Women, memory, and the archives of Lebanon’s Civil War

When official history falls silent, who remembers the war?

This question lies at the heart of Lebanon’s troubled relationship with the memory of its Civil War (1975–90). More than three decades after the conflict ended, the war remains a deeply contested part of Lebanon’s past. Lebanon has had no comprehensive state-led truth commission or national reconciliation process, and the Civil War remains largely absent from the official history curriculum. Memories of the conflict therefore remain fragmented across communities, families, political affiliations, and generations.

But silence does not mean that the past has disappeared. When official history falls silent, other forms of remembering emerge. Novels, poems, paintings, films, photographs, and testimonies become archives of experiences that institutions have failed—or refused—to preserve.

Arab women, including the Syrian novelist Ghada al-Samman, the Lebanese-born poet, novelist, and visual artist Etel Adnan, and the Lebanese filmmaker Nadine Labaki, have created some of the most powerful alternative archives of the Lebanese Civil War. They refuse to let the conflict disappear into historical silence. Their works expand what it means to remember war. Sometimes, remembering means recording a nightmare, preserving a fragment, painting a ruined landscape, or making people laugh in the face of sectarian violence. 

When everyday life becomes an archive

Ghada al-Samman’s Beirut Nightmares, written during the Civil War, takes us away from the conventional battlefield and into the intimate space of a woman’s home. The protagonist is trapped in Beirut during the siege. Snipers, shelling, hunger and fear transform the apartment from a place of safety into a prison. Yet the novel does something more than document the violence surrounding the protagonist. It records what war feels like in the body: insomnia, terror, hunger, exhaustion, and the constant anticipation of death. Conventional histories of war tend to privilege battlefields, political negotiations, military leaders, and armed combatants. Yet Al-Samman asks us to look elsewhere. The protagonist’s manuscript, written under siege, becomes an alternative archive, preserving experiences that might otherwise disappear. The home becomes a site of resistance, while the female body becomes a record of a war that official narratives cannot fully capture.

When a broken story tells the truth

Etel Adnan approaches the problem of remembering differently. Her Sitt Marie Rose, The Arab Apocalypse, Of Cities and Women, and her visual art refuse to offer a single, coherent version of the Lebanese Civil War. Instead, Adnan gives us fragments, contradictions, symbols, and ruined, blood-red landscapes. Her work captures the experiences of living through violence when the familiar structures that make life intelligible—home, city, community, language, and identity—are themselves fractured.

In Sitt Marie Rose, Adnan recounts the story of Marie Rose Boulos, a Christian educator who worked with Palestinian refugees. Marie Rose’s commitment to crossing sectarian boundaries places her in direct conflict with the patriarchal and sectarian logic of the war. Her murder exposes how women’s bodies and choices become battlegrounds for competing ideas of community, loyalty, and nation.

In The Arab Apocalypse, Adnan takes fragmentation even further. Language itself seems to break apart. Words, images and symbols collide, while recurring suns and ruined landscapes replace the orderly historical timeline we might expect.

These works create another way of remembering. Adnan’s fragments resist the demand to make war appear coherent, reconciled, or safely contained in the past. Her art keeps the wounds visible. The result is an archive without the appearance of an archive: no official monument, no single narrative, no authorised voice. Memory survives instead through images, fragments, landscapes and voices that refuse to settle into one version of history.

Can humour remember war?

Nadine Labaki’s Where Do We Go Now? takes yet another approach. The film is set in an unnamed Lebanese village divided by sectarian tensions. Its women are determined to prevent the men from turning those divisions into violence. But they do not confront the men through conventional political power. Instead, they destroy radios, manipulate religious symbols, hire Ukrainian dancers to distract the men, and even drug their meals to keep weapons out of their hands. The scenes are absurd and often genuinely funny. But the humour conceals a serious question: who carries the responsibility for remembering what war does to a community?

Labaki’s women know what another cycle of violence will cost. While their interventions are acts of care, they are also acts of historical resistance. They try to prevent the past from becoming the future. The film therefore turns women’s everyday labour—mourning, caring, organising, persuading, protecting—into political action. Its unnamed village also transforms the story into a wider reflection on communities divided by violence: what happens when neighbours become enemies, and when the wounds of one generation become the inheritance of the next?

Beyond preserving the past

What connects Al-Samman, Adnan, and Labaki is not simply that they write about the Lebanese Civil War, but how they remember it.

Al-Samman records the war through the female body and the domestic space. Adnan fragments its history through literature, symbols and visual art. Labaki transforms remembrance into tragicomedy, showing women attempting to interrupt the repetition of violence. Together, their different forms create what I call “alternative archives”: cultural memory that exists outside official institutions and challenges the silences surrounding the conflict. They challenge official institutions’ authority over what counts as history and reshape our understanding of feminist resistance; for these women are not simply adding women’s experiences to an established history of the Lebanese Civil War. They question how history is produced, showing that women’s fear, grief, survival, creativity, care and resistance are not secondary to the “real” history of war; rather, they are history itself. A monument can preserve a name; a textbook can preserve a date; an archive can preserve a document. But a novel can preserve a feeling; a painting can preserve a wound; a film can preserve a gesture; and a woman’s testimony can preserve what an official history leaves behind.

When official history falls silent, remembering becomes more than looking backwards. It becomes a struggle over who has the right to tell the story and, ultimately, who has the right to imagine what comes next.

_{Feature image: by Michael Starkie on Unsplash.}

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Getting lost in revision

Revision, I’ve been told again and again, is the key to effective writing. Yet sometimes I find myself making an essay or chapter worse when I revise it. I introduce new errors, garble sentences or paragraphs that once seemed clear, and add whole paragraphs that I later decide to cut.

Here’s what I’ve noticed myself doing:

Making new typos. When I see something that needs to be fixed, I type what I think will fix it, often glancing down at the keyboard. Then I move on to the next problem, forgetting to proof the correction and thus introducing new problems. I need to slow down.

Overlooking the obvious. Autocorrect catches the most egregious typos, like “fpor” for “for” or “teh” for “the.” But it does not correct word substitutions, for example when you type “work” for “word.” Errors may be almost too simple to notice because you are reading what you think you wrote rather than what you actually wrote. You might miss a substitution like “iconically” for “ironically” or “principle” for “principal” (or vice versa). I once mistakenly referred to The Elements of Style authors Strunk and White as Stunk and White, an error overlooked by the copyeditor and proofreader as well. We were all processing the word we predicted to be there rather than what actually was on the page.

Trying to satisfy everyone. In terms of content, I sometimes make things worse when I forget who my audience really is and try too hard to satisfy particular comments by reviewers, editors, or beta-readers. This can result in my over-explaining certain points or adding tangential asides. When I re-revise, I find myself wondering, Why did I add that? It helps to keep your eventual ideal reader in your head (or at least over your shoulder) and resist the impulse to go along with every suggestion.

Fussing too much with syntax. On more than one occasion, I’ve noticed myself revising a sentence to (try to) make it clearer but leaving in an extra word or ending from the earlier version that turns the new version into word salad. Writing about early twentieth-century scientists’ speculation about the Martian canals, I wrote that they were once believed to be “a means for transporting water.” My revision read that they were believed to be “a means for Martians to transporting water.” Oops. When I revised the phrase “the study’s aim is to clarify perceptions of dialect,” my revised version read “the aim of the study is to undercover the average person’s perception of dialect.” I had “undercover” rather than “uncover.” And when I try to resolve the reference of vague pronouns by adding in names, I sometimes forget to double-check the spelling, so Schultz becomes Shultz, and Carlsen becomes Carlson.

Understanding strengths and weaknesses. Over the course of my career, I’ve noticed that my writing gets more convoluted when I am expounding on a theoretical or technical point as opposed to when I am narrating a story. So now I pay particular attention to clarity in places where I write about abstractions rather than about people and actions. Make a list of your own strengths and weaknesses and use it to focus your revisions.

Two suggestions. The track changes feature looks messy, but I suggest leaving it on as you revise so that you can do targeted reproofing of your revisions and corrections. Or better yet, read your work aloud so you don’t fall into the trap of seeing what you think you wrote.

What you think you wrote may not be there.

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Why the West’s critics speak a Western moral language

For many critics, the West is uniquely responsible for colonialism, racism, oppression, and exploitation. America, in particular, is portrayed as a society built upon these injustices. Many of these critics were themselves raised in the West and educated in its schools and universities.

Whatever one thinks of such critiques, there is something profoundly ironic about them: many of the moral standards used to judge Western civilization are themselves products of the Western tradition. The demand for justice and human rights, the insistence that the powerful must answer for their actions, the refusal to accept that might makes right—these ideas have a distinct history. That history is complex, drawing on classical philosophy, biblical religion, Roman law, and the Christian tradition. An important, though often overlooked, stream in this history is the Calvinist tradition—a subject explored more fully in the second edition of my Calvinism: A Very Short Introduction.

John Calvin is not who most people think of when they think about ideas of justice, equality, and human dignity. He is more commonly associated with predestination, austerity, and the execution of Michael Servetus. Yet the Reformed tradition Calvin helped shape contributed ideas whose consequences reached far beyond anything he could have anticipated—and perhaps beyond some things he would have welcomed. Those ideas helped nurture forms of political liberty and moral accountability that many of his modern critics now exercise, whether they recognize their origins or not.

Consider first the profound equality Calvin placed at the center of his understanding of humanity. Because all people are created in God’s image and belong uniquely to him, Calvin insisted that no human being could ultimately be reduced to a mere possession of another. His discussions of slavery and servitude in his expositions of Exodus and Deuteronomy are among the clearest expressions of this conviction. While later generations would identify tensions between Calvin’s theological convictions and the institution of slavery as it existed in his own age, his writings nevertheless rejected the reduction of human beings to property and emphasized the obligations owed by those who exercised authority. Before God, the nobleman and the beggar stand on identical ground. Human dignity does not depend upon wealth, status, or power. These were not merely theological abstractions; they were principles whose implications later generations would develop in ways Calvin himself could scarcely have imagined.

Second, Calvin helped reshape political thought by reinforcing the conviction that rulers themselves are subject to moral judgment. He did not invent resistance theory—medieval thinkers had long wrestled with tyranny—but the Reformed tradition became one of its most influential vehicles. In the final (1559) edition of his Institutes of the Christian Religion, Calvin argued that rulers who command what is contrary to God relinquish their authority. French Huguenots, Dutch rebels, Scottish Protestants, English parliamentarians, and American revolutionaries all drew, in varying degrees, upon political arguments developed within the Calvinist tradition. The enduring principle was simple: power is never its own justification.

Third, Calvin revived a prophetic tradition of moral criticism. The biblical prophets denounced corruption, exploitation, and injustice among the powerful. Calvin adopted their posture with striking boldness. At a time when monarchs increasingly claimed sacred authority, he did not hesitate to rebuke rulers for their corruption. In a lecture on Jeremiah, he lamented that “kings are ashamed to appear humane and turn all their labors towards exercising tyranny.” In another, he complained “great kings draw human blood and do not care at all when many people perish because of them.” Such criticisms expressed Calvin’s conviction that no ruler stands above moral scrutiny. Calvin repeatedly lamented the suffering of the poor and condemned those who exploited them. Through generations of Reformed preaching and political thought, this prophetic impulse was carried far beyond sixteenth-century Geneva. It would echo through later movements that challenged entrenched authority, from campaigns against slavery to the civil rights movement and beyond.

The irony, then, becomes clearer. The critics are, of course, right to point to injustices like inequality, racism, and exploitation. These are enduring features of human societies, and the West has hardly been immune to them. Yet many of the moral concepts used to expose these failures were themselves nurtured within the Western tradition. Indeed, one of the West’s distinguishing characteristics has been its extraordinary capacity for self-criticism. America and the broader Western tradition have produced intellectual, religious, legal, and political traditions that have repeatedly exposed, criticized, and sought to reform the very injustices that exist within their own societies.

Part of that capacity arose from Calvin’s realistic assessment of human nature, his conviction that people are prone to sin and self-interest. Influenced in part by this conviction, Western political institutions increasingly sought to restrain power rather than trust it. Constitutional limits, divided authority, the rule of law, and institutional accountability were not designed to eliminate injustice altogether. They endeavored to create durable mechanisms through which injustice could be challenged and corrected. In so doing, these institutions have helped many Western societies become among the freest, most prosperous, and most legally protective in history.

None of this is evidence of either the West’s perfection or its unique immorality. It is, rather, evidence that the Western tradition has bequeathed to the modern world a moral imagination capable not only of exposing injustice but also of imagining and pursuing reform. Many of the West’s fiercest critics remain heirs to the very moral tradition that furnished them with the language through which they now judge it. That, perhaps, is one of the Western tradition’s most remarkable legacies.

