Brothers and sisters

The readers of this blog may have noticed that I usually try to stay away from the oldest words in English, those with ancient Indo-European roots. I do so, because, when it comes to such words, I seldom have any ideas worth sharing, that is, such as cannot be found in easily available sources. (Incidentally, considering the richness of the Internet, this is not always an easy task!) I feel more comfortable with baffle, pebble, and peevish (see the latest two posts about them) and among adzes, heifers, and pimps, all done to death in my etymological dictionary. But perhaps someone among our readers is especially interested in the hoary antiquities? If so, write me a note. In any case, today’s post is about the words brother and sister. Both are very old, really as old as the most ancient hills around us. The question is the same as always: Why do those words mean what they mean to us today? I wish they were sound-imitative, but unfortunately, they are not.

Brother is an especially amazing word, because its multiple cognates have practically the same form, the predictable phonetic differences notwithstanding, all over Indo-European: English brother, Latin frater, Russian brat, and so forth (an extremely rare case). The Indo-European protoform must have begun with bh-. We can state with confidence only one thing: namely, that brothers received their name not because they were the sons of the same parent(s). Rather, they were members of a certain unit, a fraternity, asit were. For instance, the Ancient Greek phrāter belonged to a phrātria, “a brotherhood,” a social, political, and religious group that had nothing to do with kinship. This is not surprising. In the remotest past, males were responsible for hunting and warding off enemies. Being the offspring of the same parents mattered less or not at all. Of course, such was no longer the situation in recorded history and in Greece, where boys did know their fathers, and the word for “brother” in our sense existed (Greek adelphós “from the same womb”; as regards the root of the word, think of Delphi, literally “womb,” the seat of Apollo’s famous temple in a gorge).

Ancient “brothers” must have belonged to a certain group. What group was it millennia ago? If we could discover the answer, the etymology of the word brother would have become clear. According to a very old suggestion, the root of brother is the same as in the verb bear. But brothers did not receive their name because they were the sons of the same parent. That’s the whole point. And reconstructing some root beginning with br– takes us nowhere.

Even the most detailed etymological dictionaries offer only lists of cognates for brother and state flatly: “Origin unknown.” Yet I might mention at least one hypothesis, to illustrate the state of the art. Jost Trier (1894-1970), a German linguist, believed that many words of Indo-European had been coined in the process of weaving, making fences, and so forth. In his time, Trier had an enthusiastic following. A few of his etymologies look plausible; others are fanciful. He reconstructed the ancient root bher “to weave, plait,” which he detected in numerous words, including brother and bride. To be sure, “connecting, binding” is a concept that underlies both kinship and marriage, but as always, it is the details that count. A bird’s eye view of kinship terms rarely pays off. The etymology of both bride and brother is enveloped in total obscurity, and comparing two words of unknown origin in an attempt to kill two evasive birds with one little stone (“pebble”) is a risky endeavor.

Such then is the sad end of the first part of today’s essay. By this time, it must have become clear why I choose to stay away from the depths of Indo-European. As a pearl-diver, I don’t like to come to the surface empty-handed.

Despite numerous disagreements among scholars, the etymology of the word sister seems to be less opaque. Before citing the solution that one can find in all recent dictionaries, I may mention a curious detail. We seem to be wandering in darkness, and yet some ancient kin terms are amusingly transparent. For instance, Old Norse (that is, Old Icelandic) lifri is one of several words for “brother,” and it means “of the same liver.” Also, in Old Icelandic, we find blóði, literally “blood brother,” hlýri “brother, (!) friend,” literally, “of the same cheek.” The already cited Greek adelphós means “of the same womb” (no connection with Adolph, despite its misleading ph at the end: Adolph is a German name meaning “old wolf”), and the Sanskrit word for “brother” had the same inner form. But as we have seen, brother did NOT mean “of the same womb,” and we are at a loss to decipher it.

We can assume that millennia ago, people coined words that were fully transparent to the speakers, but with time those words changed beyond recognition, and we are hard put to reconstruct the original form. Or the association that was once clear to everybody has been lost. The Germanic designations of “sister” are similarly all over the map: Gothic swistar, Old English sweostor, and so forth. (Gothic, it will be remembered, has come down to us in a fourth-century translation of the New Testament from Greek. Later Gothic is all but unknown.)

It is now usually believed that the oldest Indo-European word for “sister” was a compound containing the elements swe- “one’s own” and sōr “woman,” the reference being to the woman of one’s own extended family, in contrast to such terms of kinship as Latin uxor “woman from outside the extended family.” The competing etymology, explaining sister as “being of one’s own blood,” has been rejected or ignored by most specialists in Indo-European kinship terminology.

Old Germanic was full of words designating various family groups. For instance, in the Gothic translation of the New Testament, we find the noun broþrahans. It renders the usual Greek plural of the word for “brother” but presumably meant “those dealing with one another in a brotherly manner.” To us the text in Mark XII: 20 hardly suggests such a nuance (“Now there were seven brethren; and the first took a wife, and dying left no seed”). Be that as it may, the odd-looking suffix has secure counterparts in Icelandic and elsewhere.

To repeat: few words are harder to interpret than the terms of kinship in the languages of the world. The Modern English system is simplicity itself: grandmother, brother, sister, cousin, uncle, in-laws, and so forth, but even we have monsters like cousin twice removed. The old system was intricate and to us mind-boggling. So let us stay with moms and dads and make merry.

Editor’s note: for administrative reasons, The Oxford Etymologist’s column will not appear next week, July 29. The next post will be on August 5.

_{Featured image: Image by Jason Hu via Pexels. Public domain.}

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How to create visual (graphical) and video abstracts

Although the concept of visual abstracts began even before the widespread use of the internet, with journals like Angewandte Chemie and Tetrahedron Letters featuring graphical abstracts in the late 20^th century, it wasn’t widely used across all journals until the surge in scholarly papers and information overload. Given that almost 3 million scientific papers were indexed by Scopus and Web of Science alone in 2022, it isn’t surprising that it takes 17 years for research evidence to reach clinical practice. Therefore, for research to influence clinical practice, it must be effectively communicated to key audiences such as policymakers, healthcare professionals, and patients.

Since 2016, Dr Andrew Ibrahim has helped popularize the use of visual abstracts on social media. His studies have shown that presenting research findings in a visual way promises to improve audience reach and drive change, as visual abstracts make use of our ability to rapidly process and retain visual over textual information.

Planning your visual abstract

Paediatrics & Child Health encourages authors to submit visual or video abstracts with their manuscripts. While visual (or graphical) abstracts provide a succinct, pictorial summary of the paper, video abstracts are short, engaging audio-visual recordings. These abstracts give readers a quick, visual overview of an article’s main findings and information briefly. The purpose of visual abstract isn’t to divulge all the details of a study or to replace the full text, but to provide busy readers with an efficient way to find articles of interest. However, as the addition of visual abstracts on social media is relatively new (since 2016), there is a need for more quantitative studies to fully understand how effective visual abstracts are in communicating research. Preliminary data suggest that visual abstracts do increase text abstract views and enhance Altmetric attention scores of papers.

Follow these tips to create effective visual or video abstracts.

1. First, wrap up your paper: Develop your abstract after fully writing your manuscript. This will help you to fully understand your research story and highlight the key aspects of your paper. Ask yourself these questions:
   • Why did I decide to do this research?
   • What is the problem/knowledge gap my work addresses?
   • How do my key findings compare with what has been done previously?
   • And how does it matter to my peers and the public?
     
2. Create a plan: Plan out your ideas and organize your abstract in a logical way, so that readers can take a quick glance and easily follow. You can use SmartArt Graphics on Microsoft PowerPoint (process, cycle, list, matrix etc.) or search for similar elements on Canva.
   
3. Learn about your audience: It is important to understand your audience’s level of expertise when choosing the visual elements for your graphical abstract.
   
4. Less is more: Select key points from each section of your paper. This will keep your abstract succinct. Adding too many details can overwhelm the readers. The purpose of a visual or a video abstract isn’t to replace full-text articles but to pique the interest of the reader.
   
5. What to keep in mind: Learn what sizes and formats are allowed. For Paediatrics & Child Health, for example, graphical abstracts should be one panel, 1200 pixels (width) x 900 pixels (height) at 300 ppi (which corresponds to 4 inches/10 cm x 3 inches/7.5 cm at 300 ppi). You can submit your graphical abstract as TIFF, PDF or JPG file and video abstracts as AVI or MP4 files. Other journals or societies may have different requirements.
   
6. Get feedback before you submit: Send your visual or video abstracts to folks not only within your profession but also outside it, to see if they understand your paper just by looking at your visual or video abstract.
   

Technical tips for creating your visual abstract

There are technical elements to creating a visual abstract. Here are some tips for how to approach the process. For graphical abstracts:

• Choose a design program you are comfortable with such as Microsoft PowerPoint, Adobe Creative Cloud, Canva, etc.
• Select a colour palette (≤5 colours) and a font size (12- to 16-point UNICODE) to ensure legibility.
• Use simple and clear visual elements/icons to communicate your research. For general graphical elements, you can use PowerPoint, Canva, Draw.io, and Adobe Illustrator. However, for more specific visual elements, you can use software such as:
  
  1. BioRender for creating professional, scientific figures. It is best for life sciences, medicine, and biology papers.
  2. Mind the Graph for creating compelling infographics from scratch. This tool is best for health professionals, scientists, and academicians.
  3. ChemDraw to draw out chemical reactions or biomolecules e.g., drawing out the structures of essential amino acid or adenosine diphosphate in your manuscript.
  4. If pictograms/images won’t help communicate your research work, you can always include data or charts. For information on different chart types and their uses, try The Data Visualisation Catalogue.

Once you have created your graphical abstract, proofread and revise if necessary.

If a video abstract best suits your paper:

• It is good practice to begin your video with a hook to catch the attention of your viewers. Start the video with an interesting question or revealing key findings of your study.
• To make your video, create a storyboard to identify potential issues using free software like Canva storyboards or Wonder Unit Storyboarder.
• Select your mode of delivery:
  1. Talking head: You can record yourself talking about your study, creating a human connection between you and your audience.
  2. Presentation style: If you are looking for a free, beginner-friendly way to record your video abstract, you can create simple visuals on Microsoft PowerPoint or Canva and record the presentation.
  3. Whiteboard animation: You can make a video abstract by drawing out the key findings of your paper on an actual whiteboard (or using a whiteboard tool online). This method is effective but might need some prior sketching practice. To make it more creative and add motion to your drawing, you can create animated videos using Canva, Powtoon, Microsoft PowerPoint or other paid software.
• Record your audio-visual: If you opt to create a talking head video, you can use a mobile phone or a digital camera using the highest quality to record your video. For recording the script, select a quiet room and, if possible, use a plug-in microphone. Ensure your voice is audible and clear, and your tone resonates with your intended audience. You can also add free music to your video (check license and copyrights).
• End your video with a call to action e.g., you can say something like “now that you’ve watched this video, don’t forget to read and share this paper” to the audience to increase the chances of a viewer taking action.
• Lastly, use any editing software (e.g., Canva Pro, PowerPoint, iMovie, descript) to put together your final video abstract.

Conclusion

Visual and video abstracts are effective ways to increase visibility, reach, and engagement of your research work. For example, the papers published in Paediatrics & Child Health accompanied by visual abstracts, some of which were recently shared on the journal’s LinkedIn page, received higher engagement and article views on both platforms.

For more information about submitting your manuscript to Paediatrics & Child Health, please visit our website or email us at journal@cps.ca.

^{Featured image by Luke Miller via Unsplash.}

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Pen to Paper with Alexander Mikaberidze

In his most recent work, historian and OUP author Alexander Mikaberidze turns his expansive, globally minded lens to one of the most familiar episodes in American history—the Louisiana Purchase—and reveals just how far its story reaches beyond a simple land deal. Best known for his work on the Napoleonic Wars, Mikaberidze brings the same cross-border, deeply archival approach to this project, tracing the Purchase through the tangled currents of empire, revolution, and political ambition that connected Europe, the Caribbean, and North America. Here, he reflects on the enduring pull of Napoleonic history, the serendipity of research, and why the Louisiana Purchase still has urgent meaning today.

1. You’ve spent much of your career immersed in the world of the Napoleonic Wars. What was the moment when this period first caught your imagination—and what keeps pulling you back to it?

As a kid, I was very susceptible to the romance of the past. The decisive moment came at the start of middle school when I stumbled across a biography of Napoleon Bonaparte. I was, quite simply, swept away. Here was this improbable figure—a provincial outsider from a small island—who seemed to bend an entire continent to his will. It read like a romantic saga, the kind that makes you forget about your own problems (and in the turbulent 1990s, there were many problems in the former Soviet republics!). The Napoleonic legend has a way of doing that, as it doesn’t just inform; it recruits. And I responded.

What keeps me returning is the complexity of the past. The closer you get, the more it fractures into competing perspectives, new narratives, and additional layers. It’s an inexhaustible subject, and after over two decades studying the Napoleonic Era, I am only just starting to get a good grasp of it.

2. Your work often crosses borders, languages, and archives. When you’re deep in research, what does a good working day actually look like for you—and where do you most often get pleasantly stuck?

A good research day begins, as all respectable obsessions do, with a cup of coffee and a false sense of control. When I’m in the archives, I arrive with a plan—a list of dossiers to order, documents to peruse, and old leads to follow up—and within an hour that plan is usually in ruins. Some obscure document opens onto a new set of questions, which leads to a detour into entirely unfamiliar territory. At home, my working day is really a working night. Once lectures are finished, papers graded, and family attended to, I turn to reading and writing, usually well after ten o’clock. So, I tend to work past midnight, when everything has gone quiet and the world, for a few hours at least, stops making demands. I surround myself with piles of books and documents and slowly read through them all, taking notes and creating outlines. I’ve always had a particular fondness for tracing details, especially those included in footnotes. More often than not, those are the threads that unravel something larger. I recall one such instance when an innocent inquiry into a single footnote sent me chasing leads across European archives and auction houses. The trail eventually led me to the Lilly Library, where I found a rare Georgian illuminated manuscript long thought lost.

