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Monika Williams Shealey was appointed dean of the College of Education and Human Development at Temple University in Philadelphia. She previously served as senior vice president of diversity, equity, and inclusion and dean of the College of Education at Rowan University in Glassboro, New Jersey. Earlier, Dr. Williams Shealey served as associate dean for teacher education at the School of Education at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.
Dr. Williams Shealey holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of South Florida in Tampa. She earned her doctorate at the University of Central Florida in Orlando.
Kenyatta R. Gilbert has been named dean of the School of Divinity at Howard University in Washington, D.C. Since 2006, Dr. Gilbert has been a professor of homiletics at the divinity school. He is a nationally-recognized expert on African American preaching. He is the author of four books including A Pursued Justice: Black Preaching from the Great Migration to Civil Rights (Baylor University Press, 2017).
Dr. Gilbert earned a bachelor’s degree in political science from Baylor University in Waco, Texas. He holds a master of divinity degree and a Ph.D. in practical theology from the Princeton Theological Seminary in New Jersey.
Jonathan Bailey Holland has been named dean of the Henry and Leigh Bienen School of Music at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, effective September 1. He has been serving as the Jack G. Buncher Head of the Carnegie Mellon University School of Music in Pittsburgh. Earlier, he served on the faculties of the Berklee College of Music, the Boston Conservatory, and the Vermont College of Fine Arts.
Dr. Holland received a bachelor’s degree in music from the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. He earned a Ph.D. in music from Harvard University.
Sharonda Ragland will serve as the acting dean for the School of Arts and Sciences at Virginia Union University in Richmond. She is an assistant professor of mathematics and interim chair of mass communications at the university. Earlier, she was assistant dean for undergraduate studies in the School of Arts and Sciences.
Ragland holds a bachelor’s degree in business administration and a master’s degree in applied and computational mathematics from Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. She is completing work on a doctorate in education from Regent University in Virginia Beach.
Twinette Johnson was named dean of the David A. Clarke School of Law at the University of the District of Columbia. She has been interim dean since August 2022. Prior to joining the faculty in 2017, Professor Johnson was an associate professor of law and director of the Academic Success Program at Southern Illinois University School of Law. Professor Johnson’s research interests include higher education access policy and learning theory models in legal education.
Dr. Johnson holds a bachelor’s degree in English and a Ph.D. from Saint Louis University. She earned a juris doctorate at Tulane University in New Orleans.
This extraordinary profile of Clarence and Ginni Thomas—he a Supreme Court justice, she among other things an avid supporter of the January 6 insurrection—is a masterclass in everything from mustering archival material to writing the hell out of a story:
There is a certain rapport that cannot be manufactured. “They go on morning runs,” reports a 1991 piece in the Washington Post. “They take after-dinner walks. Neighbors say you can see them in the evening talking, walking up the hill. Hand in hand.” Thirty years later, Virginia Thomas, pining for the overthrow of the federal government in texts to the president’s chief of staff, refers, heartwarmingly, to Clarence Thomas as “my best friend.” (“That’s what I call him, and he is my best friend,” she later told the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.) In the cramped corridors of a roving RV, they summer together. They take, together, lavish trips funded by an activist billionaire and fail, together, to report the gift. Bonnie and Clyde were performing intimacy; every line crossed was its own profession of love. Refusing to recuse oneself and then objecting, alone among nine justices, to the revelation of potentially incriminating documents regarding a coup in which a spouse is implicated is many things, and one of those things is romantic.
“Every year it gets better,” Ginni told a gathering of Turning Point USA–oriented youths in 2016. “He put me on a pedestal in a way I didn’t know was possible.” Clarence had recently gifted her a Pandora charm bracelet. “It has like everything I love,” she said, “all these love things and knots and ropes and things about our faith and things about our home and things about the country. But my favorite is there’s a little pixie, like I’m kind of a pixie to him, kind of a troublemaker.”
A pixie. A troublemaker. It is impossible, once you fully imagine this bracelet bestowed upon the former Virginia Lamp on the 28th anniversary of her marriage to Clarence Thomas, this pixie-and-presumably-American-flag-bedecked trinket, to see it as anything but crucial to understanding the current chaotic state of the American project. Here is a piece of jewelry in which symbols for love and battle are literally intertwined. Here is a story about the way legitimate racial grievance and determined white ignorance can reinforce one another, tending toward an extremism capable, in this case, of discrediting an entire branch of government. No one can unlock the mysteries of the human heart, but the external record is clear: Clarence and Ginni Thomas have, for decades, sustained the happiest marriage in the American Republic, gleeful in the face of condemnation, thrilling to the revelry of wanton corruption, untroubled by the burdens of biological children or adherence to legal statute. Here is how they do it.
In this gorgeous essay for Vittles, the poet Seán Hewitt recalls weekend nature walks in England and his grandfather’s lessons on the wonders of foraged food. Inspired by the abundant hawthorns in Dublin’s Phoenix Park, Hewitt writes about making his own hawthorn gin.
When the hawthorns were all done and the gin was in the jar, I put it into the cupboard, then checked on it every week, turning it, watching the colours darken. Now I’ve learned to leave it in peace, and I don’t turn it that often anymore. I just bide my time until December when, on some foggy, cold evening – when it feels like winter has begun – I take it out of the cupboard.
The main difference between sloe and hawthorn gin is that, where sloe gin is fruity and sweet and mixes well with tonic or soda, hawthorn gin is like a dark sherry, perfect for winter. It has a velvety texture, a rich smoothness. I also like that, unlike sloe gin, you can’t buy it anywhere, so hawthorn gin becomes a secret, shared thing between friends, a preservation of summer pulled into winter.
Etymologists interacting with the public on a day-to-day basis usually receive questions about words like copacetic and shenanigans, but so many nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and even prepositions and conjunctions not crying for attention are not less, perhaps even more, interesting. Over the years, I have written about summer, winter, ice, sheep, dog, live, leave, good, bad, red, and even such inconspicuous words as but and yet, to mention just a few. We use them like old trusty tools and never stop to ask where they came from. Somebody somewhere coined them, which probably means that once upon a time they were as transparent to speakers as giggle and hiccup. But today their origin is either debatable or unknown. Isn’t a dog called a dog because it looks like a dog, runs like a dog, and barks like a dog? This is what the naïve speaker thinks, though nothing in the group d-o-g suggests a muzzle, swiftness, or any kind of explosive sound. How did day and night get their names? Aren’t the words in some way associated with light and darkness? Dictionaries know a lot about the oldest history of both but do not always provide a clue to the “motivation” that might explain their origin.
