

Indeed, when the 1952 Patent Act was adopted, the law was drafted to define patent-eligible methods broadly. See 35 U.S.C. § 100(b). Thus, perhaps Justice Scalia would find it interesting to note that since the Act was enacted, many patents have issued which claim methods of training animals (including horses):

* U.S. Patent No. 3,099,248, to J.K. Giles et al., entitled “Methods of Training Horses” (patented July 30, 1963) (claiming “a method of breaking and training horses preparatory to racing”);
* U.S. Patent No. 5,566,645, to T.H. Cole, entitled “Animal Training Method and Apparatus” (patented October 22, 1996) (claiming “[a] method for training animals”);
* U.S. Patent No. 6,311,645, to J.S. Brown, entitled “Animal Training Method and Apparatus” (patented November 6, 2001) (claiming “[a] method of training an animal”);
* U.S. Patent No. 6,352,053, to D. Records et al., entitled “Apparatus and Method for Animal Testing and Training” (patented March 5, 2002) (claiming “[a] method permitting an observer to determine the bucking propensity of an animal such as a bull or horse”);
* U.S. Patent No. 6,568,940, to M. Mack, entitled “Equestrian Training Method” (patented May 27, 2003) (claiming “[a] method for equestrian training”);
* U.S. Patent No. 6,602,209, to D.H. Lambert et al., entitled “Method and Device for Analyzing Athletic Potential in Horses” (patented August 5, 2003) (claiming “[a] method for predicting potential performance in a selected racing or training animal”);
* U.S. Patent No. 7,107,939, to L.J. Lady, entitled “Animal Training Apparatus and Method” (patented September 19, 1996) (claiming “[a] method for training a four-legged animal”); and
* U.S. Patent No. 7,331,310, to K. Sersland et al., entitled “Domestic Animal Training Method” (patented Feb 19, 2008) (claiming “[a]n animal training method”).

Turning back the patent law to the uncertainty of the 1800s, when our economy was based on agrarian and early industrial technology, is not what our nation needs in this time of economic crisis.

The point is that any subject should be available for patent protection, whether it is Speed Dating, Horse Training, or Hedging Risk, so long it does not claim the subject in an abstract manner.

If you haven’t already heard, unfriend is the New Oxford American Dictionary Word of the Year. In honor of this announcement, I surveyed Facebook users across the country about why they would choose to unfriend someone.

1. They’ve turned into a robot.
“People send me Green Patches all the time,” said Jane Kim, a television research assistant in NYC. “It’s annoying. And that’s all I ever get from them. Clearly, they’re not interested in actually being friends.”

That’s because your friends are robots, Jane. Marketing robots. These are the friends you never hear from except when they want you to join a cause, sign a petition, donate money, become a fan of a product, or otherwise promote something. Farmville robots are increasingly becoming problems as well, but are not yet grounds for unfriending.

2. You don’t know who they are.
“A few days ago, Facebook suggested I reconnect with a friend whose name I didn’t recognize,” said Jessica Kay, a lawyer in Kansas City. “She’d recently gotten married, but I hadn’t even known she was engaged. I’ll probably unfriend her later. Along with some random people I met at parties in college.”

“You’re tired of seeing [that mystery name] your newsfeed,” said Jonathan Evans, a contract specialist in Seattle. “You haven’t talked to that person since the random class you took together, and you’ll probably never talk to them again.”

3. They broke your heart.
Jonathan Lethem, author of Chronic City, shared that his number one reason to unfriend someone is “because they just broke up with you on Facebook.”

So, maybe they didn’t break your heart. But if the only reason you were friends on Facebook is because you two were somehow involved, it might be time to play some Beyoncé, crack open the Haagen-Dazs and click “Remove from Friends”.

4. You don’t like them anymore.
In the early years of Facebook, users would  friend everyone their dorm, everyone from high school, and every person they had ever shared a sandbox with. But now, many people are finding they no longer like a number of their friends, and spend time creating limited profiles, customizing the newsfeed, and avoiding Facebook chat.

Teresa Hynes, a student at St. John’s University, pointed out that it’s silly to be concerned one of these people might find out you’ve unfriended them and get angry. “You are never going to see them again,” she said. “You don’t want to see them ever again. You hated them in high school. Your mass communications group project is over.”

