A drinking bout in several parts (Part 2: Beer)

By Anatoly Liberman

At the beginning of the previous post, I promised to say more about some strange names of beverages. The time has come to make good on my promise. In a note dated December 1892, we can read the following: “Shandygaff is the name of a mixture of beer and ginger-beer…, and according to evidence given at the recent trial of the East Manchester election petition, a mixture of bitter beer and lemonade is in Manchester called a smiler.” Shandygaff and especially its shortened form shandy are still well-known words

Does marriage close the wealth gap between men and women?

Some may wonder if gender differences in wealth are important. After all, don’t most men and women marry, rendering any gender wealth difference relatively unimportant? Actually, about half of all households are headed by single (never-married, widowed, or divorced) persons, which makes the wealth gap between men and women a reality for a large percentage of people. Also, prominent social circumstances prevent women from closing the wealth gap through marriage. First, the protection that is offered by marriage will disappear for large groups of women, since about half of all marriages end in divorce. Second, men and women are marrying at later ages, leaving women with more years in which they are self-supporting. In fact, women now spend more of their adult years single than married.

Patterns in Presidential Politics

By Elvin Lim

As the race for the Republican nomination warms up, it is too early to tell who would head the party’s ticket next Fall. But there is more to understanding politics than predicting the horse races, and for those ready to look, there are already patterns emerging from the available field of potential candidates.

First, the next Republican nominee is not likely to come from the other end of Pennsylvania avenue. With the announcement of Senator John Thune (SD) that he would not be running, there are no more

International Women’s Day: Charlotte Perkins Gilman

For me, one of the most interesting lines of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper” appears near the very beginning of the story. The words are an aside, a nervous excuse—and the only part of this rambling, uncomfortable tale to be quartered off by parentheses: “John is a physician,” the narrator writes furtively, “and perhaps—(I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind—) perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster.”

International Women’s Day: Mona Caird

These days, not many people outside of academia seem to know who Mona Caird was. I certainly didn’t until I was studying for my Masters degree and decided to write on the New Woman writers of the late 19th century. Through that I came to read her novel, The Daughters of Danaus (1894), which is the story of Hadria, a girl from the Scottish Borders who wants to be a composer. However, the pressure to fulfil the traditional roles of wife and mother is insurmountable and her musical ambitions are ultimately sacrificed to her family obligations. The book is rightly regarded as something of a feminist classic, and it has become one of my very favourite books.

International Women’s Day: Émilie du Châtelet

By Patricia Fara
Émilie du Châtelet, wrote Voltaire, ‘was a great man whose only fault was being a woman.’ Du Châtelet has paid the penalty for being a woman twice over. During her life, she was denied the educational opportunities and freedom that she craved. ‘Judge me for my own merits,’ she protested: ‘do not look upon me as a mere appendage to this great general or that renowned scholar’ – but since her death, she has been demoted to subsidiary status as Voltaire’s mistress and Isaac Newton’s translator.

The Legal and Practical Futility of State “Amazon” Laws

By Edward Zelinsky

As they scramble for tax revenue in a challenging environment, the states increasingly turn to so-called “Amazon” laws to force out-of-state internet and mail order retailers to collect tax on their sales. The Illinois General Assembly is the most recent state legislature to pass an Amazon statute. New York, Colorado, Rhode Island, North Carolina and Oklahoma have already enacted such laws while Amazon acts are pending in other state legislatures.

While they differ in important respects, all of these proposed and enacted laws share the premise that goods which are taxed when purchased in a conventional, bricks-and-mortar store should also be taxed when bought from an online or mail order retailer. This premise is compelling.

The Difficulty of Being Good

Gurcharan Das is the author of several books, including the much-acclaimed India Unbound (which has been translated into many languages and filmed by the BBC) and most recently The Difficulty of Being Good: On The Subtle Art of Dharma. He writes a regular column for six Indian newspapers, including the Times of India, and also contributes to Newsweek, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Foreign Affairs.

