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Academic Insights for the Thinking World
I got a book of New York Times crossword puzzles, edited by Will Shortz, as a gift. I had never been a crossword addict or even an aficionado, but a gift is meant to be enjoyed, so I began working through the puzzles in the evenings as I watched the news.
Over the years, I have discussed the origin of quite a few animal names. Despite my inroads, most of them—from heifer to dog—remain problematic. Yet no word is more enigmatic than cat. Two names for cat dominate the world: either some variant of kat or miu ~ mau (Ancient Egyptian) ~ mao (Chinese).
For most readers of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, the question of the ancient material forms of the biblical books rarely comes up. When it does, readers tend to imagine the large scrolls made famous by the discoveries around the Dead Sea. Even the Dead Sea scrolls, however, are centuries newer than most of the Hebrew Bible, which may well have been written on different materials and in different formats.
In art, a figleaf is used to barely cover something one isn’t supposed to show in public. I use the term ‘figleaf’ for utterances (and sometimes pictures, or other things) which barely cover for speech of a sort one isn’t supposed to openly engage in. When someone says “I’m not a racist but…” and then […]
First of all, let me apologize for the egregious typo I made in the previous post in Ernest Weekley’s name. This is what comes of being too devoted to every line of Oscar Wilde and his comedy The Importance of Being Earnest.
Dogwhistles are one of the most discussed methods for politicians to play on voters’ racial attitudes in a stealthy manner, although they come in handy for manipulation on other topics as well. The key to a dogwhistle is this hiding of what’s really going on. Broadly speaking, a dogwhistle is a bit of communication with an interpretation that seems perfectly innocent—but which also does something else.
In 1899 a young Jewish woman published a harrowing account of her journey through Germany in 1894, based on Yiddish letters she had written during the journey. Maryashe (Mary) Antin’s travelogue “From Plotzk to Boston” stands out as one of the few detailed contemporary descriptions of a migrant journey from the Russian Empire to America. In the spring of 1894, when she was thirteen years old, Maryashe, together with her mother and sisters, left her hometown of Polotzk in northern Russia to join her father, who had moved to Boston in 1891.
This is the second and last post on Ernest Weekley, an excellent scholar and engaging writer. The “installment” a week ago dealt with the history of Standard English through the eyes of the inimitable Mrs. Gamp.
Many people who are interested in word origins know Ernest Weekley’s English etymological dictionary. I am sorry that we cannot post his photo: for some mysterious reason, all his portraits on the Internet are copyrighted. He wrote many excellent books on English words.
An instructive essay on etymology need not always be devoted to a word going back to the hoariest antiquity. It can also deal with an “exotic” borrowing like coffee, for example.
One of the quirkier features of the English syntax has to do with the simple word all. All is a quantity word, or quantifier in the terminology of grammarians and logicians. It indicates an entirety of something.
An instructive essay on etymology need not always be devoted to a word going back to the hoariest antiquity. It can also deal with an “exotic” borrowing like coffee, for example.
Have you ever seen a quern? If you have not, Wikipedia has an informative page about this apparatus. Yet there is a hitch about the definition of quern. For instance, Wikipedia discusses various quern-stones, and indeed, pictures of all kinds of stones appear in the article. But stones don’t do anything without being set in motion.
Cooperation is in our nature, for good and ill, but there is still a nagging doubt that something biological in us compels us to be selfish: our genes. This is the paradox: genes are inexorably driven by self-replication, and yet cooperation continually rears its head. Not only are humans fundamentally team players, but all of nature has been teaming up since the dawn of life four billion years ago.
In common parlance, a “prophecy” is a special kind of utterance. Perhaps an oracle about the future, words of approval or condemnation, critique or consolation. Scholars often define prophecy as a kind of message, issued from a deity to their people and mediated through an individual called a prophet.
Perhaps the most popular command in the Bible is to “love your friend”—or “neighbor,” as it’s commonly translated— “as yourself” (Lev 19:18). Less popular today are the preceding verses, which command friends to rebuke each other if one has sinned. In ancient Judaism, a good rebuke was a mark of friendship, although it had to be done the right way.