3. How different did it feel to write about the Louisiana Purchase compared with Napoleon’s Europe? Were there habits you had to unlearn—or new ones you picked up along the way?

In some ways, it felt less like a departure than a continuation under a different name. The story of the Louisiana Purchase is so closely intertwined with subjects I had already spent years studying—European colonial empires, the Haitian Revolution, and, of course, Napoleon—that the transition was more seamless than I initially expected. If anything, the shift was one of emphasis rather than method. My earlier focus of tracing connections across borders—which led to the writing of The Napoleonic Wars: A Global History—proved just as essential here. The Purchase only really makes sense when placed within those overlapping imperial and revolutionary contexts; taken in isolation, it risks losing a lot of important details.

4. After years of writing big, interconnected histories, what part of the process do you enjoy most now—and what part still gives you pause every time you start a new book?

What I enjoy most is the moment when the material begins to “talk back.” After years of research, there comes a point when the documents stop feeling like scattered fragments and begin to form a kind of chorus. Shaping that into a cohesive story feels less like construction and more like listening closely enough to catch the underlying rhythm. What still gives me pause is the beginning… There’s a particular sense of terror of realizing the depth of the subject that you will have to explore and then staring at the blank page knowing how many lives and complexities you’re bound to compress into prose. It’s a useful anxiety, though—it keeps you honest about the challenge, and more importantly, keeps you striving for a deeper understanding of what actually transpired.

5. If readers take away one big idea from The Louisiana Purchase that reframes how they think about global history, what do you hope it will be?

If there’s one idea, I’d hope readers carry away, it’s that the Louisiana Purchase was not a neat bilateral transaction—the familiar “greatest real estate deal,” measured out in a few cents per acre. It was (and in many ways, remains) a hinge in a much larger story of imperial rivalry and global entanglement, stretching across both space and time. It is a story that continues to ask something of us—serving as a striking historical precedent, for instance, when the United States recently revisited the idea of acquiring Greenland. I hope the Louisiana Purchase would compel readers to confront the past with candor and to reckon with the tangled complexities of our national story.

I think all historians, whether they admit it or not, are engaged in an ongoing conversation, sometimes amicable, sometimes argumentative. In approaching the Louisiana Purchase as a longue durée history, I found myself naturally echoing Fernand Braudel, with his expansive sense of time and structure. He has a way of reminding you that events are only ever the visible surface of much deeper currents. At the same time, scholars like William Dalrymple, Simon Schama, Gordon Wood, and Alan Taylor bring a narrative vitality that makes you want to match their energy, if not quite their eloquence. This book also owes a great deal to recent Louisiana Purchase studies, too many to mention all, but I will highlight a few: to Robert Lee on long-term consequences; to Mark Edward Hay and Larry Neal, whose economic histories of the Purchase have helped shape my own thinking; and to Peter J. Kastor, whose scholarship on the Purchase’s impact on the American identity has influenced many of my conclusions.

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A few etymological pebbles

The readers of this blog must have noticed how often I suggest solutions connected with sound imitation. Time and again I say that a certain noun or verb owes its origin to onomatopoeia. In the previous post (July 8, 2026), I used this approach while discussing the verb baffle. Today we’ll encounter a similar situation.

Etymological solutions are often intelligent guessing. Many of our readers will remember that a special branch of linguistics deals with iconicity. It studies the ways in which the form of words in some way mirrors their meaning. Barf-barf, oink-oink, and bonkers (boinkers, as it were) are the most obvious examples of iconicity (the header features a picture of our iconic idol), but iconicity goes far beyond sound imitation. Consider the compounds tip-top, wishy–washy, ping-pong, and phrases like tit for tat. They always begin with short i. Top-tip and washy-wishy are unthinkable, because we instinctively begin the enumeration with something small, and short i as in ping and tip indeed suggests smallness. This is not a law: the adjective big has a “wrong” vowel, but consider the phrase big bang.

When we learn the meaning of the words jerk, jig, and jog, we almost sense that they mean what they are expected to mean. Last week, I tried to show that baffle is a sound-imitating (iconic) word. Now think of another situation. A stone falls into a river, we watch it go down and say “plop.” This is non-controversial, but when we are told that Latin plumber, as in Engl. plumb, has a similar origin (suggested by the great linguist Otto Jespersen), doubts arise. Really, is this possible? Latin plumbum?! Why not? Plop  ~ plum(b) goes a piece of lead. After all, plumbum is a word “of obscure origin.”

Consider the noun pebble, recorded in a great number of forms: popple, pipple, pyppel, and puble, among others. It also resembles bubble, whose imitative origin no one doubts. Is pebble from Old English papol a sound-imitative word, like Jespersen’s plumbum? You throw a small stone into water, and it goes pipley ~ papol ~ pebble ~ pipley. Boulder may be sound-imitative (see the post for February 22, 2017), and so may pebble. The problem is that nothing can be proved once we leave the safe haven of oink-oink and flip–flop. Serious etymologists recognize iconicity but treat it with caution.

The origin of pebble does not interest me too much (though I suspect that the word is indeed sound-imitative). I cited it as an introduction to the story of peevish. This adjective surfaced in English at the beginning of the seventeenth century, and like, for example, pawky “cunning, shrewd” (of Scandinavian origin?), it was probably slang. The meaning of peevish has changed over the centuries. We cannot decide what exactly the word meant in the early sentences at our disposal. Here is a shortened succession of glosses (from 1400 to 1669) in the original OED: “silly, senseless, foolish; malignant; spiteful.” The 1963 Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology lists “spiteful, malignant; perverse, obstinate; querulous, fretful.” Most of those senses are obsolete. The OED online begins with “perverse, obstinate, skittish.”

Apparently, the exact connotations of peevish in those sentences are not quite clear to us (just something bad or unpleasant). Peevish is still “unpleasant” but no longer “repugnant,” because today, people who are peevish are grumpy and fretful, rather than perverse or malignant. This change is called the amelioration of meaning (as opposed to the deterioration).

The OED online gives Latin perversus as the etymon, that is, as the ultimate source of peevish. This may be correct. However, the way from perversus to peevish via Old French is not smooth. The French adjective had two quite audible r’s, while peevish has neither. Ernest Weekley (in his etymological dictionary) also derived peevish from perversus but did not discuss the phonetic details. The adjective perverse emerged in English at almost the same time as did peevish. Was the French adjective borrowed twice, once by the uneducated and some time later by those who could pronounce French, without mutilating it?

There is another suggestion about the etymology of peevish. Walter W. Skeat: “The leading idea seems to be whining, making a plaintive cry,” with reference to the bird name pewet, peewit. From the phonetic point of view, the match is perfect (the bird makes a high-pitched wailing pee-wee sound, from which it received its name and which I find rather disturbing), and indeed, peevish resembles an onomatopoeic word. Yet it is far from clear whether the earliest senses of peevish refer to that whining sound. Skeat’s glosses are “fretful, whimpering.” I agree with the OED: “Origin uncertain.” But I would add Skeat’s hypothesis in a note. It has some merit. It may even be correct.

And now, as promised last week, a short biography of Frank Chance, compiled by Dr. Stephen Goranson. I would be happy if this brilliant nineteenth-century researcher had at last re-emerged in our etymological studies from his undeserved obscurity.

Frank Chance was born at Highgate, the fourth son of Robert Lucas Chance, a Birmingham glass manufacturer. After two years in his father’s factory, he studied chemistry for a year at King’s College, London, and for two further years at Paris and Berlin. He went up to Trinity, Cambridge, in 1850, and thence, having taken his B.A. in 1854, to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital for his clinical training, graduating as M.B. in 1854. While at Cambridge he gained the Tyrwhitt Hebrew scholarship, and the study of languages became the chief interest of his life. He translated Virchow’s Cellular Pathology, at the author’s request, in 1863, and edited H. H. Bernard’s Commentary on the Book of Job in 1864. A year later he retired from practice. From 1875 to 1884 he was a member of the committee for the Revised Version of the Old Testament. He was a fluent linguist in German, French and Italian, and familiar with several other languages. He married in 1857 Jane Susan Katharine, daughter of James Brewster of Huntingdon, and had one daughter. He died at Nice.

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The level of our expertise: the perplexing verb <em>baffle</em>

Once again, my thanks are to Dr. Goranson. He succeeded in putting together a short biography of Frank Chance, my hero, whom I discovered many years ago (and learned to admire), while working on my bibliography of English etymology. His almost total obscurity today struck me as an incomprehensible slight. Dr. Goranson’s letter will be appended to the post next week. I also received a query from a reader about kayfabe. Alas, though I know something about the etymology of box/boxing (see the post “In and out of the box”), I cannot say the same about kayfabe; not a single publication on this word appears in my database. I should repeat what I have said more than once: my expertise depends on the huge database I have amassed, and when I draw blank, I appear as ignorant as any non-specialist. I know about kayfabe only what anyone can find online.

This post is about a related subject. What does it mean when a dictionary says: “Origin unknown”? We will soon see that the concept of “unknown” has several levels. The verb baffle, the subject of today’s post, has been investigated in an exemplary way in dictionaries and in both old and recent publications. Yet the OED’s latest verdict, despite the helpful notes, remains unchanged: “Origin unknown.” If so, let us look at what is known. Can everything be enveloped in impenetrable obscurity, like what you can see in the header, with a man lost in a forest?

Baffle turned up in English texts toward the middle of the sixteenth century, and rather probably, it was coined or borrowed around that time or a hundred year earlier. At that time, its recorded senses were “hoodwink, confound.” Scotch bauchle, which predates baffle, meant “to disgrace,” and it remains unclear whether we are dealing with several senses of the same word or with two different verbs. This detail of its history will indeed remain unknown or at least uncertain forever, though it is more probable that, regardless of the chronology, the same sound complex suggested to speakers several different negative associations.

The earliest English etymologists searched for the Greek originof baffle or tried to isolate the prefix be– in it. In 1766, Samuel Johnson thought of the French origin of this verb but went no further (etymology was in general not his forte). Almost a century later, Hensleigh Wedgwood, Skeat’s predecessor in the field of English etymology, wrote a paper that contained a well-informed section on baffle (the earliest attestations and Romance cognates or lookalikes) and came to the following conclusion (his spelling is retained): “The origin of the Sc[otch] bauch, bauchle is, I believe, the interjection Fauch! Baw! Pah! Pooh!, Fr[ench] Bah! Pouah!, Spanish] Baf! all of which are representations of the strong exspiration accompanied by a projection of the lips, by which we instinctively defend ourselves against a bad smell, and are consequently in the first instance expressive of physical disgust, and then of contempt. ‘Buffa, the despising blast of the mouth that we call shirping.’ Thomas. A.D. 1548… Hence also Port[uguese] bafo, breath; Prov[encial] O[ld] Spa[nish] bafa, mockery jest; Sp[anish] befar, It[alian] beffare, to jeer; Fr[ench] baffler, to mock. From the notion of mocking to that of frustrating the effort of any one, in which the En[glish] baffle is now used, is an easy transition….” A few more examples follow.

Wedgwood, an excellent observer of speech, ruined his otherwise useful etymological dictionary of English (the above quotation is not from that dictionary) by relying too heavily on the similarity of words from various languages and ignoring sound correspondences. Yet many of his conclusions still stand, and what he said about baffle sounds convincing, as also shown by the opinions of the Romance scholars who dealt with the items Wedgwood mentioned.

In Romance, numerous words beginning with baf have a very wide range of meanings: they denote “to breathe,” “full stomach,” “puff up, bloat,” and so forth. Its “relative” is buff (buffo “comic actor” and its twin buffoon belong here). According to a unanimous agreement, such words are sound-imitative: biff, baff, buff…. Baffle rather obviously belongs here. The best proof of the onomatopoeic origin of the root we are discussing is the existence of Middle High German beffen “to bark.” Beff-beff (older German), gav-gav (Russian), or woof-woof (English)—the result is the same! Dictionaries also cite Dutch baffen, Modern German baffen and bäfzen, alongside Danish bjæffe and Swedish bjebba “to bark.” By the way, Engl. baffy is a kind of golf club, while Scotch baff means “to strike.” In blind-man’s buff, buff means “blow, stroke,” and in Russian, a gun goes pif-paf.

What then is “unknown” about baffle? The answer is clear. The same or nearly the same sound complex has been recorded all over Western Europe, more importantly (as far as we are concerned) in French. The unanswerable question is whether baffle is native or borrowed. Similar questions recur again and again, especially with regard to slang, expressive words, and the names of popular tools.

In the sixteenth century, wars never ended in Europe (surprise, surprise!). Mercenaries, native and foreign, were everywhere, and so were prostitutes and vagabonds, following the troops. Despite the unrest, merchants and artisans traveled all over the continent. Foreign words were adopted (and often distorted), sometimes forgotten, and sometimes retained. A few of them survived only in regional speech, others managed to stay and even infiltrated the language of the educated.

Baffle, a word of unquestionably imitative origin (and thus, an expressive word), may be native or borrowed. Seven centuries ago, it probably belonged to the common language of the lower classes. Germanic speakers recognized it as their own (when we speak, we don’t think about the etymology of the words we use!), and so did the speakers of the Romance languages. Baffle and its lookalikes may have been native in both English and French (!), or perhaps they were migratory words (Wanderwörter, as they are called in German), part of international slang (see my blog for August 22, 2012, on ajar and migratory words). It is an important detail of the verb’s history and the only one that is beyond reconstruction. From this (and only from this) point of view is baffle a word of unknown origin.

