An etymological ham<i>burg</i>er

My thanks are to Keith Ritchie, who in his comment on the previous post noted that in Scotland, trousers are still called breeches. Unintentionally, today’s word also begins with the letter b, as the italicized part of the title indicates, but it has nothing to do with clothes.

English speakers and speakers in the wide world know the German word burg from place names (Magdeburg, St. Petersburg, and so forth), though only hamburgers, or rather burgers, as they are called, made burg really famous. The closest English cognates (that is, related forms) of burg are all over the place but hidden in compounds and not always easily recognizable. Such are –bury (as in Canterbury), –borough (as in Scarborough and Gainsborough), and of course, –burg itself, as in Edinburgh, with its unexpected pronunciation of –burgh and the redundant h at the end. (But think of Pittsburgh, USA, and of Charles Lindbergh: they could not do without final h either!) Incidentally, the noun burrow “rabbit’s or fox’s hole” is, quite probably, also related to burg, so that Alice in Wonderland need not have been surprised to find the place so well-inhabited.

The word that interests us is one the most ancient and most often-discussed words in historical Germanic linguistics. It occurred in all the earliest texts of the Germanic family, including the fourth-century Gothic Bible. The Old English form was burg; –bury in place names is a relic of the now extinct dative case. As far as we can judge, the ancient burg ~ borg existed for protecting people. Therefore, it does not come as a surprise that the verbs bury and borrow are also derived from this root. Protection is a loose concept. Thus, borrow means “to take on pledge or credit.” Note: on pledge or credit!

The trouble with the origin of burg ~ borg is that we have a great lot of information and cannot always decide which bit of it to use. The nouns attested in the oldest Germanic languages and cited above meant “height, wall; castle; city.” The Gothic Bible was translated from Greek. The Greek word the translator saw was pólis “town,” but we do not know what exactly pólis meant in fourth-century Greek. (Note: we are dealing with Medieval, not Classical Greek!) “Town” is a loose concept. In the remote past, Germanic people did not live in towns. The German cognate of English town is Zaun “fence.” Greek pólis also takes us to “fortress, enclosed space on high ground, hilltop.” The beginning was the same everywhere.

Apparently, the early town was a place fenced in. Russian gorod “town” (as in Novgorod “new town”) also refers to a fence. Likewise, the Icelandic tún, a letter for letter cognate of town and Zaun, is a fenced, fertilized home meadow surrounding a farmhouse. Yet the idea that the initial meaning of all our words was “fence,” though defended by some reputable scholars, has little appeal. Likewise, the gloss Gothic baurgs (pronounced as borgs) ~ Greek pólis is less illuminating than it may seem at first sight, because in another Gothic text, baurgs renders the Greek word for “tower” (“stronghold to flee to”?). The German word Bürger did indeed mean “inhabitant of a town,” while its Gothic counterpart seems to have meant “citizen.” On the whole, despite the numerous unclear points, we may say that German burg once referred to “enclosure; protection; fortification.”

What then was the origin of this word? German (and Common Germanic) Berg “mountain” comes to mind as a possible cognate: berg and burg, if related, had different vowels by a regular rule. But were “burgs” built on mountains? If they were structures within an enclosure, mountains were a rather unlikely place for those “towns.” On the other hand, mountains gave people good protection from attackers. We also notice Latin burgus, a borrowing of Greek púrgos “tower, fortification.” Germanic tribes were Ancient Rome’s neighbors for centuries, and borrowed words went both ways. Many Latin words infiltrated Germanic and several other languages, while quite a few others went from Germanic to Latin. However, importing such a Germanic word to or borrowing it from Medieval Greek is improbable.

The Greek noun púrgos is of obscure origin, perhaps itself a loan from some neighboring language. Many of our readers have certainly heard about the famous Pergamon altar (see the header). Pergamon is a Greek place name, and the first syllable (perg-) sounds almost like berg-. In travels from Scandinavia to Greece, from Burgundy (note the place name!) to Pergamon and all the way to the ancient Hittite kingdom, one finds similar place names and similar (almost identical) words having the root berg– or perg– (vowels of course alternated according to the well-known rules : e ~ o ~  u), with the form berg/perg predominating, and all of them refer to fortresses and mountains.

It was therefore suggested long ago that we are dealing with a so-called migratory word, probably pre-Indo-European. In such situations, linguists often refer to the substrate, that is, some unknown ancient language of an extinct tribe. But a migratory word is not even a borrowing from a substrate: it is a term that travels all over the enormous continent (in this case of Eurasia). Of course, it had some source, but we can no longer discover it. Its vowels adapt to the rule of the “guest” language, and the words pretend to be native. They do become native, though they are, rather, naturalized foreigners. Isn’t it odd that a word like German Bürger goes back to an alien root?

As a final flourish, I would like to note that the trouble with the root b-r-g is as acute in Slavic as in Germanic. For example, Russian bereg means “bank; shore,” and bereg– is also the root of a verb meaning “to preserve; keep in safety.” Both words show some phonetic irregularities, and familiar hypotheses have been offered about their history. Cognates of the noun and the verb have been recorded all over the Slavic-speaking world. As far as I can understand, some link between the words in Germanic and Slavic has been recognized, but the borrowing by Slavic from Germanic does not look like a viable option. Nor do Slavic etymological dictionaries refer to substrates or migratory words. A hamburger is a relatively simple thing. All the rest is questionable and complicated.

_{Featured image: photo of the Pergamon Altar by Miguel Hermosa Cuesta. CC-BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.}

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Implicit negation is easy to miss

One of the odder bits of language use is the phenomenon of overnegation, or misnegation. This is much different than the overly fussy stigmatizing of double negatives like “I didn’t see nothing” or “Nobody didn’t see anything,” which are common, colloquial, and not at all confusing. No one takes “I didn’t see nothing” to mean “I saw something.”

Misnegation is a rather more complicated situation where a negation and a hidden negation conspire to trip up a writer, as in this example from a Hägar the Horrible comic strip (first noticed in a 2018 post by writer Stan Carey). Hägar says “This is the only time of year when I miss not having a nine-to-five job.” When his sidekick Lucky Eddie asks “Why?” Hägar says it’s because “I never get to go to an office Christmas party!” The word miss hides a negation and if you “miss not having a nine-to-five job,” you would be missing the absence of such a job. But what is meant here is that Hägar misses ever having a nine-to-fiver.   

Misnegations happen in speech quite frequently, but unless they are in print or online, we may overlook them. The term seems to have first cropped up in 2004, on the Language Log blog in a series of posts by the linguist Mark Liberman and others. Two of the most common types of misnegations involve expressions of the form:

no NOUN is too ADJECTIVE to VERB

and

it is IMPOSSIBLE to UNDERESTIMATE X

The first type is found in examples like “no detail is too small to ignore,” where the intended meaning is “all details matter, regardless of how small,” or “no detail is too small to matter.” With the misnegation, it actually reads as if details are routinely ignored and none are too small to receive that treatment. Liberman offers some true-life examples:

No one is too young to avoid being tempted.

No business is too small to avoid or ignore protecting itself from another business using its name, product, service, or invention.

Kelly… said that in the playoffs no advantage is too small to ignore.

No error is too small to ignore—I want to make the second edition perfect!

If these make your head hurt, just wait.

The second type of misnegation is found in examples like “It is impossible to underestimate Springsteen’s influence,” and many similar examples. If “overestimate” means to attribute too high a value and “underestimate” means to attribute too low a value, then one is saying “It is impossible to attribute too low a value to Springsteen’s influence,” which is presumably not what is meant, unless it is a backhanded compliment.  

Here are some more real examples:

The challenge of creating weekly scripts that move seamlessly among six clearly defined principal characters cannot be underestimated. (Liberman found this one in The New York Times, 2004)

All of which is to say that we can never underestimate the psychological impact of language’s massive migration from the ear to the eye, from speech to typography. (from Neil Postman’s The Disappearance of Childhood, noted in Stan Carey’s post)

Tracy and Shelli contributed to the band in those early days in ways that cannot be underestimated. (from Charles R. Cross’s Heavier Than Heaven, also noted by Carey)

There are other types of misnegation as well. Ben Zimmer points out some examples of overnegation that arise from one too many nots: It’s HARD NOT TO X AND NOT Y.

It’s hard not to walk into a press conference these days and not hear, at some point, “With scholarships where they are today…” (The Michigan Daily)

But it’s hard not to read Olney’s book and not appreciate the key members of the team that dominated baseball for half a decade. (Deseret News)

[In researching the period] it’s hard not to look at 1910 and not see what’s coming down the road. (Provincetown Banner)

The first not in each example means that one is not doing the walking, reading, or looking. But if you are not doing those things how can you then not hear, not appreciate, or not see what’s coming. The first not in each example is causing the problem and needs to go. And Zimmer points that that you also get misnegation with the variant “It’s hard not to do X without doing Y” as in “It’s hard not to think of the art of New Mexico without thinking of Georgia O’Keeffe” (his example from the Tucson Weekly).

And then there’s the phrasing “fail to miss,” where there is a pair of negative verbs and no not, and the expression is used to mean “fail to see.” That one was made famous by sportscaster Dizzy Dean, who told fans “don’t fail to miss tomorrow’s game.”

For writers and editors, it’s important to be aware of the possibility of misnegation or overnegation. Editing and style guides don’t tell you to put things in the affirmative for nothing.

^{Image by MasterTux from Pixabay. Public domain.}

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Endless trouble with <i>breeches</i>

The trouble begins with the pronunciation of the word breeches. Why does breeches (seemingly so, in the US) often rhyme with riches, rather than reaches? In the best books on the history of English, I could not find a satisfactory answer, but this complication is minor. The real problem is the origin of the word. (I cannot do this without an impotent jab of AI, this wolf in sheep’s clothing. I asked the computer about the short vowel in breeches, and AI supplied me with several lines of nonsense.)

The names of articles of clothing are often troublesome to an etymologist, partly because they tend to travel from land to land with the objects they designate, so that, for example, specialists in English etymology are called upon to deal with the history of Greek, Latin, Celtic, or Slavic words (to name just a few of the possible sources) and offer opinions about the data they know imperfectly or not at all.

As long as we stay with breeches, consider some other names for “loose-fitting garments for the loins and legs” (dictionary definitions of the most common words are a joy to read): pants (shortening of pantaloons; Italian), trousers (French), jeans (also Romance), knickerbockers (from a proper name), and in connection with proper names, bloomers may be mentioned. Probably, most people remember the origin of Levi’s.

Breeches and its cognates have traveled over half of the world for centuries, and over time, a mountain of linguistic literature dealing with the word has accrued. This word certainly originated in the singular (that is, breech was meant). It occurred in all the Old Germanic languages, except Gothic. We know Gothic only from a fourth-century translation of the Gospels (the original was in Greek), but the characters mentioned in the New Testament did not wear trousers (or breeches). The forms of the word in the recorded Germanic languages are so similar that all of them either go back to the same ancient native protoform or were borrowed from the same foreign source. That form or source must have sounded as brōk (ō designates a long vowel, approximately as in Modern English awe; as far as we can judge, that brōk rhymed with Modern English hawk).

And here’s the rub. If the word was native (Germanic), why did people call that article of clothing brōk? (Such is of course the perennial question of all etymology: only onomatopoetic, sound–imitative words, like ga-ga and croak, are transparent.) As regards brōk, we know only one thing for sure. The old noun was singular (that is, breech). To give a relatively late example, in a thirteenth-century German romance, the youth’s mother sews such a brōk (German bruoch) for him as part of a one-piece hunting outfit.

Since the Germanic word refuses to reveal its origin, historical linguists looked at the evidence in other languages and, naturally, noticed Celtic brāca (a similar meaning), along with its less common doublet bracca. The once powerful Celts were close neighbors of the “Teutons,” as Germanic-speaking tribes were referred to in the past (the German form is die Germanen). Germanic and Celtic share numerous words, and sometimes such words occur only in those two language groups. They may designate natural phenomena (shadow belongs here), tribal property (the most interesting term in this group is town), social relations(here the history of free and oath is worthy of notice), and so forth. The most spectacular borrowing from Celtic into Germanic is perhaps iron: apparently, it was the Celts who taught their Germanic neighbors how to deal with iron.

Even when a word has been recorded only in Germanic and Celtic (that is, without cognates elsewhere: in Greek, Latin, Slavic, and so forth), we cannot be sure who borrowed from whom or whether speakers of both language groups borrowed their word from a third source about which we have no information. The recorded Celtic forms that interest us are braca and bracca. Whence the long consonant in bracca? This cc is usually called emphatic, but what was so emotional about a rather trivial piece of clothing? Or did the word once have n in the root (branca?), so that nc became cc? To repeat: who borrowed from whom? Or was there a third source from which the Celts and the “Germanen” borrowed both the piece of clothing and its name? Incidentally, the oldest (unrecorded) Celtic form is also controversial.