Let us look at day. Its past is not totally hidden (no reference to or pun on clear obscure!). Day has exact cognates everywhere in Old Germanic, including of course Old English, as well as in Sanskrit, Celtic, Slavic, and elsewhere. In Old Icelandic, the proper name Dagr has been recorded. Similar names existed in Gothic and Old High German. Does this fact testify to the word’s significance in some religious ritual? We’ll never know. What conclusion will an etymologist two thousand years from now draw about our names June, Melody, and Makepeace? Day, it should be remembered, does not always mean “a period of twenty-four hours” (as in a few days ago) or half of this period (as in day and night or daytime): it sometimes refers to “a certain period or date” as in Doomsday, the day of reckoning, I’ll remember it until my dying day, and the like. Even if you were born at night, you probably celebrate your birthday. It follows that we are not quite sure where to begin our exploration, though day as “the period of light” looks more promising: after all, law-abiding citizens tend to make their arrangements for the time when there is enough light around, while at night most of us sleep.
Speakers of Modern English no longer realize that dawn has the same root as day. The verb to dawn means “to begin to grow light,” and the same reference is obvious in the phrase it dawned on me. I’ll skip the phonetic part of the story (why dawn? In German, unlike what we observe in English, the connection between the noun Tag and the verb tagen is immediately obvious). Will then a search for the etymology of day take us to the idea of “light,” as suggested above? Perhaps. But first, let us remember Latin diēs “day.” Its root occurs in the English words diurnal, dial “an instrument to tell the time of day by the shadow cast by the sun,” and diary, all three of course borrowed from Romance. Though diēs and day sound somewhat alike, they are not related (a fact often mentioned in dictionaries, to warn readers against what looks like an obvious conclusion), and as though to prove the absence of ties between them, language provides us with a word like Gothic sin-tiens “daily,” in which sin– means “one” and –tien– is a cognate of the Latin word. The correspondence d (Latin) ~ t (Gothic or any other Germanic language) is regular, by the so-called First Consonant Shift: compare Latin duo versus English two.
This –tien- has unquestionable correspondences all over the Indo-European world: for example, Sanskrit had dínam “day.” In Latin, we find the word nun-dinum “market held every ninth day.” Also, Russian den’ “day” (with cognates elsewhere in Slavic) and many other references elsewhere to burning, ashes, and warmth belongs here too. On the strength of, among others, several Greek words meaning “appear” and “visible,” the root of all such words has been understood as “shining.” Since the Sanskrit dèvas (obviously related) means “god,” this idea looks realistic. The Indo-Europeans habitually referred to “god” as “shining” or “sky” (such was Latin Jū-piter “sky father,” known to the ancient Scandinavians as Týr, no longer a sky god; but the name reveals his distant past). Yet it is still odd that both the words related to day and those related to diēs, though unconnected, sound somewhat alike and not only mean “day” but also begin with d. Did d suggest burning, heat, or glowing or refer to things dry and arid? Such ancient sound-symbolic associations are beyond reconstruction. They are often hard to pinpoint even in our modern languages.
Another puzzling lookalike is Sanskrit áhar “day.” It almost rhymes with Proto-Germanic dagaz but lacks d-, to which, above, I ventured to ascribe magical properties. An incredible coincidence? The Sanskrit noun has no correspondences in Germanic, Romance, Celtic, and elsewhere. (At least, none has been discovered.) Did áhar once have d- and lose it? The fertile imagination of historical linguists reconstructed several processes that could be responsible for the loss. Initial d- does sometimes disappear for no known reasons. For instance, t in tear (from the eye), which, as expected, corresponds to d outside Germanic, is sometimes absent altogether: this is true of Sanskrit and Baltic, among others. We have enough trouble with s–mobile (it tends to turn up wherever it wants). Did d–mobile also exist? Most unlikely.
My point has been to show how intriguing some of our common words sometimes are. Copacetic is late (it was first recorded in the twentieth century), while day is older than most of the hills around us. But the problem of origin remains the same: people coin words and etymologists wander in a labyrinth of look-alikes, roots, fleeing initial, and final consonants, and emerge with the all-too familiar verdict: “Origin unknown (uncertain, disputed).” Yet day probably did refer to heat or a bright light. This conclusion sounds reasonable, assuming (and this a reliable assumption) that the word’s initial sense was “the time of light,” rather than “a certain period, date.” Plain as day? Almost.
Featured image by Ivana Cajina via Unsplash (public domain)
Confronting <em>bud</em> and <em>buddy</em>
In the previous installment (14 June 2023), I mentioned several attempts to explain the origin of bud(dy). See also the comment at the bottom of that post. It may perhaps be useful to remember that monosyllabic words beginning with b, d, g ~ p, t, k and ending in one of those consonants (bed, big, pig, kick, gig, dog, gag, keg, dab, bug, and a host of others) are notoriously obscure from the etymological point of view. Sound imitative? Sound-symbolic? Baby words? Borrowed? Some of them once had an ending (e, i, a), which is of no consequence as regards their origin. Incidentally, bud (on a plant) also poses problems. Known from texts since the Middle English period, it has a Dutch lookalike with t at the end and resembles French bouton, which may be of Germanic origin, but this derivation is far from certain. In one widely-used but rather unreliable dictionary, buddy is said to be “etymologically identical with the adjective buddy ‘full of buds’.” Thus, our correspondent, who had a similar idea, even though she cannot be said to be in good company, is at least not alone. Another complicating factor deserves mention. Such nouns and verbs may be coined, forgotten, and coined again in the same form. After all, it is not too hard to come up with words like bob, gab, pad, and so forth.
Buddy poses familiar problems. It may or may not be a native word. Everybody is agreed that we are dealing with an Americanism. It appeared in texts around the year 1800, which excludes the idea of its derivation from bud “part of a plant.” Strange things sometimes happen. Guy, one the most common American words, goes back to a proper name and the 1605 Gunpowder Plot. The plot happened in England, but guy ousted or limited the use of pal, fellow, and their likes in American English. Last week, I mentioned Skeat’s derivation of buddy from booty-fellow and expressed my doubts on this score. Despite my admiration of everything Walter W. Skeat did, I keep thinking that in this case he was wrong.