_{Feature image: Palestine solidarity protest in Berlin. Photo by Hossam el-Hamalawy. CC-BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.}

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Answering two questions from readers

This week’s post is devoted to answering two questions from readers. Do you have a question you’d like me to answer (hopefully not with origin unknown)? Feel free to leave a comment or send an email to blog@oup.com!

Ghent, gaunt, and John of Gaunt: what is the connection, if any?

John of Gaunt (1340-1399) was indeed born in Ghent (Dutch Gent, Belgium) but never used this extended name as an adult. If Shakespeare had not called him John of Gaunt in his tragedy King Richard II, no one would probably have remembered that ancient soubriquet today. (“Old Gaunt indeed, and gaunt in being old”; this is the beginning of Act II, and the dying duke keeps playing with the word again and again in the next eight lines.)

It is usually believed that Ghent is a Celtic place name going back to ganda “confluence of two rivers.” A few other hypotheses on this score need not concern us here, because the ancient origin of Ghent has no bearing on the present discussion.

Gaunt is a doublet of Ghent, and we are, naturally, interested in how “the linguistic confluence” happened. Bear with me, as they say, because, probably for the first time ever, I am going to discuss some niceties of sound change. The spelling gh has an obvious reason: h prevents English speakers from pronouncing Ghent as Jent. The problem is the vowel: why eif the etymon was Ganda? Not a single book on the history of Dutch seems to have explained the change. Only one thing is obvious: there was no umlaut in the word that would have turned a into e.

So, why e? My idea needs some explanation, but I’ll state it dogmatically, without going into detail.

Part 1: Dutch. Old Germanic languages had many palatalized consonants; l’ and n’ (the apostrophe denotes palatalization) were common. To give an example, palatalized l and n are the sounds we hear in the Italian words famiglia “family” and compagnia “company.”

Those who have studied Russian know that palatalized consonants are called soft in that language. Such sounds are also widespread in modern German and Dutch dialects. They often affect the preceding vowels by moving them to the front. For example, [a] becomes [e]. This is probably how Gant, which, I suppose, had “soft n,” became Gent in Dutch. I would be grateful for approval or refutation.

Part 2: English. In Anglo-French, which was spoken in England after the Norman Conquest of 1066, the vowel [a] before m and n was often pronounced like [au] in Modern English out. The medieval spellings comaunder, Caumbrigge, and so forth were ubiquitous. In many words, this au became the sound we today hear in haunt and vaunt. The adjective gaunt, discussed in the previous post, most probably, did not come from French but joined haunt, vaunt, and the rest. This is also how the place name Ghant became G(h)aunt. The modern English spelling Ghent is “correct” but late. It was introduced to conform to Dutch Gent.

For a long time, people associated gaunt with the town of Ghent in today’s Belgium. Hence also the idea, cited in the previous post, that running the gauntlet and the word gauntlet originated in Flanders, though this punishment was first used in the Swedish army, as also explained last week.

Are lubber and loblolly related?

There can be no clearcut answer to this question, because we are or seem to be surrounded by a host of expressive words. This is obvious in dealing with loll-. Consider loll “to drop, dangle,” lollop “to lounge,” and lollipop, which is almost loblolly in reverse. Loblolly once meant “thick gruel” (so in the sixteenth century, when the word first surfaced in English texts). Some time later, it acquired the sense “country bumpkin” (compare chawbacon “hick, yokel”: from simple food to a derogatory term, or beefeater “Yeoman of the Guard”). We’ll return to loll– later

Lob– (in loblolly) reminds us of lubber “clumsy man,” today known mainly from landlubber “someone ignorant about the sea and all matters nautical.” It has a root, similar to that of love (Old English lufu)! Lubber and love have nothing in common, except that both are expressive. (The statement that love is expressive probably needs no proof.) That’s the arrow they share, but the target is unpredictable, and there is of course no way of explaining why l-v, rather than m-v or n-v, should possess emotional connotations: none of them is sound-imitative.

For whatever reasons, the sound complex lab/laf ~ lub/luf seems to evoke more or less similar emotions in speakers from all corners of the earth. For instance, Russian lafa (pronounced as la-fa, stress on the second syllable) means “great luck.” The word reached Old Russian from the East: the source is Arabic and Turkish. It may amuse you to know that the German verb loben “to praise” has no secure etymology, though cognates, certain and putative, are numerous. They sound very much alike, but, naturally, throw no light on the origin of the verb. Another expressive word like love?

The OED suggests that lubber reached English from French and that French may have borrowed it from German. This is of course possible, but, while dealing with such a universal sound complex, one never knows for sure who borrowed from whom or whether each language coined the word independently.

In my old posts, I often referred to the Swiss linguist Wilhelm Oehl, who compared dozens of similar-sounding words from various languages and referred to the process he called primitive creation. If you search for Oehl, my posts will turn up at once. Oehl is now all but forgotten, but many of his ideas deserve attention. It appears that laf/lab is indeed a “primitive complex,” evoking two dissimilar ideas: one of awkwardness and another of something pleasant.

When one deals with bare roots, it sometimes happens that they refer to incompatible, even opposite phenomena. This circumstance need not worry us. A list of Indo-European roots looks like very serious linguistic algebra, but, for example, four Indo-European homonymous ter‘s and seven (!) per‘s have been reconstructed!

We can now turn to –lolly, the second component of loblolly. There is (or was) the regional noun lolly “tongue.” Its “expressive” origin cannot be doubted. The verb loll (as in “don’t loll about all day doing nothing” and “the dog’s tongue lolled out of his mouth”) belongs here too. Finally, the verb lollop “to walk with lounging gait, etc.,” mentioned at the beginning of this essay, also exists. Hensleigh Wedgwood compared loblolly and lollipop long ago. Other etymologists agreed with him.

Where are we then with the questions about lubber and loblolly? Are they related? Of course, the basis of comparison is only lub– and lob-. In the discussion above, lolly has been thrown in for good measure. We have seen that all three components of those words are expressive, or sound–symbolic. Their relationship is of a special kind. By way of analogy, consider jag, jig, and jog. Are they related? Lub– and lob– belong together, which does not mean that they are cognate in the same way in which live and life, write and writ, wine and vinegar, or Engl. love and German Liebe (the same meaning) are. We should rather refer to affinity than relationship. This then is the answer to the question in the heading.

NOTE: I’ll be at a conference next week. See my next essay two weeks from today. Send us questions and suggestions. It has been years since I received so many queries that I could produce regular monthly (!) gleanings. I long for the largess of old days.

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Gloves, gauntlets, and gaunt people

Last week, I finished my story with a brief reference to all kinds of gloves. A few days later, a query came about the word gauntlet. What is its origin, and is there any connection with the adjective gaunt? (See my answer to two more questions at the end of this essay.)

Gaunt surfaced in English texts in the fifteenth century and could also be pronounced as gant. Since no reliable information has been discovered about its origin (no cognates or comments from contemporary authors), the word might be newfangled slang, whose etymology was as unclear to speakers six hundred years ago as it is to us. If so, the chances of discovering its origin are close to zero (however, see below). The oldest etymologists (John Minsheu, Stephen Skinner, and Franciscus Junius) provide no information and offer no conjectures, though they were a bit closer to the time when the word originated.

The only bold conjecture about the etymology of gaunt goes back to the undeservedly forgotten dictionary by Eduard Mueller, who mentioned Old French jaunet “yellowish, sickly” and the Scandinavian words for “stick; thin person.” Walter W. Skeat knew that dictionary and treated it with respect. He “compared” gaunt with Norwegian dialectal gand “a thin stick, a tall and thin man, an overgrown stripling” and Swedish, also dialectal, gank “a lean, half-starved horse” but called his comparison doubtful. Doubtful it certainly is. I may add that early etymologists often invited us to “compare” words, but it remained unclear how to proceed with such “comparisons.”

In the Scandinavian languages, words with the root gant– most often mean “fool, foolishness,” rather than “emaciation.” Also, a fifteenth-century borrowing from some Scandinavian dialect into Early Modern English is unlikely. No post-Skeat hypotheses about the origin of gaunt have been offered, and several dictionaries repeat it as being at least worthy of interest. There may be a grain of truth in Mueller’s wanderings between Old French and Scandinavian.

Having disposed of gaunt, we may procced to gauntlet. That word went a long way before the object it designates found its peace on English hands, also in the fifteenth century. The story (again!) begins with a Scandinavian word. It must have sounded like wantuz. In Old Icelandic, we find vöttr; Modern Norwegian has vante. From medieval Scandinavia the word migrated to Romance, obviously, with the object. There must have been something in that object that favored its travel across Europe.

The current etymology of vante (though always accompanied by the word probably or possibly) suggests that the word’s root is the verb wind. This idea may be true (a woven glove?), but there is a hitch. The great medieval English historian, known as the Venerable Bede (672/673-735), wrote that the Gauls (!) wore hand coverings called vantos. If the word was Celtic, even its most ingenious Germanic etymologies are wrong by definition.

Coverings for the hand had many different forms and shapes; hence numerous ideas for giving them names. For instance, mitten, from some Romance form like medietāna, referred to a cut in the middle. Human ingenuity has no limits, as shown by the history of words for “glove.” More (much more!) surprising is the early prestige of gloves. Last time, I mentioned the Old English proper name Hond-scio “glove,” literally “hand-shoe.”

It occurred only in Beowulf, but, however fanciful, it probably did not sound odd to the audience of the poem, because also Vöttr existed as a man’s name in medieval Scandinavia. This puzzling name giving antedated by many centuries the rite of throwing down the gauntlet. And we are not in Greece or Rome, where gloves were a sign of social prestige, or among medieval knights. Why then call male children this? Little Boy Thumb makes sense, but Little Boy Glove? A warrior called Glove? Suggestions from our readers on this subject are invited.

The bottommost image in the previous post referred to the cannibal Grendel, the monster destroyed by Beowulf. Grendel stored his victims (or rather the “leftovers”) in a glove (Old English glōf). That “glove” might be a pouch. In any case, some gloves were probably big, even huge. The Old Germanic word lōfa meant “palm,” and it is possible that g- in glōf is a remnant of an ancient prefix, as is, for instance, g- in Modern German glauben “to believe.” In any case, this is the only probable etymology of the word there is.

Finally, something should be said about gauntlet, the metal-plated glove of medieval armor. With it we are back where we were at the beginning. Articles of clothing and their names, as stated above, travel from land to land. Old French gantlet meant “a little gant,” that is, “a little glove,” and gant is our Old Scandinavian acquaintance vöttr, changed beyond recognition. The object was large, despite the misleading diminutive suffix –let (as in islet, kinglet, and so forth).

However, running the gauntlet has nothing to do with gloves. It was known long ago that the second component (let) of the now familiar noun had been changed beyond recognition from Swedish lopp “run” under the influence of gauntlet, with which it has nothing in common. But the first component remained less clear. My database contains several old suggestions on this score. From Gant, another name of Ghent (!), where running the gauntlet was, allegedly, first executed? Or from German Gasse– “street”? The last-mentioned (fanciful) conjecture was well-known, because it appeared in Brewer’s popular Dictionary of Word and Fable. Actually, the etymon of gauntlet is Swedish from beginning to end: gat-lop “lane run” became gantlope. The punishment, where the culprit ran between two rows of men who struck him with sticks or knotted cords, originated in the Swedish army.

Is it possible that I succeeded in antedating the examples in the OED? In any case, Notes and Queries (7/XII, Dec. 12, 1891, p. 476) gives two quotes, sent by Edward Peacock, from 1647 and 1648.

Questions

Ampersand. I have nothing new to say about this symbol and can only state that the questioner’s information about it is correct. The silly phrase and by itself and (Latin et per se et) degenerated into the gibberish ampersand. In cursive writing, the Latin word et became the by now familiar sign &. The ampersand was indeed for some time treated as the 27^th letter of the English alphabet, but this addition has never been canonized. 

Dung and dungeon. I think the term for this connection is “false affinity.” False affinity plays a certain role in changing the affected words’ meaning and is an important source of folk etymology. Dung was discussed in my post “Unsavory etymologies.” It is a word of Germanic origin, while dungeon is Romance. Those interested in other “false friends” of etymology may look up the origin of the word demijohn.

Please send questions and comments!

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Chemical periodicity: why does the chemistry of some elements resemble the chemistry of others?

Before attempting to answer the title question, we should be clear about what the term ‘periodicity’ actually means—and where better to turn for an explanation than the matchless OED. The entry under ‘chemistry’ is the most relevant, viz. ‘The complex periodic variation of the properties of the chemical elements with increasing atomic number’, the term’s use in this context dating from the nineteenth century. This was, of course, the time of the so-called chemical revolution and is, therefore, a good place to begin.