In the two-part podcast below, Das talks with none other than the brilliant Kamla Bhatt.

Hamlet, and his secret names

By Lisa Collinson
In this new article, I conclude that Hamlet probably came ultimately from Gaelic Admlithi: a name attached to a player (or ‘mocker’) in a strange and violent medieval Irish tale known in English as ‘The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel’. If I’m right, this means that some version of the Hamlet-name was associated with players hundreds of years before Shakespeare lived or wrote.

Who cares about National Grammar Day? Or is it whom?

By Dennis Baron
March 4 is National Grammar Day. According to its sponsor, the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar (SPOGG, they call themselves, though between you and me, it’s not the sort of acronym to roll trippingly off the tongue), National Grammar Day is “an imperative . . . . to speak well, write well, and help others do the same!”

The National Grammar Day website is full of imperatives about correct punctuation, pronoun use, and dangling participles. In the spirit of good sportsmanship, it points out

John Lennon and Jesus, 4 March 1966

By Gordon Thompson

Forty-five years ago, in the spring of 1966, as swinging London and its colorful denizens attracted the attention of ‘Time’, the publishers of an American teen magazine found part of a recent interview with John Lennon to be of particular interest. A rapid disintegration ensued of the complex identity that the Beatles management, the media, the fans, and even the musicians themselves had constructed, setting in motion a number of dark forces.

Translating Gulag Boss

Unfortunately, there’s no doubting the fact that oppression and cruelty has existed and will indeed continue to remain in society. The question that does need to be asked, however, is how ordinary people can commit these extreme and vicious acts of evil upon their fellow man? In Gulag Boss: A Soviet Memoir by Fyodor Vasilevich Mochulsky, and translated by Deborah Kaple, that question is explored through the lens of one normal man who eventually ran one of Stalin’s most notorious prison camps.

What can the Norman Conquest teach us about regime change?

By George Garnett
The Norman Conquest of England, recently examined in Rob Bartlett’s television series, offers some striking parallels. The term is jargon, of a type beloved by politicians, because it attempts to foreclose on reflection and debate. The manner of the ‘change’ – by armed force – is veiled, and the agent unspecified, even though both are always obvious.

Michael Scheuer sits down with Stephen Colbert

Michael Scheuer was the chief of the CIA’s bin Laden unit from 1996 to 1999 and remained a counterterrorism analyst until 2004. He is the author of many books, including the bestselling Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terrorism. His latest book is the biography Osama bin Laden, a much-needed corrective, hard-headed, closely reasoned portrait that tracks the man’s evolution from peaceful Saudi dissident to America’s Most Wanted.

Among the extensive media attention both the book and Scheuer have received so far, he was interviewed on The Colbert Report just this week.

A Drinking Bout in Several Parts (Part 1.5: Ale continued)

By Anatoly Liberman

The surprising thing about the runic alu (on which see the last January post), the probable etymon of ale, is its shortness. The protoform was a bit longer and had t after u, but the missing part contributed nothing to the word’s meaning. To show how unpredictable the name of a drink may be (before we get back to ale), I’ll quote a passage from Ralph Thomas’s letter to Notes and Queries for 1897 (Series 8, volume XII, p. 506). It is about the word fives, as in a pint of fives, which means “…‘four ale’ and ‘six ale’ mixed, that is, ale at fourpence a quart and sixpence a quart.

Shari’a Law and the Archbishop of Canterbury

Over the first two weeks of February 2008 in the United Kingdom, a sizable controversy was stirred up by a lecture given to the Royal Courts of Justice by the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury, the Rt Rev Rowan Williams, entitled ‘Civil and Religious Law in England: A Religious Perspective’, and a prior interview which he gave to the BBC Radio 4 news programme, ‘The World at One’. In the course of both the talk and the interview, the Archbishop suggested that certain extensions of Shari’a law in Britain were both ‘unavoidable’ and also desirable from the double point of view of civil cohesion and the defence of the ‘group rights’ of religious bodies.