What follows depends largely on Jeremy Bergerson’s article in the Dutch periodical Leuvense Bijdragen (91, 2002, 63-71). Dutch has the dialectal word boetje “brother.” It has been recorded in numerous variants, and, according to a reasonable suggestion, it is an affectionate form of the baby word boe “brother.” In recent English scholarship, the idea that buddy goes back to brother has gained the upper hand. The direction seems to be correct, but the way may have been less straight than etymologists would like it. The problem is the loss of r after b. In languages in which r is a trill (or a roll: both terms mean the same), for instance, Spanish, Italian, and Russian (to cite a few examples), r is usually the hardest sound to master. Children tend to substitute l for it. But English r is NOT a trill, and the well-known substitution for it is w. Many of us have heard children say: “I am hungwy.” This is also a much-ridiculed pseudo-aristocratic affectation. As a general rule, an English-speaking baby would probably not say buddy for brother.
We may try to ask for help abroad. Dutch bout, beut, boetje, and budde, among many other similar forms, seem to go back to the baby word boe (pronounced with a vowel like English oo in boo). The story is partly reminiscent of the history of English boy. Boy, too, may be a derivative of a baby word for “little brother,” and the Old English name Boia perhaps contains the “root” in its pristine form. Dutch Boio, Boiga, Boga, and even Scandinavian Bo may once have meant “little brother.” (More details on this score can be found in my and J. Lawrence Mitchell’s An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction, pp. 15-16). If this reconstruction is correct, the many words cited above do go back to “brother,” but not to the word brother. The baby etymon contained no r. This suggestion runs counter to what we find in some of our most respectable sources.
Unexpected light on the origin of buddy comes from the English word Boots. The word is known from such compounds as slyboots and lazy–boots, but most will probably remember Boots “a name for the servant in hotels who cleans the boots.” The OED cites numerous examples. Apparently, Boots emerged with the meaning “servant; a person at the lowest level of the hierarchy” rather than “shoeshine boy.” This is evidenced by such senses as “the youngest officer in a regiment” and others. The hotel Boots did clean boots and put them outside the gentleman’s door, but this is not why he received his name. George Webbe Dasent used the word Boots for rendering Norwegian Askepott ~ Askeladden (this is what the despised third son in fairytales, “male Cinderella,” is called). If Dasent had associated Askepott only or mainly with the shoe shiner, he would hardly have used the word in such a context. An ingenious correspondent to Notes and Queries once suggested that Puss in Boots might be a misnomer, because allegedly, Puss and Boots, that is, Puss as Servant was meant. But the English title is a translation from French, where Chat botté is unambiguous.
Bergerson suggested that Boots is a borrowing of Dutch boet, a childish word for “brother.” We find Dutch boet “a recent recruit in the Indian Army” and a few other words that fit our story well. If boet (pronounced approximately like English boot) was indeed borrowed into English with the meaning “a person of inferior rank,” the rest is plain sailing. The ending s is added freely to English words. I, for example, have dealt with two guineapigs: Cuddles and Sniffers. In Dickens’s Dombey and Son, the servant who wheeled Mrs Skewton around had the name Withers. Dobbin of ours, a most important character in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, was called Figs, because his father sold all kinds of groceries. And don’t we occasionally live in digs and have things for keeps?
Dutch words in English are numerous (very numerous indeed). If Boots is one of them, perhaps so is buddy from boetje. The voicing of t between vowels is no problem. Buddy is an American coinage, and in American English, intervocalic t is voiced, so that seated and seeded, Plato and playdough, sweetish and Swedish, futile and feudal (to mention just a few examples), are homophones pairwise. With time, the vowel in boetje acquired, as expected, the value of u in but, and butty ~ buddy was born. Speakers quite correctly interpreted the last sound as a diminutive suffix and produced bud from buddy by back formation. The word has just the expressive value one needs: compare studs “a great virile guy,” as in Studs Lonigan byJames T. Farrell.
Have we solved the riddle? No, the etymology of buddy and Boots will probably remain “debatable” (unless it suddenly gains universal recognition—a rare case in etymological studies), but perhaps we have made a step in the right direction.
Featured image via pxfuel (public domain)
The world’s first transgenic ants have olfactory sensory neurons that flash green in response to odorants.
Ants navigate their richly aromatic world using an array of odor receptors and chemical signals called pheromones. Whether foraging or defending the nest, mating or tending to their young, ants both send and receive chemical signals throughout their lives. And the ant brain is well equipped to process the abundance of scents: The olfactory processing center in the ant’s brain has 10 times as many subdivisions as those of fruit flies, for example, even though their brains are about the same size.
And yet how the ant olfactory system encodes scent data has remained largely unknown.
Contrary to previous findings, the new study in Cell finds that only a few specific areas of the olfactory system lit up in response to alarm pheromones, danger signals that elicit panic and nest evacuation. The results raise questions about how sensory information is processed in the ant brain—as well as tantalizing possibilities for revealing what hundreds of other odorant receptors are up to.
“Neurogenetic tools have revolutionized the field of fruit fly neuroscience over the past decades, while social insect neuroscience has essentially been stuck,” says Daniel Kronauer, head of the Laboratory of Social Evolution and Behavior at Rockefeller University. “Our technical breakthroughs now finally allow us to apply these powerful tools in ants to study their social behavior.”
In 1958, E. O. Wilson reported that a secretion from the mandibular gland of harvester ants triggered their nestmates to quicken their pace and take up colony defense behaviors. He called this response “alarm behavior.” Since then, scientists have documented that alarm behavior and many other complex social activities in ant colonies are regulated by a vast array of pheromones.
Ants’ olfactory receptors are located on neurons in their antennae, which send their input to brain centers called the antennal lobes. The antennal lobes are comprised of specialized structures called glomeruli that are essential to scent processing. Some ants have more than 500 glomeruli—a bounty thought to be related to their heightened ability to perceive and discriminate between pheromones. Previous work from Kronauer’s lab has shown that ants whose odorant receptors have been knocked out cannot respond to pheromone signals.
In this study, the researchers created their transgenic subjects by injecting the eggs of clonal raider ants—a queenless species composed entirely of blind female workers—with genetic material encoding the synthetic protein GCaMP, which lights up neon green when calcium levels change during cellular activity.
“Our goal was to get GCaMP expressed only in a single cell type—the olfactory sensory neurons,” says lead author Taylor Hart, a researcher in Daniel Kronauer’s lab.
