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Title cover of "Origin Uncertain: Unraveling the Mysteries of Etymology" by Anatoly Liberman

Returning to Yule

A reader, as I mentioned in one of the most recent posts, called my attention to the 1853 book The Two Babylons by the Reverend Alexander Hislop. The book, which has been reprinted many times since the middle of the nineteenth century and is still easily available, contains an original etymology of the word Yule (and this is why the comment was written)

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Cover of "My Fellow Americans: Presidents and Their Inaugural Addresses," edited by Yuvraj Singh, with an introduction by Ted Widmer

“My fellow Americans” [timeline]

Every four years, the incoming president of the United States delivers an inaugural address in a tradition that dates back to 1789, with the first inauguration of George Washington. The address reiterates to Americans—and peoples around the world—what the country has been and what it has the potential to become.

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Title cover of "Origin Uncertain: Unraveling the Mysteries of Etymology" by Anatoly Liberman

Year in, year out

As promised last week, the topic of this post is the history of the word year. It is hard to tell what hampers etymological discovery more. Consider two situations. If a word is relatively late and has no cognates, language historians are usually lost. This is what happens in dealing with slang and rare (isolated) regional words. For example, someone must have coined dweeb and nerd.

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Cover image of "The Politics of Unpaid Labour" by Valeria Pulignano and Markieta Domecka

Beyond the paycheck

In the age of gig economy, remote work, and juggling multiple jobs, unpaid labour is no longer confined only to the domestic sphere or volunteerism. It is now an insidious undercurrent in paid employment, eroding worker rights and deepening inequality.

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Cover image of "Racialized Commodities" by Christopher Stedman Parmenter.

Racialized Commodities

In the mid-sixth century BCE, the Greek mystic Aristeas of Proconessus composed a hexameter poem recounting a journey deep into Eurasia. According to Herodotus, Aristeas set off from his island home in the Sea of Marmara to visit the “one-eyed Arimaspians, and beyond them the griffins which guard the gold, and beyond the griffins the Hyperboreans, whose land comes down to the sea.”

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Title cover of "Origin Uncertain: Unraveling the Mysteries of Etymology" by Anatoly Liberman

The year is new and young. Everything else is old

It is almost certain that the main event in the reception in England of the formerly unpronounceable “low” word bloody (which first turned up in texts in 1540 and, consequently, existed in colloquial speech earlier) goes back to 1914, when Eliza Dolittle, the heroine of George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion, uttered it from the stage. Nowadays, when in “public discourse,” the rich hoard of English adjectives has been reduced to the single F-word (at least so in the US), this purism of an age gone by cannot but amuse us.

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cover image of "Introduction to International and Global Politics"

Theories of Global Politics meet International Relations theories

The study of world politics developed via a series of famous encounters, sometimes called the ‘great debates’. The first major encounter, dating to the early twentieth-century, was between utopian liberalism and realism; the second between traditional approaches and behaviouralism; the third between neorealism/neoliberalism and neo-Marxism.

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Cover image of "Meaningful Economics: Making the Science of Prosperity More Human." by Bart J. Wilson

Meaningful economics

Human beings mean. We just do. Human beings contemplate the importance or significance of everything, be it a person or a place, an action or a consequence, a possession or an idea, a relationship or our well-being, an experience or our connection to something greater than ourselves.

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The concept of emotional disorder

In August 2024, a special report on ‘ecological medicine’ was published in Psychiatry Online. The authors of the report describe ecological medicine as “the structured and deliberate use of connectedness and interaction with plants, animals, and other species to generate a therapeutic effect for individuals.”

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Rethinking migrations in late prehistoric Eurasia

People move. Whether at an individual or group level, migrations have been a constant and fundamental component of the human journey from its very beginnings to the present.

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Title cover of "Origin Uncertain: Unraveling the Mysteries of Etymology" by Anatoly Liberman

Jolly Yule

It is almost certain that the main event in the reception in England of the formerly unpronounceable “low” word bloody (which first turned up in texts in 1540 and, consequently, existed in colloquial speech earlier) goes back to 1914, when Eliza Dolittle, the heroine of George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion, uttered it from the stage. Nowadays, when in “public discourse,” the rich hoard of English adjectives has been reduced to the single F-word (at least so in the US), this purism of an age gone by cannot but amuse us.

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Oxford University Press. Best Books of 2024

A look behind the curtain at the best books of 2024

Every year, Oxford University Press’s trade program publishes 70-100 new books written for the general reader. The vast audience for these trade books comprises everyone from history buffs, popular science nerds, and philosophy enthusiasts pursuing intellectual interests, as well as parents and caregivers seeking crucial advice or support—all readers browsing the aisles of their local bookstore (or the Amazon new releases) for literature that deepens their insight into the world around them.

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Title cover of "Dangerous Crooked Scoundrels: Insulting the President from Washington to Trump" by Edwin L. Battistella, published by Oxford University Press

Does “the” get italics?

One of the idiosyncrasies of copy editing that befuddles me involves the word “the”. Should it be capitalized and italicized when one refers to newspaper titles in a piece of writing? The Chicago Manual of Style will tell you no. 

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Title cover of "Origin Uncertain: Unraveling the Mysteries of Etymology" by Anatoly Liberman

Varia

It is almost certain that the main event in the reception in England of the formerly unpronounceable “low” word bloody (which first turned up in texts in 1540 and, consequently, existed in colloquial speech earlier) goes back to 1914, when Eliza Dolittle, the heroine of George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion, uttered it from the stage. Nowadays, when in “public discourse,” the rich hoard of English adjectives has been reduced to the single F-word (at least so in the US), this purism of an age gone by cannot but amuse us.

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Cover image of "The Possibility of Moral Community" by James Lenman

Morality without metaphysics

Let’s talk about morality. There is stuff we think is okay to do and there is stuff we think is not okay to do. Human relationships work (when they do work) when we are all more or less on the same page about what stuff is and is not okay to do; as we often are. We all agree, for example, that it is not okay to beat people to death because you do not like the way they dress. We expect others to obey such rules and our relationships with them are shaped by whether or not they do so. We hold each other responsible for what we do in ways that inform how we distribute, on the one hand, our love and esteem and, on the other, our condemnation and resentment. 

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