5. Annoying status updates.
“I don’t want to see ‘So-and-so wishes it was over,’” said Andrew Varhol, a marketing manager in NYC. “Or the cheers of bandwagon sports fans—when suddenly someone’s, ‘Go Yankees! Go Jeter!’ Where were you before October?”

Excessive status updates are one example of Facebook abuse. Amy Labagh of powerHouse Books admits she is irritated by frequent updates. “It’s like they want you to think they’re cool,” she said, “but they’re not.”

A professor at NYU, agreed, and said he finds a number of these frequent updates to be “too bourgie.” “It’ll say something like, ‘So-and-so is drinking whatever in the beautiful scenery of some field.’ I mean, really?!”

The style and type of each update is also important. A number of users agree that song lyrics, poetry, and literary quotations can be extremely annoying. Updates with misspellings or lacking punctuation were also noted. “I once unfriended someone because they updated their statuses in all caps,” said Erin Meehan, a marketing associate in NYC.

6. Obnoxious photo uploads.
Everyone has a different idea about what photos are appropriate to post , but a popular complaint from Facebook users in their 20s concerned wedding and baby photos. “It’s just weird,” said a bartender in Manhattan. “I know that older people are joining now, but if you’re at the stage in your life when most the photos are of your kids, I mean, what are you doing on Facebook?”

“I think makeout photos are worse,” said his coworker. “My sister always posts photos of her and her boyfriend kissing. Sometimes I want to unfriend and unfamily her.”

Across the board, a number of users found partially nude photos, or images of someone flexing their muscles as grounds for unfriending. Another reason, as cited specifically by Margitte Kristjansson, graduate student at UC San Diego, could be if “they upload inappropriate pictures of their stab wounds.”

7. Clashing religious or political views.
“I can’t handle it when someone’s updates are always about Jesus,” said Robert Wilder, a writer in New York.

In the same vein, Phil Lee, lead singer of The Muskies, said he’s extremely irritated by “religious proselytizing and over-enthusiastic praise and Bible quoting. Often in all caps.”

An anonymous Brooklynite shared that he purged his Facebook account after the last Presidential election. “It was a big deal to me,” he said. “I found it hard to be friends with people who didn’t vote for Obama.” After which his friend added, “I voted for McKinney.”

8. “I wanted a free Whopper.”
In January, Burger King launched the Whopper Sacrifice application, which promised each Facebook user a free Whopper if they unfriended 10 people. It sounded simple enough, but if you chose to unfriend someone via the application, it sent a notification to that person, announcing they had been sacrificed for the burger. Burger King disabled the application within the month when the Whopper “proved to be stronger than 233,906 friendships.”

Since Facebook has made the home page much more customizable than it used to be, you might wonder, “Why unfriend when I can hide?” More and more, Facebook users are choosing to use limited profiles and editing their newsfeed so undesirable friends disappear from view. “I find lately I’m friending more people, then blocking them,” said Gary Ferrar, a magician in New York. “That way no one gets mad, no one’s feelings get hurt.”

Do you have another reason? Tell us about it!

Laura Pappano, co-author with Eileen McDonagh of Playing With The Boys: Why Separate Is Not Equal, is an award-winning journalist and writer-in-residence at Wellesley Centers for Women at Wellesley College. She blogs at FairGameNews.com . In the original post below, Pappano discusses  Elizabeth Lambert’s hair-pulling and sportsmanship in women’s athletics.  Read Pappano’s previous OUPblog posts here.

Outrage over New Mexico soccer player Elizabeth Lambert’s dirty play – including her ponytail-yanking an opponent to the ground – is justified given this egregious act of poor sportsmanship.

But as the conversation and video have gone viral – from SportsCenter to NFL pre-game shows to David Letterman – the subtext has become less about comportment and more about the gendered expectations of female athletes.

Guys fighting in sports – whether ice hockey or baseball – is considered a “natural” by-product of intense play and, well, testosterone. They can’t help it. When women get heated in competition (ask any high school female athletes about trash talking and you’ll get an earful) there is a perception that they’re supposed to act…differently.