Elmar Seebold, the most recent editor of Fridrich Kluge’s etymological dictionary of German, wrote a detailed entry on Bruch and pointed out that the Germanic word has a less opaque history than the Celtic one, because it may be related to the verb break, while the Celtic word has no cognates. But the relation of breech to break is uncertain, and I could not verify the Old English and Old Icelandic names of the body parts Seebold cites. Where then are we? In a sadly familiar place: the hunt was exciting, but the target escaped us. Breech is a very old Germanic and Celtic word, whose ultimate origin has not been found. The etymologist, as I have noted more than once, is a lonely hunter.

Recently, I cited a proverb advising us not to eat cherries with great men. Such adages seem to have bookish origins: they are insipid and too long, even bombastic. In one’s breeches (synonym: in one’s buttons) “perfectly fit” was recorded in several parts of England a century and a half ago and sounds like a genuine “folk creation.” Probably the same holds for the phrase to wear the breeches “to usurp the authority of the husband.” A medieval equivalent of this phrase existed in Italy, and in the nineteenth century it occurred in French and Dutch. Incidentally, in medieval Iceland, the husband was allowed to divorce his wife if she wore breeches. A look at breeches in the OED is also revealing. Other than that, stay in your breeches.

_{Featured image: Christ with his disciples, A.N. Mironov. C-BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.}

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Americana: enter hillbilly. Moby Dick follows

This is a continuation of the previous post, devoted to all kinds of country bumpkins. Hillbilly looks like the most uninspiring word to discuss: it is so obviously made up of hill + billy. This is also what the entry in the OED online says. The entry has not yet been updated, but as regards etymology, there may not be anything to update. Though the word is rather old, the dates of its first occurrence in print vary. In a source for 2008,1893 is mentioned. The extremely detailed entry in Wikipedia gives 1892. Webster’s dictionary online pushes the date to the 1880s but gives no references. Those details matter little: apparently, the word became rather well-known toward the end of the nineteenth century, which means that it was coined earlier. We have no way of knowing how much earlier.

From an etymological point of view, hillbilly does not look more exciting than, for example, blackboard. A blackboard is indeed a black board, but think of blackmail, blacksmith, greyhound, blueprint, greenhorn, and redneck. Is their origin fully transparent? Greyhound is particularly tricky (even though the dog is grey!). Hillbilly may also contain a secret, among other reasons, because compounds and collocations with rhyming components (like claptrap, hobnob, hodgepodge, and Georgie Porgie) are almost too good to be true, that is, their origin may not be as transparent as it seems. On the other hand, Oscar Wilde wrote a tale titled The Sphinx without a Secret. You never can tell.

Surprisingly, an alternate etymology of hillbilly has been offered. The Dictionary of American Regional English quotes a well-known passage from an old column in the New York Times: “Protestants who came of Appalachian stock were called ‘hillbillies’ and the term connoted ignorance, poverty, vile habits and, in general, low lifers perfectly at home in a pig pen.” Jack Morgan published a short note on the subject in the journal Comments on Etymology (22/8, 1993, p. 22). He was intrigued by the emphasis on Protestant and cited another researcher, in whose opinion the word hillbilly goes back to the emigrants’ preoccupation with their hero “King Billy” (that is, William of Orange), so that they became known as Billy-boys of the hill country. This is a very unlikely source of hillbilly (to put it mildly).  

The historians who stress the North English/Scottish ancestry of the original settlers “of Appalachian stock” failed to find a probable source of the word in Scotland (that is, no appropriate etymon ofhillbilly exists in Scots). Most likely, the word hillbilly is an American coinage, though this fact does not exclude a non-Appalachian “ancestor.” The authors of the article published in the journal American Speech 83, 2008, p. 215, say: “… prior to [!] the word’s chief association with mountaineers in Southern Appalachia and the Ozarks, hillbilly was also generally used in the American language to refer to residents of hill country, especially those in the backwoods districts, in the lower Midwest and Deep South” (emphasis added). To conclude, anyone from hill country was a hillbilly! (Those interested in JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy and the discussion of this book will find a lot of information on the Internet.)

I’ll now cite a curious German parallel to hillbilly. German Hillebille is a wooden hardboard that served as a primitive signaling device, chiefly in the Graz mountains. People struck it in case of fire and on many other occasions. The etymology of this word is unknown, because neither component of Hillebille means anything in German. Only some dialectal Dutch cognates of hille– seem to contain allusions to romping and other precipitous movements. Between 1894 and 1898, a spate of publications appeared in the local, now little-remembered, but at one time well-read German periodicals describing the device, but almost nothing was then or later said about the word’s origin (the few suggestions I found are not worth discussing). The German Wikipedia describes the device, gives a picture of it, and points out that no connection exists between the German and the American noun. (In America, this connection would not have occurred to anyone, because outside Germany, Hillebille is a word people do not know, while I ran into it more or less by chance.)

Indeed, the similarity is, most probably, coincidental, except that both might be “emotional formations.” English hillbilly is a humorous coinage, even if it surfaced as an offensive sobriquet, while the German noun is rather obviously sound-imitative. Nothing points to the fact that German immigrants brought this word to the Appalachians and produced a German-English pun, that is, turned Hillebille into Hill Billy. Only the coincidence is curious. Thus, we have come full circle: Hillbilly emerged unscathed (a “Billy” from the hills), while the German near-homonym remains unexplained and unrelated to its English twin.

Stalled in the mountains, we will progress to the ocean with our Americana. Chapter 53 of Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick is titled “The Gam.” Those who have read the book will remember that it opens with a page bearing the title “Etymology.” Therefore, they won’t be surprised that the author supplied us with the following explanation toward the end of that chapter: “GAM. Noun—A social meeting of two (or more) whale-ships on a cruising-ground; when, after exchanging hails, they exchange visits by boats’ crews; the two captains remaining, for the time, on board of one ship, and the two chief mates on the other.” A good professional definition, even though not containing an explanation of origins.

The OED online features this odd word but cannot offer a decisive etymology. Indeed, such a monosyllabic word might come from all kinds of sources. Erich Maria Remarque even wrote a novel about a woman named Gam (certainly, not his best book). Once again, I have nothing to offer, except for an uninspiring lookalike. Russian gam (pronounced like English gum) means “great noise; ruckus.” The word is probably sound-imitative (onomatopoeic). Could English gam also once refer to a noisy gathering? To conclude, we ended up with two obscure, possibly sound-imitative, words, whose origin should have been clear, but the solution escaped us. As usual, I am turning to our readers’ expertise. Perhaps someone knows more about Hillebille and gam than I do. If so, kindly send us your comments.

_{Featured image: Photo by Ken Jacobsen. Public domain via Pexels.}

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Hobnobbing with a hillbilly

It is unimaginable how many denigrating names people have invented for our breadwinners and shepherds! Those names were, I assume, coined by city dwellers who did not want to soil their hands with earth and manure. Urban dwellers are urbane and genteel, while dwellers in villages are villains. Right? To be sure, those are the most extreme traces of the medieval (feudal) attitude toward the populace, but our more modern vocabulary is neither more tolerant nor gentler.

A look at some of the better-known synonyms for hillbilly is worth an effort. One such word is hayseed, a late sixteenth-century metaphor, now, at least in the US, mainly remembered as meaning “comical rustic.” (Rustics, except in the opera Cavalleria Rusticana, are comical by definition, aren’t they?) Now, what is wrong with the inconspicuous, tiny hayseeds, “grass seeds obtained from hay,” as dictionaries very properly inform us. Yet a hayseed is also one of the names for a country bumpkin. The suffix –kin in bumpkin is Dutch (as in mannikin, napkin, Wilkins, and the unforgettable bare bodkin), so that the entire noun bumpkin is probably also of Dutch origin. It seems to mean “a little tree” (implying a blockhead?).

Wood has not fared well in our metaphors. For instance, Russian dubina “a big wooden stick” (stress on the second syllable; the word more or less rhymes with English farina) means “idiot.” The root bump– in bumpkin ends in an excrescent sound (that is, a sound added without etymological justification: see the post for last week) and means “wood,” as do English beam and German Baum. The implication seems to be clear, because wood is neither gentle nor genteel. A wooden smile will hardly meet with a sweet response. Nor is a wooden gait graceful. However, a bumpkin does not have to be a country dweller. Oliver Goldsmith introduced a rather endearing spoiled brat and trickster Tony Lumkin in his play She Stoops to Conquer. The name, modeled on bumpkin, became proverbial. Tony was not a “hayseed.”

Back to the countryside, where one is expected to meet numerous hicks and rubes. Surprisingly, hick is Hick, a doublet of Rick (Richard), just as Hob is a doublet of Rob, and Hodger of Roger. The union of h and r has a long and interesting history, but it is anybody’s guess why just Hick became a synonym for bumpkin. We may also ask why our genteel restroom is called john and sometimes jenny, while Shakespeare’s contemporaries used a jake for the same purpose. Words from names are countless, and you need a historical linguist, rather than any Tom, Dick, and Harry, to explain their origin. Modesty prevents me from discussing dick, but Richard arrived at Dick by way of its rhyming partner Rick (who, as we have seen, is also Hick). Hick is as good a synonym for “country bumkin” as any other.

More words like bumkin? Take joskin. It sometimes seems that any name, supposedly or really common, might acquire the sense “hayseed.” Yet most peasants were never called Hick! The same holds for Rube, briefly mentioned above. Rube is short for Reuben. According to the story known from the Old Testament, Reuben came to a sad end, but to repeat, Reuben/Rube was never among the most popular names in the English-speaking world, and especially in the countryside. Why then are hicks also called rubes? Just to commemorate a man cursed by his father and to transfer the guilt to an uncultivated villager? Incidentally, some of the names mentioned above are rather recent, a fact that complicates our story even more.

The stock of names for hayseeds and their ilk is almost inexhaustible. Louts and lubbers (the latter as in landlubber) join this motley, nondescript company. Lout is supposedly related to a verb meaning “to bend” (by way of “clown”?). No one takes this derivation seriously, but every dictionary mentions it with a question mark. Lubber is also problematic. Its Old French lookalike does mean “swindler,” but though Middle English may have borrowed such a word from French, more likely, lobur ~ lobeor ~ lobre was part of the Common European slang of the lower classes and criminals (such words existed; this jargon or argot, is called Gaunersprache and Rotwelsch in German).

Another etymology traces lubber to Middle Dutch lobben “clown” (again clown!) with reference to words for “lump.” More probably, the French, Dutch, and English nouns are indeed part of thieves’ (wandering traders’, strollers’) late medieval jargon, used in several parts of Europe. The very word slang may have a similar origin. See the post for September 28, 2016 (“The origin of the word ‘slang’ is known”) and the comments.

The king of hayseeds is probably the hillbilly. The etymology of hillbilly is of course clear, isn’t it? By no means! To this subject the entire next post will be devoted.

POSTSCRIPT

1. Last week, I mentioned William Bates, the author of an excellent essay on the origin of limerick in Notes and Queries, and expressed my regret that I could not find any information about him. As usual, my colleague Dr. Stephen Goranson came to the rescue. This circumstance did not surprise me. Over the years, I have often witnessed his uncanny ability to ferret out all kinds of well-hidden information. This time, he sent me an obituary of Dr. Bates (1821-1884) from the Birmingham Daily Post, an important regional newspaper. Willian Bates, a surgeon, was also well-known in the world of art and literature. The short obituary made a special mention of his contributions to Notes and Queries. A century and a half ago, permanent association with NQ might make one famous or at least distinguished. Those were days! I may add that my database of English etymology features fifteen contributions by William Bates to word origins. No doubt, he also wrote on other subjects. Incidentally, I, too, searched for William Bates and found two celebrities called this, but not the one unearthed by Stephen Goranson.

2. I have a rich database of obscure proverbs and idioms. Here is one of them: “Those that eat cherries with great persons shall have their eyes sprinkled out with stones.” Its analogues have been recorded in German, Romanian, and in a famous medieval Dutch poem. Such an elaborately picturesque and seemingly usleless proverb! Does anyone know its source? Perhaps Dr. Wolfgang Mieder, our great specialist in this area, will enlighten us. Anyway, enjoy a peaceful image of eating cherries below.

_{Featured image: A group of farmers harvesting paddy in Bangladesh. Photo by Zaheed Sarwer Khan. CC-BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.}

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Five surprising facts about baseball [map]

As a game, baseball has multiple antecedents and ancestors, most notably an English children’s game called rounders. But as an organized spectator sport, baseball is native to the United States. Still, the sport spread quickly beyond U.S. borders, and took hold in many other parts of the world. It became the national sport of both Cuba and Japan, and migrated from there to many of the lands where fans pay to watch live games and also follow professional leagues abroad. Here are five sites that illuminate baseball’s complex geography.