This was important because the antennal lobe is composed of multiple cell types: sensory neurons, projection neurons that carry sensory data to other parts of the brain, and lateral interneurons that link everything together. “Those other cell types can make signal-to-noise ratio poor, because they can be doing other activities, such as computations, processing information, and modulating signals,” Hart says. All of this can obscure what the olfactory neurons are doing.
While successfully breeding a small group of ants with GCaMP expression in the olfactory sensory neurons, the team also developed a sophisticated two-photon calcium imaging technique that allowed them to record neural activity throughout the entire antennal lobes of live ants for the first time.
The researchers decided to focus on alarm pheromones, because they are particularly volatile and elicit strong and robust behavioral responses. They found that adult ants that detected the scents immediately scrambled to gather as many eggs in their mandibles as they could and then made a break for it, fleeing into an adjacent section of the test chamber.
Hart and her team then used their new techniques to monitor GCaMP fluorescence levels in the antennal lobes of 22 transgenic ants as they exposed them to a range of odors, including the alarm pheromones (which smell fruity to the human nose). The flashes clustered in six glomeruli in one region, suggesting that area may act as the brain’s panic button.
“We were expecting that a large portion of the antennal lobe would show some kind of response to these alarm pheromones,” Hart says. “Instead, we saw that the responses were extremely localized. Most of the antennal lobe did not respond at all.”
Hart says the findings reveal details about how the ant brain processes sensory input. Researchers have wondered whether the activity is privatized, with each glomerulus responding only to one or a few specific stimuli, or distributed, with unique combinations of glomeruli activated by a stimulus. A brain with more than 500 glomeruli that operated in a distributed way, with hundreds of sensors firing at once, would need extraordinary computational power when it comes to sensory processing, Hart says.
“Most of the odors we tested activated only a small proportion of the total glomeruli,” she says. “It seems that privatization is the way in the ant antennal lobe.”
Considering that only six glomeruli responded out of 500, Hart wonders, “What do they need all these different glomeruli for? The fruit fly gets by with just 50.”
It will now be easier to find out why ants have a greater need to differentiate odor stimuli than other insects, Kronauer says—and not only because Hart has since bred hundreds of transgenic ants who differ from their wild counterparts only in their ability to signal in fluorescence, providing a robust pool for future research.
“The tools that Taylor developed open up a really big range of questions that were inaccessible to us until now,” he says. These include associating specific glomeruli with the variety of pheromones ants use for things like raiding, recruitment, and distinguishing between nestmates and outsiders. “There are also interesting developmental questions about how the ant olfactory system gets assembled, because it’s so complex. Larvae also have olfactory sensory neurons, so now we can look at their sensory capabilities.”
Source: Rockefeller University
The post Transgenic ants glow in response to alarm pheromones appeared first on Futurity.
The company we keep, part two: <em>bud(dy)</em>
I am picking up where I left off two weeks ago. Since there have been no comments or letters connected with part one, I will, as promised, tackle the convoluted history of bud. The Internet is awash in suggestions about the origin of this universally known word. Some such suggestions are reasonable, even clever; others fanciful (for instance, bud has been derived by some from Pashto, from Spanish, and even from the names Buddha and Budweiser!). Of course, we now have the opinion of the OED online, and yet I may add something to the ongoing discussion—no revolutionary hypothesis: rather a glance at the state of the art. Predictably, bud ~ buddy can also be found in the first volume of the original OED, but its editor James A. H. Murray was reticent on the word’s etymology. Today’s editors have much more to say about the history of bud; yet the sought-for origin remains disputable and will probably remain such.
Though the first volume of the OED appeared in 1896, people kept returning to the history of bud, and some of their hypotheses deserve attention. Perhaps the most important part of the tale is whether bud ~ buddy has anything to do with the word butty “comrade.” Here are some quotations from the letters sent to the biweekly Notes and Queries (my constant and inexhaustible source of inspiration). “What is the origin of the word butty, gamekeeper’s slang for “comrade”? The dog was took away home to granny by my butty” (Richard Jefferies, ‘The Amateur Poacher,’ 1896, p. 117”). The editor answered:
“The origin is unknown. The ‘H.E.D.’ [that is, Historical English Dictionary, the original name of the OED; even Murray could not remember when HED became OED!] says that it is a possible corruption of booty. The word is in general use in England. See ‘English Dialect Dictionary’ [by Joseph Wright].”
Other contributors also cited butty from the regions where they lived, and Walter W. Skeat, ever-ready with a suggestion when it came to etymology, wrote:
I would suggest that butty, comrade, is a mere abbreviation of booty-fellow, one who shares in booty; hence a comrade. The full form occurs in Palsgrave [an early sixteenth-century lexicographer] and is duly explained in the “H.E.D.”, s. v. [sub voce “under the word”] “Booty,” §5.
Since that time the derivation of butty from booty-fellow has been repeated more than once. Other contributors to Notes and Queries mentioned butty collier “a man who contracts with the proprietor of a coalpit to get and raise coal to the bank at so much per ton.” In that context, butty was also connected with boot. Additionally, “in ironworks, where two men frequently manage a forge, one superintendent by day and the other by night, each often describes the other as his butty.” In the same region, “a man and a woman living together irregularly sometimes describe each other as his or her butty, and other people would so describe their relations” (1901). “In Warwickshire [the West Midlands] sweethearts who keep company describe their association as buttying with each other.” Bud “husband” has been used for centuries, but of course no phonetic legerdemain can produce this wordfrom husband. Finally, in Scotland, buddy, buddie, and butty have been long since used as a pet designation for a little child.
Judging by the meaning of the words mentioned above, it seems that buddy and butty have rather little to do with booty, a French word of Germanic origin. Booty-fellow is close but seems to have little to do with buddy as we know it. Below, I will quote part of a letter from the journal American Speech 4, 1929, p. 389. Though the author’s suggestion looks like an example of folk etymology, bud is such a controversial word that even dubious remarks have some value.
The Standard Dictionary [that is, Funk and Wagnalls] gives butty as a variant of buddy. I raise the query whether precedence should not be the other way. When I was a boy in the Pennsylvania coalfields, one of the commonest words in the miners’ speech [again mining, as in England!] was butty, or buttie, as I have always preferred to spell it, meaning work-fellow. In the cramped, underground and honey-combs where bituminous coal is dug, the man with a pick and the man with the shovel are literally butties, working all day long buttock to buttock, or in the vulgar but comradely abbreviation, butt to butt. The word was used generally in a technical sense, without any endearing connotation of spiritual nearness. But the boys of the community thirty years ago adopted the word for the idea which later at school they were to express by chum, a word which I confess always sounds emasculated and utterly lacking the vulgar warmth of buttie (!).