In a season of throw-backs, you can add this to the list: Just as our grandmothers insisted that girls don’t sweat, they “perspire,” there remains a narrow range of acceptable behavior for female athletes. Such rigidity is not new (in previous eras women basketball players were required to wear makeup in competition and submit to half-time beauty contests), but until Lambert we had thought the rules had evolved – at least a little.

The increasing skill level and intensity of women’s sports even at high school and college levels should not be a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention. Problem is, of course, many have not been paying attention. Women’s sports remain poorly covered by the mainstream male sports media. News outlets hardly feel obligated to report on even major events (it took digging to get the result of the WNBA final). And chatter about Lambert on sports talk radio last week on the Boston station I listen to was preceded by the admission that “we have never talked about women’s college soccer on this program and we will probably never talk about women’s college soccer again, but…”

The fact remains that while female athletes have developed skills, hard-charging attitudes and leave-it-all-on-the-field seriousness about their play, we still view them as grown-up girls (in ponytails) who might be doing cartwheels in the backfield if they thought they wouldn’t get caught.

Some little girl-female athlete affinity is purposeful marketing. That’s the justification for Saturday afternoon college basketball games and cheap tickets. And, certainly, why shouldn’t women’s teams, from college basketball to professional soccer build a fan base from those who can relate to them as role models? Isn’t that the NFL’s goal fulfilled when millions of boys paste Ladanian Tomlinson Fatheads on bedroom walls and wear Peyton Manning jerseys to school?

Promoting athletes as role models, of course, is always tricky. But where men get a pass for bad behavior, women draw fire.

We forgive Michael Vick, and gasp when Serena Williams screams at a line judge’s late call at the U.S. Open.

We must get past the notion that female athletes are “nice” first and good second, and women’s games should be peddled as “family fare.” It is tiring to hear enlightened men describe themselves as “supporters” of women’s sports as if they are charitable donors. No one likes dirty play. But if Elizabeth Lambert just made people see that women’s sports are highly intense, competitive, and exciting, well, good for her.

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A midwife is called a midwife not because the midwife is in the middle of anything, nor because during the birth of children the midwife is helping the wife as opposed to the husband.

It is pretty uncommon to find men who are midwives but I guess they do exist. The etymology of the word midwife reflects the fact that assisting in bringing a new little person into this world has long been a gender role and almost completely dominated by women.

The wife part of midwife has nothing to do with the marital state of the parents of the baby being delivered, nor that of the midwife herself.

The word wife predates an association with being married or unmarried and in our earliest records just meant “woman.”

If we paste that meaning on midwife we get midwoman.

Unfortunately this doesn’t get us much further along the way toward understanding why these deliverers of babies might be called midwives.

We have to take another step and examine the mid part of midwife.

In this case mid does not mean middle.

There don’t seem to be too many examples of words other than midwife that retain an old meaning of mid but what it is believed to have mean was “with.”

Thus midwife literally means “with woman” and refers to the fact that this woman called a midwife has the job of being with the mother during her labor and delivery.

Our Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary expert, Professor Christian Kay, blogs about the numerous press enquiries and interviews in the wake of the HTOED’s publication.

To read more about the HTOED click here.

An unexpected outcome of the publication of HTOED was the interest it generated in both UK and overseas media. On the whole, encounters with the press have been an enjoyable experience, and they’ve done us proud with articles, reviews, and interviews, but sometimes I find myself conning over the less flattering words for members of the journalistic profession (hack, penciller, tripe-hound, ink-slinger, creeper, thumb-sucker, press gang), and plotting my revenge.

So what interests the media? I learned to carry with me at all times a list of ‘favourite words’ to distribute on request. During the final stages of the project, I had asked the proofreaders to keep an eye open for anything suitable – unfortunately what they considered entertaining was often not what one would want to spell out over the phone or see in a family newspaper. However, I managed to offload such rare gems as spanghew ‘to cause a frog or toad to rise in the air’ (unfortunately mis-spelled as it whizzed round the world), purfle ‘to decorate with a purfle’, and ostrobogulous ‘indecent, somewhat bizarre’. I’m still waiting for a victim for Old English paddanieg ‘an island with frogs on it’ or weirding peas, a Scottish term for peas employed in divination.