_{Featured image by Tim Gouw via Unsplash.}

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A tortuous journey: the word <i>pamphlet</i>

In English, pamphlet is synonymous with booklet, brochure, but in some other modern European languages, a pamphlet makes one rather think of its synonym lampoon. The word surfaced in writing in 1415, and only two things are clear about its origin: pamphlet did not carry political overtones when it was coined, and it must have had a foreign source (or, because of its spelling with ph, was at least understood to be a loan from Latin or Greek).

It is astounding how often and how passionately scholars and amateurs at one time discussed the origin of pamphlet in the popular press. The main vehicle was, as usual, Notes and Queries, but no old etymological dictionary missed the word. The OED online presents a clear picture of the history of the word and supports a well-argued etymology, which was first offered in 1874 by the great French philologist Gaston Paris in Revue Critique, for September 26, 1874, p. 107. The full OED volume with the letter P appeared in 1909.

These are the main old hypotheses about the derivation of pamphlet. Perhaps the etymon is the French phrase par un filet “(held together) by a thread,” with reference to a single occurrence of the word written as paunflet (as though panflet, with u inserted) and an additional reference to French brochure “brochure” (brocher “to stitch together”; see a picture of a relatively old brochure in the heading). This etymon has been offered and rejected many times, because pamphlets contained a page or two, without a cover, and did not have to be connected by means of a thread.

Another suggested source was papyrus, and I might have passed it by as devoid of interest if it had not been defended by Frank Chance, a talented philologist. In some form this hypothesis can already be found in Stephen Skinner’s 1671 etymological dictionary of English. Chance believed that in a word like papyrus the consonant m might easily be inserted (another insertion!). He cited a few analogs of this phenomenon but not English empty: this adjective goes back to ǣmtig. Also,sumpter “packhorse” developed from Old French som(m)etier; in it the entire group mp is excrescent (that is, added without etymological justification). The Old Dutch noun pampier meant “paper.” Frank Chace believed that pampinus and papyrus “got mixed up.” There is a cruel law of etymology: the more complicated the proposed derivation, the greater the certainty that it is wrong. Not without regret, I have to dismiss Chance’s hypothesis as unrealistic.

A somewhat similar guess was offered in 1889 by Richard Stephen Charnock, a good folklorist but a totally unreliable word historian: “…from Spanish papeléta, diminutive of papél paper from which, with an infixed m, pamphlets might have been formed.” Why the infix, and why Spanish?

Naturally, Walter W. Skeat did not stay away from this discussion either. He reconstructed the date when papyrus probably turned up in English texts and came to the conclusion “that the word must be French, with a Greek root.” And here the Greek historian named Pamphila appeared on the scene (she was discovered long before Skeat in this context). Pamphila lived in the first century CE and enjoyed great popularity. Her multiple works are, it appears, lost. As far as our word is concerned, the posited way must have been from the author’s name to a common noun. The process is common. For instance, we may say that travelers take a Baedeker when they go abroad. Yet in the latest edition of A Concise Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, Skeat wrote: “Etymology quite uncertain. We find French pamphile, the knave of clubs, from the Greek name Pamphilus. Similarly, I should suppose that there was a French form *pamphilet [the asterisk denotes here and below a reconstructed form] or Late Latinpamphilētus, coined from Latin Pamphila….” At the end of the entry, he added a noncommittal reference to Gaston Paris.

Pamphlets were erotic (“amatory”) tracts, and as early as 1344, Richard de Bury, Bishop of Durham and a great bibliophile, recollected in his book Philoliblon (“The Love of Books”) that the youths of his generation had cared more for fat palfreys than for leanpanfletos (sic). In those days, students were advised to stay away from pamphlets! Surely, the learned Pamphila need not interest us in this context. Such was also the opinion of Hensleigh Wedgwood, Skeat’s main predecessor in the area of English etymology. Another Pamphila, responsible for the manufacture of silk, enjoys renown. She cannot be the heroine of our tale either.

The most detailed summary of older views on the history of the word pamphlet will be found in an article by William Bates (Notes and Queries 3/V, 1864, 187-169; see also NQ 3/IV, 1864, 325). I am sorry that I could not find any information about this extremely knowledgeable man.

The second edition of The Century Dictionary summarized some of the attempts to explain the derivation of pamphlet and listed four main hypotheses: 1) from a supposed Old French *paum-fueillet (as though “a leaf of paper held in the hand”), 2) from a supposed Medieval Latin *pagina filata “a threaded (sewed) leaf,” 3) from a supposed use of French par un filet “by a thread,” and 4) from a supposed Old French *pamfilet, Medieval Latin *pamfiletus, resting upon a name Pamphilus or Pamphila, of Greek origin. And here is the corollary at the end of the entry: “The last conjecture is plausible (compare the like personal origin of donet, a grammar, from the name Donatus, and of French calepin, a notebook, from the name Calepinus), but historic proofs are lacking.” My reference to Baedeker is less exotic. Yet I tend to agree with the conclusion by the Century Dictionary.

These are the reasons for my uncertainty. It is usually believed that pamphlet emerged in French, made its way into English, and was later retranslated by French. Perhaps so. I can only add that though words from names and titles are fine, no one, not even the knave of clubs, was called Pamphlet! It is understood that –et in pamphlet is a French suffix. English, –let (as in rivulet, bracelet, and their likes) seems to have emerged in English a century and a half later than the word that interests us. It seems that in 1415, no one in England would have divided pamphlet into pamph-let, but the new noun may have sounded vulgar. Sound groups like pump, pomp, pimp are sound-imitative (the German noun Pumpf means “a fart”). Perhaps this circumstance contributed to the word’s popularity among students. And as for the sound f after m in pamphlet, compare English humph, with its exotic spelling ph!

POSTSCRIPT

1. After the reemergence of this blog, two of our readers expressed their joy that THE OXOFORD ETYMOLOGIST is back on track. I am deeply grateful for their comments.

2. In connection with my derivation of yeoman, a reader reminded us of the British river yeo and suggested that the earliest yeomen might be recruited from that area. I could find no evidence of this connection, while the existence of another word with yeo– (which I mentioned) and of the Dutch cognate of yeo– seem to point in another direction.

3. In commenting on the history of limerick (see the previous post), Stephen Goranson pointed out that during the Civil War in the US, the phrase come to Limerick meant “get to the point, come to terms,” in connection with the Treaty of Limerick (1691). This is a most welcome reference. Search the Internet for THE TREATY OF LIMERICK.

_{Featured image: Pamphlet, “Adieux de madame la duchesse de Polignac aux francois,” 1789. Photo by Eliasdo, CC-BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.}

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Trailblazing paths: iconic women through time [reading list]

In honor of Women’s History Month, we’re celebrating trailblazing paths taken by women whose courage and vision transformed societies. This reading list features five biographies that highlight women who resisted systemic barriers, confronted entrenched hierarchies, and fought for the dignity and safety of others. From activists and reformers to scientists and cultural leaders, these stories reveal how women—often overlooked or silenced—have pushed boundaries, protected the vulnerable, and inspired movements for justice. Together, they remind us that progress toward gender equality has always been driven by those who refused to accept the limits imposed on them.

1. A Slumless America: Mary K. Simkhovitch and the Dream of Affordable Housing by Betty Boyd Caroli

In this biography, Mary K. Simkhovitch emerges as a pioneering force in the settlement house movement and a central architect of American public housing reform. Betty Boyd Caroli traces Simkhovitch’s founding of Greenwich House in 1902 and her influential role in shaping early 20th‑century urban policy, including her leadership in New Deal housing initiatives, the creation of the National Housing Conference, and co‑authoring the landmark 1937 National Housing Act. Balancing an unconventional marriage, family life, and a relentless public mission, Simkhovitch became widely admired—once even depicted as a “Wonder Woman of History”—for her ability to confront urban poverty while advocating fiercely for immigrant communities and affordable housing. This biography, rich with historical insight, positions her as an enduringly relevant figure whose work helped define the federal government’s responsibility to support low‑income families.

Read more.

2. American Infidelity: The Gilded Age Battle Over Freethought, Free Love, and Feminism by Steven K. Green

American Infidelity traces the dramatic late‑19th‑century clash between a dominant evangelical culture and a rising coalition of freethinkers, feminists, and sexual reformers who sought greater personal liberty and challenged religious authority. Historian Steven K. Green follows this struggle through the activists who fought for birth control, divorce reform, and women’s autonomy, as well as the moral crusaders—including Elizabeth Cady Stanton—who worked to suppress them. Revealing how these “infidels” pushed for a more open, rational, and egalitarian society, Green shows how their movements were ultimately stifled but left a powerful legacy that continues to shape today’s debates over reproductive rights, censorship, and the role of religion in public life.

Read more.

3. COMBEE: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War by Edda L. Fields-Black

Winner of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for History

This book recounts the often‑overlooked story of Harriet Tubman’s 1863 Combahee River Raid, a daring Civil War operation in which she led Union spies, scouts, and two Black regiments up South Carolina’s river to destroy major rice plantations and liberate 730 enslaved people. Drawing on newly examined documents—including Tubman’s pension file and plantation records—historian Edda L. Fields‑Black, a descendant of one of the raiders, brings to life the enslaved families and communities who escaped to freedom that night and later helped shape the Gullah Geechee culture. Through this vivid reconstruction, the book reveals one of Tubman’s most extraordinary military achievements and the enduring legacy of those who fought for liberation.

Read more.

4. The Things She Carried: A Cultural History of the Purse in America by Kathleen B. Casey

The Things She Carried reveals how purses, bags, and sacks have long been critical tools for women asserting privacy, autonomy, and political power in America. Kathleen Casey shows how these objects—from 19th‑century reticules to the handbags carried by immigrant workers, civil rights activists, and Rosa Parks herself—became symbolic extensions of women’s rights struggles, allowing them to navigate male‑dominated spaces, protect personal dignity, and challenge discriminatory systems. Drawing on sources ranging from vintage purses to photographs, advertisements, and legal archives, Casey uncovers how women of all backgrounds used the bags they carried to assert agency, cross restrictive social boundaries, and shape pivotal moments in the fight for gender and racial equality.

Read more.

5. Frances Oldham Kelsey, the FDA, and the Battle against Thalidomide by Cheryl Krasnick Warsh

This biography tells the remarkable story of Dr. Frances Oldham Kelsey, the FDA medical officer who, in the early 1960s, prevented the dangerous drug thalidomide from being approved in the United States, sparing countless Americans from catastrophic birth defects. A pioneering scientist who earned advanced degrees in an era with few female researchers, Kelsey resisted intense pressure from Merrell Pharmaceutical and spent nineteen months demanding solid evidence of the drug’s safety. Her unwavering stance not only kept thalidomide off the U.S. market but also spurred sweeping reforms in drug regulation through the 1962 Drug Amendment, which established modern clinical trials, informed consent, and stronger FDA oversight. Drawing on archival records and family papers, the book reveals her lifelong commitment to ethical science, her battles against industry hostility and institutional barriers, and her enduring legacy as a vigilant protector of public health.

Read more.

Explore our extended list of titles on Bookshop (UK | US) and Amazon (UK | US).

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The “Freest Writer” in Stalin’s Russia

Laurence Sterne, the eighteenth-century author of Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey, might seem an unlikely figure to capture the imagination of early Soviet intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s. The Bolshevik Revolution dismantled the cultural institutions of the old regime, displaced much of the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia, and set out to create a new literary canon for a new Soviet reader. From the outset, literature was subject to political control.By the 1930s, the state increasingly defined a canon of approved literary classics, while the newly-established doctrine of Socialist Realism began to dominate official literary institutions.

What place could there be, in such a system, for an eccentric Yorkshire clergyman whose popularity in Russia had peaked more than a century earlier, at the turn of the nineteenth century? And yet, in the two decades following the 1917 Revolution, Sterne’s name began to appear with notable frequency in lecture halls, private correspondence, diaries, and unpublished manuscripts. Laurence Sterne and His Readers in Early Soviet Russia: The Secret Order of Shandeans traces Sterne’s reappearance in early Soviet culture. Drawing on letters, diaries, translation drafts, marginal notes, illustrations, and editorial correspondences, the book reconstructs how Soviet readers encountered Sterne and what they sought in his writing.

In mid-1920s Leningrad, an undergraduate student Edvarda Kucherova wrote to a friend: “You cannot imagine how much I adore Sterne. In a very personal way and with such gratitude, for he helps me live. Thanks to him, it is so clear that everything that is closest and most desirable is always so far away from us. Sterne taught me to understand and endure this.”