In fact, the chemical revolution started a little before the nineteenth century with the work of Antoine Lavoisier. Of his many contributions during the 1780s, one of the most important was to define a chemical element as a substance which cannot be further decomposed by chemical means. Soon after came John Dalton’s atomic theory (in the early 1800s) in which he proposed not only that all matter is made of atoms but that atoms have weight and, furthermore, that atoms of different elements (he accepted Lavoisier’s definition) have different weights. Accurate atomic weights (strictly, relative atomic weights) were not that easy to determine but following the Karlsruhe Congress organised by Stanislao Cannizzaro in 1860, a list of atomic weights for most of the sixty-odd elements then known became widely accepted. Such a list was important for many reasons but not least for the subsequent development of the periodic table which orders the elements according to their atomic weight (later by atomic number) but also in a manner that reflects their observed chemical similarities.

With regard to these similarities, it was Johann Döbereiner who, in the 1820s, drew attention to certain resemblances within particular groups of three elements (Döbereiner’s triads)—lithium, sodium, potassium and chlorine, bromine, iodine, for example. Additional groupings, some with more than three members, were later highlighted by others but by the 1860s several chemists had also begun to notice underlying regularities. Among them was John Newlands, who recognised that for the first fifteen elements known at that time (hydrogen to chlorine; helium and neon had not yet been discovered), chemical similarities were observed to repeat every eight elements, which he codified as the Law of Octaves. In just a few years, tables depicting further regularities were constructed with many more elements, most notably by the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev, who published his first periodic table in 1869. (For an excellent history of the periodic table, see: The Periodic Table: Its Story and its Significance, 2nd edition, E. Scerri, Oxford University Press, 2020.)

It should not be forgotten that in these early periodic tables, the regular arrangement of elements according to their chemical similarities was entirely based upon empirical observations. But why should there be any such similarities and, moreover, why should these similarities occur in a regular or periodic manner? Something at a fundamental level must repeat, albeit imperfectly, but in the nineteenth century, it was entirely unclear what the nature or origin of this repeat might be.

By the end of the nineteenth century most chemists accepted that matter was indeed made of atoms, but it would soon be determined that atoms were not indivisible: they had structure. A model of the atom in which most of its mass, along with its positive charge, was concentrated in a tiny nucleus around which were distributed the much lighter, negatively charged electrons (discovered by J. J. Thomson in 1897) was proposed by Ernest Rutherford in 1911. Not long after, it was established that elements were better ordered according to the number of units of positive charge in the nucleus (later identified with the number of protons present), the so-called atomic number, rather than according to atomic weight (the number of protons plus neutrons).

At around this time, it was also revealed, principally by the Danish physicist Niels Bohr, that electrons in atoms occupied discrete shells, the reasons for which would emerge from the nascent quantum theory. As this theory developed it was established that these shells could accommodate up to a certain number of electrons but no more, initially two with a maximum of eight allowed in the next shell. Accordingly, we can represent the electronic structure of, for example, lithium (which has three electrons) as Li (2,1) whereas sodium (which has eleven electrons) would be denoted as Na (2,8,1). Thus, each has one outermost electron which accounts for why their chemistry is similar, albeit not identical; the chemistry of an element is determined in large part by the number of outer electrons.

Of course, it’s a bit more complicated than this (actually quite a lot more complicated) but at a fundamental level quantum theory allows us to understand the origins of chemical periodicity according to the electronic structure of atoms—ultimately providing the answer to the title question: why does the chemistry of some elements resemble the chemistry of others?

^{Featured image by PAVM. Public domain via Pixabay.}

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Unsavory etymologies: <em>dung</em> and its kin

Below, I’ll speak about the amazing history of the word dung “manure.” In broad outline, the story is known, but some details are seldom discussed in dictionaries. I should also mention another reason I turned my attention to dung. Probably few people outside the tiny group of professional etymologists realize that dung is related to dingy, as in “a rundown and dingy alley; a shabby, dingy coat,” not necessarily “foul” or “ill-smelling” but certainly unattractive (“shitty,” if I may). Note the vowels of dung and dingy! We will return to the alternation u ~ i at the end of this essay.

Surprisingly, dung is a word that goes back to Old English (surprisingly, because we seldom associate antiquity with manure, excrements and their likes: temples and sarcophagi are another matter). By contrast, dingy surfaced in printed texts only in the seventeenth century, though it may have been current in oral speech much earlier. Dung, unlike dingy, has cognates all over the Germanic-speaking world. Closely related to itis German Dung (the same meaning).

The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (1965) followed the original OED and wrote about dung “of unknown origin.” Apparently, the editors of that otherwise excellent work missed the rich literature on the word, a mistake the OED online, not unexpectedly, avoided. The entry in the online version discusses the problem in detail, makes suggestions, and finally says “of uncertain origin.” Though the origin of dung may indeed be uncertain, below, I’ll cite a few arguments that may throw light on the problem.

But first, a few facts, culled from easily available sources. As noted, dung has close cognates in other Germanic languages. German Dung is also known from very early texts. Apparently, the word was not offensive anywhere: just a neutral and useful name for what it designated. The same holds for Old Frisian and Middle Dutch dung. Old Icelandic had dyngja “heap; dung.”

Closer to home, we find Engl. ding “to knock, dash down.” Whether this verb is a loan from Scandinavian (Old Icelandic dengja meant “to whet a scythe”) makes little difference, because we are dealing with a Common Germanic group of words. The verb ding,I suppose, emerged as a sound-imitative word (think of ding-dong, a complex representing the sound of a knock on a hard body). However, it joined the vocabulary of English as a strong verb, that is, it had its three principal parts like those in sing ~ sang ~ sung.

This type of vowel alternation is called ablaut, and verbs displaying ablaut are called strong. The other type, as in pick ~ picked ~ picked is known as weak. Yet the line is sometimes crossed. To those who say sneak ~ snuck ~ snuck the verb is strong, and to those who prefer sneak ~ sneaked ~ sneaked it is weak.

Only old, inherited verbs displayed ablaut, and that part of the history of ding comes as a surprise. Wasn’t ding a funny, colloquial newcomer fifteen or so centuries ago? Apparently, not, because ding never behaved like a recent formation. Ding ~ dang ~ dung joined ring ~ rang ~ rung (which, incidentally, acquired this type of conjugation late!).

As a rule, newcomers of this type are weak. Think of the relatively late English verb to wing (as in the bird winged its way across the lake and winged words). It would have been odd to have the sequence wing ~ wang ~ wung! I may add that bing “to pile up,” another onomatopoeia, also existed, and its past tense was of course binged. Thus, whatever the distant origin of ding, the verb was strong (ding ~ dang ~ dung), and therefore, nothing objects to its affinity with the noun dung. The vowel alternation followed the rule of ablaut.

The works postdating the OED volume with dung pay special attention to the Old Icelandic noun dyngja “women’s underground quarters” and Old English dung “prison.” It has been suggested that the meaning underlying those words is “a cover.” Modern Icelandic dyngia refers to all kinds of elevated structures: volcanoes, heaps, nests, and so forth. Therefore, it is perhaps more likely that such was also the original sense of both “women’s quarters” and “prison”: people produced an underground structure that stuck out. Some sort of roof over it might exist, but being covered does not seem to have played a role in naming those places.

In sum, dung, it appears, is related to the strong verb ding “to strike.” A dung was something that was piled up with an effort (hence “strike”). Other than that, one could build a dugout and heap earth on top. The structure could be used for all kinds of purposes: from isolated living quarters to a place of confinement.

It may have come as a surprise that dung is related to a verb meaning “to strike,” but language is full of surprises. Here is another one. The German for “dung” is Mist, also a word of great antiquity. Related forms exist all over the Germanic-speaking world and mean “to drizzle” and “urinate.” Its Old English cognate meox has survived (in a changed form, to be sure) only in some British dialects.

Every English speaker learning German asks whether Mist and mist are related. Yes, the root of both nouns means “to drizzle, urinate.” The underlying idea is wetness. Isn’t it amazing how the same root produced “muck,” and “light fog”! But after all, mist is a collection of thin drops, and “urine” seems to be a tolerably good base for both. The substance denoted by German Mist is not necessarily wet, but let us not be too particular when it comes to the development of meaning. (Incidentally, muck also refers to urination!)

Historical phonetics is governed by certain tolerably accurate regularities. Historical semantics is not quite capricious either, but the explorer of meaning encounters many more dangerous corners. Human ingenuity has no limits. Above, we have traced the path of two roots for the words meaning “manure”: Engl. dung and German Mist. One path was unpredictable, the other quite logical. Let us be pleased with what we have. 

POSTSCRIPT

In connection with the most recent post “Boots (or Rather, Shoes) on the Ground” (September 2, 2026) Mr. Nicholas Dobson called my attention to the German word Handschuh “glove,” literally, “hand-shoe.” The word makes it clear that shoe once meant “cover.” It existed all over Germanic, and one of Beowulf’s warriors was called Hond-scio. The history of glove and mitten is also not quite devoid of interest, but at the moment I have nothing to say about it.

See also a most curious comment by Mr. Israel Cohen following that post!.

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Boots (or rather, shoes) on the ground

Few words are harder to trace to their sources than the names of clothing articles. Those names travel with the things to which they belong, and the sources are easily lost sight of. As regards such travels, consider the global success of the word jeans. Today, my object is the etymology of the word shoe, but the origins of boot, stocking, and sock are also worthy of note. They provide a useful background for the main story, and as regards boots on the ground, see the header.

Let me begin with boot. The most detailed entry on this word will be found in Henry Cecil Wyld’s The Universal English Dictionary. He admits that the history and the origin of the word, which seems to have originated in Germanic, are obscure. Late Latin, we are told, probably borrowed it from German, and from Latin it passed into most of the Romance languages. The early senses were “barrel, tun, leather bag” and later “leather flask; bottle.” We are of course interested in boot “covering for the feet and legs.” Here German Bottich “tub, barrel” (from bottaha) and (!) English body turn up in the entry, along with Old English byden “tub, barrel” and byte “leather bottle, wine-skin.” Thus, boot refers us to body and bottle.

Are all those words related? Perhaps. But surprisingly, at body, the same excellent dictionary makes no mention of the words listed above. The etymology of body is said to be very uncertain. “Its usage and origin may be exclusively English.” Some authorities connect body and Greek, apotēkē “storehouse” (think of Engl. apothecary). Most other sources state bluntly that the origin of the word is unknown.

Unfortunately, the entry on bottle sheds no additional light on boots. It is a pity that some dictionary makers do not check their cross references. Be that as it may, the entry on boot gives us food for thought. According to the chronology available to us, Engl. boot was borrowed from Old Norse. Perhaps so, but this fact tells us nothing about the distant origin of the word. So much for boot (a meager harvest). Apparently, it referred to a receptacle, rather than a covering.

Stocking is outwardly clear: stock + ing, but what is –ing? Our revered authority Walter W. Skeat says: “Stocking is a diminutive form of stock, used as short of nether-stock. … stock means a piece or stump, a piece cut off.” Stock is clear, but a diminutive suffix –ing does not and did not exist! Stockling would have been perfect, but stocking? What then does “a diminutive form of stock” mean? The word has been in use since the sixteenth century, and we could expect its structure to be more transparent. Great expectations: it is hard to disagree with the verdict “of obscure formation.”

Sock is both less and more problematic that the words briefly discussed above. The word and its cognates have existed all over Germanic since the oldest period. The word emerged with the sense “light shoe” and only much later developed into “half-hose.” The source is undoubtedly Latin soccus, from Greek. Dictionaries say: “of Oriental origin” or more precisely, “from Asia Minor.” Somebody somewhere in (?) Asia Minor invented this foot covering, gave it an easily remembered name, and it spread all over half of Europe.

By this time, it won’t come as a surprise that the origin of shoe remains partly undiscovered. Shoe is a Common Germanic word. It occurred even in the fourth-century Gothic text of the New Testament, where it meant “sandal.” Incidentally, sandal, like sock, is, most probably, a word of Asiatic origin!

The oldest form of shoe must have been skōh-, and numerous attempts have been made to detect its ancient root. An old verb meaning “to go” sounds somewhat like the root of skōh-, but it is most unlikely that a name designating a covering for the foot should have been derived from the idea of moving or going. Then there was a word meaning “cover, surround,” whose sense fits the idea of “shoe” much better, and some authorities cite this word (though without much enthusiasm) as the source of shoe. The reference is not specific enough: a shoe is not a kerchief or an overcoat, and this etymology does not sound like an ideal solution to our problem.