I believe that verdicts in dictionaries should be more nuanced. (In this case: “Baffle. Sound-imitative. In the early Modern period, similar sound complexes were current all over Western Europe, and it is impossible to decide which words of this type are native and which are borrowed.”) Some words are indeed so obscure that nothing at all is known about their prehistory. Baffle does not belong to this group of etymologically impenetrable words.

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VSI 800: A history in eleven titles

Short. Sharp. Inspiring.

These are the words that have guided the Very Short Introduction series for over thirty years. With over ten million copies sold worldwide, it’s become a universally accessible way to gain new knowledge (ChatGPT, eat your heart out).

To celebrate the publication of our 800^thVery Short Introduction, we’ve put together a timeline featuring our series milestones, from our first Introduction co-authored by famed classicist Mary Beard, all the way to our upcoming introduction to rock ‘n’ roll.

Check out our interactive timeline below!

^{Featured image: Oxford University Press.}

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Clinical Legal Education, Theory and Practice

Legal education, at least in the Anglosphere, has been undergoing a quiet but very recognisable transformation. The case study method, developed by Christopher Columbus Langdell at Harvard in the 1870s, is steadily giving way to ‘authentic’, ‘real life’ or ‘experiential’ learning, wherein theory and practice are intermeshed. Law is now often studied ‘in context’ (consequences, remedies, and enforcement are discussed); the gap between ‘law in theory’ and ‘law in action’ is investigated; and the ‘theory of the practice’ is incorporated into the curriculum.

Clinical legal education (CLE) takes this pedagogical approach to its logical conclusion. In CLE, law students learn through the practical application of law by providing legal services to the public and by reflecting on this experience to develop their understanding of law and legal theory. In light of the above, it is unsurprising that CLE has seen a rapid growth in the UK in the past decade. In addition to the aforementioned pedagogical shift, another driving force for this growth has been the hollowing out of public services by years of austerity politics, manifested in significant cuts in the provision of free legal services, both from the voluntary sector and from private law firms with legal contracts. These two factors combined to create a growing demand from the general public for free legal services and a growing demand from law students for some practical experience to form part of their law studies. This expansion in university law clinics has also seen a gradual move away from the law clinic inhabiting a small extra-curricular space populated by a handful of keen volunteers to larger, permanently staffed spaces where the clinic is incorporated into the curriculum, forming an assessed and credit bearing part of both undergraduate and postgraduate law programmes.

Clinical legal education is now very much a part of the twenty-first century legal education landscape, with an estimated 80% of law schools in the UK offering some form of provision. Against this background, it is somewhat surprising that there are very few textbooks available for students. It seems likely that one reason for this is that each university law clinic is unique in its offering and there is no common substantive law uniting them. A law clinic may provide advice services in one or more of the following: family law, housing, employment, criminal law, welfare benefits, special educational needs, small businesses, immigration and asylum, small claims disputes. Those services may be supervised by law school staff or by external agencies working in partnership. When you come to consider the incredible variety of models of delivery along with the range of legal topics needed, the lack of standard core textbooks becomes less surprising, as it is hard to imagine how one book might serve quite so many needs.

In addition to the incredible range of substantive law that can be found in university law clinics, the rationale for and underpinning values of law clinics are highly contested. Is the university law clinic a vehicle for developing deep critical thinking about values, power and justice in an unjust world, a vehicle for developing employability skills for budding lawyers, a way for law schools to help meet the legal needs of local communities, or can it be all of the above?

Undaunted by this landscape, we decided to rise to the challenge of creating a text that unites the theory and the practice of clinical legal education—and in doing so set out our own vision of what clinical legal education is and can be. We seek to champion a vision of clinical legal education that is radical and transformative for students and the communities they serve whilst also positioning ourselves on the side of promoting social justice through legal practice.

We explore the ways in which experiential learning can enrich the student experience, not only by developing key employability skills but also by creating a space in which theory can be applied and become meaningful.

Our proposition is that there are 6 features to clinical legal education:

1. Active participation: this is the defining feature, and thus the foundation of clinical legal education. There is no room in a clinic for students to passively absorb knowledge handed to them by a lecturer. They are active participants in their own learning experience.
   
2. Interaction in role: students play an active part in interviewing, advising, or otherwise working for a client by adopting a professional role.[CA3]  By taking on such a role, students learn how to interact with others as they would in legal practice.
   
3. The dynamic nature of the problem: in legal education, we often design neatly packaged problems for students that will draw out their knowledge and understanding of a particular point of law or practice. In clinical legal education, the problem cannot be packaged, and the solution may not be clear, which pushes the students to think creatively to apply their skills and knowledge.
   
4. Part of a planned curriculum: this does not necessarily mean that the clinic needs to form part of an assessed programme, but to move from beyond experience to education, a clear learning goal needs to be identified for students and educators. Education requires theorising, extrapolating experiences, conceptualising and framing them, understanding them as part of a general structure, and trying again on the basis of that understanding.
   
5. Reflection: learning how to reflect allows students to make sense of their experience and learn from that experience.
   
6. Access to justice: this feature is present in many, but not all, clinics. Teaching students about access to justice is central to our own approaches to clinical education and is therefore also central to the book.

We live in very uncertain times, and our students come to us anxious about jobs and their futures. Many of our universities in the UK are located in cities and regions where poverty, inequality, and injustice are part of the everyday landscape. Law students are hoping to enter a world of work that is changing so fast that neither practicing lawyers nor legal academics have a clear picture of what that world will look like. It is tempting, therefore, for the legal academy to collectively put our heads down and carry on with what we have always done: give lectures, teach the black letter law, expect students to read books and judgments and sit exams at the end of the year. We hope that this book and our vision of law as a site of injustice as well as justice, clinics as a site of theory and practice, and legal practice as a form of communication and connection between people will serve to inspire and support new generations of law students and their teachers.

^{Featured image by Sasun Bughdaryan via Unsplash.}

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Seeing red

As I expected, Dr. Goranson did dig up some information about the mysterious F. (Frank?) Adams, celebrated in the previous post (see the comment following it). Yet we still don’t know where this man acquired his vast and accurate knowledge of etymology. He was an amateur, but such a learned one! It is amazing how much nonsense people have written and keep writing about word origins. In this case we are not dealing with a professional linguist, but his observations deserve nothing but praise. By the way, Frank Chance, whom I also mentioned last week, was a medical doctor. My attempts to learn something about him produced almost no results. James A. H. Murray and Walter W. Skeat treated him as their equal!

I also received a letter in connection with my last week’s note on the regional word rowen “aftermath.” Is the tree name rowan “mountain ash” related? No. Rowan was borrowed from Scandinavian. By the way, the tree is famous in Old Scandinavian mythology (it saved the god Thor from drowning) and elsewhere, because of its red berries in winter, and the word rowan may provide a clue to the mysterious curse aroint thee in King Lear and Macbeth. See my post for February 20, 2013. The OED online has no trust in this or any other etymology of the obscure phrase. Yet this derivation of the curse may not be so bad. Finally, a long letter came that I’ll answer next time.

And now back to business. The history of color names presents countless problems, and the literature on the subject is enormous. Today’s post is only about some curious uses of the word red in English. One of them (in the phrase red gold) I discussed in the essay for October 26, 2022. But first, some notes on the etymology of red may not be out of place.

Word historians encounter two difficulties: either the facts at their disposal are too few, or they are too numerous. This trouble (paucity versus excess) is of course familiar to all researchers. The cognates of red are ubiquitous in the Indo-European world, but the sought-for ancient root emerges in too many forms. The word sometimes ends not only in d/t/th (which is fine) but also in b, f, and s. Also, the vowels alternate rather wildly. Given some finagling, there is of course a possibility to reconstruct a common protoroot, but one wonders whether such a root, valid for the entire language group, existed. It has therefore been suggested that we are dealing not only with a group of related forms but also with a so-called migratory word, a word that travels from language to language and changes its shape along the way. We’ll never know the truth.

To complicate matters, references to the color do not aways match: some of the words, seemingly related to red, mean “light brown.” The history of color words is, in principle, complicated, because at one time, people visualized a spectrum, partly different from ours. Homer’s wine-colored sea is perhaps the most often cited example. Nor is the modern picture of the spectrum quite uniform. For instance, English has to do with the phrases dark blue and light blue, while Slavic uses two different adjectives for them. Likewise, English has a most confusing adjective bleak, not related to black. Though red is the color of fire, its root seems to be the same as in rust.

However, my story today is not about the ancient root of red. While looking through some comments on my old posts, I noticed that the most enthusiastic of them were devoted to idioms and mysterious compounds. Hence a few notes on the word redneck. The first note at my disposal, by Sterling Eisiminger, is from the periodical American Speech 59, 1984, p. 284. The reference is to pellagra. The OED online refers to the same source, so that I’ll reproduce only one sentence: “…in the 1930s pellagra was still common in the southern United States among low-income groups whose diets consisted mainly of pork fat and hominy grits.” Hence perhaps the reference to the skin color of the neck.

But redneck also meant “union member,” especially so in the twenties and the thirties in the coal-producing regions of West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, western Pennsylvania, and southern Illinois and Indiana. Here my source is the same periodical, but volume 69, 1994, pp. 106-11(the author of the article is Patrick H. Huber). Though this source is also known to the OED, I will supply a few details, because the OED online is not open access. We read that the origins of redneck “union man” remain uncertain, but that the word dates back to at least the turn of the twentieth century. It may be an analog of words like cracker (an offensive term for a poor white, etc.) and hillbilly (on hillbilly see my post for March 11, 2026).

The derisive term redneck was also applied to the members of a popular trade union (red, “Communist,” etc.) and, as we are told, with a side shot to the members’ poor, rural-South backgrounds, since so many Kentucky and West Virginia miners were failed farmers and former sharecroppers and agricultural laborers from the outlying rural areas, particularly from the Appalachians.

Especially important is the fact that the term referred not so much to the people’s red sunburned necks as to the red handkerchiefs they wore around their necks. Bandanas, traditionally worn as a form of protection for railroad men, miners, and others, became a badge of honor. Here are the opening lines of the once immensely popular song: “Red Necks, keep them scabs away,/ Red Necks, fight them every day.” The term Redneck became “a badge of working-class solidarity and pride.”

This story does not mean that redneck has “multiple etymologies” (one can often find reference to this phantom). Words, like most rivers, have single sources, though later, tributaries may enrich their content. This probably happened to redneck: first, a literal sense (now forgotten), then figurative accretions. Here is the final statement by the author of the article on redneck: “…the United States labor movement’s adaption of the term redneck speaks powerfully to the fluidity and multiple meanings of language and to how those meanings are socially constructed and interpreted differently by people whose class positions differ.” Red seldom occurs in English idioms. The most interesting of them are to be in the red and to draw a red herring across the path. The curious phrase thin red line originated from the Battle of Balaclava, during the Crimean War on October 25, 1854. However, the original dispatch, as Elizabeth Knowles pointed out, mentioned streak, not line. Red, White and Blue probably needs no comment.

_{Featured image: Little Red Riding Hood c. 1862 by Gustave Doré. Photo by Chris Olszewski. CC-BY-SA-4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.}

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Learn about telic and atelic predicates

Recently, I went to a talk on telicity in verbs. If the term is unfamiliar to you, you are not alone. It comes from the Greek “telos,” meaning “end goal,” which is also the root of the philosophical concept teleology. The terms telic and atelic were first applied to French verbs by a scholar named Howard Garey in a 1957 article in the journal Language. Telic refers to verbs that are directed toward an endpoint or goal, while atelic refers to verbs that are actions without goals. So, if you were to say Emily read The Handmaid’s Tale, you are implying that she finished it: there is an endpoint—that last page of the book. Similarly, if you say Emily walked home, the verb is also telic, the endpoint being home. However, if you say Emily read in front of the fire or Emily walked after dinner, the actions are atelic—there is no specific goal expressed and no endpoint to the reading or walking.

The distinction between telic and atelic can be made somewhat sharper if we add in some prepositional phrases to express timeframes and time spans. Saying Emily read War and Peace for an hour suggests that she did not complete the book, perhaps giving it up or pausing to do something else. However, if you say Emily read War and Peace in an hour, the verb is telic, expressing formidable speed-reading. Generally, atelic verbs stress some activity, while telic verbs stress an accomplishment. To play chess is atelic—an activity. To win a chess match is telic—an accomplishment.

Notice that, unlike the familiar verbal aspects of English, telicity is not marked on the verbs. In English, there is no auxiliary verb or suffix signaling telicity. And while there are some verbs—such as arrive, crash, disappear, or find—that are always telic, and some verbs that are always atelic—such as ponder, chat, loaf, or wander—the nature of the verb’s object plays a crucial part in whether a goal is expressed. Telicity is thus usually a property of verb phrases and the actions or states they express, rather than being a property of verbs themselves. 

Telicity is inherently interesting to linguists, of course, and there is a growing scholarly literature on ways to model the semantics of telic verbs and on some of the puzzles surrounding their interpretation. What, for example, are we to say about verbs that express actions that occur by degree, such as cool in The soup cooled? Is there an end state or not?

Telicity is of interest to writers as well, despite its esoteric nature. Being aware that some verb phrases imply end results provides a perspective on sentences such as these:

I’d like to dialog with you about your behavior.

I’d like to have a conversation about your behavior.

I’d like to explain the consequences of your behavior.

In the first, the verb dialog suggests talking with no endpoint in mind just a lot of back-and-forth talking. In the second, have a conversation implies that the conversation will not last indefinitely and will hopefully resolve something. In the third, the telicity is even more apparent: the explanation is the end goal. 