One of Sterne’s most influential early Soviet advocates was Viktor Shklovsky, a literary critic associated with the experimental literary criticism of the 1920s. In a 1921 pamphlet devoted to Tristram Shandy, Shklovsky presented Sterne as a ‘radical revolutionary of form’ whose digressive prose anticipated the poetry of the Russian Futurists and paintings by Picasso. Sterne’s Soviet afterlife, however, was not confined to the avant-garde circles. By the 1930s, as official discourse turned against modernism, Sterne continued to be read, but attention shifted from questions of form to philosophical and psychological concerns. Despite this change, one association remained constant. Sterne was repeatedly linked, whether approvingly or critically, with artistic and inner freedom.

The book takes Sterne as a point of entry into the everyday intellectual life of Soviet translators, critics, and readers. The circulation of works by the ‘freest writer of all times’ (as Friedrich Nietzsche once called Sterne) an author with no obvious utility for the Soviet state, allows the reconstruction of a form of intellectual life that existed alongside, and partly outside, the enforced unanimity of Stalinist culture.

Readers turned to Sterne for many reasons. In 1937, the celebrated Soviet writer Isaac Babel and his wife, Antonina Pirozhkova, consulted A Sentimental Journey while searching for a name for their newborn daughter. Among those drawn to Sterne in the 1930s was Gustav Shpet, one of Russia’s leading philosophers before the Revolution. Excluded from academic philosophy under Soviet rule, Shpet turned to literary translation as a means of both economic and intellectual subsistence. In his notes to an unfinished translation of Tristram Shandy, he read Sterne as a belated Renaissance humanist, an author who sought distance from his own times by immersing himself in older comic traditions. Shpet’s fate, however, underscores the limits of such refuge. Arrested during the Great Terror, he was executed in 1937.

The book follows figures from very different backgrounds. One of them is the Ukrainian critic Stepan Babookh. Before becoming a literary editor, most notably one of the editors of the 1935 Russian edition of A Sentimental Journey, he had been a worker, soldier and Bolshevik activist. Babookh discovered English literature while being held as a POW by the British during the war, first in an internment camp in India and later in a London prison. A self-taught intellectual of the new Soviet generation, he chose to abandon a Party career in order to become a scholar of English literature.

In the late 1930s, Izrail Vertsman, a scholar of Marxist aesthetics, defended the first Soviet doctoral dissertation devoted to Sterne. Vertsman belonged to a group of critics known as “the Current”, led by philosophers Mikhail Lifshitz and Georg Lukács. These intellectuals advocated more sophisticated forms of Marxist criticism, opposing the crude (in their view) sociological approaches of the 1920s. For Vertsman, Sterne embodied the spirit of creative renewal he associated with “the Current”, yet his private letters reveal the difficulty of reconciling his deep admiration of Sterne with the intellectual constraints of the Stalinist 1930s.

Through these intertwined lives, the book reconstructs what it calls the secret order of Shandeans—an imagined community of readers ranging from literary scholars, translators, and high school students to soldiers and Gulag prisoners. For many of them, Sterne’s humour offered an imaginary escape at a time of political uncertainty and mounting restrictions on creative freedom, when public expressions of individuality were becoming increasingly dangerous.

^{Featured image by Alexander Popadin via Pexels.}

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Bob Turvey, a student of limericks

I have recently read two books by Bob Turvey: The Secret Life of Limericks (Ithaca, NY, 2024. 286 pp.), and Why Are Limericks Called Limericks: An Etymological Detective Story (Bristol, England: Waldegrave Publishing, 2025. 295 pp.). The first book was sponsored by The Mad Duck Coalition, about which I know nothing and am not certain whether it should be featured among the publishers. This, however, matters little, because what really matters is the author’s career and achievement. Last week, I promised to write about his books and am happy to be able to keep my promise.

The author’s career is certainly worthy of mention. Bob Turvey has a doctorate from Cambridge University. As a research chemist he worked in many countries and now lives in Bristol, England. He devoted forty years to studying the history of limericks, spared no money on buying old and recondite books, and never stopped learning more and more about his subject. Probably no one in the world knows half as much about limericks as he does, and therefore, I first envisaged a limerick in his honor, composed in my best Bristol fashion. “A limerick, new, for Bob Turvey?! / Indeed, but it went topsy-turvy. / Neither reason nor rhyme. / I am not in my prime, / Though still unabashedly vervy.” Too bad! I mean the self-effacing admission, but at least this is the first occurrence of the adjective vervy in English. Does the OED take note of blogs?

The earlier of the aforementioned volumes contain the history of eighteen famous limericks. By the way, according to Turvey, here is the most often translated limerick ever: “There was an old man of Boolong/ Who frightened the birds with his song/ It wasn’t the words/ Which astonished the birds/ But the horrible dooble-ontong.” This masterpiece is now almost forgotten, or perhaps it has fallen into temporary desuetude. One wonders what there is to study, while dealing with this or any limerick. Many, many things. First of all, the references. For example, what is and where is Boolong? Is it Boulogne? And why is French entendre pronounced in this ridiculous way? It turned out that such was indeed the way people pronounced the French group –endre when, for example, Dickens and Thackeray were active. No, it did not “turn out”: the fact had to be discovered and documented.

And who composed the limerick? We are not delving into the epoch of Homer or even Shakespeare: no limerick predates the nineteenth century. But popular limericks are almost folklore, and finding their authors is like chasing the author of “Little Red Riding Hood.” (By the way, as Jack Zipes has shown, this tale did probably have an individual author!) And here I am coming to one of the main points of my report.

The first printed version of nearly all limericks appeared in students’ magazines at Oxford/Cambridge or in newspapers. Bob Turvey sifted through tens of thousands of pages in British, American, Canadian, and Australian magazines and newspapers, many of which can now (fortunately) be found online, and sometimes (!) he ran into what seemed to be the first occurrence of the printed text. (I know only too well this labor of love, though in hunting for articles and long-forgotten notes on etymology I limited myself to journals and popular magazines. I realized that I would drown in newspapers, with their word columns and answers to the readers’ queries, and stayed away from this inexhaustible source.) But even the seemingly secure result may not be final. Thus, the author of the Boolong limerick remains undiscovered, though at least two viable candidates have emerged as such.

Is this labor worth the trouble? To my mind, certainly. To give an example from another area. Recently, a piece of music has emerged, with the notes written by Chopin. The piece has been known for years, and yet the discovery was hailed as a great sensation. And quite rightly so: Chopin’s own hand! Limericks are a noticeable part of the culture of the English-speaking world, and their history deserves the attention of those who care for culture. Unfortunately, “history” is made up of tiny details. Only later may they be assembled to produce an impressive whole. Bob Turvey collected countless fragments, and the mosaic he produced is impressive. I should add that he is often satisfied with negative results: he might not be able to find the exact date and the sought-for author, but always succeeded in rejecting fanciful hypotheses. Once again I see a parallel to my work. Sifting through numerous hypotheses of a word’s origin, I often manage to get rid of silly or fanciful conjectures but fail to discover the truth. Such is the way of all reconstruction, “The course of true love never did run smooth.”

Note my reference above to the culture of the English-speaking world. Limericks can also be produced in other languages, but only English speakers compose them by the hundreds. Bob Turvey noted how hard it often is for foreigners to understand the funniest limericks. He ascribed this fact to the specific English sense of humor, but his examples feature the people whose knowledge of English is inadequate for detecting a pun or a hidden reference. Though the English (French, Jewish) sense of humor certainly exists, we still don’t know why Edward Lear’s 1846 The Book of Nonsense was such a success. Limericks, though not called limericks, existed before him.

As noted, Turvey’s second volume is titled Why Are Limericks Called Limericks? But the book is also about when and who. The earliest mention the word limerick Bob Turvey dug up goes back to 1879, that is, at least a decade earlier than what one could find in old dictionaries. Now 1879 is also the date given in the OED online. Rather probably, limericks were called limericks because they were sung between verses of a song whose chorus included the name Limerick and typically invited the listener “to come to Limerick.” Why come to Limerick? The question remains open. For comfort, you will see a view of that town in the heading of this post. Anyone with a better derivation of the word limerick is welcome to contest this hypothesis. Limerick is certainly not a “corrupted” form of Learick.

You expected a sensation and received a reasonable hypothesis. That’s because the author of the books discussed above bases his conclusions on facts and is not interested in sensations. He is a true scholar.

POSTSCRIPT

I have recently received two questions. Since I am not sure when I’ll be able to post the next issue of my traditional gleanings, I’ll answer both right now. 1) Some people believe that the idiom chock a block is a loan from Turkish, in which an identical word means the same. This conjecture looks unconvincing, because their proponents are unable to show how the Turkish idiom reached English. In chock a block, the word chock is the same as in chockfull. 2) Another correspondent cited a Polish word, whose Russian cognate is diuzhii “strong,” and asked me whether I know it. Yes, I do. It is a cognate of English doughty and German tüchtig, whose origin has been explained quite well.

_{Featured image: King John’s Castle in Limerick by Eric the Fish. CC-by-2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.}

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This old <i>house</i> and these old <i>houses</i>

I don’t recall the first time I noticed the pronunciation of houses as HOWsiz with a voiceless s sound rather than HOWziz with a voiced z. But I remember thinking: “That’s weird. I wonder if houses is becoming regularized. Historically, the word is one of those nouns whose singular and plural stems alternate between voiceless and voiceled sounds. The most prominent examples of such alternations involve f and v, as in singular/plural pairs like wife and wives, life and lives, leaf and leaves, etc.

With the f/v alternation, the sound change is reflected as a spelling change, but not so with house and houses. The pair house/houses is the only example of an s/z alteration between the singular and the plural, though there are other s/z alternations in English, like louse and lousy, lost and lose, useful and use, et. cetera.

I checked to see what dictionaries had to say about house and houses. The online Merriam Webster Dictionary gives the pronunciation ˈhau̇-zəz also -səz, where the “also” indicates a less common pronunciation. The online American Heritage Dictionary (based on the 2011 5^th edition) gives both houʹ zĭz and houʹ sĭz for the plural, also recognizing the new pronunciation. 

The Oxford English Dictionary, however, gives British English /ˈhaʊzᵻz/ and U.S. English /ˈhaʊzəz/, both with the z sound, and just differing in the height of the final vowel. Webster’s Third (from 1963) gives hau̇z͘ ə̇z and flags hau̇s ə̇z as “chiefly substandard.” Going back a few decades, the 1934 Webster’s Second only gives the z pronunciations.

The difference in transcriptions systems notwithstanding, what all of this suggests is that in the mid-twentieth century the HOWsiz variant was common enough to be noticed but had not yet been sanctioned by elite pronouncers. Webster’s Second ignored it, Webster Third shakes a finger at it, and today’s Merriam.com is fine with either variant. 

So what happened? Most other nouns ending in –se don’t change their pronunciation in the plural (horse, case, blouse, course, excuse, lease, base, purse, vise, etc.), so perhaps houses is undergoing some analogical leveling (as we linguists call this regularization). Even though house is a fairly common word, and such words tend to preserve their irregularity, houses has finally come around. Reinforcing the contrast with the verb house, which ends in a z-sound, could also be a factor. And what about the possessive forms, like that house’s color? For me, the first s of house’s is voiceless and most dictionaries don’t address the issue. (Webster’s Third, curiously enough, lists both options for the possessive.)

It’s worth noting too that house is not the only voiceless/voiced alternation that is not reflected in spelling. It’s just the only one with an s. A smallish number of words ending in th also show alternation between singular voiceless th (as in thin) and plural voiced th (as in then): mouth and mouths, baths and baths, wreathe and wreathes often show alternation of the two variants ofth. 

In a 2018 article in the journal Language Variation and Change, titled “Variable stem-final fricative voicing in American English plurals: Different pa[ð∼θ]s of change,” linguist

Laurel MacKenzie of New York University reported on the frequencies of devoicing in more than 2,000 tokens of words in spoken corpora. MacKenzie looked at a number of factors, such as the age and gender of the speaker, the surrounding sounds and morphemes, and more. She found that houses was pronounced with a stem-final s about 50% of the time, with younger speakers leading the way: the voiced z pronunciation was present for about 65% of speakers born in the 1940s but dropped to a rate of 38% among speakers born in the 1980s. The voiceless/voiced alternation of th is also being lost. And as one might expect, the words where spelling reinforces the alternation (like knife and knives) are have better retention of the voiceless/voiced alternation. 

When I first noticed the HOWsiz pronunciation, it was already pretty robust. I may not switch my pronunciation of houses, but I’m going to be listening more carefully to these plurals.

_{Featured image by Toa Heftiba via Unsplash.}

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Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch’s fight for affordable housing [timeline] 

Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch—featured as a “Wonder Woman of History” in a series produced by DC Comics—was a key figure in America’s settlement house movement. Throughout the early twentieth century, she spearheaded efforts to improve living conditions for immigrants and the disadvantaged in American cities. Her lifelong advocacy for public housing and urban reform remains urgently relevant almost seventy-five years after her death.