Anecdotes were much in demand. Fortunately, we had one anecdote to cap them all, the Great Fire of 1978, when the building housing the project went on fire (as Glaswegians disingenuously say). At that time, all our research was contained in a single set of paper slips, which luckily were housed in metal cabinets and escaped unscathed. Recounting this for the twentieth time, it was tempting to embellish the narrative, rescuing screaming infants, or at least professors, from the flames rather than smouldering volumes of the OED.

Human interest questions varied in subtlety: “how many years have you worked on the project”, “how old were you when you started”, or simply, “how old are you?” Colleagues threatened to get me a badge like the ones children have on their birthdays, emblazoned with ‘I am 69’ to forestall such questions. Many reporters seemed to find it incredible that anyone would work on a project for 44 years, as several of us did. Some hinted that this was at the expense of a more fulfilling life, but I was nevertheless startled that in 2009 a newspaper would produce a headline describing me as a “lingo-loving spinster”, and one, moreover, who “coyly confessed” to celebrating publication with a glass of champagne.

I am not really a morning person, so the number of breakfast radio programmes requesting live (or fairly live) interviews was something of a trial (unless they were in Australia, which was fine, as the interviews took place in the evening). On publication day, I set off at 6.30 a.m. for the BBC headquarters in Glasgow, and by 7.45 had chatted brightly to four radio stations. At that point a colleague and I were handed a news story about an Australian golf course and asked to ‘translate’ it using HTOED synonyms, thus providing an uplifting finale to the programme at 8.55. HTOED does not abound in synonyms for the creatures which apparently haunt Australian golf courses, such as kangaroos, camels, dingos, and hairy-nosed wombats. We felt that we had done pretty well to produce boomers, ships of the desert, warrigals, and hirsute-nebbed badgers. Then we returned to campus to deal with three television crews.

One learned to be tolerant of minor inaccuracies (OED is a dictionary, OUP is a publisher; HTOED contains 800,000 different meanings, not 800,000 different words). Often I longed to launch into my first-year lectures on the history of the English language, while refusing even to attempt to answer such questions as “What is the oldest word in English?”

The closing question was often on the lines of “What are you going to do now?” as if life had come to a stop when the last slip was entered in the database (by coincidence, or careful planning, the last slip was the word thesaurus itself). One interviewer had thought this through, however, taking due account of age and gender, and asked: “And now you’ve finished, have you got something else you’d like to get back to, like your garden, or a big piece of knitting?” I’d like to put it on record that I do not have, and never have had, “a big piece of knitting”.

Ammon Shea is a vocabularian, lexicographer, the author of Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages and a frequent OUPblog contributor.  In light of our Word of the Year 2009 announcement (WOTY) Ammon has taken a closer look at how WOTY is chosen.  In the post below he reveals the process that led to unfriend being chosen as WOTY 2009.

Every year, at about this time, the New Oxford American Dictionary releases its Word of the Year (WOTY), a combination of solid lexicographic practice and a light-hearted look at the changing face of English today. Since there are quite possibly thousands (or at least dozens) of people out there who wonder “where does the Word of the Year come from?” the following is a brief explanation of what this momentous process entails, and what it does not.

You could be forgiven for thinking that the Word of the Year is chosen by a group of unruly lexicographers, drunk on whimsy and an inflated sense of their own power, who are hell-bent on introducing silly words into English. So let’s see what actually happens.

The candidates for WOTY are drawn from three main sources, each of which reflects a particular strength of Oxford University Press and its unrivaled language research program. The first of these is the Oxford English Corpus, a database of over two and a half billion words drawn from current English the world over. The corpus is fully searchable, allowing the editors to find words that have either entered the language or changed meaning significantly enough to warrant attention. The use of the corpus allows tracking of words, and the examination of the shifts that occur in geography, register, and frequency of use.

The second body of candidates to merit consideration for the WOTY is composed of those that have been “catchworded” (catchworded words are those that have been identified as new or unusual usages by one of the vast number of readers who provide citations of word use for the OED and other Oxford Dictionaries). An editor who is responsible for new words in English combines the catchworded items into a digital database, a sort of mini-corpus, in which individual words can be analyzed by frequency, register, and region.