Or consider a bit of culinary advice like Cook the meat versus Cook the meat until the internal temperature is 165 degrees. There is a goal and end point in the second, and less room for guesswork.

And finally, if you are enumerating your goals for the upcoming year, you might say I will continue working on my book about Milton or I will finish chapters 3 and 4 of my book on Milton. Your dean will prefer the telic version, but you might want to leave some wiggle room with the atelic one.

Understanding telic and atelic predicates is a good goal for writers to have.

_{Featured image by Brett Jordan via Unsplash.}

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<i>Aftermath</i> and its kin

First, two notes in the aftermath of the previous post. 1) My thanks are due to Stephen Goranson, who, as I expected, did find out everything about Thomas Bee, the gentleman, mentioned in last week’s essay on boxing. Mr. Bee discovered the origin of the phrase to box the compass. As usual, I wonder how my old friend Stephen Goranson manages to ferret out all kinds of information, because I also try to do some research along those lines and invariably fail. 2) I am equally grateful to Mr. Gavin Wraith, who asked me why I had not discussed Greek pyx “fist” in connection with box. This connection was noticed long ago. The problem, as James A. H. Murray already knew, is a late attestation of the English word box. As a cognate of box, pyx does not look promising either. Perhaps box indeed originated in university slang (from Greek to English), but this hypothesis is hard to substantiate.

My story today is about several words referring to aftermath. All of them have a rather confusing sound shape. Thus, aftermath is transparent to an etymologist but not to a modern speaker of English. The component –math goes back to a noun meaning “mowing; crop mown.” This noun still exists in modern British dialects, with the suffix –th being the same as in growth and truth. The correct explanation of –math can be found in all detailed dictionaries of English and online. Usually, the root, followed by –th, is changed beyond recognition, as in birth, filth, and death (here, the roots are easy to see in (to) bear, foul, and die). A synonym of aftermath is British regional yeomath. The prefix yeo– means “additional.” I was probably the first to recognize this prefix in yeoman (see the post for June 17, 2009). The OED online seems to concur.

As I said, for some reason, English words for “aftermath” are usually obscure from the etymological point of view. Such is also the case in Russian. For those who know Russian, consider the dialectal words shutyom, probably meaning “an empty space,” and otava “a place left to rest.” Both nouns are stressed on the second syllable, and the origin of both is opaque to modern speakers. I have mentioned Russian for a reason. One Russian word for “fallow land” may, as I believe, throw light on its English synonym. I made this point in the post for November 9, 2016, and would like to repeat my idea here. English fog is, most probably (and such is the common opinion), of Scandinavian origin, even though it surfaced in English only in the middle of the sixteenth century. But we now know that this chronology is not unusual. The Scandinavian invasion happened in the epoch of the Vikings (King Alfred fought the “Danes”). Yet it took some northern words, which flooded dialects, hundreds of years to emerge in written and printed texts.

Another fog, which can be very broadly glossed as “aftermath,” has been known from books since 1400. No doubt, we are dealing with the same word as fog “mist.” Or perhaps some doubt exists, because the senses seem incompatible? Yet the common denominator of both words is “moisture,” and here one Russian phrase comes in most useful. An unsown field is said to be “under vapor” (pod parom). Fog is, most probably, related to German feucht “wet.” By the way, old etymologists, who liked to trace words to their ancient Indo-European roots, reconstructed the root of fog as bhu, a typical sound-imitative complex (an onomatopoeia for a puff of air). English fog “aftermath” means “under vapor, wet.” Even the best historical linguists cannot know all languages in detail. Not unexpectedly, English, German, and Scandinavian etymologists never came across the Russian phrase pod parom, because otherwise, they would have detected the connection, so obvious to me, long ago and would have used it to substantiate the idea that fog “heavy mist” and fog “aftermath” are indeed two senses of the same noun.

Why, I may repeat, do people keep coining such hard words for “aftermath”? Here is one more example: eddish “aftergrowth, stubble.” The root of this noun seems to mean “again,” as, for instance, in eddy. I would probably have left this gallery of etymological riddles in peace if among my folders I had not discovered one, devoted to the word rowen. Here is a note by a man from Madison, Wisconsin (Notes and Queries, 9/VII, June 8, 1901, p. 453): “Aftermath, or second mowing, was not used by New England farmers in the last century. Rowen was their term, derived, doubtless, from those eastern counties where their forefathers lived. Nor has rowen been yet displaced.” Does anyone among our readers know this word? My computer fails to recognize it.

A lively discussion of rowen preceded that note, but I have brought it to light because of the letter printed on the same page. Its author, Mr. F. Adams, did not only debunk a “ridiculous” derivation of the word, given in a respectable English dictionary, and referred to several foreign dictionaries and scholarly publications: he cited the correct date of the first occurrence of the word in English texts and proposed the etymology that still stands, namely, from a word, related to French regain. It “had filtered into our language through a French dialect, w for hard g being common in the north-east of France.”

Who was F. Adams? He sent numerous excellent letters on word origins to NQ between 1892 and 1903 and does not seem to have contributed to any other periodicals. At that time, an English-speaking specialist in word origins could not wish for better exposure: “everybody” read NQ. The great Walter W. Skeat appeared there hundreds of times. But soon after the First World War, its popularity waned. The journal did not die (it still exists) but became more specialized and less “popular.” In this blog, I have often referred to Frank Chance, an outstanding etymologist, who, like F. Adams, never sought another venue for his ideas in addition to NQ and as a result is now almost forgotten. Those who have read my review of a recent book on Webster Unabridged (April 8, 2026) will see that the otherwise well-informed author called NQ an obscure provincial periodical.

At one time, NQ was a famous outlet, and I hope that Dr. Goranson will enlighten us on the career of F. Adams (what a terrible idea it was and still is to use only the first initials in the signature! In references, I have often seen female authors taken for males and namesakes confused). This is the end of my today’s travel through fields left to rest. Along the way, we have encountered many forgotten words and observed once again how rich the English language is and what problems etymologists face. A good aftermath indeed, if you ask me.

_{Featured image: Fallow land near Dale Farm by Bill Broaden. CC-BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.}

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Unbuttoned: an interactive history of the suit

To the modern eye, this man in his dark suit probably looks perfectly normal—perhaps even boring. But what if this ubiquitous uniform is actually one of the most powerful and heavily engineered political institutions in Western history?

Before the nineteenth century, elite men across the Western world dressed in vibrant silks, rich velvets, and sparkling embroidery, using fashion to display their social rank just as much as women did. However, in the wake of the American Revolution, a massive cultural shift occurred—the “Sartorial Revolution.” Between the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, men renounced decorative fashion in favor of plain, dark, woolen suits.

The Founding Fathers used clothing to enact a new political reality. Men like George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson purposefully adopted sober, unadorned suits to visually reject aristocratic luxury and the tyranny of European monarchies. Their new uniform was designed to reflect republican ideals of democracy, equality, and industry. But this equality was an illusion. The suit functioned as a visual boundary that granted civic authority and political power exclusively to white men, while using the language of fashion to cast women, Indigenous men, and Black men as feminine, primitive, or uncivilized, and therefore unfit for political power.

Click on the different elements of the suit below to uncover the hidden histories woven into its fabric. From the exploitation of land and labor required to produce its dark dyes and crisp white linens, to the mathematical tailoring that secretly sculpted an idealized male body, you will see how these seemingly mundane garments served as tools of social control. The history of the suit is the history of power, democracy, and the fashioning of modern men.

Perhaps the most striking thing about the modern suit is how boring it seems. That is exactly its power. By the mid-19th century, the suit became so plain, uniform, and ubiquitous that it practically turned invisible. It functioned as a “civic uniform” that united white men in a visual brotherhood of democratic equality. But this uniformity was exclusive. By defining serious, rational masculinity through the dark suit, society simultaneously codified anyone who didn’t wear it—women, Indigenous men, and Black men—as frivolous, savage, or unfit for political power. The suit didn’t just reflect social hierarchies; it actively enforced them.

_{Featured image: Thomas Sully, Joseph Dugan, 1810 (detail). National Gallery of Art, Washington.} 

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Interdisciplinary horizons in human–animal studies

Over the last few decades, scholarship in the arts has undergone a significant shift towards questions and topics related to animals and our relationships with them. Referred to as ‘the animal turn’, this movement has involved various disciplines working together to critically analyse the conceptual construction and material treatment of non-human animals (and ‘nature’ more generally) in human cultures, histories, discourses, and practices. These studies focusing on human-animal relations have been interdisciplinary from the outset, since they have required communication amongst theories and methods derived from the humanities, creative arts, and social sciences—and increasingly the biological and environmental sciences as well. Accordingly, the range of approaches that has come to be called human-animal studies (or sometimes just animal studies) has tended, even before the development of explicitly ‘intersectional’ theory, to focus on fundamentally intersectional topics, seeking to analyse, measure, and account for the inter-implicated fates and interests of specific human societies as they relate to particular animal species, populations, and individuals. These dynamics are, in turn, shaped by relevant cultural and political structures and practices.

In the context of the more politicised fields of human-animal studies (HAS), such as feminist animal studies or critical animal studies (CAS), intersectional theory often explicitly underpins interrogations of power and control in human relationships with non-human species. Importantly, in these overtly political strands of HAS, intersectional theory is extended from its original anthropocentric form to now include an examination of marginalisation, discrimination, and oppression affecting all living beings, not only humans. Speciesism refers to the ideology that prioritises humans over other animals (otherwise called human exceptionalism or human supremacy) and also favours certain animal species—such as dogs—over others, such as rats (this latter aspect of speciesism is obviously affected by cultural differences). The deliberately anti-speciesist form of intersectional theory is associated with ecofeminism, which emerged in the 1960s and ’70s, alongside other counter-cultural political movements of this era, including second-wave animal rights, environmentalism, LGBTQIA+, Indigenous, civil, and disability rights.

Specifically, feminist and critical animal studies approaches interrogate the ways in which speciesism manifests in ideological discourses as well as cultural constructions and practices. Anti-speciesist intersectional theory is also concerned with analysing and disrupting the various ways in which forms of human-to-human oppression (such as colonisation) map onto, shape, and are in turn shaped by forms of human-to-animal oppression (e.g., processes of species translocation and ecological transformation). Thus, while more human-centric forms of intersectional research have concentrated on the compounded experiences of marginalisation felt by people affected by racism, heterosexism, transphobia, ableism, and classism, it is only when we embed speciesism in intersectional understandings of oppression that we get a clearer picture of how all oppressions—of humans, animals, and environments—are intricately linked, and how humancentric constructions of ‘animality’ (or animal difference) have been used in the dehumanisation of certain peoples and in the exploitation of and cruelty towards certain animals. Intersectional feminist and critical animal studies approaches are also more likely to pair with activist or advocacy outcomes with the aim of improving the lives of animals—both human and non-human ones.

In the field of CAS, the use of multiple disciplinary perspectives and approaches in combination with anti-speciesist theory has resulted in timely and potentially transformative new knowledge of human-animal relations and human-animal-environment connections. Ongoing areas of research include:

• The employment of novel historiographies to account for the role of animal agency in historical change;
• Feminist, critical race, disability studies, and CAS theories coming together to examine the constitutive links between discourses of animal agriculture and animal breeding and human experiences of disability, exploitation, and incarceration;
• Marxist and other political theories explicating the connections between capitalism, industrialised farming, and slaughter, and the exploitation of human and animal labour;
• Indigenous critiques of environmental colonisation and the marginalisation of Indigenous human–animal knowledge systems;
• CAS and ecofeminist theories scrutinising the gendered components of dairy, meat, and egg farming and the ways that carnism, meat culture, and advertising of animal products rely on certain constructions of gender, class, sexuality, and ethnicity;
• CAS and environmental theories examining the interrelationship between animal agriculture, environmental degradation, climate change, biodiversity loss, and species extinctions;
• CAS and queer ecologies subverting mainstream environmental discourse, binary configurations of culture/nature, masculine/feminine and human/animal, and the dominance of evolutionary theory;
• Critical race and Indigenous theorists decolonising western food practices and historicising plant-based Indigenous foods;
• Various disciplines and scholar-activists are developing intersectional veganism in theory and practice.

Many of the articles in the forthcoming “Animals” section of Oxford Intersections: Environmental Change and Human Experience employ interdisciplinary, anti-speciesist, intersectional theories in their explorations of human-animal-environment entanglements, thereby offering nuanced, in-depth critical analysis of various domains of privilege, power, and control. Contributions range from theoretical, textual, thematic, and visual analyses through to empirical interviews and digital algorithm statistics. Authors utilise diverse approaches influenced by critical race, Indigenous and decolonial, queer, posthumanist, ecofeminist, ethological, social justice, cultural history, animalist, disability rights, Marxist, trans-species intersectional, and environmental justice perspectives. Those writing from Indigenous or decolonial perspectives prioritise deep relational connections with environments and non-human species.

Several exciting emerging trends in interdisciplinary HAS and CAS research are represented in articles appearing in the “Animals” section. One important trend is represented by scholars here who offer cutting-edge contemporary critiques of the animal—industrial complex, drawing on both the vast scientific evidence connecting animal agriculture to environmental degradation, diversity loss, and species extinction, and the ubiquity of cruel practices associated with breeding and farming animals for consumption. A second trend involves the scrutiny of anthropocentric environmental theories and mainstream conservation practices, demonstrating the ways in which they construct disrespect or deliberate disregard for the sentience and suffering of animals constructed as “unwanted”, such as so-called “pests,” as well as introduced and feral animals. For the most part, the authors in “Animals” are critiquing western cultural constructions and practices since these are closely connected to global animal and environmental exploitation, and because of their links to western capitalism, industrialism, and colonialism.

If you’re interested in getting involved in Oxford Intersections: Environmental Change and Human Experience, let us know.