Discover Mary K. Simkhovitch’s extraordinary legacy with our interactive timeline below.

^{Featured image provided by Betty Boyd Caroli.}

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Labor and luck in etymology

The blog is back on track, and I’ll begin where I left off in August. I am now reading two books on the history and etymology of limerick by Mr. Bob Turvey. He spent forty years researching the subject, and I’ll devote a special post to his work, but at the moment, I can offer only “point counter point”: this short essay is about how worthwhile conclusions come as a reward for an unpredictable encounter or chance knowledge. All the examples are from my own experience, and I have written about them in the past, but they will perhaps make a stronger impression when collected in one place.

An especially enigmatic English word (enigmatic with regard to its origin) is yeoman, which surfaced in written texts in roughly the middle of the thirteenth century (obviously, it existed in speech some time before it was recorded). The riddle is yeo-. The etymology, half-heartedly (?) supported by the revised OED (the entry was touched up last in 2025), traces yeo– to young. I assume that my hypothesis is more realistic, because, for phonetic reasons, yeo- cannot be traced to young.

Now back to coincidence and luck. In my research, I look through numerous books, on the off-chance that they may contain some information I need. In an obscure book on Dutch linguistics, I came across a detailed discussion of the English dialectal noun yeomath “a second-year crop of grass,” which, predictably, the OED also records, and the entry contains a sagacious guess about yeo– that provides a good but not final clue to this enigmatic sound group. Young grass? No, the prefix means “additional.” With regard to the details, see the post for June 17, 2009. A yeoman was, quite probably, understood as an “added man.” In nearly seven years since 2009, neither Wikipedia nor etymonline (both are sensitive to new hypotheses) has commented on my suggestion, and I decided to repeat it here. I also contributed an essay on yeoman to an excellent Festschrift, but alas, the scholarly climate has changed dramatically since the nineteenth century. Such volumes, honoring retired and still active philologists, are now so numerous that even specialists have a hard time following them.

Watch one more attack on grassroots. English fog means “thick mist,” but in dialects, fog also refers to “second-year crop.” This time, it was a different kind of luck that provided a clue to the riddle. How can “fog” and “grass” be connected? By an accident of birth, my native language is Russian, and I know the Russian words par “steam, vapor” and par “field left under steam/vapor.” Both have the root meaning “to become damp, moist.” Fog, with its final g, is almost certainly a word of Scandinavian origin (English words, like sedge. ridge, bridge, and so forth, end an affricate). Related to this fog is, quite probably, German feucht “damp.” The same semantic thread connects Russian par¹ and par² as the two English nouns. If I did not know Russian, this analogy would never have occurred to me.

Another reward for knowing Russian may not impress too many of our readers, because that key word is Icelandic, rather than English. Yet the case is curious. Icelandic glenna refers to all kinds of open spaces, from “a ray of sunshine” and “a deceptive move in wrestling” to “a clearing in the forest” and “perineum” (hear, hear!). It also means “joke” and all kinds of trickery. Given enough ingenuity, semantic bridges can be built between any two concepts, but still, “joke” and “perineum”?

I decided to look up Russian shutka “joke” in etymological dictionaries and discovered that its Bulgarian cognate means “vagina.” This sense left Bulgarian researchers nonplused. But Icelandic glenna explains everything. We remember “perineum,” don’t we? In the past, shutka referred to a quick motion, leap (with the legs spread wide!), and the like. Henceanytype of opening. The sought for connection becomes clear when we look at all the old senses of shutka and the word’s related forms. But who knows Icelandic, Russian, and Bulgarian?

Until roughly the 1870s, most specialists in comparative philology were Germans. As we have seen, to connect glenna and shutka, an inquisitive linguist should be aware of the relevant Russian and Icelandic words and “accidentally” note the otherwise hidden connection. Too bad, I have never studied Welsh, Ewe, and Japanese. What precious associations must be left fallow in them, as far as I am concerned! A few historical linguists of old, Jacob Grimm and Antoine Meillet among them, knew many languages. Today, their peers are rare. To exacerbate the situation, famous polyglots, those who can talk glibly in thirty or more languages, are seldom endowed with great analytic abilities. As St. Exupéry’s Fox remarked sadly, nothing in the world is perfect.

My most amusing discovery, which I have celebrated more than once in my publications, concerns the origin of the noun pimp. See also the post for June 7, 2007. The word did not interest me, but while reading an old dialectal dictionary, I ran into the entry “pimp ‘faggot’.” I was surprised by the proximity of two infamous nouns with sexual connotations and discovered that the origin of pimp is “contested.” It is “contested,” because older English etymologists did not know the German word Pimpf, while German scholars had no idea of English pimps. Pimpf refers to a youth and specifically, to a member of the youth organization under Hitler. Like Engl. pimp and pimple, it has a root meaning “to swell” (faggots, that is, bundles of sticks, are, it follows, big pimps!).

Finally, galoot “an awkward fellow.” Like pimp, it revealed its history to me by chance. An article on Italian seafaring terms made me aware of the Italian noun galeotto “galley slave; scoundrel.” The rest was plain sailing. My etymology, proposed first in the post for July 23, 2008, has had some recognition, but alas, Webster and the OED keep saying “origin unknown.” I am patient. Everything comes to him who waits, and I hope that the tie I suggested will one day gain wider recognition.

Luck? To be sure. But to quote Tchaikovsky, inspiration never visits the lazy.

_{Featured image: Yeomen of the Guard, in procession to St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle, for the annual service of the Order of the Garter. Philip Allfrey, CC-by-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons.}

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Centuries strong: Black history told through 10 essential Oxford Reads

African American history does not begin with the founding of the United States—its roots stretch centuries deep. Black experiences, intellectual traditions, resistance, and cultural innovation have shaped the story of America. This timeline brings together Oxford works that illuminate pivotal moments across over two hundred transformative years—from a Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of Harriet Tubman to long-overlooked accounts from the later Civil Rights era. Explore the essential role of historically Black colleges and universities, and encounter richly drawn portraits of trailblazers like Louis Armstrong and Althea Gibson. Taken together, these books reveal a legacy of resilience, creativity, and influence that has defined American life from the colonial era through the 20th century.

Explore the depth and breadth of African American history with this curated selection of Oxford University Press titles—stories that predate 1776 and continue to shape the nation we know today.

^{Featured image by Joel Filipe via Unsplash.}

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The rule of three

I’ve been reading S. Jay Keyser’s fascinating book Play It Again Sam, which (despite its waggish title) is a serious and insightful study of the role of repetition in the verbal, musical, and visual arts. The key idea is that repetition is both efficient and pleasurable, setting up patterns that reinforce linguistic structure and create aesthetic impact.

Part of the book deals with the “rule of three” and the role that triples play in capturing and focusing our attention, providing rhythm, and making things memorable and surprising. Take a second and think of some tripled up phrases if you can. My list included these tricolonic phrases, in which the repetition builds the list in significance:

Vini, vidi, vici

Friends, Romans, countrymen

Reduce, reuse, recycle

Government of the people, by the people, for the people

we cannot dedicate – we cannot consecrate – we cannot hallow – this ground

Faster than a speeding bullet. More powerful than a locomotive. Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound.

It’s a bird. It’s a plane. It’s Superman.

The number three shows its rhetorical impact in a number of places. It’s in jokes (“A priest, a minister, and a rabbi walk into a bar …”), folklore (“Goldilocks and the Three Bears”) and advertising (“Snap, Crackle, Pop). The stereotypical five-paragraph essay, which is still taught in some places, consists of an introductory paragraph, a concluding paragraph and three body paragraphs. And its paragraphs are often made up of topic sentence, a concluding sentence, and at least three supporting sentences. 

In prose, tricolons show up in sentences where triples are used to build emphasis. Sometimes a simple bicolon is too little and a tetracolon is too exhausting. Here are a few from recent reading. In Annie Lowrey’s essay about avoiding microplastic, “I Fought Plastic. Plastic Won” in The Atlantic (August 2025), in one sentence we find a compound noun phrase with three parts, where the second echoes the first and the third expands the idea:

Scientists have found plastic in brains, eyeballs, and pretty much every other organ.

In another sentence, the triple goes down the body, from the eyes to the groin:

We cry plastic tears, leak plastic breast milk, and ejaculate plastic semen.

Triples can pack a lot into a small space as the compound subject of a gerund:  

Concerns over plastic exposure have exploded in recent years, with podcast bros, MAHA types, and crunchy moms joining environmentalists (and a number of physicians and scientists) in attempting to ditch the substance.

And they can even be used to organize longer lists in to rhythmic triples of pairs of adjectives:

Plastics are amazing. The synthetic polymers are light and inexpensive, moldable and waterproof, stretchy and resilient.

Compare that last one to the same sentence with “light, inexpensive, moldable, waterproof, stretchy, and resilient.” You’d be snoring before you get to the end. If you stop, look, and listen, you find tricolons everywhere. Look for them.

_{Featured image by Adriano on Unsplash.}

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On reading reviews

After I’ve finished a book, I’ll often check the reviews to see how my opinion lines up with what others have to say. Sometimes I’m surprised at points I’ve missed and amazed at what others have found (factual flubs, influences, allusions). After reading one recent book where a reviewer flagged a meandering style, I was prompted to reconsider my own reaction: was the meandering an indicator of the narrator’s mental state or the author’s inattention? The review prompted me to think further and reflect on previous books by the same author. Was he slipping?

I often use reviews in advance, to get a feel for a book that I’m thinking of reading before I commit. And sometimes I’ll compare a few reviews. I’m still wondering, for example, whether to commit to the 1,000 plus-page biography of Mark Twain by Ron Chernow. I read the New Yorker review by Lauren Michele Jackson (“Up the River,” in the May 5, 2025, issue) which opens with the idea that

America sees itself in a young boy who learns—but not too much—and whose story ends with his eyes on an open horizon, a stretch of land claimed by the nation but not yet bound to it.

The review implies that Twain’s work and life parallel the story of the United States and describes Twain as a man of contradictions, whose restlessness “was the most American thing about him.”

Graeme Wood’s review in the Atlantic (“The Not-at-All-Funny Life of Mark Twain,” in the May 9, 2025 issue) tells us that the book “dwells more on the wreck of a man than on his sublimely comic work.”

Both reviews mention Twain’s coming of age in an era dominated by the legacy of the Civil War and slavery, his sad family life, his addiction to get-rich-quick schemes, and his concern with leaving biographical footprints. Jackson offers a more straightforward summary of the book’s path, commenting on Chernow’s “misreading of Southern racial dynamics,” his focus on Twain’s writing habits, and his “apologies” for some of Twain’s attitudes and behaviors, such as his Lewis Carroll-like affection for young girls, whom he called his “angelfish.” Wood sees Chernow as presenting a Twain who was “gullible, emotionally immature, and prone to shoveling money into obvious scams…,” a man “able to spot and depict frailties of conscience, character, and judgment in others [but who was] … powerless to correct them in himself.”

For good measure, I also read Dwight Garner’s review in the New York Times, (“A New Biography of Mark Twain Doesn’t Have Much of What Made Him Great,” May 13, 2025). Garner gives away the game in the title and opens with a jab:

Ron Chernow’s new biography of Mark Twain is enormous, bland and remote — it squats over Twain’s career like a McMansion.

It gets rougher, but there are some key insights. Garner notes that the book seems out of balance to him, with Twain’s formative early life given short shrift. The review points us to some other Twain bios that might be worth a look, and it notes that Chernow’s is the first biography to appear in the context of the #Black Lives Matters and #Me Too movements.

All three reviews are chockful of detail and wit, so I appreciate them as a writer as well as a reader. I still don’t know if I’ll commit to Mark Twain. But if I do, I know what to watch for.

_{Featured image by Ugur Peker via Unsplash.}

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How to write an interdisciplinary abstract

The purpose of any abstract is to summarise your article’s content in a way that will help potential readers decide if they want to read your work. An abstract usually runs between 150 and 300 words and will likely be your readers’ first interaction with your research article, so you must write it with that in mind. It should be intelligible on its own, without someone needing to have read your whole article or have in-depth knowledge of the subject at hand to follow the abstract’s meaning.

Interdisciplinary abstracts are more complex than abstracts aimed at a single discipline, since they must appeal to a wider range of readers with radically varying knowledge bases. What follows is a list of eight key strategies for writing clear, compelling abstracts for interdisciplinary research. It’s not intended to be prescriptive or exhaustive, but I hope it will help if you’re feeling overwhelmed with the amount of ground you’re expected to cover in such a small number of words.

1. Start with the hook
   A stand-up comic once told me that the golden rule of comedy is to always start with your best joke. This advice can be applied to writing abstracts: start with the hook. The ‘hook’ is the most exciting and impactful feature of your work. It answers the perennial questions of ‘So what?’ and ‘Why should anyone care?’ If you can convincingly answer these questions in the first sentence of your abstract, readers are much more likely to want to read the full article.
   