The third source for potential Words of the Year comes from the various editors at OUP, who are continually keeping tabs on the varieties of English and the ways in which these varieties are changing. These words come from the editor’s own reading, or from conversations they’ve had, and from lists of new words that are taken from one of the numerous dictionaries published by OUP.

Once the preliminary list of words has been collected it is sent to a group of perhaps 7 or 8 editors, who commence poking at the words with a sharp stick, weeding out those that aren’t in fact new, or which may new, but not yet widespread enough to be more than a regionalism. The words are all checked to make sure that they do not exist in any current dictionary, and that there is sufficient evidence in the Oxford English Corpus, in various forms of print, and on internet search engines to warrant each one’s inclusion.

This list of words is sent around and winnowed to a short list, which is then itself winnowed to a final list, and from the final list a single word is chosen which has been accorded the honor of being the Word of the Year.

Although the process of picking the WOTY is quite similar to that of introducing a word into a dictionary, this status does not guarantee that the word will be included in any future reference works. The word in question may be quite widespread today and have fallen entirely from use within a few years. The WOTY is not a popularity contest, nor is it simply the word that has been used more than any other over the past year. It is a forward-looking examination of one small aspect of our language, one in which the Oxford lexicographers take a chance on picking the word that they think represents the use of language today, and that will continue to have an influence.

It can be a tricky business, trying to figure out which words will stick ahead of time, and there is no shame in making an educated guess that turns out to not be as accurate several years hence as it seems now. James Murray famously decided to leave the word appendicitis out of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary after receiving advice from William Osler (a famous doctor at Oxford) that it was likely not a word that would ever be in widespread use. A short time later the coronation of Edward VII was delayed after he had to undergo an emergency operation for his appendicitis. Although many people wondered why the word was not in the OED, there was no way that Murray could have made the necessary guess to include it.

The WOTY is an attempt to capture some of the breathtaking fluidity of our language, and to look at its semantic change and inventiveness in real time, through the use of solid research, editorial skill, and intuitive guesswork.

By Anatoly Liberman

Specialists seldom agree about anything (that is why they are specialists), and in the field of word history few etymologies are final. But today heated controversies regarding the origin of words seldom spill over into the pages of the popular press. At best, concerned individuals write to editors or Dear X and ask questions. Most of them begin with the statement: “My husband and I (variant: my colleagues in the office) cannot decide whether….” The editor of the word column or Dear X gives a cautious reply (sounding judgmental? God forbid!), intimating that opinions differ but that effect and affect should rather not be confused, that careful speakers distinguish lie and lay (though if you are a Midwesterner, go ahead and say: “I laid for a few minutes”—never mind what), and that the origin of boondoggle is uncertain, but according to — (fill in the blank), it comes from…. Unfortunately, in the English speaking world hardly any outlets for such questions and answers exist, whereas in Germany, for example, any respectable library subscribes to at least one of three language journals aimed at teachers, editors, and everybody trying to speak and write well. The Internet bears witness to the need for an authoritative English magazine specializing in such matters. Countless blogs invite comments on word origins, and people offer them. Etymology has gone underground and rots there.

There was a time in both England and the United States when lances were broken in open etymological tournaments. My database, with its more that 20,000 titles, shows that the history of some words, especially slang, was discussed mainly in Notes and Queries (including this great periodical’s local offspring), The Gentleman’s Magazine, The Athenaeum, The Academy, The Saturday Review, and so forth. The vehemence of those jousts cannot but fill one with wonder. The derivation of English words and phrases also took a good deal of space in books like John Timbs’s Notabilia; Curious and Amusing Facts about Many Things Explained and Illustrated (1872; printers occasionally put a semicolon in titles where we have a colon) and the much more reliable Nuggets of Knowledge by George W. Stimpson, first published in 1925 (it had a sequel and was reprinted as late as 1970). One of the bones of etymological contention was Whitsunday. A look at that old mini-tournament may perhaps be worth a minute. Whitsunday, it will be remembered, means the same as Pentecost, the seventh Sunday after Easter, celebrating the descent of the Holy Ghost upon the disciples. In Old English, Pentecost, the name of the Feast, appeared in the form pentecosten. Whitsunday (also in its archaic form) emerged about a century later. Pentecost is of Greek origin and means “fiftieth” (day after the numeral has been left out; with respect to the root, compare pentagon). The only serious question is: “What is Whit-”?