^{Featured image by Jorge Maya via Unsplash.}

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Over 500 open access books: shaped by experience, strengthened by learning

When a collection passes 500 titles, it’s tempting to focus on the milestone. But what’s more interesting is the story behind the number, the years of collaboration between authors, editors, institutions, funders, and readers who share a commitment to making scholarship easier to discover, read, teach, and build upon.

Over 500 open access books are now available on Oxford Academic. Each new open access title brings insights shaped by research and experience. Each download, citation, classroom discussion, and cross-disciplinary connection strengthens the wider academic conversation. Behind each title is a simple idea: research should travel as far as it can, reaching anyone who might benefit from it.

But what does open access look like in practice, once a book is out in the world? Across disciplines, authors describe a common theme: reach.

Timmons Roberts, Ittleson Professor of Environmental Studies and Sociology at the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society, Brown University, has seen how open access can amplify timely research:

“Open Access allowed us to publicize our two assessment volumes on obstruction of climate action broadly and quickly, and to make it available all over the world at once.”

For David Thorstad, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University, the motivation was equally clear:

“We wanted to reach a broad public audience and remove cost barriers to access.”

Editors also point to how open access can shape the longer arc of scholarship. Steven C. van den Heuvel, Professor of Systematic Theology at Evangelische Theologische Faculteit, Leuven, shared an early sign of impact for The Oxford Compendium of Hope:

“Quantitatively, we can see that, despite it has been out only for a few months, it was already downloaded close to 8,000 times.”

For Yujin Nagasawa, Kingfisher College Chair of the Philosophy of Religion and Ethics and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oklahoma, open access connects directly to being read and engaged with worldwide:

“Publishing my books with OUP as open-access titles has, in many ways, made that dream a reality.”

Taken together, these experiences point to a clear set of learnings. Open access helps scholarship travel further, faster. It supports discovery across borders and disciplines, and it makes it easier for books to find their way into classrooms, conversations, and new areas of research. It enables teaching and learning in a wider range of contexts. It also creates new opportunities for connection between authors and readers.

With over 500 open access books now available, the collection continues to grow. Each new title adds to a shared body of knowledge, made more powerful by being open.

If you’re curious, you can explore the full collection, or share the list with colleagues and students to help extend their reach even further.

^{Featured image by simon on Unsplash.}

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In and out of the box

Today’s story is about boxing (that is, about the word box). I cannot offer a new solution and will support the etymology cautiously given in the OED online. Yet sometimes the way to the truth and chance byways are more exciting than the result, obtained at the end of the search. It will also be fair to mention the paper by the German linguist Hermann Flasdieck in the periodical Anglia (Volume 70,1951-1952, pp. 295-307), the best historical study of the word box in linguistic literature.

The earliest citation of box “to beat, bash, strike” in the OED online goes back to 1390, but we have to wait until 1519 until the next one. Even some time later, the word’s occurrences in print were rare. Apparently, box was not a word one chose to use in books. This fact confirms the origin (see it below), proposed tentatively by the OED’s first editor James A. H. Murray and now accepted with some caution by the revisers of the OED and other sources.

In the United States, boxing, a sport whose land of origin is England, became immensely popular. Those who have read Jack London’s short stories “The Mexican” and “A Piece of Steak” will agree. German tourists must have picked up the word box in America, because they brought it home in the forms boxen and baxen. A great difference exists between the way a word like box sounds in most of England and in the United States. Foreigners living and traveling in America often mistake box, not, and their likes for bucks and nut. German boxen ~ baxen tell us that long ago, the word box sounded in America as it does today.

One wonders whether box (the verb and the noun) has anything to do with its best-known homonym. The history of box, as in Christmas box, may not be entirely clear, but that box already occurred in Old English and is a borrowing from Latin. Nothing in the sport, as we know it, suggests its connection with any receptacle. Theater boxes and box offices return us to containers and throw no light on boxing either.

Along the way, we find the phrase to box a compass “to repeat the points of the compass in order and backwards.” Though also unconnected with boxing, the story is worth telling. Walter W. Skeat referred to the OED, but the OED had nothing to say about the etymology of this phrase. Nor did the 1914 edition of The Century Dictionary. The OED online refers us to the verb box (and that is what the original OED did). My surprise came when I consulted The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (1966). This work seldom deviates from its great model. Yet, surprisingly, it contains a special entry on box the compass: “Probably from Spanish bojar (boxar) ‘sail round’.” Next, we find two examples and the statement that other nautical terms from Spanish also exist in English. Such are allegedly buoyant (which may be from Spanish or Old French!) and capsize (this is Skeat’s suggestion; elsewhere, including the OED online, we find the familiar verdict “of uncertain origin”).

References to authorities in the original OED and in Skeat are rather regular but not generous. In the 1966 dictionary, they never appear. What then was the source of the new entry? Perhaps I can provide the answer (of course, known to the Oxford team but not to the rest of the world, eager for an explanation). In the periodical Notes and Queries XII/1, March 18, 1916, p. 226, H. J. B. Clemens published part of a letter, written in 1836 by Thomas Bee, a native of South Carolina, who was at Oriel College, Oxford, from 1783 to 1789. Here is the relevant part: “You know I had always a smattering of etymology, but never indulged so much in it as since I have become a great reader of Spanish […]. I was principally gratified with the origin of the phrase ‘to box the compass’, which has puzzled me from a boy […]. Boxar (or as it is more modernly written, bojar—with the same pronunciation) signifies circumire, to go round: boxar el mundo, to go round the world; boxar la isla to sail round the island. To box the compass is, therefore, to go round the several divisions from north to south, and from south to north.” I could find no information on H. J. B. Clemens and do not know why he had access to Thomas Bee’s private correspondence. His etymology of the English phrase looks promising.

The 1966 dictionary cites the same two Spanish phrases, which clinches my belief that this note was indeed the source of the entry. Finding the true origin of a difficult word is “a big deal” in the uneventful life of dictionary makers, and the name of an occasional pathfinder should not be forgotten. Obviously, the Spanish verb throws no light on the word box that interests us, but let me repeat my idea that in a convoluted romance, digressions are sometimes more exciting than the main story.

Back to boxing. The Century Dictionary says, “supposed to be of Scandinavian origin”; doubts the relevance of the Scandinavian sources, because baste “to cudgel” and the noun bash “blow” are already known as the legitimate reflexes of those sources; mentions Dutch beuk “a blow” and Middle High German bochen “to strike,” but concludes that the most probable origin should be sought for in box “to place in a box.” The conclusion is not persuasive. The origin of bash is as obscure as the origin of box, and in principle, nothing prevents one etymon (source) from producing two or more reflexes (“offspring”). Reference to box “receptacle” leaves us nowhere. However, German bochen, known to the speakers of Modern German in the form pochen, and Dutch beuk may provide a clue to box.

If we look for the many variants, older forms, and cognates of pochen ~ bochen, we’ll find puchen, puggen, pukken, boka, buka, and (!) Engl. poke (verb). In the present context, it matters little whether poke is borrowed or native. More important is the fact that we are, rather obviously, dealing with sound-imitative verbs (the reference is to the sound heard in striking), like English kick, jab, dab, cuff, bang, boom, bash, Russian bukh (a word reproducing a loud noise, with cognates elsewhere in Slavic), and puk “fart.”

Murray, whom I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, already supposed that box is an onomatopoeia. In all probability, he was right, and one cannot but admire his intuition. “Origin unknown,” so lavishly added to such verbs in dictionaries, is an unhelpful label. The OED online has no citations of box between 1390 and 1519. We may be dealing with two independent coinages: the same verb was perhaps invented or borrowed twice, with about a century and a half between those events. Such words travel widely from language to language, and it is hard to decide whether we see loans or independent coinages.

Such then is a rather probable history of the sound-imitative verb box. Origin unknown? Not quite. Uncertain? Of course! What else could one expect?

Postscript

My thanks are due to the two readers who commented on the previous post on the evils of Spelling Bee.

_{Featured image: By Natalya from Pixabay. Public domain.}

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Spelling bee is back. So am I

Spelling Bee is back. At the end of the marathon, this year’s winner spelled correctly the word bromocriptine, received $50,000 cash, a commemorative medal, $2,000 from Merriam-Webster, $1,000 in flight credit from Delta Air Lines, and $400 of reference works from Encyclopedia Britannica. “Spelling fast is what I do every day,” explained the winner, an eighth-grader from California. As noted, the winning word was bromocriptine. May the youngster never use this medication!

Actually, bromocriptine is not a hard word compared to the other monsters he spelled at a lightning speed: Philepitta, Metohija, hwyl, and Bhubaneswar. Don’t pity my ignorance, but I recognized none of those words, and since some of our readers may not know them either, I’ll provide definitions. Philepitta is a bird name. Metohija is part of Kosovo; the place name is Greek. Hwyl is Welsh for “excitement”; it never occurs outside the Welsh context. (Incidentally, despite all the efforts to save Welsh from extinction, it is still an endangered language.) Finally, Bhubaneswar (not to be confused with Nebuchadnezzar) is a city in India.

The prize winner, as the NYT informed its readers, spelled more than one word every three seconds, and the author of the article mentions some more words used in the competition: oconee bells (a flower name), catometope “a division of crabs,” and Faesulae, the name of an ancient city in Italy. History is good to know. Yet botany and carcinology are rather special branches of scholarship, are they not? I understand: “Crabbed Youth and Age cannot live together,” but I refuse to surrender.

One learns from the article that the world can boast of a spelling community and that seasoned instructors teach young people to compete. Naturally, the world is also full of ambitious parents, ready to pay coaches who specialize in hard words and know how to spell them fast. What a waste, what a tragic waste!

I have been dealing with students most of my life. Among the hundreds of the young people I see at my lectures, I rarely find anyone who is aware of what happened to Tom Sawyer, David Copperfield, and Natasha Rostova, or who recognizes the word Decameron, let alone the names Walter Scott and Washington Irving. I suspect that their teachers belong to the same lost generation. But catometope and Philepitta, which sound like cat on my top and Philadelphia pita deserve everybody’s attention, do they not? Child abuse! Parents of the World, unite against it! I said so years ago and will repeat it today. Of course, the winner receives a good sum of money. Money, “the stuff that passes from hand to hand and never grows warmer,” as Mowgli put it. The money will be spent, but time never returns. Has this year’s winner, who is of Indian heritage, read The Jungle Book?

In 2026, one of the tough words was quillaia, pronounced “key-eye.” It designates a type of bark that yields a soapy lather, originally a word from the Mapuche language, native to southern Chile. Greece, Chile, Albania, Wales…. What about English words?

Our readers know that for at least a century and a half some of the brightest people in the English-speaking world have fought for reforming English spelling. An English Spelling Society was founded in 1908, but attempts to make conservative and partly irrational English spelling more accessible to learners are decades older. Now that English is used so widely all over the world, those attempts deserve special attention. Such efforts have been very mildly successful only in the United States (thanks to Noah Webster). Our spellcheckers do not solve the problem: before making a mistake, the speller has to learn how to try to spell Peru, kangaroo, rue, grew, through, and rhubarb (add guru for good measure); occurrence and endurance; rally and valley, to say nothing of valet. And don’t forget all those horrors with grey and gray and triplets like crayon, reign, and arraign.

Those are the words whose spelling millions of native English speakers and foreign learners have to cram. Do we need oconee bells to make people’s lives even more miserable? We may ask: will English spelling ever be reformed? I keep hoping against hope. Most of those who will read the examples cited above will probably agree that rue, crew, and through should not only rhyme but also be spelled alike.

All the arguments against the Reform are known, and indeed every change disrupts the status quo by definition and makes someone unhappy. But are we happy now? Spelling has been modified by law in several countries. The most drastic reform took place in Russia after the 1917 revolution, but the project predates 1917: it was only implemented by the Bolsheviks. In our lifetime, spelling has been modified in Germany and less drastically in Iceland. We need someone like Elon Musk to support the idea, and before you can say Jack Robinson, our atrocious spelling will also be reformed. (The article in the NYT is titled “He can spell ‘bromocriptine’ faster than you can say it.”)

I was mildly amused to read that Webster Unabridged and Encyclopedia Britannica support the Scripps National Spelling Bee. A dictionary like Webster Unabridged is not only a great national treasure. It is also a historical museum. It should not be abused for the purposes of an insane competition. The Spelling Bee ruins the brain of the youths who believe that they have achieved something useful and praiseworthy. And as concerns the prize, the winner and $50,000 will soon be parted. I would like to finish my diatribe on a less pathetic note. In the pronunciation of the speakers of American English, at least in the Midwest and in some other parts of the country, latter and ladder, writer and rider are homonyms pairwise. The voicing of t between vowels is a phenomenon well-known to British dialectologists. This is the reason pottage (as in a mess of pottage) became poddage and finally (by rhotacism) porridge, which Goldilocks ate up, knowing nothing about historical phonetics. My students write deep-seeded for deep-seated and futile for feudal. I am so happy they never venture into the spelling beehive.

_{Featured image: A school spelling bee in 2011. Photo by Heather Temske. CC-BY-2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.}

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Restive people never rest

Some parts of the story I am going to tell can be found in most dictionaries, but it is the attempts to connect a few distant dots that may be interesting to those who wonder “where words come from.”

Rest “repose” is a Germanic word with cognates among other related languages, that is, for instance, in Dutch, German, and Scandinavian. At one time, it had the form rasta, as still in Gothic, a fourth-century language, known to us from a translation of parts of the New Testament into it. Yet the Gothic word rasta meant “a mile,” not “rest”! One Germanic mile was equal to two Gaul leagues or five kilometers, a bit over three miles, the distance a walker is supposed to cover on foot in an hour. Consequently, in those days, “rest” had a more concrete sense (namely, “a distance after which one rests”) than “relief from activity.” The history of all abstract words in language runs along similar lines.