   Often, the hook is placed at the end of the abstract as an enticement to read more, but increasingly I think it can be more effective when placed in the very first sentence of an interdisciplinary abstract. When writing up interdisciplinary research, you are appealing to a wider readership that goes beyond the confines of one discipline, so you must capture their attention right from the off with a statement of impact that makes it abundantly clear why researchers in multiple disciplines need to read your work. Then, you can move onto specifics like background and methods.
   
2. State your purpose
   Every abstract should state the central research question or aim of the article, in the clearest possible terms, and justify why it must be answered. It is possible for an article to answer more than one research question, but juggling multiple research questions often leads to an unfocused argument and an overly long article. An article of six-to-ten thousand words gives you enough time to answer one central research question very convincingly, and it is better to do this than to answer multiple research questions less convincingly. Before moving on, you must clarify why it is important to answer that research question. Why is this research necessary and how does the article address that need?
   
3. Summarise disciplinary contexts
   Your interdisciplinary article likely builds upon recent developments in more than one discipline, so you should not assume that readers will be conversant in all the disciplines with which your work engages. Use a couple of sentences to explain key developments in each relevant discipline that directly impact your research. Focus only on what’s essential for understanding your argument. Keep this concise, though, as abstracts should not be overloaded with contextual information.
   
4. Explain your methods
   Interdisciplinary methods are complex but enriching. They usually pull together and combine research techniques from multiple disciplines. Due to this complexity, interdisciplinary abstracts are sometimes overloaded with technical terminology that seem impenetrable to many readers. Take care to explain your methods or theoretical framework and why they help you answer your research question, keeping jargon to a minimum and defining key technical terms with which readers may not be familiar.
   
5. Defend your interdisciplinarity
   Interdisciplinary research is often called upon to justify its existence as interdisciplinary research. There are large numbers of scholars who are sceptical about the very idea of interdisciplinarity. If you are to retain these scholars as readers, you must explain in your abstract why an interdisciplinary approach to your research question is not only possible but essential. Some problems demand interdisciplinary approaches, others do not. You need to convince readers that your work fits into the former category and explain why you have assembled your unique interdisciplinary methodology or theoretical framework to respond to this research question.
   
6. Forecast your results
   Some abstracts won’t do this because the authors prefer to keep the revelation of their findings back for the conclusion of their article. I prefer abstracts to at least forecast the results of the research, simply because this might convince more prospective readers to engage with and cite your article if they know from reading the abstract that its results have direct implications for their own research.
   
7. Use an economy of words
   All your sentences should have a purpose. Meandering trains of thought that take a while to get to the point do not have a place in an abstract, so remove anything that is even slightly tangential. Bear in mind that an abstract is also a discovery aid, since the text of an abstract is often part of the metadata that is pulled across to bibliographic indexes such as SCOPUS and Google Scholar. Consequently, an abstract should include the kind of words you imagine potential readers might type into a library catalogue or online search tool. You will often be asked to provide a list of keywords alongside your abstract, and it is a good idea to work them into the text of the abstract itself to boost your article’s discoverability further.
   
8. Write assertively
   Abstracts are not the place to be modest about your achievements. Use assertive verbs and write in the present tense: say ‘this article does X’ rather than ‘this article aims to do X’ or ‘this article will do X’. Avoid hedging your bets, with words like ‘arguably’ and ‘potentially’ or an overly liberal use of the conditional. And above all: back yourself! It is expected for a research article to contain detailed discussion of other researchers’ work. That is not the case for an abstract, which should foreground your own original interpretation.

Further resources:

• Download our Interdisciplinary Research Abstract Checklist
• Watch the recording of Crafting Strong Abstracts: A Virtual Workshop for Interdisciplinary Researchers

_{Featured image by Thought Catalog via Unsplash.}

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Unexpected words

When I read slowly, I’m a somewhat easily distracted reader. I might ponder an idea, puzzle at a phrasing, or admire elegance and style. Sometimes, though, it is unexpected words that cause me to stop and wonder about their origins. 

Here are a handful of expressions that have sent me to the dictionary: “shades of,” “craned her neck,” “sported a new hat,” “madcap kids,” “stool pigeon” and “moniker.” They all put my reading on pause. When I encountered them, I pondered a bit, jotted down the words so I’d remember to research them, and got back to what I was reading.

Here’s what I learned.

Shades of is related to shadows and to shadow-like nuances. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, from about 1818, shades of was used, “in humorous invocation of the spirit of a deceased person,” with the implication that the deceased person would be horrified or amazed at what was going on. The dictionary notes that it is no longer exclusively humorous and can now refer to some person or thing that is reminiscent of a present happening. So to say “shades of Bruce Springsteen” would be to invoke the Boss’s image or music as a point of comparison.

To crane one’s neck is from 1799, according to the OED, and means “To stretch (the neck) like a crane,” and it even has the variant to crane one’s head. The crane in question is the bird, of course, though cranes for lifting have been around for millennia (think Archimedes or the Egyptian pyramids). But the mechanical ones have only been called cranes since 1487, also getting their name from the bird.

The verb to sport is fearsomely complicated and has nothing to do with football. It wends its way back to disport, meaning “to divert, amuse or entertain” often with a reflexive. Over time sport came to refer to the act of amusing oneself or frolicking, often outdoors. Sport also developed the meaning of “to display” something ostentatiously or to say something publicly. Since about 1778, it could mean “to wear”, and the OED gives the example of “Some macaroni Barristers [who] have presumed to sport Bags and Pig-Tails.” “Macaroni barristers” refer to ones wearing fashionable Italian and French styles—eighteenth century hipsters.

Madcap, it turns out, began as a noun, with a first citation from 1589, meaning a madman, and within a few years the word was also used as an adjective. The suggested etymology is mad + cap, where cap has the metaphorical sense of “head.” And the OED points us to such similar uses as goose-cap, huff-cap, and fuddle-cap for a simpleton, a swaggerer, and a drunk. All are now obsolete. 

When I hear stool pigeon, I think of a criminal who snitches on cohorts to make a deal. But it turns out to refer back to the practice of using a decoy bird tied to a moving stool to attract its fellows. The OED treats stool pigeon as US usage from about 1804 to indicate first a literal decoy and later an informer. An 1804 citation refers to a turtle “exhibited like a stool pigeon to a parcel of geese, in expectation that it would encrease the flock” and in 1844 we find “Those secret partners, by gamblers, are termed ropers, or stool-pigeons: their business is to delude the inexperienced into their dens of iniquity.” A few years later, we get an 1850 citation that “The senior high constable of Philadelphia … recollected that Harry White … who he had been lately using as a ‘stool pigeon’, or secret informer, had informed him … that ‘a big thing’ was coming off shortly.”

Moniker is still a bit of a stumper to me. The OED gives it as “origin uncertain” with an earliest citation from 1851. One suggestion is that it arose from a slang usage for eke-name (meaning nickname). Other ideas relate it to the words monarch or monogram. The scholar R.A.S. Macalister, in The Secret Languages of Ireland (1937), suggests its origin can be found in the mixed language Shelta (sometimes called Tinker’s Cant or simply The Cant). Macalister posits the Shelta word munika meaning name, and this idea is developed further in a 2007 essay by William Sayres called “Moniker: Etymology and Lexicographical History.” That’s the latest word on moniker.

Since I started writing this piece, I’ve come across new words and phrases to puzzle over and research: cheapskate, right as rain, beck and call, chockful, and bespoke. I’m off to the dictionary again.

_{Featured image by Paul Melki via Unsplash.}

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Humour as a higher form of justice

Walter Benjamin, the intellectual hero of the 1968 generation and one of the most influential figures in German cultural and media studies, is still regarded as the quintessential melancholic. Yet his work is interwoven with reflections on humour and the political opportunities it offers.

Despite the evident interest in Benjamin today, his views on humour have received little attention so far. One reason for that may be that, unlike his explorations of melancholy, mourning, and allegory, his thoughts on this matter do not exactly leap out at the reader. In Benjamin’s oeuvre, humour plays a role similar to how he described the relationship between comedy and tragedy. He observed that while comedy is ‘the essential inner side of mourning,’ its presence is subtle—much like ‘the lining of a dress’, which may occasionally flash into view at the hem or lapel. In this manner, humour is neither a counterpart to the much-discussed interweaving of melancholy and the allegorical form of perception in Benjamin’s work, nor an isolated phenomenon. Rather, it is an integral part of a complex, often ambivalent structure of tension, consistently entangled with elements of melancholy, seriousness, and darkness.

The fashion metaphor of inner linings reveals a theoretical contraband that appears from time to time at significant points in Benjamin’s writings, spanning from his early linguistic-philosophical works to his media-aesthetic theses on cinema and his late materialistic concept of history. But rather than being the subject of a comprehensive study, his insights on humour are scattered across a wide range of texts. Most of these are small forms—critiques, fragments, satirical pieces—that engage with contemporary debates and bear witness to striking intellectual constellations. These include the engagement with authors such as Paul Scheerbart, Salomo Friedlaender, Karl Kraus, Jean Paul, Gottfried Keller, Johann Peter Hebel, Sigmund Freud, Charles Fourier, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, and others. Moreover, laughter plays a crucial role in Benjamin’s writings on childlike modes of perception and expression, the reception of technology via popular culture, and his experimentation with hashish. Benjamin often expresses his ideas on humour only in passing, making it all the more surprising how much importance he attaches to this phenomenon. In this vein, The Author as Producer claims: ‘It may be noted, incidentally, that there is no better trigger for thinking than laughter. In particular, convulsion of the diaphragm usually provides better opportunities for thought than convulsion of the soul.’ If, however, laughter is the best way to stimulate thinking, where does it lead in Benjamin’s thought?

To begin with, Benjamin is not concerned with fundamental anthropological patterns of a universal human condition (unlike his contemporary Helmuth Plessner, for example). Instead, his focus is on concrete historical constellations, which possess specific expressive forms for capturing the experience of contemporary history. Whether looking at the literature of Gottfried Keller or Disney’s Mickey Mouse, the central question is always how humour, cheerfulness, laughter, and wit provide opportunities for dealing with one’s own time in a productive way—both aesthetically and politically; regardless of whether the time is marked by the massive upheavals of bourgeois society in the canton of Zurich around 1848, or by the overwhelming technological advancements of the period between the world wars. Productivity in this context means, first and foremost, critical thinking.

From very early on, Benjamin believed that humour serves as a mode of genuine criticism. In his letters, he compares it to rays of light that illuminate and dissect whatever they touch. At the same time, since laughter testifies to ‘shattered articulation’, humour has a tension-filled connection to language, pointing to a fundamental conflict between what is or can be expressed and what remains inexpressible. This disruption of human words is vital, as it also means the disruption of one of their fundamental operations: the distinction between good and evil, which is a basic condition of human judgment. In a fragment from around 1917 and 1918, now translated in our Forum Special Issue into English for the first time, Benjamin presents humour as an act that can bypass or even subvert judgment, thereby allowing for a different, higher form of justice beyond conventional moral norms. Benjamin greatly admired Johann Peter Hebel’s calendar stories, as he saw ‘applied justice’ in their humour. Rather than relying on judgment and punishment, he perceived this applied justice in Hebel’s stories as emerging from vivid narration, composition, and a scenic dramaturgy, animated by small rogues and swindlers and enriched by an abundance of details and props. What becomes apparent is a penchant for microscopic humour that avoids grand gestures and operates at the level of concretion.

These early thoughts stayed with Benjamin throughout his career, right up to his later work, where he emphasized the utopian qualities of laughter. Humour emerges in Benjamin’s work as a site of thought where his early writings intersect and resonate with his later materialist reflections. Notably, even in the Arcades Project, he draws inspiration from his initial ideas on humour. Of particular note here is the enormous relevance of early science fiction writer Paul Scheerbart. In his astral novels, Benjamin perceived not a description of reality at work, but the radical attempt to change it. In fact, Scheerbart’s visions of glass and lightweight architecture had a decisive role in shaping modern and even post-war architecture in Germany and elsewhere. Benjamin appreciated this offbeat author for two reasons. First, he valued Scheerbart’s understanding of technology as a medium of interacting with nature rather than dominating it. Second, he admired the humour in Scheerbart’s literature, which he felt could facilitate a profound metamorphosis of both human beings and society. It is precisely this metamorphosis that encapsulates the political potential of humor as higher justice. Ultimately, through the lens of laughter, there is still a great deal to discover in Benjamin’s aesthetic and political thought.