Several nonsensical etymologies of Whitsunday competed for recognition, of which two were especially hard to eradicate. The first denied any connection between Whit- and white and associated Whit- with wisdom, so that Whitsunday turned out to be a day on which wisdom was acquired or on which wise (“witty”) people were selected by some assembly. But wit never had an h preceding w, while the oldest forms of Whitsunday (hwit-) always did. Norman scribes could not pronounce the consonantal group hw and tended to omit the first letter. This fact is of no importance for the derivation of a native English word. The vowel of Old Engl. hwit- was long (it had the value of Modern Engl. ee). In words of more than two syllables, the first vowel regularly underwent shortening; hence the difference in the pronunciation of south and southern (despite the traditional spelling of both with ou), holy and holiday, homonymous with whole-ly and holly-day, and many others.

Supporters of the other etymology (a sizable crowd) traced Whitsunday to Pfingsten, which is a German modification of the Greek word. I am sorry to report that some reviewers of Hensleigh Wedgwood’s English etymological dictionary (Skeat’s once influential predecessor) and Timbs, the author of Notabilia, held the same view. In their writings, they never asked why in the 12th century the Old English name of a religious holiday should have been borrowed from German and what phonetic tricks transformed Pfingsten into Whitsunday. If I am not mistaken, cows are colorblind, so that a red rag cannot irritate a bull more than any other, but it is a pity to give up the idiom. The derivation of Whitsunday from Pfingsten (occurring in Old High German only in the dative plural as phingstenen) was to Walter W. Skeat like that proverbial red rag to a bull. An irascible man and a hard working scholar, he despised amateurs and had no patience for unprofitable guesswork or smug ignorance. Between 1877 and 1904 he wrote five letters to journals, four of them to Notes and Queries, on Whitsunday, and discussed it at length not only in his great dictionary but also in its concise version. And indeed, before 1400 no High German word was known to English speakers, who already had pentecosten. To boost his argument, Skeat cited the Old Icelandic analog of Whitsunday, unambiguously meaning “White Sunday.” However, the Scandinavian form may have been an adaptation of the Old English one. It tells us how the English word was understood in the North but may have no independent value (this is how we should interpret the remarks in the OED). And Skeat was right when he said as early as 1877: “It is, perhaps, as well to note that Whitsunday is a wretched popular corruption of Whitsunday-week.”

It is not absolutely clear what “white” has to do with Whitsunday. Modern dictionaries explain: “From a tradition of clothing the newly baptized in white baptismal robes on Whitsunday” (sometimes with probably inserted for safety) and refer, as Wedgwood and Skeat did, to Dominica in albis “Sunday in Whites,” which, however, was the name of the First Sunday after Easter but called this for exactly the same reason. Another suggestion about the color white has been offered by T. Oswald Cokayne, a reputable scholar, even if not a luminary in the area of etymology. Originally, he said, Whitsunday was a pagan festival celebrating the coming of summer, and young women appeared on that day in white clothes, “asking for a white clear summer sun.” Pagan and Christian rites merged in post-conversion Europe, and disentangling their roots is not always easy. The reference to Dominica in albis remains the strongest argument in favor of the view we find in our dictionaries, but even Skeat admitted that, although the origin of the word Whitsunday is non-controversial, we are allowed to argue over the reasons for the name.

The Voulet-Chanoine Mission left Dakar on the coast of French West Africa in the late summer of 1898. They were heading for the Central African region of Lake Chad, with the aim of establishing effective borders between the French and British empires while “pacifying” a notoriously belligerant region. However, the mission descended into a horrific catalogue of colonial violence and cruelty that eerily prefigures fictional accounts of the “scramble for Africa” such as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which originally published as a three-part series in 1899. When the story reached Paris in 1899 a second mission was sent out to investigate, culminating in a dramatic shoot-out when the two mission met in the July of that year. Below is a short extract from Bertrand Taithe’s new book on the subject, The Killer Trail: A Colonial Scandal in the Heart of Africa.