This first step in searching for the etymology of rest looks convincing. But we may perhaps go the proverbial extra mile, to obtain a deeper solution. In this blog, I have more than once referred to the old German journal Wörter und Sachen (“Words and Things”). It featured many papers about how words developed their meanings in the process of labor activities. Some such conjectures did not stand the test of time, while others have weathered well. One of the most active contributors to that journal was its founder Rudolf Meringer (1859-1931), for whose contributions I have unbounded admiration. Among other things, he suggested (but in a different periodical) that rasta is related to Gothic razn “house.” This was a great idea. One can find guarded positive mentions of it in all dictionaries, but I doubt that caution is needed here. Meringer guessed well.

Those interested in the origin of other Germanic words designating human habitats will find some information in my posts for January 21 and February 4, 2015 (the essays deal with house and home). Among other things, I noted that the grammatical gender of some such words tends to be neuter. Germanic neuter nouns had the same form in the singular and the plural (like Modern English sheep: one sheep ~ many sheep), so that when we deal with Old English hūs (ū designates a long vowel, as in the modern word who), we cannot know whether the reference is to one building or several “houses” linked together, as is the case with the Old Icelandic word hús (here, ú designates a long vowel).

Characteristically, Gothic razn was also neuter, a circumstance hardly ever discussed in the scholarly literature on this word. In any case, razn, which must have been a place for rest, probably consisted of two or even more adjoining structures, rather than being a separate building. Old English ræsn, a word obviously related to razn, meant “plank, beam,” which means that the Old Germanic razn was made of wood. However, a few non-Germanic cognates of razn refer to branches, switches, and the like. Thus, we get a glimpse of the way old houses were constructed, but hardly of why speakers chose the sound complex raz– (from ras-) to designate one type of their habitat.

Perhaps ras– (a verb, not unlike rush and dash) imitated the sound a branch makes when waved through the air? Unless a word is an obvious onomatopoeia, like puff, hush, grunt, and so forth, we never learn why it has the form that has come down to us. But I find some support for my idea in the fact that quite a few non-Germanic cognates of rest refer to “rush (!), attack.” As Henry Cecil Wyld put it in The Universal Dictionary of the English Language: “We might suppose that the primary meaning of the base was ‘movement’, whether into action or away from it, from which latter sense we later got the sense retreat, cessation from action, rest.”

Disregard the inelegant phrasing and note: “into action or away from it”! The related forms of ras-, as they appear in Greek and elsewhere, are treated with caution or even distrust in some dictionaries and as certain in others. I tend to agree with those who trace English rest, German Ruhe, and Dutch rust (they all have the same meaning) to the root erē– ~ rē– and share Wyld’s interpretation of the root (“movement into or AWAY from action”). I would therefore be happy if my sound-imitative treatment of the Germanic root ras– could find some support: swish branches, build a house, and have a rest!

The old word for “house” can still be discerned in English saltern “saltworks” (that is, a place where salt is prepared commercially), from sealtærn; in barn, from berern, a building for storing “bern,” that is, barley; and in ransack, from Scandinavian (rann-saka, “to search a house,” but the “searching” was performed then, as now, for the purpose of plundering.

Restive, though it now means “restless, fidgety,” once meant the opposite, namely, “inactive, inert”! A restive horse refuses to move. The word goes back to the root of the Romance verb having the sense “to remain in the same position,” from Latin restāre “to rest.” Closely related is English arrest. One wonders at the erratic history of this late borrowing, which emerged in English only in the middle of the sixteenth century: “intractable,” then “stubborn,” and finally, “restless, unruly.” The OED presents, as always, a full picture of this history. The most common sense today (that is, “restless”) surfaced in books only in the middle of the nineteenth century, that is, in Dickens’s days! And we show surprise when unexpected semantic leaps are said to have occurred in the remotest past. 

An Old Idiom

To set up one’s rest “to make up one’s mind, to pause for rest, to halt.” Robert Nares explained this phrase in his indispensable 1822 book A Glossary; or, Collection of Words, Phrases, Names, and Allusions to Customs, Proverbs, &c. Thought to Require Illustration… From the game of primero, meaning “to stand upon the cards you have in your hand, in the hope that they may win.” Nares explains the rules of the game and gives numerous examples. In 1907, the idiom was still known. The OED has one comparatively recent example.

Postscript

I am sincerely grateful to the readers of this blog who responded to my plea for comments. Indeed, there was a break between August and February. It was caused by personal reasons and had nothing to do with paucity of responses. The rest is of course silence.

_{Featured image: The Long Walk. CC-BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.}

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Is there an L in both?

My grandmother was one of those speakers who had an r in the word wash, pronouncing it warsh. For her, the nation’s capital was Warshington, D.C., and the vegetable was a squarsh. That r-ful pronunciation is known as an intrusive r. I’ve got it too, though mine is variable. Sometimes I have an r in wash, washcloth, and Washington, and sometimes I don’t.

There is also something called the intrusive l, which occurs when someone pronounces the word both as bolth. You can also find the intrusive l in mouth and south, though that is less common. I noticed it in the speech of my students in the Pacific Northwest. Typically, about 15% of any given class pronounced both with an l. So what’s going on?

One possibility is that the l is a naturally occurring co-articulation. What does that mean? Well, notice how the o is a vowel produced in the back of the mouth, with the tongue at mid-height and the lips rounded. The b is also a sound made with rounded lips—a bilabial stop in the lingo. Your lips close the airflow and then open it to produce the buh-sound. Go ahead and make some b-sounds and o-sounds and bo-sounds.

The th of both (it’s a single consonant spelled with two letters) is what’s known as an interdental fricative. What that means is that the tongue goes between the teeth (hence the interdental part) in order to obstruct the airflow and create friction (hence the fricative part). Say the th-sounds a few times.

Well, what happens to your tongue as it moves from the back-rounded bo to the word-final –th? Say both slowly a few times and see what you notice your tongue doing. Do you notice how similar the tongue movements are for both and for bolth? For me, both has a slightly lower position of the tongue blade as it goes from bo to th, so perhaps the l-sounds of bolth comes from some speakers having a slightly raised tongue during that transition from bo to –th.

The intrusive r of warsh may have a similar genesis. The consonant r holds a special, quirky place in English phonetics and phonology. There is the historical r-lessness of southern England and of certain American dialects, the linking r that shows up in words like Cuba(r) and idea(r), and the syllabic r of words like bird, which is pronounced brd. The intrusive r of warsh seems to be its own thing, most common among older, rural speakers (and their grandchildren). There’s a back-rounded w and back vowel a followed by sh. Sh is a palatal fricative, meaning the friction is produced with the tongue approaching the hard palate (the front of the roof of your mouth). Along the route from back wa to palatal sh, your tongue makes a gesture close to an r. Try saying wash and then marsh a few times, and you’ll feel where your tongue is going. 

By the way, just as there is a linking r sound (as in Cuba(r) and idea(r)), there is also a linking l sound in some dialect areas of English (such that spa is is pronounced as spal is and drawing is drawling). The linguist Bryan Gick of the University of British Columbia has studied the emergence of such sounds in a 1999 article in the journal Phonology and a 2022 article in American Speech, and he shows how certain articulatory gestures can sometimes create the l-sounds and r-sounds. Gick also notes that “gestural overlap” is a likely cause of the r in warsh. The same, I think, can probably be said for bolth. 

My grandmother would approve.

^{Featured image by Merve Sehirli Nasir via Unsplash.}

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Much <i>hubbub</i> about very little

Soon after the blog Oxford Etymologist came into existence on March 1, 2006 (more than twenty years ago!), I wrote a post on the word hubba-hubba (in those days, I was told not to exceed one page of text, and of course, there were no illustrations). Numerous comments followed. Some time later (on November 22, 2006), my topic was hullabaloo, and again multiple comments rewarded my modest effort. In those days, a stream of responses established a close tie between my readers and me (hence the now defunct section “Monthly Gleanings”). Though I have no idea why that stream has dried up, today even a single comment makes me happy, for “he who is not satisfied with a little is satisfied with nothing.” Perhaps I should stick to the letter H. Anyway, I decided to woo my fickle luck again and will now add hubbub (see the image gracing the title) to that ancient series.

Exclamations, interjections, and war cries are usually hard to trace to their origins. Oops, upsy-daisy, drat, hurrah, hello, hi, and their likes look natural to speakers but not to language historians. Even oh and ah have nontrivial origins, because when people are in pain or are genuinely surprised, they do not emit such genteel “vocalic gestures”: they scream. Hubbub is of course not an interjection, but it makes one think of hullabaloo and other “emotional” H– words denoting noise. We can also remember hoopla and the bird name hoopoo ~ hoopoe.

I usually avoid  discussing nouns, adjectives, and verbs whose detailed and often transparent origin can be found online or in any good dictionary. Yet the amount of information varies from work to work. Though hubbub seems to be a case in point (nothing new, and nothing to write about), this is an illusion. All sources say approximately but not quite the same thing and not enough. Here is the etymological part of the entry hubbub from The Century Dictionary (though this monumental reference work is seldom consulted today, I treat it with great respect): “Formerly also hobub, hooboob, also whoobub (apparently, simulating whopp, hoop); also extended or reduplicated hubbub–boo, hubbleshow, hubble-shubble—words showing imitative variation of a base *hub, probably of interjectional origin, but perhaps in part of hoop, shout.” An asterisk denotes a reconstructed form.

This is all very true. However, there is a hitch in dealing with that entry. Compare the information from the last edition of Walter W. Skeat’s An Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, 1911: “Imitative. Cf. Gaelic ub, interjection of aversion. Formerly also whoobub, a confused noise. Hubbub was confused with hoop-hoop, reduplication of hoop; and whoobub with whoop-hoop.” (Many years earlier, Skeat suggested that perhaps the source of hubbub was indeed whoop-whoop.) Surprisingly, The Century Dictionary does not mention Gaelic, and Skeat, who begins (!) with Gaelic, uses only the irritating word cf., that is, confer, compare. Old dictionaries often tell us to “compare” different forms. How are we supposed to do it?

The volume of the OED with the letter H appeared in 1901, and the entry on hubbub rather cautiously suggested the Irish (that is, Gaelic) origin of the English word, but the second edition of The Century Dictionary ignored this tip. By contrast, The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (1966), derived from the OED, states unhesitatingly: “Of Irish origin .” It then cites a few (irrelevant?) Irish words for disgust and amazement, but the alleged source is supposed to be the battle cry. Can interjections be borrowed? Yes, indeed. The bookish word alas is from Old French. Oh goes back to Latin, via Old French. So does ah, a truly international word. Upsy-daisy is from Dutch.

Hubbub, its history and etymology, attracted a good deal of attention in the nineteenth-century popular press (as usual, in Notes and Queries). The most curious analogy takes us to hubbub,a game like dice, played at one time by some Native Americans. Here is a passage from the book by Henry Spelman Relation of Virginia (1613; I have modernized the spelling): “Drums and trumpets they have none, but when they will gather themselves together, they have a kind of howling or whopub, so differing in sound one from the other as both part (sic) very easily be distinguished.” The earliest example of English hubbub from a text in the OED goes back to 1555.

The ship Pilgrim arrived in America in 1620. By that time, hubbub had become widely known in England. Even Shakespeare used it, though he spelled the word as who-bub. Speelman may have identified the native word with the one he had known at home. But this is unlikely. William Wood in New England’s Prospect (1634) described hubbub as a game resembling dice (“…smiting themselves on the breast and thighs, crying out, Hub, Hub, Hub!”). English hubbub is certainly not from Algonquin, but the coincidence is striking. Similar words have been found in some other languages. For instance, in 1904, a report from Egypt mentioned habub “a dust storm of considerable extent.” Hubbub is, most certainly, an onomatopoeia that could have originated almost anywhere at any time. The question is whether the English word is native or borrowed and, if borrowed, then from where.

Thanks to the excellent research of two scholars, David Greene and Alan Bliss, we know a good deal about the history of hubbub. The seemingly plausible suggestion that hubbub is from French, rather than from Irish, should be discarded. But surprisingly, the Irish form is from English! The source of hubbub must have been the Middle English adverb abo “above,” pronounced as aboo. This pronunciation has been recorded even in some archaic eighteenth-century British dialects. The etymon of hubbub seems to have been some war cries like Irish ub! ub! ubub!

But this reconstruction leaves out the origin of initial h in hubbub. Though the history of this h is unclear, we should note that the earliest form of hubbub, recorded by the OED, has the spelling whobub. Similar spellings were common in the sixteenth century and some time later. As Alan Bliss explained, the story may or even must have begun with fubbub, whose f became voiceless hw (as in the pronunciation of those who say what, which, why with voiceless hw) and later h. Details would take us too far afield. All we have to know is that, most probably, hubbub originated in Early English, was taken over by the Irish, and later returned to English. Not unexpectedly, the word changed its pronunciation more than once along the way. To us this itinerary is full of gaps, and we are left wondering why in the sixteenth century the word was reborrowed into Early Modern English. However, something about this itinerary has been traced with a good deal of certainty, so that hubbub is not “a word of unknown origin,” which is good. Thus, after all, our ado (hubbub) was not about nothing.

P.S. Thank you for the comment on sorrow. The alleged tie between the Hittite and the Germanic words is curious, but of course, its existence cannot be demonstrated, unless both forms are sound-imitative.

_{Featured image: Photo by Joe Van. CC-BY-2.0 via Flickr.}

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Music therapy musicianship: a call for change

The following is offered as a manifesto: a bold assertion of our unique musicianship. We – music therapists – are different from performers and educators. If you are a music therapy student or clinician, consider this an affirmation of who you are. Your musicianship matters much more than you know.

How are we different?