_{Feature image: Margot von Brentano, Valentina Kurella, Walter Benjamin, Gustav Glück, Bianca Minotti, Bernard von Brentano, Elisabeth Hauptmann (from left), Berlin (1931) © Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Elisabeth-Hauptmann-Archiv 758. Used with permission.}

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The truth about the microbiome: what’s real and what isn’t?

What’s really happening with those microbes inside us? Are we really superorganisms or is it all hype? Dr Berenice Langdon reveals the truth about the microbiome.

Does ‘microbiome’ mean our friendly gut bacteria?

Yes, sort of. Many people are aware that the term ‘microbiome’ refers to ‘friendly gut bacteria’. But ‘microbiome’ also refers to all the microbes or germs inside us. These are mainly bacteria – but they also include fungi, viruses, and many others. The word ‘microbiome’ also refers to where these microbes are: the ‘biome’ part of the word. They couldbe in our gut, or on our skin but a microbiome can also refer to much bigger locations outside the body: the microbiome of a forest, even an ocean.

And going back to the human gut; are these microbes friendly? Well, some are and some aren’t. Like all best buddies, sometimes even the ‘friendly’ ones can be awkward sometimes.

Is it true that our microbiome helps protect us from infections?

We know that if we take antibiotics, they can reduce our gut microbiome, and we can get a diarrhoea infection moving into our gut. On the other hand, we know that the microbiome is mainly made up of bacteria, and bacteria often cause infections. So does our microbiome protect us from infections, or does it cause infections?

The answer is a little bit of both. Our gut microbiome is usually made up of benign bacteria, the sort that don’t cause us harm. These benign bacteria keep the ‘baddy bacteria’, the pathogens, out of the gut. They do this either by outcompeting the bad bacteria, or by making the gut a bit too acidic for the bad bacteria to grow. In this way we can see that the gut microbiome is helping us, just a bit, to avoid gastrointestinal infections.

On the other hand, if our ‘friendly’ gut bacteria happen to get out of our guts and into the wrong place—like our blood stream or our brain—even though these bacteria are generally benign and friendly, they can cause a very serious infection.

Is it true that probiotics are live microorganisms that improve our health?

We know that probiotics are live microorganisms. This is part of their definition, and the idea is that taking them is meant to improve our health in some way. It’s the ‘improve our health’ part that’s difficult to prove.

Scientists have been testing probiotics for decades to determine if they have an effect on our health. They’ve tested their effect on all sorts of medical conditions, including constipation, diarrhoea, ulcerative colitis, and irritable bowel syndrome, as well as other non-gut related conditions such as Parkinson’s and autism. So far, however, there’s no evidence to show that probiotics help any of these conditions. The American Gastroenterological Society mainly does not recommend taking probiotics except as part of a research trial.

Many probiotics currently on the market contain bacteria that are found in our food anyway (in yoghurt, for example), or in fact, are already inside us. Some probiotic packaging even says so itself: contains live microorganisms that naturally exist in the body.

If probiotics don’t do much, are they at least safe? The answer for most people is: yes, probably. The bacteria that make up probiotics are usually fairly benign and don’t usually try and attack us.

But for people who are very ill or in intensive care, probiotics are not recommended. Research shows that probiotics can translocate from the gut to the blood stream. Once in the wrong place—just like the microbes in our gut microbiome—probiotics can cause life threatening infections or even death.

Is it true that a microbiome is essential for survival?

Amazingly, the microbiome is not essential for survival for all sorts of animals including rats, mice, guinea pigs, chickens, flies, and even fish. All of these creatures have been successfully raised without a microbiome. Even more amazingly, this isn’t new. Scientists have been doing this for over a hundred years. It’s absolutely possible for certain animals to survive just fine without a microbiome, and even have babies. This is a fascinating field of research, and these animals are sometimes known as gnotobiotic animals or germ-free animals.

However, it is true that herbivores can’t survive without a microbiome. They are dependent on gut microbes to help them ferment grass or foliage and extract the necessary calories. Herbivores really couldn’t survive without a microbiome.

Is it true that fermented foods and drinks are healthy?

We know that not all fermented foods and drinks are healthy and interestingly, not all fermented foods and drinks have microbes in their final product. Alcohol is an obvious example of this; a fermented drink with known health risks and also one in which the final product contains no microbes whatsoever. Other popular fermented products such as soy sauce are full of salt and are also clearly not universally healthy, while the acid contained in the very popular fermented product cider vinegar can dissolve our teeth and is a known cause of oesophagitis.

However, we still love fermented foods. Fermentation often makes foods taste great and helps us preserve our food. So, while there are certain benefits to fermented food and drink in terms of food production and preservation, overall fermentation doesn’t automatically make foods healthy.

Is it true that we need to pay attention to our diets to improve our microbiomes?

We should of course pay attention to our diet, by not eating too much, having a varied diet and including plenty of fibre, as this is the route to good health. But from a microbiome point of view, the bacteria in our guts don’t need much help.

Our colon typically contains a quadrillion bacteria per ml or 1,000,000,000,000 – a mind-blowingly large number. We also have a wide variety of bacteria inside us, constantly changing minute by minute. We obtain these effortlessly from the bacteria that coat the outside of our foods – even those foods we think of as ‘clean’ like bread and fruit as well as the bacteria naturally found within certain fermented foods mentioned above.

A wide variety of bacteria in our gut is regarded by some as a mark of health and is easily achieved by eating a wide variety of foods and by daily contact with each other, with the outside world, and with nature.

Is it true that together with our microbiomes we are superorganisms?

No, this is not true. Together with our microbiomes we are not superorganisms. While microbes do help us a bit—helping us digest a little bit more food, avoiding certain infections—they also cause us a lot of work, as we have to protect ourselves from them and avoid infections. It is not a universally positive relationship.

But ultimately, we are not superorganisms simply because we do not evolve as one unit. Microbes evolve inside us at a vastly faster rate than we do. And we evolve slowly, evolving protective mechanisms against the microbes, but making use of them when we can.

^{Featured image by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases via Unsplash.}

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Reintroducing Justice Robert Jackson

In 1952, Justice Robert Jackson issued a concurring opinion in the case of Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, in which a majority of the Supreme Court held that President Harry Truman could not invoke executive power to seize several of the major U.S. steel manufacturing companies in order to prevent a nation-wide steel strike that the Truman administration claimed would disrupt the participation of the United States in the Korean war.

Jackson’s opinion in Youngstown sketched a framework for executive power under the Constitution, identifying three examples of executive decisions against the backdrop of congressional authority. He set forth a continuum of executive power, ranging from instances in which executive decisions were “conclusive and preclusive” of the authority of other branches, to ones in which Congress and the executive shared powers and the branches operated in a “twilight zone” of concurrent authority, to ones in which an executive decision was in contradiction to a congressional effort to restrain it. When Jackson’s opinion appeared it garnered some appreciative commentary in academic circles but did not otherwise attract much attention.

Jackson’s Youngstown concurrence was revived, however, in two memorable opinions in American constitutional law and politics. The first was United States v. Nixon, in which Chief Justice Burger quoted a statement by Jackson that the dispersion of powers among the branches of government by the Constitution was designed to ensure a “workable government.” Burger concluded that allowing President Nixon to assert executive privilege against a subpoena in a criminal proceeding merely on the basis of a “general interest in confidentiality” would gravely interfere with the function of the courts and render the government “unworkable.” The second was Trump v. United States, in which Jackson’s statement in Youngstown that in some instances the president’s power to make executive decisions was “conclusive and preclusive” was used by Chief Justice Roberts to show that granting presidents absolute immunity for their official acts was necessary to enable them to execute their duties fearlessly and fairly.

More than seventy years after Jackson issued it, his Youngstown concurrence remains the most authoritative statement of the scope of executive power under the Constitution. But what of the justice who issued that opinion? Robert Jackson was arguably one of the most influential persons in the mid twentieth-century legal profession and a unique figure in American legal history. Yet today he is not widely known and has in some respects been misunderstood. Despite his having one of the largest collections of private papers in the Library of Congress, there has been comparatively little scholarship or popular writing devoted to Jackson. It is time to reintroduce him.

Jackson was the last Supreme Court justice to have entered the legal profession by “reading for the law,” a process where people apprenticed themselves to law offices prior to taking a bar examination. He would eventually study law for one year at Albany Law School and receive a degree, but he never attended college. His family were dairy farmers in western Pennsylvania and New York, and he was the first in his family to pursue a legal career. By 1934 he had become one of the more successful lawyers and wealthy residents in Jamestown, New York.

That year Jackson was approached by members of the Franklin Roosevelt administration and recruited to join the Bureau of Internal Revenue, even though his practice had not included tax law. From that position he progressed rapidly through New Deal agencies, becoming Solicitor General of the United States in 1938 and Attorney General in 1940. By that year he was on the short list for Supreme Court appointments, and was nominated to the Court by Roosevelt in 1941.

Jackson seemingly had every quality necessary to be an influential Supreme Court justice, possessing exceptional analytical and forensic skills and being a gifted writer. But he ended up somewhat unfulfilled on the Court, chafing about its isolation from foreign affairs during World War II and having fractious relationships with some of his fellow justices, notably Hugo Black and William O. Douglas. In the spring of 1945, he was offered the position of chief counsel at the forthcoming Nuremberg trials and took leave from the Court, uncertain about whether he would return. Jackson was largely responsible for the format of the trials, and although he had numerous difficulties with representatives of the other allied powers prosecuting Nazi war criminals, especially those from the Soviet Union, he said in his memoirs that he regarded his time at Nuremberg as the high point of his experience.

Jackson’s two years at Nuremberg were also a time in which he began an amorous relationship with his secretary, Elsie Douglas, to whom he would eventually leave his extensive private papers in his will. Douglas continued as his secretary when Jackson returned to the Court after Nuremberg, and when Jackson suddenly died of a heart attack in October 1954, it was in Elsie Douglas’ apartment. After Jackson’s return to the Court in 1946 his relations with colleagues improved, and his last major participation in a Court case came with Brown v. Board of Education in the 1952 and 1953 terms, in which Jackson, through writing successive memos to himself, eventually joined the Court’s unanimous opinion invalidating racial segregation in the public schools. Jackson had a heart attack in March 1954 and only returned to the Court on the day the Brown case was handed down. He then sought to recover over the summer of 1954, only to succumb that October.

All in all, a memorable life and career and a fascinating, complicated personality, whose remarkable talents somehow did not quite suit him for the role of a Supreme Court justice.

_{Featured image by Abdullah Guc via Unsplash.}

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“I’m good”

The word good does a lot of work in English. Aside from its garden-variety sense (as in “good game” or “good job” or “good dog”), we find the word has a number of extended uses. For example, it shows up in the funky expression “good and …” which means “very” when connected with short adjectives (“good and smart,” “good and hot,” “good and ugly”). 

The expression “I’m good” is especially interesting. As a reply to “How’re you doing?” it can be a replacement for “I’m well,” “I’m fine,” or “I’m okay” (acceptable to all but the snarkiest of prescriptivists). “I’m good” also has a related sense in which it expresses satiation or satisfaction and implies refusal. When a server brings more coffee around or the bartender points to your empty glass, you might hold up a palm and say “I’m good.” Here “I’m good” is an indirect way of saying “No, thanks.”

In fact, “I’m good” is listed in the Oxford English Dictionary with the sense “no thank you; I’m not in need of anything.” The OED gives it as originally a US usage, with a first citation from 1966 in John Ball’s novel The Cool Cottontail. Asked if he wants another beer, detective Virgil Tibbs replies, “I’m still good, thanks.”

“I’m good” can also indicate a negative reply to a suggestion, as in this 2003 OED example from the Toronto Star:

‘Try these on Paige,’ says Emma, holding up the smallest pair of pink shorts I’ve ever seen in my life.

‘Thanks, I’m good!’ I tell her, laughing. 

That was a definite “No” on the pink shorts. But sometimes “I’m good” seems to signal agreement. If you are planning to meet someone, you might propose a time by saying “Can we meet at 7:30?” and get a reply that “I’m good.” This may be a reduction of phrases like “I’m good with that.” Similarly, if you are inquiring of a friend or significant other whether they are prepared to do something. you might ask “Are you just about ready?” A possible reply (one of many), might be “I’m good.” Again this could be a reduction of “I’m good to go” or a response to an implied disjunction “Are you ready or do you have to go to the bathroom?” In the latter case, “I’m good” can indicate “No, I don’t need more time.”

Sometimes the meaning of “I’m good” is in the eye of the beholder. The linguist John Rickford recounts an incident involving two African American sisters who were on a bus that was being checked by Drug Enforcement Agency agents. When an agent asked if he could search their bags, one sister said yes. When he asked the other sister if he could search her, she said “I’m good,” which the agent took as “Okay.” He discovered some drugs and arrested the woman. She contested the search, and Rickford presented a long deposition giving evidence about the meaning and frequency of “I’m good” to mean “No, thanks.” The case ended in a plea deal with time served—two years.  So the next time you say “I’m good,” stop to consider what you might be saying.