What was meant by that ancient skōh? What kind of “footwear” (to use the commercial term that Henry Cecil Wyld detested) did it designate? “Sandal” is fine for the biblical text, but the speakers of Gothic, Old Norse, or Old English certainly did not wear sandals. We can notice some similarity between soccus, the afore mentioned etymon (source) of sock, and skōh-. If shoe and sock are indeed related, we are back in Asia but not an inch closer to the origin of the words that interest us. We may, if we wish, reconstruct the ancient root of both, but only historical linguists will be happy with this result. As always, we want to know the human impulse behind word formation. For instance, sweater owes its form to sweat, hood is related to hat, and shirt is a cognate of short, but shoe seems to be a migratory word, a loan from afar, whose etymology is now beyond reach.

Such is the situation with most articles of clothing. Look up jacket, coat, cloak, and so forth! It is also amazing that nearly all such words in English are loans from foreign languages. And this is true not only of such exotic words as chemise and kimono. Cap (of somewhat unclear origin) is from Latin, dress is from French, breeches from Irish, pants ultimately from Italian, sandals from Greek (and there, most probably, from Asia), and so it goes. The word is either foreign or of undiscovered origin, and when it is foreign, its derivation in the lending language is often also obscure. Such is the linguistic price for globalization.

A curious detail. An inherited name for “shoe” existed: Old English hrifeling, Old Norse hriflingr, Latin crepisculum, and Greek krēpís, with broad connections elsewhere, but, surprisingly, just this ancient word has not stayed even in the conservative Modern Icelandic. The ways of language are hard to predict, and a historical linguist’s shoe is too often on the other foot.

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I had to look (them up)

When I’m reading or listening to a book, I sometimes find myself momentarily drifting away from what the author is saying and worrying about words and phrases I encounter. If there is a pen nearby, I’ll make a note, saving the word or phrase for a quiet afternoon of researching. 

For example, a writer discussing literary criticism was complaining about “smarty-pants intellectuals.” I could see why the genteel author chose “smarty-pants” rather than “smart-ass intellectuals,” but why is the seat of smarts in the seat of the pants? And where do “smarty-pants” and “smart-ass” come from? “Smarty-pants,” it turns out, is attested from the early 1900s as a term for a know-it-all and “smarty” (sans pants) goes back to the mid-1800s. It shows up in Mark Twain, for example, where Tom Sawyer refers to a “St. Louis smarty” who thinks too highly of himself. Smart-ass comes later, arising in the mid-twentieth century and similarly referring to a smug display of knowledge. Perhaps it comes from the earlier smart-alecky, which was used in the 19^th century.

In another book, a thriller featuring a lawyer who gave up her career as a mixed-martial artist, I fixed on the phrase “cleaned my clock.” It’s a bit of American slang referring to a thorough physical thrashing, and by extension any overwhelming defeat. Since we talk about the face of a clock, the underlying metaphor here is clear: a sound defeat, say in the boxing ring, could involve having one’s features rearranged. The phrase sometimes showed up as “fixed one’s clock” or “stopped one’s clock”, and the earliest example in the Oxford English Dictionary, from 1895, describes an avicide:

The man approached the bird and struck it a deadly blow with the stock of his gun…‘Old Frank [sc. a heron] ha’ done me out of many an eel—the warmint—but I ha’ cleaned his clock now.’

The present-day meaning is thankfully less fatal.

In a review of another noirish suspense novel, I spotted the phrase “hard-bitten,” used to describe a world-weary protagonist. Is it supposed to refer to someone who has been bitten hard by life? It turns out that “hard-bitten” was first used of dogs that were resolute in their biting, a usage from the 17^th century. By the early 19^th century, the phrase could refer to people who were “tough,” “resolute,” “hardened by experience,” or “cynical.” A citation from 1819 refers to “Some hard-bitten fellow [who] assailed the orator with a line from Swift, ‘Fine words—I wonder where you stole ’em’,” and another from 1857 described some cricket players as “such hard-bitten, wiry, whiskered fellows, that their young adversaries felt rather desponding [sic] as to the result of the morrow’s match.” 

Hard-bitten carries a sense of having been chewed up by life, and I wondered how it compared with “hard-boiled.” That phrase, of course, originated with eggs, and has been used that way since the late 16^th century (and later in the 19^th century to refer to hard-boiled peas, hard-boiled pudding, and hard-boiled dumplings). In the early 19^th century, we find ideas referred to as “hard-boiled” and, by the late 19^th century, people as well, including those who were tough, cynical, ruthless, or callous. By 1928, we find examples like this blurb from Century Magazine: “A hard-boiled, two-fisted, super-sleuth of the secret service tells the story of his adventurous dealings with the underworld of all nations.” I think of the contrast this way: hard-boiled is cynical toughness and a world-weary detachment; hard-bitten is a toughness arising through struggles. 

One final puzzler (for now) is the phrase “eat your heart out.” Cannibalistic zombies aside, it can be a boastful expression (“eat your heart out, bro”) or can be used to indicate actual grief. In English it originally meant the latter: to suffer pangs of longing, regret, and envy, a usage that goes back to the 16^th century and seems patterned after a Greek expression. So we find this from 1651: “A man that eats out his heart with worldly cares, will never sleep an happy sleep.” And in this example from 1707, without the out, we find: “He eat his valiant Heart to see the Prey He thought his own, so bravely snatch’d away.” By the late 1950s, a U.S. variant had emerged indicating that the addressee is likely to be annoyed or envious, as in this from 1958: “The boy, after noting my pained expression after his good run, yelled over to me: ‘Eat your heart out, coach.'” The meaning and point of view of the phrase has shifted from an indication of anguish to an expression of triumph. 

A productive afternoon’s research.

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Translation, not imitation: what legal educators can learn from schools

Teaching is something of a family profession in our household. My dad was a primary school headteacher, my mum was a head of department and teacher in further education, and my sisters teach in primary and secondary education. You can probably imagine the scene around the dining-room table: conversations about lesson plans, reluctant learners, brilliant activities, difficult classes, and the occasional spirited disagreement about what counts as “good teaching” and who has it harder.

When I became a lecturer in 2017, I was surprised that teaching approaches commonly used in schools were sometimes viewed negatively in a university setting. Structured and participatory activities were described, not always approvingly, as “too PGCert”: too carefully designed, too heavily facilitated and, occasionally, too much fun to be considered sufficiently substantial. Perhaps this reflects how we imagine university teaching, with the lecturer as specialist, the student as adult, and the work as advanced and intellectually rigorous. Against that backdrop, an activity that looks playful, colourful, or highly structured is often dismissed before we consider what it is actually asking students to do.

Yet, to borrow a saying many of us first learned at primary school, we should not judge a book by its cover. A lesson involving movement, conversation, or a creatively designed task may look less serious than a lecture or traditional seminar discussion, but that does not mean the intellectual work beneath it is less demanding. An activity may require learners to research unfamiliar material, distinguish between competing ideas, identify what matters, communicate it clearly, respond to questions, and revise their understanding. Fun and substance are not opposites. An activity can be enjoyable precisely because students are actively engaged in a challenging process.

This deserves attention because many of the intellectual processes developed through school activities remain central to legal education. The Law Subject Benchmark Statement emphasises critical thinking, evaluation, problem-solving, and communication, while across the national curriculum learners are also asked to reason, compare, justify, and evaluate. The level, context and disciplinary demands are clearly different, but the processes themselves do not become irrelevant when a student enters university. The challenge is therefore to separate the purpose of an activity from the form in which it first appears.

Consider the “marketplace” activity used in school teaching. Groups research different parts of a topic and create a market stall from which they share what they have learned. Some students remain at the stall to explain their findings, while others visit the rest of the marketplace, gather information and return to teach it to their group. On the surface, the activity may appear informal, perhaps even theatrical, but beneath that surface students are researching, selecting, synthesising, explaining, questioning, and taking responsibility for one another’s learning.

Those processes have an obvious place in legal education, but the school activity cannot simply be copied and pasted into a law seminar. Transferred unchanged, even a valuable activity may feel patronising, artificial, or disconnected from the discipline. That is a legitimate concern, but it is an argument for thoughtful adaptation rather than for dismissing the approach altogether. The answer is not imitation, but translation.

Translation begins by asking three questions: what intellectual process sits beneath the activity, where does that process arise in legal learning, and how can the activity be redesigned for the students, subject, and level of study in front of us? The marketplace might, for example, become a client-interview carousel or a legal networking fair. Different groups could examine judgments, statutory provisions, or competing perspectives on a contested issue before deciding what others genuinely need to understand. Students moving between groups might be required not simply to collect information, but to identify tensions between authorities, record points of uncertainty, and return to their original group to construct a reasoned position or advise a client.

The translated activity would retain the research, synthesis, peer explanation, and shared responsibility of the original, while introducing the ambiguity, authority, and contestability that characterise legal reasoning. It might look very different from the school activity that inspired it, but that is not a weakness. What has been transferred is not the activity itself, but its underlying purpose.

The best dining-room-table conversations in my family are rarely about copying exactly what somebody else has done. They are about understanding what made an idea work, identifying what it enabled learners to do, and wondering what it might look like in another classroom. School teaching does not provide ready-made activities that can simply be imported into legal education. It offers something more valuable: an invitation to reconsider what intellectually rigorous teaching can look like.

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Tarry or hurry?

It is surprising how similar the verbs in the title sound, though they are antonyms: tarry means “to linger, delay,” while hurry refers to haste. One even suspects that there is some affinity (hidden attraction) between them, and perhaps there is, but on the surface they are quite different, except that both are probably native formations.

I’ll begin with hurry and quote two statements from Walter W. Skeat. This is what he wrote in 1885: “I derive this as Wedgwood does, from the imitative word to hurr, a Scandinavian word meaning to whir or whiz. I suggest that this hurr is a mere variant of whirr. I now find that Nares actually gives the verb to whurry, with the sense of ‘hurry’; with two examples. This clinches the etymology.” Hensleigh Wedgwood, it will be noted, was Skeat’s predecessor, and Robert Nares (1753-1829) is the author of a famous glossary.

Alas, nothing ever “clinches the etymology.” Here is Skeat’s final statement (1911). The abbreviations have been expanded. For sb. (that is, substantive) I used noun. “Not allied to harry. Formed from an older base hurr-. Like skurr-y from skir. Middle English horien, to hurry….. + Middle Swedish hurra, to swing, whirl round; Swedish dialectal hurra, to whirl, hurr, noun, hurry, haste. Compare Danish hurre, to hum, whir; Icelandic hurr, a noise; Middle High German hurren, to move softly. See Hurland compare whir, whiz, of similar imitative origin; whence whurry, to hurry….” Hurl is said to be perhaps of Scandinavian origin.

The volume of the OED with hurry appeared in 1899, and there the etymological section on this word is considerably more cautious than in Skeat. The same is true of the modern OED online. Hurry does not antedate late Middle English, even though a dubious earlier instance has been found. The Century Dictionary mentions hurr and whirr, “the last word well combining the two notions of rapid motion and buzzing sound.” The obsolete verb hurr meant “to buzz, hum.” The sources I have consulted also mention hurly-burly and sometimes hurrah, both of them referring to the same emotional sphere. In sum, Wedgwood’s old idea seems to have withstood the test of time.

In Germanic, numerous words mean “to hurry, to make speed.” Such are, for instance, Engl. rush, dash, and scurry. All three are also “emotional.” But a few members of this family have a convoluted history. This is true of Engl. haste and German eilen. As a rule, if the verb is not onomatopoeic, the sense “move at high speed” tends to go back to the idea of doing something with force. This fact may throw light on the question even professional language historians hardly ever ask. If English, German, and Danish already had several verbs meaning “hurry,” why coin its synonym? The answer may not be too far to seek. Instinctively, people want words to have transparent meanings. Grunt, kick, push, and their likes answer this demand, and speakers keep producing such words. Rush is iconic, and so are its German cousins rutschen and rütteln. To coin and remember them is easy. The same holds for words like jig, jog, and push. Language was probably iconic at its inception, and it partly remains such to this day. So much for hurry, which by its shape suggests the idea of moving fast.

Tarry

The Italian word chiaroscuro means, as Byron rendered it, “a clear obscure.” Clear obscure may serve as an excellent label for the history of the verb tarry. This verb has been obsolete in British English for a long time, but it is still alive in American English. Tarry surfaced in the fourteenth century in the forms tarien and terien “to provoke, worry, vex.” The original OED has a long note on the history and etymology of the verb, and so does the OED online. The latter cites numerous opinions on the history of the verb but does not provide references. My database contains only one important title (a paper by Leo Spitzer) and nothing postdating 1947. Apparently, the history of the verb has been given up as hopelessly controversial.