A focus on people

First and foremost, we are musicians of the people. When we engage with participants, we are employing musics that diverse people listen to in their everyday lives. We also use the instruments common to these musics.

An example: I (Bill) am a percussionist who sings and plays thousands of diverse songs, emulating the qualities of different genres. I change these qualities to sound like the original, or to convey a different feel. I improvise using a range of musical frames (e.g., rhythms, progressions, modes). I compose lyrics to songs on the spot while accompanying through an improvised structure. This is only a surface understanding of my unique musicianship, and only one example.

Interactive engagement

Performance is NOT our focus. We focus on musical interaction that can lead to growth or change. We develop shared intentions with participants based on strengths, needs, backgrounds, interests, access to music, and their musicality/musicianship. We navigate with our clients a dynamic balance between structure/safety and creativity/autonomy. Our music-making is not tied to a “score,” but rather to in-the-moment modifications. We are musically vigilant (Ruud, 2020) and musically responsive.

Aesthetic sensitivity

We center our aesthetic sensitivity on people. We listen for more than what is in a song or piece, more so to the qualities of the music that participants and the environment give us: in the sound of a voice faintly singing, in a drum profusely struck, in a breath, in the sound of an ICU machine. We listen as witnesses, and integrate and respond in kind.

We see the values of music in their diverse and connected presentations: as a human right (Clements-Cortės et al., 2024), as a human technology (Patel, 2007), as a tool (Thaut, 2005) or resource (Rolvsjord, 2005) for promoting health, and as a medium for experience (Aigen, 2005; Dewey, 1934).

Why is this difference important?

While affirmation is an imperative of this research, systemic change is our overarching goal. The musics and processes that we employ in our work as music therapists are often peripheral in academic training outside of music therapy-specific courses. Common curricula are greatly informed by classical training and performance, and do not provide our musicianship the amount of space it needs to be truly developed and reinforced.

In many schools of music, music therapy students provide a major portion of student credit hours and funding. Students should not be subsidizing a system that focuses on areas outside of their needs. They should be paying for engaging experiences that clearly prepare them for where they are headed. Students should be taking courses with faculty who create an engaging environment within which these students’ unique music knowledge, music skills, and aesthetic sensitivity are valued.

First steps toward change

We invite you to dig deeper into our two articles (Matney et al., 2024; Meadows et al., 2025) and their supporting analyses. For those of you who are music therapists, students, and educators, we think that you will see parts of yourself and your work authentically represented.

Moving forward, we believe the following offers us the beginning steps toward change:

1. Affirmation: Understand and affirm this uniqueness with those around you (and within you!). Small acts change cultures. For our colleagues in various music and health fields, we hope you may affirm those you work with.
2. Advocacy: Assert the difference, with both objectivity and with pride, in informal and formal conversations.
3. Instigation: Even if shifts begin small, we collectively can find ways to move the curriculum toward greater relevance for music therapy musicianship. We can discuss what content exists in what courses, and how that content does or does not meet the needs of music therapy students. We can instigate change, moving toward classes, content, and timelines that benefit each student’s effort and investment.

The 21^st Century Commission on Music Therapy (2024) has provided concrete and practical recommendations for restructuring curricula. Drafts of new AMTA musicianship competencies seek to provide greater detail, but do not yet go far enough in discussing the nuances of our musicianship: the processes of shared music making and musical responsiveness.

Affirm, advocate, and instigate. Together, we can shift the current culture to foster the future of music therapy as ‘musicians of the people.’

^{Feature image by Andrew K via Unsplash.}

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Think before you tan: why sun awareness matters

Sun Awareness Week (11-17 May 2026) is the British Association of Dermatologists’ (BAD) annual week-long campaign dedicated to raising awareness of the public health risk of sun exposure, from traditional tanning to sunbed use. The week also aims to teach the public about the importance of good sun protection habits, including ways you can check for signs of skin cancer.

Tanning and sunbeds

Sun damage is normally caused by ultraviolet rays from the sun, known as UV rays.

Two types of UV rays can penetrate the Earth’s atmosphere: UVA rays and UVB rays. UVB rays are largely responsible for that perennial summer problem, sunburn. However, both types of UV rays are responsible for potentially more serious issues—specifically skin ageing and skin cancer—the most dangerous version of which is melanoma.

Tanning beds, also known as sunbeds, are well-known for allowing tanning year-round, and are also a source of those UV rays, and can provide an even greater risk for melanoma than their natural counterpart. This is because tanning beds also produce UV rays, but at a much higher concentration than normal, making tanning beds faster, but capable of far more skin damage. That is not to say that traditional tanning is safe; however, sun exposure can be harmful in any amount, to any age group.

Sun protection, prevention campaigns, and public awareness of skin health risks are vital in preventing skin cancers and premature skin ageing.

Recent research from the BAD family of journals—the British Journal of Dermatology, our educational journal Clinical and Experimental Dermatology, and our open-access journal Skin Health and Disease—offers new insights into preventing skin damage and life-threatening skin cancers. Here are some highlights.

Tanning bed trends internationally

In 2009, the International Agency for Research on Cancer classified indoor tanning as a source of Class I carcinogens—the highest level known. As a result, almost 25 countries globally have banned their use for minors—though anyone using a sun bed before their mid-thirties is at a higher risk of developing skin cancer later in life. A study published in BJD showed that Ireland is one of the countries that passed the Public Health (Sunbeds) Act in 2014. Since then, Ireland has seen a dramatic 40% reduction in registered tanning businesses. The key message of the study was that a targeted multi-pronged approach is needed to inform and stop the use of sun beds.

Although the ban on younger people who use sunbeds is helpful in pre-empting later skin cancers, tanning beds are still considered sources of carcinogens, with no safe level of exposure. In the United Kingdom, the regulation of sun beds is poor, as seen in this study, with many beds in sun tanning businesses recorded at settings far higher than the legal limit. This finding also correlates to higher melanoma rates in parts of northern England, with over 50 percent of businesses in some regions over-exposing customers.

Nail lamps and skin damage

Sun beds are not the only indoor source of UV rays. Getting one’s nails done can also pose a surprising risk of UV ray exposure through nail lamps, which help to rapidly dry gel lacquer using similar technology to full-body tanning beds. Individuals using both (ideally not at the same time) can be at risk of skin-damage conditions such as pseudoporphyria.

Sun exposure and athletes

Amongst those who spend much of their time in the sun, student athletes risk over-exposure to UV rays year-round, no matter where in the world they play. Novel research from Stanford has shown that when provided with a short video explaining the risks of sun-exposure, with the free provision of sun-protection in the areas that student athletes frequent, had a positive effect on attitudes towards sun protection usage.

Sun awareness in the medical field

Sun protection awareness campaigns can also benefit healthcare workers. An observational study from Ireland demonstrated that a digitally based sun-awareness campaign targeted at healthcare workers (857 workers completed the survey) in their places of employment raised not only raised the awareness of the importance (79%) of using sun-protection, but also increased the likelihood that healthcare workers would discuss sun protection universally.

Research has shown that clinicians emphasize the use of SPF-containing sunscreens and cosmetics, even though they also do not always meet the standard guidelines themselves. Clarification of sunscreen application guidelines, and further dissemination of the risks of the limits of cosmetics containing SPFs, may be in order—for physicians and the public alike.

Why public health outreach for sun exposure matters

Social media is emerging as an essential tool for raising awareness of the risks of sun exposure and preventing sunbed use among younger generations. Alternatively, social media has also raised interest in sun bed use—especially in the guise of ‘wellness’ and cosmetic applications. Research has shown that individuals who frequently use sun beds are more likely to sunburn as adults and participate in higher risk sun-exposure while using lower-UV ray blocking sun protection.

Acne can be the bane of any teenager—or adult. While some turn to tanning beds for temporary acne relief, adolescents can be unaware of the risks of frequent tanning bed use until the damage may be too late to prevent.

Finally, there is evidence that public health campaigns on skin cancer in both the United Kingdom and Australia have had the positive effect of steadying the rate of melanoma in young adults—especially when those campaigns are based on published research that confirmed the cancer-causing nature of ultraviolet radiation from all types of tanning.

Sun Awareness Week highlights the need for sun protection, education, and awareness about the risks that can contribute to skin cancers—not just from tanning beds. If you notice any changes to skin lesions or moles, then it is best to consult your doctor.

Contribute to the conversation this #SunAwarenessWeek and explore the latest research collection from each of the BAD journals, and check out our Patient Hub for more Sun Awareness resources.

^{Feature image by ClickerHappy via Pexels.}

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Why recovery after a hip fracture is about more than bones

For many older adults, a hip fracture arrives without warning, suddenly changing the course of daily life. Walking becomes difficult, routines are disrupted, and the freedom to live independently can suddenly feel uncertain. Yet when people recovering from hip fractures are asked how they make sense of what has happened, a familiar phrase often emerges: “It’s just part of getting old.”

This widely held belief plays a powerful role in shaping recovery. It influences not only how people understand their injury, but how they imagine what comes next, and whether they believe improvement is possible.

Research published in Age and Ageing, following people from diverse social and cultural backgrounds after hip fracture, suggests that recovery is shaped by far more than the physical aspects of surgery and rehabilitation alone. Beliefs about ageing, cultural norms, family expectations, and the realities of daily life all influence how people approach recovery and whether they take action to prevent another injury.

Even with strong uptake of best-practice acute hospital-based care for hip fractures, a concerning pattern remains. Many patients struggle to stay engaged with rehabilitation or longer-term fracture prevention once they return home. In our research published in Australasian Journal on Ageing, fewer than half of patients followed through with physiotherapy strength and balance exercise after discharge, and even fewer sought related dietary advice or other preventative support. These findings suggest that clinical care does not succeed in isolation. For recovery efforts to be effective, recommendations must make sense within the social and cultural settings of people’s everyday lives.

Recovery after a fracture isn’t just a personal journey; it’s shaped by cultural values and social expectations. For people from collectivist cultures, in which a “we” oriented sense of self is prioritised over an individualistic “I”, recovery is tied to family and community responsibilities. Exercise and rehabilitation were meaningful when they enabled role fulfilment, such as caring for grandchildren, preparing meals for communal gatherings and contributing to household activities, rather than focusing solely on independence. On the other hand, those from individualist cultures often viewed recovery as a path to regaining autonomy, with success defined by walking unaided or avoiding dependence on others. Neither perspective is a one-size-fits-all, but both highlight how aligning recovery with personal and social values can strengthen motivation. When this alignment is missing, even the well-intended advice can feel disconnected or difficult to maintain.

For effective recovery and refracture prevention after a hip fracture, healthcare providers must involve families as partners in care. In cultures where family bonds and collective decision-making are deeply valued, understanding expectations is critical to prevent the risk of well-meaning but limiting advice like “take it easy”. Such reassurance, while comforting, might unintentionally hinder a patient’s full recovery potential. Healthcare providers can help reframe these conversations, empowering families to advocate for progress while respecting cultural values of filial piety.

At the same time, healthcare teams can also inadvertently hinder recovery potential. A focus on acute bone and wound healing, short-term safety, and hospital discharge, while important, may sometimes overshadow conversations about longer-term recovery and potential. When recovery goals are shaped mainly by what feels most safe rather than what feels possible, expectations can narrow, and momentum can stall. Models of care that integrate rehabilitation and prevention into the home environment, such as hospital in the home (HITH) or rehabilitation in the home (RITH), may help bridge the gap between hospital-based care and everyday life, creating continuity across settings rather than a sharp divide at discharge.

As populations age, even with age-specific reductions in some regions, the number of patients with hip fractures will increase, making recovery and the prevention of further injury ever more important. Viewing recovery through a broader lens, one that includes culture, beliefs, relationships, and lived context, helps explain why recovery journeys vary so widely. When care recognises these influences, recovery can become more than bone healing and regaining physical function. It can support people to rebuild confidence, remain connected to what matters in their lives, and reduce the risk of future injuries, including fractures, in ways that are both meaningful and sustainable.

^{Featured image by @daejeung via Pexels}.

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Pen to Paper with Peter Mancall

Writing a volume for the Oxford History of the United States is an exercise in both synthesis and ambition. The series has long set the standard for American historical writing, and to join it is to enter a multigenerational conversation about how the story of the nation’s past should be told. In the interview that follows, Peter Mancall reflects on writing for that tradition, the historians, and reading habits that have inspired and shaped his thinking.

1. You’ve spent decades studying early American history. What first drew you to this period, and what continues to hold your curiosity after all these years?

I became an early American historian during graduate school, lured into the field at first by Bernard Bailyn, who became my advisor. I had not studied this period as an undergraduate, but it sparked my interest almost immediately when I got to my PhD program. I found an arena to investigate the issues that drove me to become a historian—the chance to explore the lives of lesser-known people whose actions shaped North America.

2. Your book opens the Oxford History of the United States—a series known for reshaping historical understanding. What does it mean to you to set this foundation for the entire narrative arc of early American history?

The OHUS has a long and well-deserved reputation as a source of sparkling narratives about the American past. As a historian who had moved towards writing narrative, which I have previously done in three books that focused on what an individual’s life could tell us about a crucial topic, I could not resist the chance to write a narrative history that stretched across a continent—and beyond. Having now finished this book, I am in awe of those who wrote these earlier volumes. Each is a work of great scholarship, but just as important, compelling style. The art of history, as others have said more elegantly than I can, lies in the telling of the story as much as the contents. It is daunting to think that my book will be the first in a chronological sequence that tells a history of the nation over several thousand pages. But I hope that my emphasis on contingency and agency, the concepts that drive my approach to writing about the past, set the stage for the many unexpected and unpredictable turns told in the luminous books that follow mine.

3. The OHUS series aims to integrate narrative storytelling with rigorous scholarship. This obviously requires both a scholar’s discipline and a storyteller’s instinct. How has your approach to writing evolved over the course of your career?