_{Featured image by Volkan Olmez on Unsplash.}

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Rethinking nuclear

As someone who has spent decades studying the evolution of nuclear energy, I’ve seen its emergence as a promising transformative technology, its stagnation as a consequence of dramatic accidents and its current re-emergence as a potential solution to the challenges of global warming.

While the issues of global warming and sustainable energy strategies are among the most consequential in today’s society, it is difficult to find objective sources that elucidate these topics. Discourse on this subject is often positioned at one or another polemical extreme. Further complicating the flow of objective information is the involvement of advocates of vested interests as seen in the lobbying efforts of the coal, gas and oil industries. My goal has been to present nuclear energy’s potential role in a sustainable energy future—alongside renewables like wind and solar—without ideological baggage.

An additional hurdle that must be overcome in dealing with the pros and cons of nuclear energy is the psychological context in which fear of nuclear weapons and of radiation impedes rational analysis. The deep antipathy to nuclear phenomena is illustrated by what might be called the “Godzilla Complex” that developed after the crew of the Japanese fishing boat, the Lucky Dragon 5, was exposed to heavy radiation from a nuclear weapons test in 1954. Godzilla was conceived as a monster that emerged from the depths of the ocean due to radiation exposure. It has become an enduring concept that has been portrayed in nearly forty films in the United States and Japan and in numerous video games, novels, comic books and television shows.

It is not surprising that fear of nuclear reactor radiation has been widespread. In spite of the fact that there are no documented deaths due to nuclear reactor waste (in contrast to deaths from accidents), it is widely assumed that nuclear reactor waste is quite dangerous. In contrast, the fact that premature deaths attributable to the fossil-fuel component of air pollution worldwide exceeds more than 5 million annually generates little concern. Similarly, the total waste produced from nuclear energy can be stored on one acre in a building 50 feet high, whereas for every tonne of coal that is mined, 880 pounds of waste material remain. Furthermore, this waste contains toxic components. Yet public concern for nuclear waste clearly overshadows that for coal, despite these contrasting impacts.

After an in-depth review of the most significant nuclear accidents and recognition of the deep psychological antipathy to nuclear energy, I’ve become increasingly interested in the emergence of an international effort to develop safe, cost-effective nuclear energy known as the Generation IV Nuclear Initiative. This began in 2000 with nine participating countries and has since grown substantially.

In the early years, the Generation IV Nuclear Initiative took a systematic approach to identify reactor designs that could meet demanding criteria—including the key characteristic of being “fail safe”. Rather than depending upon add-on safety apparatus, “fail safe” designs rely on the laws of nature—such as gravity and fluid flow—to provide cooling in the event that the reactor overheats. Another high priority design feature is modular construction, allowing multiple units to be constructed in a timely and economical fashion.

After reviewing dozens of options, the Generation IV Nuclear Initiative settled on six designs that it found to be the most attainable and desirable. Since its initial efforts, countries that have embraced the goals of the Generation IV Nuclear Initiative have been pursuing additional designs including reactors that range in size from quite small to about one third the size of the typical one megawatt reactor.

In my book, I’ve focused my attention on four promising designs. These four designs eschew the vulnerabilities of using water as a coolant that proved so devastating at Chernobyl and Fukushima. The explosion at Chernobyl was due to steam and the three explosions at Fukushima were due to hydrogen gas that resulted from oxidation of fuel rods by overheated water. These were not nuclear explosions. Instead, the four designs I’ve highlighted use liquid sodium, liquid lead, molten salts and helium gas as coolants. Liquid sodium and liquid lead cooled reactors are operating successfully in Russia, while China incorporated a gas cooled reactor into its grid in 2023. In the United States, Kairos Power is constructing a molten salt cooled reactor, while the TerraPower company (founded by Bill Gates) has broken ground on construction of a sodium cooled reactor in Kemmerer, Wyoming. These are intended to be models for replacing coal fired power plants with Generation IV nuclear plants. Multiple implementations of this approach are planned through the early 2030s.

Given the world-wide interest in Generation IV reactor development and the many initiatives that are being pursued, it is likely that at least some of these projects will come to fruition in the near future. While success is not guaranteed, there is clearly a need for the general public and students to be kept informed of progress leading up to 2030 and beyond.

To help bridge the knowledge gap in this rapidly evolving domain, I’ve launched a newsletter on Substack called “Nuclear Tomorrow.” It’s written for anyone concerned with the intersection of public policy, energy generation, and its impact on global warming. I hope it serves as a resource for those seeking clarity in a complex and consequential field.

^{Feature image: nuclear power plant via Pixabay.}

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What all parents need to know to support their teens in college

With the semester well underway, your college student is probably juggling a lot—classes, homework, exams, and writing assignments—all while managing friendships, jobs, and other responsibilities. This balancing act can be tough for any young adult, but it’s often especially challenging for students with ADHD. In high school, your teen may have benefitted from built-in structure and support systems (e.g., teachers, parents) that helped them stay on track and meet their goals. In college, those supports tend to fade, leaving students to navigate much more on their own.

As a parent, you can play an important role in helping your student adjust to these new demands. Sometimes this means offering a little extra “scaffolding”—gentle support and guidance—to help them build the skills they need to thrive on their own. That’s exactly why I wrote Mastering the Transition to College: The Ultimate Guidebook for Parents of Teens with ADHD. It’s packed with practical information and strategies to help you and your teen navigate these years successfully. This blog post offers a first look at some of those tips, so you’ll have tools ready if your student starts to struggle, academically or otherwise, this semester.

1. Communication and collaboration are key. You probably know from the high school years that giving unsolicited advice to your teen can backfire. Pushing too hard often leads to resistance. Instead, try to use a calm, collaborative tone. Let your teen know you’re there to support and guide them, but that they are in control of their own decisions. Approaching conversations this way helps your teen feel respected and more open to brainstorming solutions with you.
2. Set goals. Before you can help your teen make changes, it’s important to first understand what they want. Ask about their goals, not just in academics, but in all areas of their life that matter to them. Once you know their priorities, you can work together to map out what steps are needed to get there. This also makes it easier to guide them without feeling like you’re imposing. Some of these steps may be addressed in the tips below.
3. Help your teen establish an organizational system. This may sound obvious, but it’s incredibly powerful: having a clear system to track tasks and deadlines is a game changer. Encourage your teen to choose a system that works for them. It could be a paper planner, a phone app, or a calendar on their laptop. The key is sustainability, so expect some trial and error as they experiment. Whatever they choose, the idea is that the system should be sustainable. The goal is to help them feel in control of their time, not overwhelmed by it.
4. Encourage your teen to develop a system for completing tasks. College life means that the to-do list is rarely empty. Your teen may feel as if their tasks are never-ending… as one is completed, another is added to the list. Therefore, developing a method for triaging what needs to get completed and by when will be crucial. An approach that balances what is important vs. what is urgent is often a good place to start.
5. Discuss all available campus resources with your teen. College campuses offer a lot of support to help your teen succeed. However, students (and parents) often find it difficult to know what resources are available and how to access them. Resources may be academic in nature (e.g., tutoring, office hours, advising, academic accommodations, writing center), mental health related (e.g., student health center, counseling center, skills groups), or logistical (e.g., career services, resident assistants). Knowing what resources to use, when, and how to access them will be essential for ensuring a successful college career. Further, if your teen needs more support than your conversations with them or my book can provide, finding a licensed professional may be a helpful next step. Outside help can be an important part of your teen achieving success.

I hope these tips provide you with a solid starting point in supporting your teen with the transition to and through college. For even more guidance and detailed advice as to how to implement these strategies, check out my book Mastering the Transition to College: The Ultimate Guidebook for Parents of Teens with ADHD.

^{Feature image: photo by Joshua Hoehne via Unsplash.}

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Open Access Week: Nothing about me, without me

In a 2011 speech about shared decision making in healthcare, the UK Secretary of State, Andrew Lansley, coined the phrase “nothing about me, without me”. Used at the time to summarise efforts to empower patients in decisions about their care, the phrase has since been borrowed by advocates and activists on a range of social justice topics.

This year’s Open Access Week poses the question: “How, in a time of disruption, can communities reassert control over the knowledge they produce?” Here at OUP, we were inspired to delve into our open access publishing for examples of research that doesn’t just study communities, but actively involves them. From shaping research questions to guiding implementation, these projects center the voices and experiences of the people at their heart. This commitment to community-led knowledge creation isn’t limited to the articles themselves. It’s reflected in the editorial policies, peer review practices, and team structures that support our journals—ensuring that open access is not just about availability, but about equity and inclusion in research and publishing processes:

• Our Editors and authors publishing with Oxford Open Immunology use the Sex and Gender Equity in Research (SAGER) Guidelines to promote reporting of sex- and gender dimensions in research.
• The European Journal of Public Health is one example of a publication creating space for the promotion of the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance, supporting the ability of Indigenous Peoples to control the use and application of Indigenous Knowledge and data for collective benefit.
• Many of our journals, Nucleic Acids Research included, utilise Early Career Boards to ensure their publications are managed in a way that serves the next generation of researchers and provides those earlier in their careers with experience contributing to journal development.
• Health Promotion International has created a special collection of research on participatory approaches in health promotion.
• Oxford Open Immunology has an open call for papers promoting the use of patient knowledge in research literature.
• JNCI: Journal of the National Cancer Institute and JNCI Cancer Spectrum are committed to supporting and advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion in editorial practices and published content. Recognizing that many populations have been systematically excluded from scholarly publishing, the journals have several initiatives strengthening diversity.

From participatory research approaches to elder care, to self-determination paths for trans and gender diverse people, to rural ownership of businesses in areas of high tourism, and citizen empowerment during energy transitions – our open access publishing is full of examples of the benefits of including people in the process of generating knowledge about them. All articles included here are published with an open access license, ensuring peer-reviewed, trusted knowledge and diverse voices can reach everyone, anywhere in the world:

Diversity in Health Interventions

Self-determination and self-affirmative paths of trans* and gender diverse people in Portugal: Diverse identities and healthcare by C Moleiro et al, European Journal of Public Health

Counting everyone: evidence for inclusive measures of disability in federal surveys by Jean P Hall et al, Health Affairs Scholar

Creating inclusive communities for LGBTQ residents and staff in faith-based assisted living communities by Carey Candrian, Innovation in Aging

Developing a co-designed, culturally responsive physical activity program for Pasifika communities in Western Sydney, Australia by Oscar Lederman et al, Health Promotion International

Co-creating a Mpox Elimination Campaign in the WHO European Region: The Central Role of Affected Communities by Leonardo Palumbo et al, Open Forum Infectious Diseases

Participatory development of a community mental wellbeing support package for people affected by skin neglected tropical diseases in the Kasai province, Democratic Republic of Congo by Motto Nganda et al, International Health

Inclusive Digital Health Strategies

The ATIPAN project: a community-based digital health strategy toward UHC by Pia Regina Fatima C Zamora et al, Oxford Open Digital Health

From disease specific to universal health coverage in Lesotho: successes and challenges encountered in Lesotho’s digital health journey by Monaheng Maoeng et al, Oxford Open Digital Health

Implementing an inclusive digital health ecosystem for healthy aging: a case study on project SingaporeWALK by Edmund Wei Jian Lee PhD et al, JAMIA Open

Developing the BornFyne prenatal management system version 2.0: a mixed method community participatory approach to digital health for reproductive maternal health by Miriam Nkangu et al, Oxford Open Digital Health

Equitable Energy Transitions

Energy communities—lessons learnt, challenges, and policy recommendations by L Neij et al, Oxford Open Energy

Solar-Powered Community Art Workshops for Energy Justice: New Directions for the Public Humanities by Anne Pasek et al, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment

Community participation and the viability of decentralized renewable energy systems: evidence from a hybrid mini-grid in rural South Africa by Mahali Elizabeth Lesala et al, Oxford Open Energy

Quantifying energy transition vulnerability helps more just and inclusive decarbonization by Yifan Shen et al, PNAS Nexus

Renewable energy and energy justice in the Middle East: international human rights, environmental and climate change law and policy perspectives by A F M Maniruzzaman et al, The Journal of World Energy Law & Business

Protecting Local Cultures

Enriching Cultural Heritage Communities: New Tools and Technologies by Alan Dix et al, Interacting with Computers

A framework for tourism value chain ownership in rural communities by Michael Chambwe et al, Community Development Journal

Local government engagement practices and Indigenous interventions: Learning to listen to Indigenous voices by Christine Helen Elers et al, Human Communication Research

The strengths, gender, and place framework: a new tool for assessing community engagement by Justin See et al, Community Development Journal

^{Featured image by Mareike Mgwelo via Pexels.}

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