The difficulty is obvious. As just mentioned, the oldest known senses of tarry are “to worry, vex,” while today it means “to delay, linger.” The only solution, supposedly, reconciling those senses, has been known for a long time: it is believed that the English verb was influenced by Old French targer “to delay,” related to Latin tardus “tardy.” But don’t the paths of “vex” and “tardy” cross?

Tarry “worry, vex” has numerous cognates outside English (especially in Slavic and Baltic. Note, for example, Russian drat’ “to pull or strip with force.”) Such verbs also mean “rub; tie a knot” and even “torment”—obviously, figurative senses. We seem to be dealing here with a series of words related to labor activities, and all or most of those activities (cf. rubbing and tying knots) are slow. I would like to suggest that the oldest attested senses of tarry “worry, vex” are late, figurative (worry itself once meant “strangle, choke”!). It may also be of interest to remember that linger has the same root as long. Tarry, I assume, emerged as a verb denoting a protracted action. It is of course possible that Old French targer crossed the path of its English lookalike and reinforced its original sense.

Ernest Weekley summed up the problem of tarry most succinctly: where the senses match, phonetics fails us, and where the phonetic correspondences are perfect, the senses diverge. However, if, in light of the multiple cognates, we assume that the earliest recorded Middle English sense of tarry (“to vex, harass”) is late, going back to “perform a difficult time-consuming process,” “delay” will fit the phonetic and semantic mosaic quite well. And did tarry ever interact with hurry, so that they began to look like cousins? That we’ll never know.

I have said more than once that a conscientious researcher fears two things: to say something trivial (then there was no need to say it) or to say something new (then perhaps the idea is wrong). In each scenario, the researcher may become the target of severe criticism or ridicule. Have I solved the age-long riddle of tarry? It is not for me to decide. In any case, though like a medieval archer, I shot my bolt, I tried to make haste slowly.

POSTSCRIPT

Once again, my thanks are due to Professor Wraith, who noted my wrong division of the Russian word medved’ “bear.” See the blog “On big and little foxes.” The correct division is med(v)-ed’, that is, “honey-eater.”

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Climate Adaptation – who will we become in a warming world?

Climate change has become an everyday reality. Communities, businesses, and nations are being battered by impacts that would have seemed impossibly apocalyptic a decade ago: unprecedented heat waves, destructive storms, crop failures, floods, and wildfires. Global action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is too slow, and we are likely to breach 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels as soon as 2050. As the global temperature increases, so does the likelihood of exceeding tipping points, bringing further environmental destabilisation with serious consequences for all forms of life.

The causes and physical consequences of this predicament have been exhaustively established by scientists and modellers. The possibilities for decarbonisation, and its challenges, are also well covered in the academic literature. Far less examined are the implications of plausible climate change trajectories for human societies and cultures.

In Climate Adaptation, forthcoming in Oxford Intersections, we seek to offer a thought-provoking body of work from across disciplines, including from the humanities, social sciences, arts, and from Indigenous scholarship. Our central question is “Who will we become?” In seeking answers, Climate Adaptation highlights opportunities to rethink our relationships with one another, with knowledge, and with the world. We seek to stimulate new ways of thinking and taking action for greater resilience to climate instability. Here are a few of the approaches our contributors are taking.

Learning from the past

In a world in which unprecedented levels of production and consumption have become normalised, it is difficult (but necessary) to consider how current economic and social systems could be destabilised by climate change, and how humans might respond. We can learn much from the past. Our contributors explore topics such as:

How have Indigenous cultures survived and sustained themselves despite massive environmental, political, and social change?

What lessons can be drawn from history and prehistory, of the experiences of societies that faced climatic and environmental shocks, especially those that adjusted and thrived?

Rethinking governance, justice, and responsibility

Many existing institutions, laws, and governance arrangements are unprepared for the rate and scale of climate change and are scrambling to adjust. We explore how adaptation at all scales—from local to global—can be restorative and equitable, especially with regards to future generations and those that are already structurally disadvantaged. What transformations are necessary in dominant institutions, organisations, and systems of governance?

Our contributors necessarily think boldly, as addressing these questions will require not simply modifying existing systems, but, in many cases, transforming them to become fit for a changing world.

The importance of place

While the effects are global, climate change is by its very nature a localised experience. Each place, and the people of that place, are impacted in distinctive ways. In many climate-impacted locations, communities and organisations are already taking action designed for their needs and circumstances, often collaborating across governance scales. Our contributors explore topics such as:

What can be learnt from innovative approaches (often at local and regional scales) for addressing the immediate impacts and long-term challenges?

How can place-based communities work collaboratively with central and local governments to lead or help shape their own climate responses?

Between optimism and catastrophe

Public discussions about climate futures are generally framed between two extremes. In the optimistic view, it is possible to achieve a sufficiently radical transformation of global politics, businesses, infrastructures, technologies, and behaviours to halve global GHG emissions in the handful of years before 2030, and for these to continue to drop rapidly to net zero over the following 20 years. In the pessimistic view, this is unachievable and we are thus facing a dystopian world dominated by conflict, mass migrations, hunger, disease, and despair. The former now appears to be unlikely; the latter, unimaginably terrifying. Neither perspective provides a way to explore the space in between extremes.

Our experiences of climate change are already starting to reveal its social, economic, and cultural implications. Our contributors explore its likely ramifications, along with ways to envision and create positive narratives of alternate futures. Is our ability to transform and adapt hampered by our capacity to imagine different ways of being?

Climate Adaptation, forthcoming in Oxford Intersections, explores the fundamental question of we will become—individually and collectively, locally and globally—when old certainties melt away, and new realities have become the everyday experience.

Leading the commissioning of articles on these questions is our brilliant team of section editors which encompasses scholars from the global south and global north, Indigenous scholars, early-career and seasoned scholars, and multiple disciplines and knowledge systems.

Climate Adaptation will be launched in Fall 2026. If you’re interested in getting involved, let us know.

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Abraham Lincoln and the election of 1860 [timeline] 

The presidential election of 1860 was, in the words of eminent Civil War scholar James McPherson, “undeniably the most important – and pivotal – in all of American History.” But the election, which culminated with the election of Abraham Lincoln after a chaotic campaign which saw parties disintegrate, dark horses flourish, and secessionists plot the undoing of the republic itself,

Explore the timeline below to follow along on some of the key moments in the nation’s most momentous campaign.

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On big and little foxes

This is a story about how the fox got its name. I discussed the word fox ten years ago (see the post for March 23, 2016), but today I have more to say about the subject.

Rudyard Kipling devoted many wonderful pages to elephants, camels, porcupines, and other animals in his Just So Stories but neglected the fox. Yet over the centuries and millennia, no other beast has engaged people’s imagination more than the fox. Wikipedia has an entry on Joel Chandler Harris’s 1880 book about the Br’er Rabbit cycle (Br’er “brother”), but the author of the entry did not mention the readership of that book abroad. Yet it so happened that in 1936 the book was translated into Russian, became immensely popular, and I grew up reading it.

Surprisingly, during my many years of teaching folklore at the University of Minnesota, I don’t remember meeting anyone who knew those tales. It may be different in the south. The fictional Uncle Remus was a slave from Alabama entertaining the owner’s son. This context is revolting, but the tales are wonderful. In the twentieth century, researchers of oral tradition studied African folklore very well, and some sceptics’ idea that Harris fabricated the tales was refuted once and for all. Analogs of those animal tales are known very well, though in Africa, the rabbit’s counterpart turned out to be the antelope.

Br’er Rabbit is a brilliant trickster. His main enemy is Br’er Fox, whom he always outwits. Yet elsewhere in the wide world of folklore, it is the fox that emerges as the prototypical trickster. In the oldest Indo-European languages, the word for “fox” is most often feminine (so, for example, in Greek, Latin, and Slavic, though not in Sanskrit), as opposed to wolf and bear. The same holds for some other language groups. It is unclear why, but Slavic provides a classic example of the situation. Thus, the Russian for “fox” is lisa (stress on the second syllable). The final vowel a marks the feminine gender, and the ending was cut off from this noun, to produce the fox’s masculine counterpart; hence lis, a dead born creation.

Why does the word for “fox” so often belong to the feminine gender? The old hypothesis—that the fox “lacked courage” and for that reason was thought of as a woman—lacks merit. Oral tradition depicts women as dangerous, nearly invincible warriors and certainly not as “the weaker sex.” We also read that great wars were fought on account of women, who either provoked deadly strife or were abducted. As matters stand, we have no answer to the question about why fox ended up as a feminine noun. In one of the Grimms’ tales, we encounter Mr. Fox and Mrs. Fox, and Mr. Fox has nine tails.

Be that as it may, the Germanic form for “fox” was indeed feminine. The noun in the text of the fourth-century Gothic Bible (the oldest long text in Germanic) is fauho (au had the value of o in Engl. fox). In English, s was added to the root foh-, the result being fohs, that is, fox. That s marked the masculine gender! For instance, one of the Old Icelandic cognates of the animal name bear (Old English bera) is bersi (that is, ber-s-i). To repeat, once s was added to the old root foh, the fox became a he. (This was a more complicated process than the one in Russian: see above!)

The great protagonist of the German/Dutch/French epic Reineke Fox ~ Reintje (Reinaert) de Vos ~ Roman de Renart is a male, and a very aggressive one. (Note the Dutch form Vos: we will need it below.) In the spirit of medieval romances, he, we presume, is perhaps the queen’s (the lioness’s) lover. The great William Caxton, whose command of Dutch was near-native, wrote a delightful English version of the tale. It was published in 1481, but two Modern English versions of it exist.

There is no grammatical gender in English. Yet the fox may perhaps be categorized as a male, because it has a female counterpart, namely vixen, though in our linguistic intuition, fox and vixen are hardly connected. Also, I think we more often hear about a vixen (if we at all do) as about a cantankerous woman, a shrew, than about an animal. Yet vixen is originally a she-fox. If vixen began with an f, the tenuous tie between it and fox may have been retained.

German Füchsin throws some light on vixen, whose earliest recorded form was fyxen (indeed, an adjective “belonging to a fox,” rather than a noun). The main puzzle is of course why vixen begins with a v. The Dutch for “fox” is vos, and we can see that its v is not accidental. In Dutch, initial f was voiced regularly, but in England this change affected only some dialects in the Southwest. A few of those forms made their way into the dialect that became the foundation of Modern “Standard” English. Hence vat, veneer, vial, and a few more words that could have been expected to begin with an f.

The last (but the main!) question is, naturally, about the origin (etymology) of Gothic fauho, that is, foho. According to most authorities, light comes from words like Russian pukh “a covering of fluffy feathers” (Germanic f regularly corresponds to non-Germanic p: cf. my perennial example, Latin pater versus English father). A congener of pukh is a Sanskrit word meaning “tail”. In light of such cognates the fox emerges as an animal with a bushy tail. Few other suggestions are hardly more convincing.

There is only one point I may add here. Dictionaries usually say that coinages like “fluffy” or “having a long tail” are taboo words. Animals were often given names to deceive their bearers, because if one said (pronounced) wolf or bear, the beast might take the utterance for an invitation and arrive. But why should “fluffy” or “long-tailed” be taboo names? They are mere descriptions. When in Russian the bear is called medved “one knowing honey,” that is indeed a taboo name, but “long-tailed” or “fluffy”? After all, people had to call the fox something! To be sure, fox may not even be an Indo-European word. If so, its origin will remain hidden from us for all times. But such is often the situation with ancient words.

POSTSCRIPT: A QUESTION AND A COMMENT

QUESTION. What is the origin of the German noun Ereignis “event, occurrence”? This word has a bizarre history. The verb ereignen “to put in sight; present before the eyes” goes back to Old High German irougen. The root of the word is ouge “eye” (Modern Gernat Auge). This irougen later became eröugnen and still later ereignen. Today, ereignen looks like a verb related to eigen “one’s own,” but despite this association, the word managed to reteam its old meaning (-nis is a suffix in the noun Ereignis).

COMMENT. Professor Gavin Wraith cited a Hittite noun for “libation” in connection with my discussion of sp-words (see the post “Supper with an Etymologist” for August 12, 2026). I cannot judge whether the connection is valid, but I would not be surprised if here we indeed had another sp-word for sipping, supping, and the like.

_{Featured image: Brer Rabbit turnt ‘er aloose. Public domain via Picryl.}

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The right-wing revolution is guaranteed to continue long past Trump

Analysts are taking the pulse of the MAGA movement, seeking to understand whether it can sustain its momentum without its godfather, Donald Trump. In fact, the right-wing movement energetically was rolling along in the early 2010s, before the MAGA label emerged and while Trump was starring in The Apprentice.

