Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
By Charlotte Buxton
The First World War may be famed for poets such as Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and Edmund Blunden (most of whom were officers), but the rank and file also made their own vigorous contribution to the English language. Remembrance, after all, isn’t just in the two minute silence. It’s in the talk that follows; the memories of those who gave their lives woven into the very words we use every day.
By Anatoly Liberman
Last week I answered only the questions that needed relatively detailed answers. Today’s “issue” will be devoted to shorter queries.
By Anatoly Liberman
This has been a long month, and I was very pleased to have such generous feedback. Today I’ll only respond to the comments and will deal with the questions next Wednesday. Many thanks to our correspondents who take the time to agree and disagree with me and suggest new topics. In one comment, my responses were called derogatory. God forbid! Why should they even sound such to anyone? I may misunderstand an opponent or refuse to go all the way with him or her (“them”), but I am truly grateful for the attention my blog receives, and I like to hear counterarguments, even though no one’s opinion has ever changed as a result of discussion.
Nobody wants to be called a bigot, but accusations of bigotry are hurled at political opponents with great regularity, because (obviously) everyone who disagrees with us is a bigot, and it is to the popularity of this ignominious word that I ascribe the frequency with which I am asked about its origin. Rather long ago I wrote about bigot in the “gleanings,” but answers in the “gleanings” tend to be lost, while a separate essay will pop up in the Internet every time someone will ask: “Where did bigot come from?”
In light of the growing momentum of Occupy Wall Street and the international riots this summer, we’ve decided to share the following excerpt from Sharp’s Dictionary of Power and Struggle: Language of Civil Resistance in Conflicts. These 198 methods of nonviolent action have all been used in historical instances of nonviolent struggle. Without doubt, a large number of additional methods have already been used but have not been classified
By Anatoly Liberman
During five and a half years of its existence, this blog has featured the periodical Notes and Queries twice. Why I am turning to this subject again (now probably for the last time) will become clear at the end of the post. Notes and Queries appeared on November 3, 1849. In a series of short notes (naturally, notes) spread over the years 1876-1877, its first editor William John Thoms (1803-1885) told the world how the periodical had become a reality and how almost overnight
By Anatoly Liberman
When we deal with the origin of ship and boat (the names of things pertaining to material culture), problems are almost predictable. Such words may have been borrowed from an unknown language (or from an attested language, but definitive proof of the connection is wanting) or coined in a way we are unable to reconstruct, but wife? Yet its etymology is no less obscure. My proposal will add to the existing stock of conjectures, and the future will show whether it has any chance of survival, let alone acceptance.
After re-explaining how this works so many times, I decided it would be easier to jot off a quick post. #OxfordFortuneCookie is a game I like to play with the followers of @OUPAcademic.
By Dennis Baron
English is a world language. Once an insignificant set of immigrant dialects on an obscure island in the rainswept North Sea, English is now the de facto language of multinational business, of science and technology, and of rock ‘n’ roll. Non-English speakers around the globe seem to be learning English as fast as they can. Plus there are more than three times as many English articles in Wikipedia as there are German, the second-biggest language of the online encyclopedia. When it comes to the global domination of English, resistance may be futile.
By Anatoly Liberman
The history of boat is no less obscure than the history of ship. Britain was colonized by Germanic-speakers in the fifth century CE from northern Germany and Denmark. It is hard to imagine that the invaders, who became known to history as the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes and who must have known a good deal about navigation, stopped using boats after they crossed the Channel. But a cognate of boat has not turned up in any modern dialect spoken on the southern coast of the North Sea.
By Mark Peters
A few weeks ago, I spotted this tweet by Braden Graeber: “Dear white guys, stop trying to make camouflage cargo shorts happen.”
Minutes later—in a moment of true synchronicity—I saw a white dude in camouflage cargo pants. Whoa.
As a fashion-challenged, oft-confused doofus, I appreciated the heads-up to two facts: 1) those shorts are an atrocity, and 2) this phrase is a snowclone that’s invaluable in mocking anything fake or contrived that annoys or pains us.
By Anatoly Liberman
Ingle is usually derived from Celtic. The Scots form is the same as the English one, while Irish Gaelic has aingeal. The Celtic word is a borrowing of Latin ignis “fire” (cf. Engl. ignite, ignition). Therefore, some etymologists derive Engl. ingle directly from the Latin diminutive igniculus; ingle nook gives this derivation some support. Be that as it may, no path leads from ingle to inkling.
This Day in World History – On September 27, 1822, Jean François Champollion announced a long-awaited discovery: he could decipher the Rosetta Stone. The stone, a document written in 196 BCE during the reign of Ptolemy V, had been discovered in Rashid (Rosetta in French), Egypt in 1799 by French troops involved in a military campaign against the British. Deciphering hieroglyphics had frustrated scholars for centuries. Arab scholars, beginning in the ninth century, CE, made unsuccessful attempts, as did Europeans in the fifteenth.
By Adam Rosen
A little over three weeks ago, Hurricane Irene passed through New York City. Although residents greeted warnings from authorities with wildly varying degrees of seriousness, their response was nearly uniform: hunker down. Even for those types relishing the chance to buck official admonishment, there wasn’t much point. Concerts were canceled, beaches were closed, and untold numbers of brunches went unserved. I wasn’t, in truth, all that bothered by the state of affairs.
I decided to stay at sea for at least two more weeks. The history of the word frigate is expected to comfort Germanic scholars, who may not know that, regardless of the language, the names of ships invariably give etymologists grief. In English, frigate is from French, and in French it is from Italian, so that the question is: Where did Italian fregata come from? Naturally, nobody knows. Although the literature
By Lynda Mugglestone
Spin is one of those words which could perhaps now do with a bit of ‘spin’ in its own right. From its beginnings in the idea of honest labour and toil (in terms of etymology, spin descends from the spinning of fabric or thread), it has come to suggest the twisting of words rather than fibres – a verbal untrustworthiness intended to deceive and disguise. Often associated with newspapers and politicians, to use spin is to manipulate meaning, to twist truth for particular ends – usually with the aim of persuading readers or listeners that things are other than they are.