I began to write narrative about 25 years ago for a book about the younger Richard Hakluyt, who, among other things, was an avid promoter of the English colonization of North America. While writing that book, which appeared in 2007, I became increasingly interested in questions central to writing narrative, especially trying to develop characters and scenes to move the story forward. That led me to two tragic figures—the explorer Henry Hudson, not during the years of his glory but instead on his last voyage when he could not escape a world he had created; and Thomas Morton, a lawyer exiled three times from early New England. In these works, I hope I have shown readers how individuals wrestle with the hands they must play, sometimes with cards they have dealt to themselves.

4. Many readers associate early American history with the English colonies, but your work ranges far beyond that. Which non-English actors—Indigenous, African, or European—do you think readers will be most surprised to encounter?

Since historians of early America have long been integrating non-English actors into our stories about the colonial era, I am not sure that readers will necessarily be surprised to find Indigenous, African, and European figures jostling in the pages of my book. They may be more surprised by my insistence that we need to tell the stories of everyone who lived in this era, which means a great deal of attention in this volume to Indigenous peoples, who outnumbered everyone else across the centuries I cover in the book. The smaller stories I tell reveal depth and complexity and, I hope, bring to life a narrative that needs to trace the arc of the story from the so-called 30,000-foot perspective. I hope I have succeeded in telling that large history through the accumulation of many intimate moments.

5. If readers take away one big idea from Contested Continent that reframes how they think about American history, what do you hope it will be—and why is that idea particularly relevant now?

I think that those who have looked at early American history have been shaped by three overarching explanations for what happened. The first emerged at the time: Europeans took control over the Americas because this was what the Christian God dictated. The second came later and became associated with scholars like Frederick Jackson Turner: the history of North America, and especially that of the United States, witnessed a clash of civilizations and cultures, with Europeans and Euro-Americans emerging on top because of the advantages they allegedly possessed. The third, the dominant narrative in recent years, emphasizes that European conquest was largely the result of the spread of infectious diseases, part of what the historian Alfred Crosby labeled “the Columbian Exchange.” Each of these narratives presumed European success in the Americas. But as I hope I reveal in Contested Continent, there was no certainty that Europeans would prevail in the contest for the Western Hemisphere. I end my book with a series of events from 1675 to 1680 to suggest that tumult, not stability, defined the American experience, and that it had for centuries.

6. Are there historians, past or present, whose work you feel especially in conversation with in Contested Continent?

I hope that my book will be looked at with other wonderful, long-form versions of early American history. I hope that my book is read alongside Bernard Bailyn’s The Barbarous Years, a brilliant narrative focused on the experience of people in eastern North America from the time of the founding of Jamestown in 1607 to the era of rebellion in the 1670s. My geographic and chronological framing is different from Bailyn’s. For example, my story starts much earlier than his. But when he wrote that book near the end of his storied career, I saw it as reflecting his uncertainty about the fate of our society. My book, too, reflects ambivalence about the future and tries to explain the causes for what some would see as our current predicament, namely the dangers that humans pose to our planet and too frequently to each other.

7. What kinds of books—historical or otherwise—do you find yourself returning to for inspiration, whether for craft, perspective, or pleasure?

I find inspiration in what many people refer to as creative non-fiction, especially stories focused on individuals or specific moments. The writers who embody this approach for me are people like Jonathan Harr, especially in A Civil Action, and Patrick Radden Keefe in Empire of Pain. Harr once gave me great advice about how to start a book, which I took to heart and have shared with many others over the years. I also turn to great works of fiction that get at issues about human motivation and character. While writing Contested Continent, I looked again at Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby—not for their plots but instead for how each, in relatively short works, was able to summon complex portraits of characters in vividly drawn scenes. Even on a large canvas, the small scenes matter.

Featured image by Debby Hudson via Unsplash

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Pen to paper with Jonathan Parshall

Jon Parshall has spent his career asking big questions about how wars are remembered, argued over, and ultimately understood. Best known for his meticulous work on the Pacific front of World War II, Parshall has long been drawn to the structural questions of how wars are fought and won. His upcoming, highly illustrated book marks the most ambitious project of his career so far, distilling years of research into a single, sweeping year. In the conversation that follows, Parshall reflects on the historians who shaped him, the challenges of thinking on a global scale, and what surprised him most along the way.

1. You’ve spent decades studying World War II. What first drew you to this period, and what continues to hold your curiosity after all these years?

I’ve always been interested in ships, and building a kit of a Japanese heavy cruiser as a fifth-grader was sort of the entry point to World War II for me. What remains endlessly fascinating about it is that our understanding is constantly changing. I’m very much of the belief that history is a journey; it’s always dynamic, always evolving. That’s what keeps it fresh and engaging.

2. You’ve written extensively about the Pacific War, including the award-winning Shattered Sword. What drew you to 1942 as a standalone subject, and why do you see it as the pivotal year that defined the global trajectory of World War II?

I came out of  Shattered Sword mulling the nature of “turning points” and “decisive battles” within the war and wanting to educate myself regarding the larger structure of 1942. The year begins with a global Allied dumpster fire, yet ends with the Allies on the offensive basically everywhere. How did that happen? What was going on “under the hood,” so to speak? It turns out: a LOT. There’s no simple answer. That’s what the book addresses.

3. 1942 is a year in which the balance of power shifted across multiple theaters—Pacific, Eastern Front, North Africa, and the Atlantic. Which theater or campaign did you find most challenging to narrate in a way that made sense as part of a single worldwide story?

Without question, the Eastern Front. There are two fundamental problems, the first being a lack of sympathetic characters, as we watch the minions of one horrid despot battling the minions of another horrid despot. Moreover, the enormity of the theater often means reaching for unsatisfying narrative generalities—like one army “slicing” through another army. It’s difficult to construct a story that feels personal or relatable. The solution lies in providing enough micro-views of the situation on the ground to make conveying the larger events comprehensible.

4. 1942 includes hundreds of your own maps and timelines—a rare level of visual narrative in military history. Why was it important for you to build the story of the war year with this kind of granular, visual clarity?

I’ve always loved maps. I’m a visual learner. Shaded-relief maps help to convey, even if only subliminally, things like, “Oh, yeah, the Japanese couldn’t advance this way, now could they, because there are some hella big hills over here!” Likewise, the monthly timelines help readers understand not only chronology but also the connection points between different theaters. The war was vast—it was happening everywhere all at once. Seeing events laid out temporally helps create a framework for understanding their relationships.

5. What was your motivation for making such a comprehensive account? At over 1,200 pages, do you not have concerns about inflicting muscle strain on your readers?

The fundamental problem is one of creating an engaging narrative. If you do this story at too high a level, it becomes abstract, generalized, and boring. I wanted to dedicate an appropriate level of detail to the battles. But doing that for every major battle worldwide during the year inexorably leads to more page count than I had originally hoped for! If you’re going to do that to a reader, you have to give them lively dialog, lots of maps and pictures, bits of humor (I hope!), and other Easter eggs. There’s a pertinent quote from Pink Floyd in the book, another from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and a third from J. R. R. Tolkien. Can you find them?

6. Are there historians, past or present, whose work you feel especially in conversation with in 1942?

The two that have most influenced my thinking this year are Richard Overy and my friend Richard Frank. Overy and I have similar views regarding the necessity of describing the war in its totality in order to understand its outcome. One theater or battle won’t do. You must look at the whole enchilada. Rich and I share a common understanding, forged over many years and beers, regarding the importance of the Asia-Pacific theater to the overall trajectory of the war, particularly early on when the USSR was on the ropes.  

7. If readers take away one big reframing of how to think about World War II from 1942, what do you hope it will be?

Allied victory was neither inevitable nor obvious at the beginning of the year. Likewise, there was no single turning point, but rather dozens of inflection points that ultimately reshaped the war’s trajectory from one of Allied ruin to Allied triumph.

8. What kinds of books—historical or otherwise—do you find yourself returning to for inspiration, whether for craft, perspective, or sheer pleasure?

Great question! I still re-read The Lord of the Rings almost yearly. I love a good fantasy novel. Other than that, though, it’ll probably be something World War II-related—the “Need-to-Read” pile never seems to get smaller!

Featured image by Romain B via Unsplash

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What matters most for children in their family relationships?

Navigating the vast number of opinions about what matters most for children’s healthy development can be a daunting and seemingly endless task. From politicians to journalists to self-styled ‘parenting experts’, everyone has an opinion on what children need in their family relationships and how parents should provide this. These opinions can range from the relatively mundane aspects of everyday parenting, for example, how parents can encourage children to brush their teeth, to larger socio-political and legal questions, such as who is allowed to use fertility treatment to create their families, who is recognised as a parent, and what this means for children.

Too rarely does evidence manage to break through the heat and noise of these debates, yet developmental psychologists have spent decades addressing the questions of how family relationships shape child development and what really matters for children. We draw on classic and cutting-edge research on family relationships to highlight three factors that psychologists have consistently found to shape children’s development across different relationships, transitions, and cultures, which can enable children to thrive within their families.

1. Relationship quality is more important than family structure

Empirical evidence has consistently shown that the quality of relationships between family members matters far more for children’s healthy development than who lives together and how they are related. Research into the aspects of parent-child relationships that predict outcomes for children has shown that responding in a sensitive (i.e., timely and appropriate) way to a child, consistent provision of support and boundaries, and open communication facilitate positive mental health and social development in children. Similarly, positive, co-operative relationships between parents and siblings also support healthy child development.

Furthermore, studies that have looked at different family structures, whether that be the number, gender, sexual orientation, or gender identity of parents in a family, the way in which families were created, or whether family members share a genetic connection, have provided robust support in this area. What a family looks like matters far less for how children develop within that family than how family members treat each other.

This is not to say that family relationships, whether between parents and children or between siblings, must always be calm and non-conflictual. The presence of appropriate levels of conflict within family relationships, when handled well (i.e., respectfully and flexibly), can actually be beneficial to children and adolescents in helping them learn and practice different communication skills.

2. Connection promotes autonomy

Until recently, it was not uncommon, particularly in Western countries, for parents to be told that the developmental task of childhood and adolescence was to achieve separation from parents. Research has consistently shown, however, that parents can best support children to develop autonomy in age-appropriate ways by maintaining a connection with them. This is the case whether we are looking at research on how parents can encourage their toddlers to explore a new environment, help their children manage the transition to starting school, or support their teens to navigate increasing independence and changing peer relationships. The presence of a consistent, supportive parent-child relationship facilitates rather than hampers the development of autonomy.

3. Supportive policies and communities matter

Finally, research from across different areas of developmental psychology shows us powerfully and consistently that families don’t exist in isolation and that the structures around them matter for children’s (and parents’) wellbeing. This is the case whether we are talking about parents’ access to social support (i.e., the presence or absence of family and friends), the provision or absence of statutory support, for example, in the case of families raising children with disabilities or special educational needs, or the legislative frameworks around families.

We know, for example, that policies around parental leave influence, and in some cases constrain, parents’ decisions about parenting and childcare during infancy, and that satisfaction with these arrangements is related to parents’ relationship quality and mental health, both of which affect children’s development. And discriminatory rhetoric and laws, for example, anti-LGBTQ+ legislation or legislation that negatively targets minoritized ethnic groups, can make children and families feel less safe by legitimising abuse towards the family and adding further burdens on family members to advocate for or defend their family. It should come as no surprise, then, that children and families do better with supportive communities and structures around them.

No two families or two relationships within a family are the same, but there are consistent factors within relationships that can support children’s healthy development. The extent to which families are able to provide these will differ depending on their knowledge, their previous experiences, the resources available to them, the challenges they face, where they live, and the extent to which the structures around them are supportive or obstructive of family life. Children and their families should be supported to thrive in all their diversity, and focusing on what the evidence tells us really matters for children is, surely, the best place to start.

Featured image by Juliane Liebermann via Unsplash.

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Tearing apart a book

For several years, I taught a course on the history of publishing. We covered technology (from scrolls to scrolling), the impact of the book on culture, economics (how publishers and bookstores make money), and much more. I invited authors and editors to class. We toured a printing company and an audiobook studio. A ghost-writer friend came one Halloween. A book restorer told harrowing tales of damaged books and her heroic efforts to repair them.

One of the highlights for me was slicing and dicing a book in front of the class.

In a room full of writers, readers, and bibliophiles, cutting up a book never failed to elicit wide-eyed gasps and groans. There was a serious point to the cutting: to familiarize students with the parts of a book. As I cut, tore, and otherwise mutilated the book, I marked its various parts and passed around the remains.

I pointed out the two boards that made up the cover and noted the inner and outer hinges. I pulled back the endpapers and pointed out the pastedown and flyleaf. I marked up the front matter: the title page and the verso of the title page, with its copyright material, ISBN, and mysterious edition numbers. Sometimes there was a cloth headband atop the spine of the book, and we speculated about its purpose (protection of the spine or decoration?). It was rare to find a full-length sewn-in headband. 

We examined the text block of the book and pulled apart its signatures. (In a later class, I would give students a large-sized piece of paper with sixteen numbered blocks and challenge them to fold it to a correctly numbered signature.) We noted the gutter, the margin where the left and right pages come together. We looked at the ways in which the signatures were bound and contrasted that with the less expensive perfect binding and burst binding, which inevitably led to a discussion of textbooks that fall apart when you read them. One time, we got into a discussion of the differences between hot-melt adhesives and organic glues.

After the initial horror of the dissection, the students learned a lot from the exercise and were able to pick up just about any book and understand how it was made. 

You can try this exercise at home, with a thrift-store hardback, a Sharpie, and a box-cutter. Just remember to cut away from your body. Safety first.

^{Featured image by Karim Elmissiry via Unsplash.}

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