In the late 2000s, a group of right-wing thinkers broke off from traditional free-market conservatives and the small-government Tea Party movement. They developed instead a new focus on social issues and organized a careful, often unseen, movement to drive change by gaining power over key political institutions. Donald Trump had little—if anything—to do with the genesis of this movement, but he was extraordinarily successful in riding it to the presidency, driving historic changes in what government does and how it does it.

Trump might slowly fade from the political scene and national commentators might debate whether MAGA still lives. But the right-wing idea factory is continuing to work, especially in state and local governments. It is generating a large and ongoing collection of issues, guaranteeing that right-wing ideas will continue to live on through an ongoing campaign for political power and influence.

Here are some of the reasons why.

1. The money pipeline is open wider. Until recently, donors had to obey strict contribution limits to candidates. Political parties could collect piles of cash, but they couldn’t coordinate their advertising with the candidates. In a June 30 decision, the US Supreme Court ruled that donors could funnel money to the parties and the parties, in turn, could spend as much as they liked in direct coordination with candidates. That decision effectively blew off contribution ceilings. At least for the time being, that gives Republicans a huge advantage, since the party has more than $100 million more in the bank than Democrats. This will give the right-wing tremendous additional fuel for its ideas.


2. Transgender bans get the green light. Idaho and West Virginia have both enacted bans against transgender players on women’s and girls’ sports teams. The Supreme Court ruled that the states could indeed establish such bans. That’s sure to ignite more debates in more states about where they can draw the line on LGBTQ+ rights. The Court didn’t decide whether it was permissible for states to specifically allow transgender individuals to compete on the teams. That issue is sure to come before the Court, along with more tussles about how far the states can go in dealing with LGBTQ+ rights.


3. Religion creeps into the classroom. In 2022, the Supreme Court ruled that a Washington state school board was wrong in disciplining a former football coach, who knelt in postgame prayer in the middle of the field. That set off a scramble throughout the country to push religion into other school programs. Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas require local schools to display the Ten Commandments in classrooms. Texas went even further by building Bible study into the curriculum, beginning with Noah’s Ark in the first grade and David and Goliath in second grade. How far will they be able to go?


4. State policy upsets traditional higher education policies. Florida is leading a broad revolution against what colleges and universities teach and how they are run. Gender studies programs are gone. So are DEI initiatives. A “back to the classics” movement has sprung up in a bid to push out what the right-wing sees as the “woke” bias in the classroom. Tenured professors undergo new, tough, regular reviews. Undocumented students are blocked from enrolling. Similar initiatives are rolling out across the country, led by Ohio, Tennessee, and Texas, all designed to uproot what are viewed as powerful liberal forces in higher education.


5. The fight to prohibit abortion is red-hot. Medications, not surgical procedures, account for nearly two-thirds of all abortions in the US. That compares with just a third in 2014, and it scrambles the efforts from the right to shut down abortions. When abortions take place in a clinic, it’s relatively easy to end them: close the clinic. But medication-induced abortions are far more difficult to prevent. Women can obtain a prescription and take the drugs at home. Some physicians prescribe the drugs remotely and mail them to patients, and that makes it possible to circumvent abortion bans in 41 states. Louisiana indicted a New York doctor for mail-order abortion medications, and a Texas judge fined a physician $100,000 for, the judge said, prescribing pills to a Dallas-area woman. New York countered that its “shield law” protected the doctor. The US Supreme Court might have overturned Roe v. Wade, but the abortion battles in the states are far from over.


6. Policy leaders are campaigning to make all public employees at-will. The Trump administration won a big victory with the Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. Slaughter, in which the Court ruled that the president could fire members of independent regulatory commissions. The administration followed the Court’s decision with a new regulation that would allow agency heads to fire employees if they didn’t meet “suitability and fitness” standards, as the officials chose to define them. The Trump administration says the changes are necessary to make public employees more accountable. In fact, they push accountability from effectiveness in administering the law to loyalty to the president. The decisions might seem subtle, but they are very likely to shift the balance of powers within the nation’s democratic system, in favor of the president at the expense of the Congress.

The list could easily go on—and Trump has had little to do with most of them. They are only loosely connected with the national MAGA movement, but they all have long legs in the states. And, put together, they point to why the right-wing idea factory will continue to anchor a big movement in American politics.

_{Feature image: Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash.}

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Supper with an etymologist

It does not require much philological preparation to guess that supper is a word containing the root sup– and the suffix –er. Yet in the days of King Alfred and even much later, the inhabitants of Anglo-Saxon England had no such word. People spoke of the morning meal, midday meal, and evening meal. The word for “meal” was mete “meat,” whose ancient meaning “food; meal” is still heard in the idiom meat and drink, the compound sweetmeats “candies, etc.,” and the obsolete greenmeat “fodder.” As far as I can judge, sweetmeats is a dead word in American English (that is, no one even understands it), while greenmeat is so little remembered that even my computer does not recognize it. Be that as it may, supper exists (see the header!) and has been an English word since the thirteenth century. It was borrowed from French, but the root of the French noun is Germanic. This means that at one time the speakers of Old French took over the word sup from their neighbors, while later, those neighbors added a Romance suffix to it! Quite a journey, but such hybrids are not too rare.

Now, what is sup? Never mind sup for “what’s up.” Sup means “to sip,” and it seems to occur only in the context of imbibing alcohol. Yet it is an old “respectable” word with well-known cognates, for instance, Dutch zuipen, German saufen, and Icelandic súpa. Once we begin to wonder where sup– came from, we are sucked into a vortex of similar-sounding verbs. I used and even highlighted suck for a purpose: this verb is part of a sizable group of s-words, referring to liquids. All of them seem to be “obscurely related” to one another, as dictionaries characterize this situation.

Sup is not the same as sip, and neither is a synonym of suck, but the affinity is obvious. Let us first look at sap (from which we have sapling). The word is old and has cognates all over the Germanic-speaking world (for example, German Saft “juice”). Etymologists, naturally, reconstruct the most ancient form, common to several languages, and come up with the ancient noun sapam or sappam.

However, the sounds refuse to play the expected game, because we also remember Latin sapa “grape juice, boiled until it is thick” (Italian sapa or saba is the continuation of that word), obviously a member of the same family, but it too has p in the root, and it is well-known that Latin p should correspond to Germanic f (as happens in Latin pater versus English father). Another borrowing? Who borrowed what from whom? The most cautions sources admit that the origin of the word is unclear. Indeed, it seems that we have a group of words, either sound-imitative or somehow (how?) reflecting the words’ sense, that is, sound-symbolic. All of them refer to the way we deal with liquids: sip, sap, sup, and sop.

It pays off to have a look at those verbs individually. So far, we have examined only sup. Sip is a late fifteenth-century addition to English. Similar verbs exist elsewhere in Germanic. Etymologists seem to agree that sip, though “allied” to sup, is a weaker version of it. This verdict sounds convincing, because sip and sup do seem to be cognate in at least some way. Can seep throw light on this group? Not really. Old English sipian, along with its lookalikes with a long vowel in the root, have been recorded, but none of them would have become seep. Even if the progenitor of sip were found, we would still remain with the same group of similar-sounding verbs describing the movement of liquids.

There also is sop “a piece of bread dipped in liquid” (and compare milksop “a timid male, a pushover”!), which is universally recognized as a member of the family we are discussing, even though its ultimate origin is as obscure as of that of the verbs we have examined. Sip, seep, sop, sup…. Finally, what about sap “juice”? It has a secure German cognate Saft (the same meaning (f in Saft goes back to p, and final t was added to saf only in the fourteenth century). A good old word, but it is unable to solve our puzzle. We should resign ourselves to the conclusion made above: all the words belonging to the complex s-p with a vowel in the middle in some way imitate the noise made in the process of drinking.

Though we realize that multiplying the words belonging to this group will hardly result in a revelation, perhaps soup is worth mentioning here. Sop, we remember, was borrowed into English from French in the seventeenth century, and the story of soup sounds familiar: Latin suppa, the ancestor of soup, seems to be a word of Germanic origin! I am happy to report that so is soap.

Incidentally, Latin also had the word sapor “taste, flavor,” which (by way of French) ended up as English savor. To repeat: the words describing the “activity” of the mouth tend to depend on the complex sp– not only in Germanic but also outside it. The British scholar John Rupert Firth (1890-1960) was especially interested in such complexes (he called them prosodemes, a rather unfortunate label), but though he has, or at least had, a sizable following at home, he is little known in the US and elsewhere, which is a pity.

Once we become aware of the “mouthy prosodeme” sp-, we are beginning to wonder whether spit, spew, and even speak belong to our story. No doubt, sp- is at least partly sound-imitative, and once it established itself, it acquired a symbolic meaning, and many words, vaguely belonging to the same sphere, came into being. Since people spit and “sup” in the same way all over the world, it is no wonder that we have quite a few verbs sounding alike even in unrelated languages. A supper with an etymologist is rich but leaves you hungry. Sorry!

POSTSCRIPT: A question and a comment

QUESTION. What is known about the etymology of the word core?

The answer is: “Next to nothing.” The word surfaced in the early fifteenth century in the form we still have today. Its earliest recorded sense was also familiar: “the core of an apple”. The word has always been spelled with final e, which indicates that this sound was not mute. The French word for “heart” did not have this e. Core supplanted the dialectal (northern) word colk (the same meaning). But both core and colk also referred to what is today called coke, another dialectal word of unknown origin. One wonders who needed a special little-known word for the core of a fruit! Obviously, we are dealing with a regionalism, a technical term, whose origin we’ll probably never be able to discover. The fact that core sounded somewhat like French cœur “heart” may have contributed to its longevity (mere guessing). The verdict remains: “Of unknown origin,” and it is to be regretted that some dictionaries do not make this verdict sufficiently clear.

A Lover’s Complaint

A correspondent who is very particular about good usage was shocked to read a politician’s phrase less than fulsome information, in which fulsome means “full.” Many people like language history, but no one wants to be part of it. Fulsome did once mean “full,” but then “deteriorated” and stayed mainly as part of the phrase fulsome praise, that is, “excessive and insincere praise.” However, language has always changed under the influence of the uneducated, who don’t care whether what they say is correct or wrong from professors’ point of view. For many years, most of our young people have been reading only pulp fiction and one another’s emails. If troublesome means “full of trouble,” and if the main epithet for all situations is awesome, then fulsome obviously means “quite full.” This change has been going on for decades. Too bad! The same man dislikes the pronunciation gerrymandering with g, as in get. Incidentally Governor Elbridge Gerry did pronounce his last name with hard g. Thus, our “correct” pronunciation is wrong! Now those who have never heard the word mispronounce it, without knowing that Mr. Gerry would have been happy. Inscrutable are the ways of language. What is wrong is correct, and what is correct is wrong.

_{Featured image: Photograph by Lewis Hine. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.}

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Gender Justice in these times

I have long admired the example of the late Paul Farmer, MD and anthropologist. He founded Zanmi Lasante (Partners in Health), a global network of community health providers in areas of the world ravaged by social and natural disasters such as poverty, racial, class, gender-based inequality, underdeveloped or war-destroyed public infrastructure, and political violence. The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Tracy Kidder titled his 2003 biography of Farmer Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World (NY: Random House). The phrase “mountains beyond mountains” comes, according to Kidder, from a Haitian proverb, “dèyè mòn gen mòn“, translated as “beyond mountains there are mountains”. As a hiker during my graduate school days on the Central Coast of California, I know the feeling well of gutting out a long uphill switchback, hoping that this was the last leg of the climb, only to see before me another long uphill track—a mountain beyond the mountain I thought I had ascended.

Teaching, researching, and writing about gender—about what gender relations could be in a just world if we put the work into imagining that just world into existence—feels a lot like scrabbling uphill over dangerous terrain only to find mountains beyond the mountains we have already scaled. Especially now, in the current political climate featuring anti “gender ideology” sentiment—willful misunderstandings of what should by now, in the 21st century, be noncontroversial assertions of basic human dignity for women and gender-nonconforming persons of all races, classes, faiths, sexualities, and ethnicities—the paths upward seem strewn with careening boulders.

A decade ago, I wrote an essay comparing queer feminist scholarly endeavors to the task encountered by a feminine counterpart of Sisyphus, using the feminine ending Sisyphe to set her apart from her more famous brother. Sisyphe, unlike Camus’ stoic existentialist Sisyphus, is not happy. She is understandably angry about having to continually roll a rock, made up of the sediment of ages of conscious and unconscious injustices and indignities, up a hill while attending to the already difficult everyday tasks of living. The upshot of this effort, nevertheless, is that Sisyphe has very strong arms. She handles the rock with one hand while doing the bulk of the often-unacknowledged care work of generations with the other.