The author begins his letter by saying that buddy “is by origin a childish corruption of brother, with a familiar form ‘bud.’ … it is incontrovertible that bud and buddy are diminutives of brother…”.
The “emasculated” chum was discussed briefly and inconclusively in the previous blog post, and I will not comment on the author’s use of the word incontrovertible. I have more than once expressed my objections to terms like certainly, undoubtedly, obviously, and so forth. (Very few things in etymology are incontrovertible.) I am only a bit confused about the order of events. If buddy is from brother, how can it a variant of butty? Here, I’ll also mention the enigmatic sixteenth-century adjective baddy of unclear meaning, but, apparently, with some negative connotations. This word deserves attention, because Murray devoted a long letter to “the queer phrase” paddy persons in Notes and Queries 9/XII, 1903, 87-88, and nothing that great man wrote should fall through the cracks. It turned out that paddy persons is a misreading: the correct 1585 phrase is baddy persons, and I wondered whether baddy has anything to do with buddy. My question remains unanswered, but the syntax of the quotation is characteristic, and I would like to quote that phrase as a postscript to my blog post.
Here is this phrase: “I doubt [= fear] not that the flower of the pressed English bandes are gone, and that the remnant supplied with such baddy persons as commonly, in voluntary procurements, men are glad to accept.” Baddy will, unfortunately, remain a minor riddle, but another thing should not be overlooked: “The flower of such band(es) are gone.” The subject is of course flower, and the verb should have been is. Yet the writer made the verb agree with the noun closest to it (bands). As is well-known, colonial languages are conservative. American English is no exception. The Revised Version of the Bible has: “Our Father which art in heaven.” And I sometimes hear statements like: “That’s the guy which I told you about.” But this usage is relatively rare. By contrast, the syntax of the phrase quoted above is ineradicable: students’ papers teem with it. I have once quoted my favorite example from an undergraduate’s essay: “The mood of the tales are gloomy.” This usage, well-known to the historians of English syntax, is still rather common in Ireland and in other “colonial” varieties of English. It would be interesting to heart what our readers know about it.
Next week, I’ll finish my discussion of buddy and say what little I think I know about its origin. Nothing in my suggestion will be original or incontrovertible.
Featured image via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)
Like millions of other people around the world, I have spent much of the past few weeks playing The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (TotK), the nineteenth installment in Nintendo’s widely acclaimed series. With ten million units reportedly sold in its first three days—and other metrics on the prevalence of gaming and significant industry profits even after a rough 2022—I have started to wonder why the study of popular culture and International Relations (IR) has given video games relatively little attention.
Work on popular culture and IR has identified various ways in which films, television series, popular literature, and other cultural artifacts (often in the science fiction genre) might reflect and even affect real-world politics. It stands to reason that video games could have similar effects, but with few notable exceptions, these products have received much less attention than those in more established media. I will more systematically consider how video games might affect our political world in my next post. For now, I want to focus on TotK.
TotK might not seem like a game that offers much fodder for IR scholars. There is plenty of fun to be had, but at least in the first half of the game that I have completed, there is little explicitly political content. The story is a fairly straightforward tale of good versus evil, and our valiant hero, Link, is asked to find damsel-in-frequent-distress Princess Zelda.
At most, TotK scandalously asks you to corrupt a local mayoral election by gifting mushrooms from one of the candidates to potential voters. [Spoiler alert] Your election interference matters little—the two candidates decide to share power because, as it turns out, “The best way to keep Hateno Village vibrant is to work together to combine traditional culture with new ideas!”
Where TotK might matter most clearly for IR scholars is in the scope of the game’s reach. This will likely end up being one of the best-selling games of all time, and wherever it falls on that list, it will join many other Nintendo products. Given Nintendo’s world-wide popularity—as well as that of other Japanese game developers and publishers—we might consider whether popular cultural exports like TotK act as a source of “soft power” for the exporting country.
As Joseph Nye originally defined the concept in 1990, soft power is “co-optive” rather than “command” power displayed “when one country gets other countries to want what it wants”. Nye identified “culture” as a “soft power resource” because a state that “stands astride popular channels of communication has more opportunities to get its message across and to affect the preferences of others”. (See the Duck’s own Peter Henne on this topic for a more detailed discussion of this concept.)
For Nye, soft power was a central aspect of his argument—developed more fully in Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power—that the United States would not soon be eclipsed by any other potential competitor. The volume and uptake of American cultural exports constituted evidence that the United States could remain the world’s leading power even if others made some relative gains in the military or economic domains.
Nye saw various kinds of cultural exports as generative of American soft power. “Young Japanese who have never been to the United States wear sports jackets with the names of American colleges. Nicaraguan television broadcast American shows even while the government fought American-backed guerrillas. Similarly, Soviet teenagers wear blue jeans and seek American recordings, and Chinese students used a symbol modeled on the Statue of Liberty during the 1989 uprisings.”
By contrast, Nye saw Japanese cultural exports as unlikely to overtake American popular culture on the world stage. “Although Japanese consumer products and cuisine have recently become more fashionable, they seem less associated with an implicit appeal to a broader set of values than American domination of popular communication.”
Whether one is playing TotK or, say, watching 2020’s highest-grossing film, Demon Slayer: Mugen Train, today’s ubiquity of Japanese cultural exports would suggest that such products have broader appeal and may be a more reliable source of soft power than Nye expected.
Writing a year before Nye, Francis Fukuyama made such an argument—”the triumph of the West” could be seen in part through the spread of its popular culture, and Japan’s popular cultural products had helped make it one of the world’s leading powers. Japan had “follow[ed] in the footsteps of the United States to create a truly universal consumer culture that has become both a symbol and an underpinning of the universal homogenous state”.
Fukuyama was not concerned that Japanese cultural products would rival those of the United States. Rather, the successful post-war infusion of “the essential elements of economic and political liberalism” into Japan produced a popular culture that complemented American cultural products and that affirmed “consumerist” liberal democracy as a path toward prosperity and influence.
For me and many others, the hours we log restoring order to TotK‘s Kingdom of Hyrule represent a fraction of the exposure we have had to Japanese cultural exports. Do all those experiences—perhaps the experiences of watching Studio Ghibli films, reading Haruki Murakami novels, or decluttering with Marie Kondo’s assistance—translate into soft power?