In the end, their tracks became clearer. Burnt villages signalled the progress of their journey. Occasionally, hanging bodies marked the entrances of villages while corpses littered the places they had visited. In the first few settlements beyond the uncertain borders of French Soudan the corpses had been arranged in shallow mass graves, a long dark blood stain hinting how the bodies had been dragged to their burial ground. Later on the corpses lay where they fell. To Colonel Klobb and his small squad of native troops of the French in West Africa, the so-called tirailleurs, it became obvious that the men they were looking for had lost their ways in every conceivable manner.

On 25 April 1899, Arsène Klobb had been sent after a much larger military ‘mission’ or ‘colonne’ led by two men: Captains Voulet and Chanoine, whose fates were so entwined that they have become almost a twin entity sharing a common tragedy: Voulet–Chanoine. These men were the kind of colonial figures known for their daring and initiative, the nationalists lionized. Indeed only a few years earlier they had been welcomed back in Paris as heroes. From heroes these men became villains, worse still, a national embarrassment. There had been early signs that the mission they led would encounter ‘difficulties’. When Klobb had received Voulet in Timbuktu, in November 1898 he had confided to his diaries: ‘Voulet is coming to me tomorrow. I am anxious, it seems to me that he is venturing into something he does not know. A conversation with him should tell me if that is the case.’ While driving his small group hard on Voulet’s track, Klobb noted in increasingly telegraphic style the evidence of destruction he encountered. On 5 July he wrote:

I am starting to be exhausted—I am still running. I am on the 5th longitude East and I still have not reached anything. It’s true that the expedition is a year ahead of me. I am in a village where I eat what has not been torched. Voulet burns everything—exactly. I do not encounter many difficulties: the inhabitants are terrorised by Voulet’s passing through, they run away when they see me coming; when they see the tirailleurs the bows and arrows fall from their hands.

On the 6th of the same month, on reaching Tibiri, ‘huge village with many gaps; entirely burnt. The dry moat is 4.5 metres deep to the tip of the wall. Women hanged.’

Klobb had received orders from the governor of the military colony of French Soudan, Colonel de Trentinian, who led from the city of Kayes a huge and ill-controlled territory which would cover most of today’s Burkina Faso, Mali, and (as Voulet’s advance furthered its borders to the east) the south of Niger. De Trentinian was acting on orders received through two telegrams sent from Paris. The first stated that a mission should be sent to catch up with the army of Captains Voulet and Chanoine to investigate the news leaked in the daily newspaper Le Matin. The second, sent three days later, ordered that both Voulet and Chanoine should be arrested and held accountable for their crimes:

Recent massacre Sansané Haoussa, 15 women and children—execution tirailleur—number of exhausted porters refusing march would have been beheaded then six massacres to obtain new porters—Tirailleurs alleged to have to bring hands to captains to show orders were executed—Captain Chanoine alleged to have put on sticks heads of inhabitants found in villages which would have been burnt twelve kilometres around—I hope the allegations are unfounded—if against all probability these abominable crimes are proven Voulet and Chanoine cannot continue to lead mission without a great shame for France . . . send from Say superior and subaltern officers join mission.

The minister of colonies’ telegram contained a summary of the allegations published in the Parisian press. These were leaked from the correspondence of a Lieutenant Péteau, dismissed a few weeks earlier by Voulet.

Some of the accusations seemed so extreme that officers on the ground such as Klobb were originally unconvinced. It is only gradually, the official version reveals, that he came to accept that something might be grievously wrong. According to his second in command, Lt. OctaveMeynier, Arsène Klobb was convinced, when, upon entering Birnin Konni, he saw little girls hanging from the low branches of the trees and over a thousand corpses rotting in the sun. For Klobb the decision to arrest Voulet seemed justified and in a letter to the rear, he noted, ‘I confess I find it hard to believe that French officers could have ordered such horror. I will do what I can to prevent a scandal but I will send Voulet and Chanoine back if I can.’ The mission had to continue but it had to change. Something had gone wrong east of the colonial border of French Soudan.