Ten years after writing about Sisyphe’s strong arms, I realize that my original analogy is underdeveloped. For starters, Sisyphe is not singular. She has many siblings of many genders who move those boulders with strength, resilience, and collective ingenuity. And the boulder of the Greek myth is too contained and controlled to fit the moment. The image of an all-powerful and punitive god manifesting a daily boulder to torture Sisyphus/Sisyphe is too staid, too dignified for what we are experiencing now. In place of the figure of Zeus, modern day Sisyphes must contend with dozens of chaotic, vengeful, and comically incompetent Wile E. Coyotes hurling rocks off cliffs scattershot. It doesn’t help that we can laugh at the bathetic antics of the ranting figure behind the rock. The boulders still do damage to those in their path.

That’s what researching, writing, and teaching about gender often feels like today. Consider the self-satirizing example of a professor in the U.S. being told that he can’t teach a canonical work by Plato in a philosophy class because to read Aristophanes’ speech from circa 400 BCE is to promote “gender ideology” in 2026 CE. The rocks are falling every which way, and it is going to take a large, global community to keep them from crushing the communities, institutions, and principles we cultivate in order to make a better, if not perfect world for ourselves and our global siblings.

Gender Justice, a new topic featured in Oxford Intersections, is one such gathering of Sisyphes—a community of scholars, thinkers, and practitioners who continue the work of rigorous inquiry and analysis of systems of power that derail the quest for livable lives, with dignity and purpose, for all persons across the globe regardless of gender, sexuality, nation, race, disability, social class, faith, and other social markers that are leveraged to produce inequality rather than just relations. Divided into twelve sections like the hours of (an analogue) clock or the months in a year, Gender Justice draws together experts and community-based knowledge workers to provide reasoned and researched work on gender from a wide range of disciplines and interdisciplines: from philosophy, technology studies, politics, law, environmental studies, economics, creative arts, health and mental health, family studies, comparative religion, and intersectional queer and feminist studies. The module is ambitious in its aims but curated carefully to provide readers, researchers, and scholars access to reliable, ethical, and intellectually rigorous insights into the complex and dynamic field of gender studies. We are not hubristic enough to believe that Gender Justice will change the world by mere fact of its publication in June 2026, but we do have hope—a virtue much needed in these times—that the resources it provides will prove useful to the multifaceted conglomeration of thinkers and dreamers who continue to do the work of striving for a world that is more livable, more humane, and more just for all. We’ve got the next mountain, together.

^{Featured image by hdbernd via Unsplash.}

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The kings of etymological rings

It is amazing how many words Indo-European languages have for “supreme ruler; potentate.” In English, the main one is king. But outside English, a host of others exist. Two of the best-known examples are Latin rex (which also meant “priest”; see a variation on this theme below!) and Hindi raja(h). Rex and raja(h) share an ancient root, but those two venerable titles are rather isolated in their royal splendor. Only Irish ríg belongs with them, even though the same root turns up in some other common words—for instance, English right (its cognates are, among others, Latin rēctus and German recht). English region is also related. According to a plausible explanation, the ancient REX traced out the line for cities (!), regiō “region” being the point reached out in a straight line. This explanation will come as a surprise to many.

Engl. rich also belongs to our story, and so does its German cognate reich (the same meaning). In both German and English, this adjective once meant “powerful, great”; hence “having abundant means.” (Power brings wealth, does it not?) The German noun Reich “empire, realm,” as in Hitler’s infamous Third Reich, meant to last a thousand years, returns us to the same root. As regards the names for rulers, we recall the English word basilica “church built on the model of a royal palace,” from Greek. Basileús is still another word for “king.”

Incidentally, the plant name basil goes back to an adjective meaning “royal” (because of its fragrance?), and the name of the fabulous reptile basilisk is a rendition of Greek basilískos. According to Pliny, the name is due to a crown-like spot on the reptile’s head. Since no one has ever seen the creature, we needn’t contest this explanation. By contrast, the lizard basilisk is quite real and in one respect exceptional: it can run on water (hence its other name the Jesus Christ lizard!). The proper name Basil and Slavic Vasily belong here too.

Usually, when the origin of an old Germanic word is discussed, the first form dictionaries cite is Gothic. This is natural, because the Gothic Bible (part of the New Testament) is the earliest long consecutive text we have in any Germanic language. But the Goths did not know the word king! The Gothic for Greek basileús was þiudans (þ has the value of th in Engl. thick). Other Germanic languages retained exact cognates of this noun. For instance, in Old English, it meant “ruler, lord” and even “God.”

Most probably, the Goths had no kings in the sense known later to the rest of the Germanic-speaking world. Þiudans is most often used about Jesus, though some earthly kings are also called thatin their text of the New Testament. It must have been the speakers of West Germanic (to which Old English belongs) that began to use the word kuningaz in the sense familiar to us today (that is, king).

To us king is “a sovereign ruler of the state,” but when this word and its synonyms were coined, the implication must have been approximately “tribal leader,” with the emphasis on tribal. King is, obviously, related to kin. At present, we are no longer aware of this connection. But when fifteen or sixteen centuries ago, people said cyning or still earlier kuningaz (the original form of king, mentioned above), that connection must have been clear to the speakers.

Several words for “kin; people” existed in Germanic. One of them was þeod– ~ þiud (to repeat, þ has the value of th in Engl thick). We can still detect it in the German word Deutsch “German,” originally, “related to the people” (its d goes back to þ). The Goths also had a cognate of English cyn “kin,” but in translating the Greek word for “king” chose its synonym (we cannot decide why).

In any case, the Gothic word for “tribal chief; king” (þiudans) had no analogs among the other Germanic tribes, while cyning sounded almost the same in Old Saxon (kuning; some such form became Modern Dutch koning), Old High German chuning (in German, this word died without issue), and Old Norse konungr. The Germanic forms spread far and wide. Finnish has kunningas, and Russian has kniaz’. The Russian form has changed almost beyond recognition, but it is undoubtedly of Germanic origin. Isn’t it curious that in the Russian phrase Kniaz’ Vasily “Pince Vasily” the first word is Germanic and the second is Greek! Beware of nationalism.

The derivation of king from kin seems obvious, and one wonders why so many researchers tried to find another etymology for this rather transparent word. The difficulty is not in the word but in the concept. The oldest Germanic speakers had no kings in the modern sense of this term. And we have seen that no one followed the Gothic choice (þiudans “king”). The northerners did have a cognate of king, namely konungr (borrowed from their neighbors?), but their main word for the person we would call “king” was dróttinn (drótt meant “the military chief’s bodyguard”). To give another example: those people knew the word Caesar but had no analog for it; hence German Kaiser, a borrowing.

The less known attempts to explain the origin of the word king are ingenious but sometimes fanciful. Konungr (the Scandinavian form) from kven-ungr (kvenna “woman,” ungr “young”)? Or indeed from kin (in its oldest form) but with reference to the king as one specially born, perhaps as a being of divine origin. Or perhaps –ing goes back to the name of an earth god as the progenitor of the human race? Old Norse konr “sexual partner” exists. Does king refer to it? With this word we are returned to the previous hypothesis.

Finally, think of the English word ken “knowledge,” for example, as it is used in the phrase “beyond one’s ken.” German kennen means “to know.” Is it possible that the root of king contains reference to this root and thus has nothing in common with kin? Germanic chiefs were supposed to be also priests and possess arcane knowledge. This etymology has an influential modern supporter. I find his approach unprofitable. A few more exotic conjectures along similar lines are hardly worth mentioning. All this being said, most probably, –ing is the suffix we find in words meaning “descended from,” while the root of king is the same as in kin.

The history of king is instructive in several ways. We have a word with multiple cognates in old texts, we seem to understand what it meant, but its meaning has changed in a subtle way from antiquity to the modern period, because the social milieu behind the word has changed. The king of today is not what the word designated two thousand or even fifteen hundred years ago. I have once referred to the theme “Words and Things” in etymology. The history of king is a good example of how the “thing” refuses to give a definite answer to the question about its earliest meaning of the word. Hence our uncertainty concerning its origin. Yet the simplest etymology is probably correct. Long live simplicity! Long live the king!

_{Featured image: Image by Alexey Komarov. CC-BY-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.}

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How can they do it when we can’t?

Everyone knows that many salamanders can regenerate legs and tails while mammals never can (Figs.1, 2). If you tell a layperson that you work on regeneration, they will inevitably ask, “How can they do it when we can’t?” For most of my career, I was obliged to answer, “We don’t know”, and reflect on the fact that the key questions of science really are those simple ones asked by lay people.

The great news of the last few years is that now we do know. At least, now we have some good ideas about how it works, although there are still many gaps to fill. The two key concepts are cell potency and positional information. Cell potency relates to the range of cell types that the cells of a regenerating structure are able to become. Positional information relates to a system of signals that vary with position within the regenerating structure and control what pathway of differentiation those cells adopt.

Let’s start with the cells and consider those cells making up the limb of a vertebrate animal. The skeletal structures and connective tissues of limbs arise in embryonic development from a limb bud—a structure consisting of a loose mass of cells wrapped up in an outer layer. The loose cells are multipotent, meaning that they can become any one of a series of connective tissue cell types: bone, cartilage, tendon, ligament, or dermis (the inner layer of the skin). The other principal structures of a limb: the muscles, nerves and blood vessels, are formed from separate cell populations that grow into the bud during limb development.

When an adult salamander limb is amputated, the connective tissue cells near the cut surface dedifferentiate and become a uniform population of multipotent cells very similar to those of the embryonic limb bud. This fact has only been discovered recently, and it relied on a very powerful modern technology: single-cell RNA sequencing, which enables individual cells to be analysed to find which genes are active and to what extent. This is not the case for the cells of frog tadpole legs, which show very limited regeneration. However, it has been shown that grafting of embryonic limb bud cells into the amputation sites of frogs can improve their regenerative ability. So, to achieve successful regeneration, one requirement is a mechanism to de-differentiate connective tissue cells into multipotent cells similar, or identical to, those of the embryonic limb bud.

But this is only half the story. To regenerate a complex structure like a limb, these cells need to re-differentiate into the various functional cell types arranged in a complex three-dimensional pattern. This is the role of positional information.

Positional information is a concept invented by Lewis Wolpert (1929–2021), a public intellectual well known both in developmental biology and in wider social circles. In the late 1960s, he proposed that developing or regenerating systems must have some kind of embedded information that varies with position, such that multipotent cells can look at the positional information in their locality and use it to decide into what cell type to differentiate. Wolpert postulated the existence of positional signals—for example, gradients of diffusible molecules, which set up the system; and positional values, which were a long-term stable representation of the positional information. This latter concept of positional value is particularly important in regeneration because the information is needed not just for embryonic development, but also to be available to control regeneration after maybe years of the animal’s life.

The identity of many positional signals was discovered between 1980 and 2000 through intensive studies of embryonic development in frogs, mice, fruit flies, and nematode worms. They are composed of small proteins secreted by cells, which are often called “growth factors” or “cytokines” in other contexts. They include molecules discovered by biochemists, like fibroblast growth factors, transforming growth factors, and bone morphogenetic proteins, and others discovered by geneticists with weird names like Wnt and Hedgehog. Most of these factors are active during limb development and again during regeneration. However, they do not persist during adult life. What does persist is the system of positional values, which were only discovered recently.

The key elements of positional value are the genes that define specific body regions during embryonic development. Such genes all encode transcription factors, which are proteins that control the expression of other genes. For example, in the limb, expression of a gene called shox defines the middle part of the limb and of another gene called hox-a13 defines the hand or foot. These genes are not expressed in the mature limb, but they are still “open for business” in the appropriate regions. For example, hox-a13 is permanently repressed in the upper arm by a specific modification of chromosomal proteins, while in the hand it is not repressed and so it can be re-expressed when exposed to the stimuli of regeneration. In other examples, there is very low-level expression of the relevant positional information genes in the adult, which can be upregulated in regeneration. There are also some cell adhesion molecules, regulated by the same genes, that keep the cell populations in appropriate groups as regeneration proceeds.

Although mammals use the same genes to specify positional information in embryonic development, these genes cannot be reactivated in the adult. Mammals have neither the appropriate multipotent cells nor the appropriate positional information to enable successful regeneration. This is why “they can do it and we can’t.” Whether these key elements can be rebuilt using the modern techniques of regenerative medicine remains a question for the future.