If enough Americans engage with images of Japan that generate fond feelings for (or “affective investment” in) the country, does that mean that the United States as a government will be more likely to “want what [Japan] wants” in at least some areas?
I do not yet have firm answers to these questions. At a time when Chinese officials are seeking to enhance their own country’s soft power, however, and when Japanese game developers are fretting about the rise of the Chinese gaming industry, it would be worth building on some of the scholarship I have cited here to answer such questions. We might thereby bring video games more fully into the study of popular culture and IR.
Author’s note: I have edited the original post to specify that “IR” is an acronym for International Relations and to add a spoiler alert for a side quest.
Ecological crisis, rural deindustrialization, and real estate speculation have created conditions in which the far right thrives.
There is an increasing focus in academic and policy circles on research-policy partnerships. These partnerships are often achieved through co-creation, or “the joint production of innovation between combinations of industry, research, government and civil society.” Co-creation is central to innovation in the hard sciences and technology, but its role in international relations scholarship and aid policy remains underdeveloped.
As scholars of international aid practice, we believe that co-creation can help us design and conduct more relevant, rigorous, and impactful research. It is also a core mission of the Research on International Policy Implementation Lab (RIPIL), whose co-creation process engages policymakers and practitioners in: 1) the generation of important, policy-relevant research questions; 2) research on these questions, through regular validation and consultation; and 3) the development and dissemination of findings and their policy implications, which often leads to the identification of important new research questions and opportunities.
In this piece, we focus on the first phase: the co-creation of research questions. This is one of the trickiest phases of the co-creation process because it requires researchers and policymakers to find a common question and research design that aligns with academics’ incentive to publish rigorous research and policymakers’ incentive to feed evidence into the policy process. Future blog posts will discuss how to implement co-created research and disseminate co-created findings.
At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, we initiated a collaboration intended to generate policy-relevant research questions on the changing nature of international aid. Our aim was to get a sense of whether the combined shocks of COVID-19, growing calls to decolonize aid, and the rise of populism and popular protest had changed the underlying power dynamics in aid.
Importantly, in this project, we did not just want to learn from practitioners based in Western Europe or North America. We wanted insights from key thinkers and actors from the context where aid dependency has been most acute: the African continent. We wanted to understand how these thought leaders viewed aid-related power dynamics and how research could help answer their most puzzling questions.
Between 2020 and 2022, we conducted one-on-one interviews, organized virtual focus groups, and hosted a high-level roundtable in Geneva with donor governments and international non-government organizations (INGOs) on power in aid, all to better understand the changing nature of aid and the research questions that matter to policymakers, practitioners, and key African thinkers.
A synthesis of our thematic findings is available here. In this blog, we discuss our four most important lessons learned about the co-creation process itself.
We saw our discussions as an exchange of knowledge. Therefore, we wanted to make sure that we brought something to the table. Before each meeting and workshop, we circulated a summary of the existing research and our discussions from previous meetings. Having set the stage with these syntheses, we then focused each interview and workshop on listening (not talking). This allowed us to build on the existing academic knowledge, and to use the conversations to identify how it diverged from the everyday experiences of our interviewees and workshop participants. It also allowed each participant to arrive feeling well-prepared, in part through the materials we provided.
Importantly, we began each workshop and roundtable with presentations by African scholars and practitioners. They helped shape the power dynamics of the conversation from the outset.
The process worked. Our preparation, planning, and careful facilitation enabled open and respectful communication among key African thinkers and representatives of international non-governmental organizations (INGOs), donor governments, recipient governments, and the United Nations.
We wanted to hear what donors, recipients, and key observers had to say about changing power dynamics around aid. We wanted to understand the perspectives of people from different recipient and donor countries to see if there might be broader trends.
Most of the people who participated in our discussions did not know us or each other. To enable an open conversation, we had to create an environment where they could trust us, and each other. This took time. We had to reach out to people repeatedly; build relationships through one-on-one conversations at the beginning of the process; and use these one-on-one conversations and our repeated meetings over time to establish our own credibility. This paid off in the quality of the conversations we were eventually able to have in our focus-group discussions and, subsequently, in our high-level panel in Geneva.
If the point of co-creation is to spark new lines of inquiry, researchers involved in co-creation must be willing to let go of the questions they think they should be asking and be open to the questions that others think are most important.
In our initial one-on-one conversations, we focused on asking open-ended, big picture questions to get a sense of whether participants thought power dynamics had changed and, if so, how. In some cases, their answers confirmed our assumptions. In others, we were surprised by new insights.
For example, respondents indicated that the rise of populism in Africa was leading to a backlash against aid recipients and donors. This led us to start a new research project on aid and populism that we could not have imagined at the beginning of the process.
This is hard to understate. Co-creating research questions involves the translation and transfer of ideas between science, policy, and practice over an extended period. This means that researchers should not engage in co-creation expecting quick wins or immediate research results. Co-creation is not a quick strategy to increase your research output, but a long-term commitment to identifying important research questions and building the relationships necessary to answer them.
When done well, co-creation has the potential to improve the relevance and impact of research, foster greater collaboration and understanding between researchers and practitioners, and ultimately contribute to positive change in the aid sector. But it is time-consuming and requires patience, careful planning, regularly questioning one’s assumptions, and continuous communication.
We believe that the investment of adequate time up front has been worthwhile, greatly enhancing our understanding of the power dynamics in aid today and enabling us to ask (and answer) cutting-edge research questions. It has also given us the connections necessary to conduct research on these dynamics, ensuring that our research authentically reflects the views shared by African stakeholders and is relevant to aid policymakers and practitioners globally.
To learn more about RIPIL, visit https://bridgingthegapproject.org/ripil/.
Observing how various words for “friend” originate and develop is a rather curious enterprise. Some etymologies are trivial, that is, they have been known for a long time and are undisputed. Such is, among others, the case of friend. Any good dictionary will tell the same story. The last two letters of friend (-nd) are a trace of an old present participle. In English, present participles end in –ing (a barking dog, flowering wilderness, and so forth), but at one time, the ending of this part of speech was –and. The other Germanic languages still have some easily recognizable traces of –and (cf. German kommend “coming” and so forth). The root of friend is also transparent to the language historian: it once meant “to love” (so already in Gothic, a fourth-century Germanic language, which has come down to us in a rather full form). In Old English, the word did mean “lover.”