_{Featured image by Nomad Sabor on Unsplash.}

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And what of Eurovision’s future? The Eurovision Song Contest celebrates its 70th anniversary, Vienna

The neutrality and integrity of the Eurovision Song Contest is of paramount importance to the EBU, its Members, and all our audiences. It is essential that the fairness of the Contest is always protected. We are taking clear and decisive steps to ensure the Contest remains a celebration of music and unity.

—Martin Green, Director of the Eurovision Song Contest, November 21, 2025

Where better to affirm the Eurovision Song Contest’s commitment to political neutrality and musical integrity than Vienna, with its 2026 motto, “United by Music—In the Heart of Europe?” Throughout the Cold War and the contingent history of the Eurovision, Austria had pledged itself to neutrality. If any nation were to host the annual Grand Prix, it would surely be Austria: the year before, its entry JJ (Johannes Pietsch), an operatic countertenor, had placed first, singing in a vocal style cultivated for the Baroque and Classical opera stage. The myriad public musical events of Eurovision Week (May 10–16), fringe and public alike, bore witness to Austria as the most musical of nations, unifying Europe with both song and the Eurovision Song Contest for its seventieth anniversary.

The past was so very perfect! How could Eurovision 2026 fail to unify Europe by song? Fail it did, indeed, with the abandonment and violation of the core principles upon which the Eurovision prided itself since its founding at the height of the Cold War. Rather than affirming apolitical neutrality, in recent years the parent organization of the Eurovision, the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), had increasingly blurred the rules whereby political conflicts were kept away from the competition. Russia and Belarus were banned after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, but calls by EBU member states to mete out sanctions to Israel because of its war in Gaza were greeted by pronouncements such as that in the epigraph above. Unconvinced by such gestures, five nations—Iceland, Ireland, the Netherlands, Slovenia, and Spain—withdrew from Eurovision 2026.

The assault on neutrality also extended to integrity, that of the song competition itself, and again, Israel had unleashed the main controversy. Voting at the Eurovision Grand Finale is two-tiered, one set of votes from national juries, the other from the general public. It was the latter that Israel—the Ministry of Foreign Affairs—employed during recent years through various campaigns to manipulate the public voting. One week after the Grand Finale in Vienna, more national broadcasting agencies were discussing the possibility of stepping out of the Eurovision Song Contest. We are left asking, “And what of Eurovision’s future?”

Yes, only yes for these days
And a thousand more to come.
A simple yes.
Eternity is inside a single word.
It will be you and me forever.

                       —Sal da Vinci, “Per sempre sì” / “Forever Yes” (Italy’s Eurovision 2026 entry)

Many entries in Eurovision 2026 turned to the past seventy years in search of model Eurosongs. Power ballads were in abundance; an indebtedness to the ever-present French chanson remained true; the mixture of high camp and comic took full advantage of digital stage effects; pyrotechnics consumed all in its path. Taken together as a single show, the evening performance felt like a hodgepodge of breathless song and dance. I don’t mean to throw cold water on the fiery and frenetic acts; quite the opposite, because there was much to enjoy, onstage antics and nostalgia notwithstanding. Take Italy’s entry, Sal da Vinci crooning “Per sempre sì” (Forever Yes) against a backdrop of a high-energy mock wedding ceremony. One had to believe in da Vinci’s longing for a love that would last forever, borrowed from the Sanremo Song Festival, which annually sends the Italian winner to the Eurovision. Past or perfect, both or neither, the exuberance of “Per sempre sì” well deserved its fifth-place finish.

It would be wiser to get away from here,
But I’m still playing with fire.
How could I freeze the feelings?

                 —Pete Parkkonen and Linda Lampenius, “Liekinheitin”/”Flamethrower” (Finland’s Eurovision 2026 entry)

Among the most unexpected results of the Grand Finale on May 16 was the failure of many favorites to meet the expectations of their fans. No entry bore witness to that failure more than the overwhelming favorite going into Eurovision Week, the Finnish duo, Pete Parkkonen and Linda Lampenius, whose performance of “Liekinheitin” (Flamethrower) was taken dutifully from the Eurovision playbook for winning songs. After Parkkonen’s longing intro, “Liekinheitin” turned up the heat, musically to power-ballad temperatures and choreographically as Lampenius approached the burning cage that had paralyzed the singer-lover. The impact of these playbook elements seemed so well placed that EBU officials made an exception to the performance rules, allowing Lampenius to play the violin live on stage, adding a new dimension to Eurosong vocality. That new dimension had lost its luster by the time of the Grand Finale, dropping the pre-contest favorite to sixth place.

Lead me to the stars, to the shattered nests,
There where, amid screams, they send off soldiers.
Lead me to the stars far from all the gazes.

                                                            —Lelek, “Andromeda” (Croatia’s Eurovision 2026 entry)

If the geopolitics of war in Europe and beyond and a broader sense of moral responsibility for global crisis were largely absent from Eurovision 2026, the few exceptions were notable as a bridge between the Eurovision of the past and that of a future yet realized. The most striking of these exceptions was the Croatian entry, “Andromeda,” sung by the five-woman choral ensemble, Lelek. There was power in the paradox of a song that employed traditional Croatian folk-song style to speak to ethical issues stretching across national and musical borders. Singing together with an intimacy translated musically by melodic recitative and tight harmonic intervals, Lelek drew upon ecofeminism to address the horrors of war. The Croatian lyrics were rich in metaphor, and the listener recognized “Andromeda” as heir to the long tradition of women keening for the loss of humanity. The question I ask every year is whether a deeply moving and prescient ensemble like Lelek enters the Eurovision to place first. Each year, I take comfort in knowing that there are more important questions to ask of a song like “Andromeda.”

I’m a rebel, I’m a danger,
I’m a mover for freedom.
Let me light you, light you up, let me light you up….
I’m the bangarang—

                                                            —DARA, “Bangaranga” (Bulgaria’s Eurovision 2026 entry)

Were I to range across many of this year’s Eurovision entries to identify songs with potential to do well in the final voting, I would have little trouble making a case for at least half of the twenty-five nations competing in the Grand Finale. Over seventy years, there have been many winning formulae, and Eurovision songwriters have learned their lessons well. If 2026 is a measure of those lessons, nonetheless, they may have learned their lessons too well, producing a corpus of songs in Vienna unsurprising in its overall sameness. The song that would eventually win would need to distinguish itself by liberating itself from the sameness. The unsurprising would undergo translation to the surprising, a song that came from nowhere only to claim victory with the largest point margin in Eurovision’s seventy-year history (173 points). That is precisely what Bulgaria’s DARA did with “Bangaranga.” There was nothing profound about the lyrics of “Bangaranga,” though the Bulgarian team constantly teased questioners about the title’s apparently meaningful meaninglessness. The performance itself was brilliant because of its tight choreography and precise use of limited rather than limitless space. For the three minutes of fame on the stage of the Vienna Stadthalle, Bulgaria and “Bangaranga” provided one answer—one affirmative answer—to the questions seventy years had raised about the future of the Eurovision Song Contest.

_{Featured image by Julia Engel via Wikipedia Commons.}

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What does environmental change ask of societies?

Environmental change is no longer an abstract concern. It is encountered in daily life, in regional disruptions, and in global debates. Heat and cold, drought and flood, the loss of species, food insecurity, and widening inequality are not isolated phenomena; together they mark a shift in the conditions under which human societies operate. The paradox of the present moment is clear: crises are extensively diagnosed, risks are well communicated, and policy frameworks are proliferating—yet societies remain strikingly unready.

Not all change is equally visible. Some changes unfold rapidly, within days, seasons, or years; some accumulate slowly, almost without notice until thresholds are crossed. Understanding these different temporalities requires more than measuring physical processes. It demands attention to culture, institutions, economies, and systems of meaning. Environmental change and human resilience draw on all domains of knowledge—not only to establish what has happened, but to understand how it has been interpreted and how societies have responded, in the past, in the present, and for the future.

It is in this context that we introduce Environmental Change and Human Experience, a new topic in Oxford Intersections. As general editors, we conceived the topic as a deliberately interdisciplinary space, bringing together historians, geographers, literary scholars, anthropologists, and others to examine how human societies have interacted with changing environments over time.

The core questions are longstanding. They range from long-term environmental transformations to episodes of acute disruption, and they examine how societies—under different political, economic, and cultural conditions—have understood and managed change. What is new is the intensity of collaboration across disciplines. The expansion of the environmental humanities, advances in data and modelling, and the pressures associated with climate change are reshaping how scholars work—and the range of evidence that can be brought to bear to help us understand the changes, how they affect societies and how we might be better prepared for future change.

A central premise runs through the topic. Environmental change, whether gradual or sudden, has always tested the resilience and resourcefulness of human societies. The historical record is therefore not simply descriptive; it is analytical. It offers a series of grounded cases—real-world experiments in adaptation, failure, and innovation that allow us to identify patterns, constraints, and possibilities in how societies respond to environmental stress.

This perspective is particularly relevant today. Many challenges now framed as unprecedented—climate variability, food insecurity, water management, disease, inequality, ecological degradation—have deeper histories. Examining those histories does not provide simple solutions, but it does clarify the range of responses available and the conditions under which they succeed or fail. It expands the repertoire of adaptive strategies while sharpening our understanding of their limits.

The topic is structured in nine sections: Approaches, Climate, Construction, Disasters, Land, Water, Food, Animals, and New Frontiers. Together, these sections provide a framework for analysing how humans have shaped their environments, and how those environments, in turn, have shaped human experience.

Contributors approach environmental change from multiple angles: historical, geographical, literary, religious, social, cultural, political, ecological, and anthropological. The aim is not an encyclopaedic overview, but structured analysis based on new research. Environmental Change and Human Experience will be a resource for researchers, teachers, and students around the world who seek fresh perspectives and challenging comparisons.

^{Featured image ‘Forestry activities in Tasmania, Australia’ by Matt Palmer via Unsplash.}

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Binomial expressions

The term “binomial expression” sounds very math-like, and it is. It refers to a mathematical expression with two terms connected by an operator. So 3a + b is a binomial, as is 2x³ + 6x. In algebra, binomials are used to solve equations, often by converting more complex polynomial expressions to a binomial. For example, x² − 7x + 10 = 0 can be expressed as the binomial (x − 2)(x − 5) = 0, leading to the conclusion that either x = 5 or x = 2.

But enough math. Binomials also occur in language, and where they refer to expressions like chicken and egg, by and large, in and out, cut and dried, or peace and quiet. Often, and perhaps usually, such expressions occur in a fixed A and B order: we don’t hear egg and chicken, large and by, out and in, dried and cut, or quiet and peace. Those word orders should make your head hurt worse than the math did.

English has hundreds of such expressions, and the scholarly literature on them numbers dozens of articles. Modern interest in binomials goes back to the mid-twentieth-century work of linguists like Yakov Malkiel (in a 1959 article called “Studies in Irreversible Binomials”) and Dwight Bolinger (whose 1962 article, “Binomials and Pitch Accent,” looked at the metrical structure of binomials). Later work by William Cooper and John Robert Ross (in a 1975 paper called “Word Order”) proposed that the terms which occurred first tended to be those closer to a speaker’s experience (an idea they called the Me First Principle). They also stressed the relevance of phonological and semantic properties of words. Other scholars have proposed that word frequency plays a role, with more frequent words tending to be in the first position. For an excellent overview, consult Sarah Bunin Benor and Roger Levy’s 2006 article, “The Chicken or the Egg.”

Some fixed phrases may have idiosyncratic explanations: black and white, as in “it’s right there in black and white,” gets its order from the foregrounding of lettering on the backgrounded page. Come and go suggests a temporal precedence: you have to come before you can go, but what about stop and go?

In addition, many binomials can be reversed: beer and wine seems as likely as wine and beer, and peppers and onions as likely as onions and peppers. To me, left and right, on and off, and night and day seem fine in either order. But cheese and crackers does not work nearly as well as crackers and cheese, and a cheese and ham sandwich sounds downright odd. Tables and chairs seem natural if you are shopping for furniture, as in “We were looking at new tables and chairs” rather than “new chairs and tables.” But if you are writing a novel and describing a brawl, you might have a character step carefully among the overturned “chairs and tables.” And as Benor and Levy noted, even fixed binomials can be reversed, when necessary, as in the Billy Joel song “Piano Man,” with its barfly “making love to his tonic and gin.” The reversal of the libation completes the rhymes with “the regular crowd shuffles in.”

Reversal of a fixed binomial can also be a forensic tell. When the terrorist Theodore Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber, wrote his anti-technology manifesto in the 1990s, he used the outdated binomial expression “eat your cake and have it too” rather than the more common “have your cake and eat it too.” That idiosyncratic reversal was one of the clues that led to his identification and capture.

Some frozen binomials are best left alone.

_{Featured image by Ling App on Unsplash.}

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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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