Do we love our relatives? It depends. In a society in which kinship determines people’s behavior, love (the sense of belonging, loyalty, devotion, and many other feelings) has numerous “pre-modern” shades. In any case, Icelandic frændi means neither “friend” nor “lover” but “kinsman, relative.” Those who believe that English spelling will gain greatly if reformed may note that friend and fiend are spelled alike and yet do not rhyme. Fiend is also an old present participle. It once meant “hating; hater.” So much for the origin of friends and friendship.
Another trivial case is fellow. Fellow certainly belongs with the subject announced in the title: compare fellow traveler and good fellow “an affable person.” The word came to English from Scandinavian. Icelandic félagi is a compound: fé means “property, money” (English fee is its distant cousin), while –lagi is related to English lay (as in to lay something). Consequently, a fellow is a person who lays down money with someone in a joint undertaking. The word bears some similarity to companion, except that companion is a borrowing from French, rather than Scandinavian. The Romance roots of this word are obvious: com– “together” and panis “bread” (a companion is therefore “one who breaks bread with another”). My students have never heard the phrase boon companion “good companion.” In older books, this phrase usually means “someone with whom one drinks and makes merry” (for example, we can remember Tony Lumpkin and his boon companions in She Stoops to Conquer), and there is no reason why it should be forgotten.
Sharing food will now take us to the noun mate. We have received and welcomed linguistic guests from Scandinavian and French. It would therefore be wrong to ignore Low German. Enter mate. The word (ge)mate, from gamato-, had the prefix ga- ~ ge-, denoting association, and the root discernible in English meat. Meat once meant “food,” as it still does in sweetmeats and green meat (two other items of the English vocabulary my students fail to recognize), from the root “to cut,” as in German messen and (!) English mete out. Thus, we again end up in a friendly company of food sharers.
A few more notes about this mess. The word mess, of French origin, first meant “a serving of food; dish.” In the eighteenth century, it could refer to “mixed food for an animal.” The familiar sense “medley; jumble; a state of utter disarray” appeared later. The root of mess can be seen in Latin mittere “to send out” (as in e-mit and mess-age). In a way, the noun messmate is a tautological compound like pathway. Both parts mean approximately the same: here “food-food,” rather than “someone with whom ones shares food.”
In the company we keep, three words are more serious etymological puzzles: crony, chum, and buddy.
Crony turned up in books in the 1660s. Samuel Pepys knew the word, and so did Stephen Skinner, the author of the 1671 etymological dictionary of English (the second ever). Both Pepys and Skinner were Cambridge men, and crony, long before it acquired the modem negative connotations, meant “roommate” (at Cambridge). In the entry for 30 May 1665, Pepys speaks of the death of Jack Cole, “who was a great chrony (sic) of mine.” The only reasonable derivation of crony seems to be from Greek Chronios “contemporary,” from Chronos “time.” The use of Greek and Latin words at British universities and public schools was commonplace. Pepys’s spelling of the word with ch probably shows that this is how he too understood the word, even though at that time and later, “elegant” (Greek or Latin) spelling variants were customary. To be sure, by Pepys’s time, the word may have been used for decades and been garbled more than once. Therefore, the current etymology looks acceptable but not certain. The once suggested derivation of crony from some cognate of the verb croon is nonsense.
Chum, the Oxford counterpart of crony, became known from printed texts at almost the same time as crony. (Does it follow that both were, after all, recent seventeenth-century coinages? If so, why did they suddenly come into being?). Both were slang, and those who discussed them two hundred years later sometimes apologized for dealing with such low terms: at that time, slang was a synonym for filth. “I confess I rather like the word, though not a few of those born in the [eighteen]-forties, at least, seem disposed to call it slang” (from an 1895 letter). E. B. Brewer, the author of a once tremendously popular 1870 book on the origin of words and idioms, defined chum as “bedfellow.” It is unclear where he found this gloss, but every two students at old Cambridge and Oxford did indeed share a bed.
Cicero and Tacitus used the Latin word con-taberna-lis (literally, “someone sharing a taberna,” roughly “tavern”) with the sense “comrade” (incidentally, a comrade is also a person sharing a camera “chamber” with someone). But contabernalis could hardly have been “Englished” into chum. Even less probable is the derivation of chum from Latin cum “with.” Those old suggestions deserve little consideration.
In 1896, the great Walter W. Skeat offered his etymology of chum. He cast doubt on the derivation of chum from chamber-(fellow), suggested cautiously in the OED, and indeed the path from chamber to chum “does not run smooth.” Skeat found the following entry in the 1767 very well-known Bremen Dictionary: “[In my translation]: “Kumpan, abbreviated as Kump, associate, companion, comrade; College socius, consors. Engl. chum.” He believed that chum was not only a gloss on but also a borrowing of German Kump and explained how the change may have happened. He reconstructed a devious way from Kump to chum. Yet if people could alter chamber into chum, they could do the same, and much more easily, with Kump. But why should British students have borrowed a German slang term? Though that is again not improbable, the reconstruction remains guesswork. With time, Skeat probably lost enthusiasm for his hypothesis, because he did not even include chum in the latest edition of his Concise Dictionary. Thus, today, we can remain chummy, without knowing why we use the word everybody knows (not a rare case in etymology in its relation to life).
The story of buddy is long, and I’ll leave it for the next blog post, but I hasten to thank our readers for their corrections, conjectures, and comments on cowardly custard. (Sorry for the alliteration!). I also have to inform them that I am off to a conference of the Dictionary Society of North America in Boulder, Colorado. This is my first trip “abroad” since the beginning of the pandemic. Therefore, the buddy thriller will appear a week later than scheduled. The long wait will, I hope, whet everybody’s appetite for more tales in the series of One Thousand and One Etymologies.
Featured image: “Chronos and his child” by Giovanni Francesco Romanelli, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)
More short words, or negation of the negation
In late spring and summer, when the days are long, I am often overwhelmed by the desire to write something about the shortest words in Modern English. At one time, I discussed if, of, and, in, both, and (very briefly) yet. See the posts for 2 August and 9 August 2017, and 27 July 2022. The reason I am seized by such an unnatural desire is the almost total obscurity of such words. Open the most detailed etymological dictionary of any Indo-European language and look up in, on, at, to, of, and their cognates: you will find long lists of short forms but no origin. Some pronouns, especially she, have been discussed many times, but the discussion invariably turns round their later history.
Now take any of our negations. All over the Indo-European map, the main word begins with n. What is in this sound that invites denial, refutation, or repulsion? Unable to answer this question, I decided to turn to some negative prefixes and began with the word ignoble. Latin nōbilis meant “(well-)known, excellent, highborn” (the range of meanings was broader than in the Modern English adjective noble), while īgnōbilis referred to people of low birth, undistinguished, and insignificant. Note that the first vowel of the Latin word is long (ī). Once, the prefix was the familiar in: compare such adjectives as inadequate, inappropriate, inefficient, and so forth. The original form must have been in-gnōbilis (theroot in it is the same as in gnostic), but in the heavy group ingn-, the first n was lost, and the preceding vowel, by way of compensation (as it were) lengthened. Or perhaps the heavy cluster ngn with its two n’s flanking g was dissimilated. The same sound change accounts of the form of ignorant and ignominious.
In other positions, the process of assimilation is so obvious that we need no reference to historical phonetics to recognize the origins. Such transparent forms are illegal, improper, and irreversible, as opposed to indifferent. Many Latin words ended up in Middle English by way of Old French. That is why enemy (from Old French enemi, with one n) begins with en-, while inimical “hostile” looks perfectly Latin. (An enemy is not an amicus “friend.”)
The sound of n prevails in negations. English once had ne-, corresponding to Latin nē, as in nefarious (from ne– + the root of fas “rejection of divine command”) and in Nemo, familiar thanks to the famous captain: it goes back to nē + homo “nobody.” (Those who remember Jules Verne’s book The Mysterious Island know that the real name of this fictious character was Prince Dakkar.) Being so short, ne tended to attract all kinds of barnacles. Thus, in the earliest Romance languages, p and c clung to it. We can still see the slightly transformed remnant of that c in negate, neglect, and negotiate. The syllable neg- goes back to nec-, and the roots of the aforementioned verbs can be seen in Latin aio “I say,” lego “I gather,” and otium “leisure, ease.” The consonant g is an insertion.
At present, the English negation is no, from nā, an old contraction of ne + ā As though English had too few negations, it borrowed nei “nay” from Scandinavian. There, it was a compound made up of ne + ei “ay, ever,” that is, a reinforced negation. German nein, though it means “no,” corresponds exactly to English no one or none. The word not is a later form of naught, which is the sum of ne and aught (as in for aught I know). Likewise, Russian net “no” is the sum of ne and a short phrase meaning “is here.” The more synonyms we have, the more nuanced our speech becomes and the harder it becomes to make small distinctions. Compare you are not a man and you are no man.
A curious word is German kein, used attributively, for example, kein Mann “no man.” It emerged as nih-ein, occurred also in the form (ni) dehein (with the obscure syllable de-), and meant “some,” rather than “no.” Today, it means only “no,” and if we want to say “no book,” the only way to say it in German is kein Buch. Its k-, from h-, has not been explained to everybody’s satisfaction. Very short words have to fight for their existence and sometimes change according to puzzling rules.
We will probably never know why the sound of n allied itself to negations in Indo-European, and this is a pity, for there must have been something in this consonant that suggested the opposite of unity, attraction, and agreement. Reference to sound symbolism fails us here, as it always does when linguists try to see a direct connection between the articulation of consonants and the meaning of words in which they occur.
However, we observe that n is not the only actor in the game of negation. In Old Icelandic, the adverb ei meant “ever.” English aye (“yes; ever”; cf. the ayes have it) is a borrowing of it. But the other ay meant “not” (thus, simply a verbal sign of reinforcement?) and as a rule, occurred with the particle –gi. Eigi became ekki and, like eigi, stayed in the language. The universally used Scandinavian negation (ei, ej) corresponds exactly to Finnish and Estonian ei, and as could be expected, two hypotheses compete. One defends the Finno-Ugric origin of the Finnish and Estonian word; the other equates it with the Germanic one. In any case, the coincidence is remarkable.
Suffix-like words are called enclitics. Germanic, so rich in negative words, also had several negative enclitics. One of them was –gi, discussed briefly above. It varied with –ki, but the meanings often fluctuated between negative and indefinite, which makes sense, because the line between negation and doubt and even between strict and qualified negation is easy to cross. (Hence the problem of ne and ni in Russian. It drives learners crazy, because those two unstressed words sound very much alike. An even worse horror is that ne and ni are sometimes spelled together with the word they modify, and sometimes separately.)
In Germanic, negative enclitics were rather numerous. Sometimes they corresponded to Latin –que, which meant “and”(!). They abounded in the oldest stages of the language, and poets enjoyed them. One such short particle was Old Icelandic at. Its etymology, cited in dictionaries, carries little conviction, and here we may ignore it and only note that the poets of that period loved multiplying negations. For example, né (é designated a long vowel) might occur before the verb and -at at the end of it. Incidentally, –at also has analogs in Finno-Ugric. The rule prevalent in Modern Germanic that requires only one negation in a sentence is relatively late, and those people who still say I don’t know nothin’ are unaware of the norm imposed on the Standard. Incidentally, in Russian, the English sentence I don’t know anyone anywhere, if translated literally, would sound as “I don’t know nobody nowhere.” Obviously, the more, the better.
Our tour of negations in this blog post was a mere introduction to a complicated subject. The great question is how speakers learned to negate their statements, and we wonder at the variety of the means they invented. We also wonder why the sound n- figures so prominently in the process. Apparently our statement “no means no” had many nuances at the dawn of civilization.
Featured image by cottonbro studio, via Pexels (public domain)
[I am phasing out D&I at typepad. This post was first published at: digressions.impressions.substack here. To receive new posts and support my work consider becoming a paid subscriber at <digressionsimpressions.substack.com>]
It's been about five weeks since I switched Digressions to Substack and last wrote an entry in my covid diary. (For my official "covid diaries" see here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; and here.) It's time for an update on both. Also, some blog house-keeping at the end.
First, my new/replacement neurologist at the NHS long covid clinic in London was unhappy after listening to my narrative. Short version: much recovered by end of January; teaching went well in February/March, but have struggled since. Yes, I am doing much better since the last time one of his colleagues saw me (with apologies for canceling multiple appointments with me). But no, I shouldn't be taking naproxen so frequently at this stage in order to manage the effects of migraine.
The neurologist's concern was straightforward: I am not nipping the migraines in the bud, but rather masking symptoms. Bottom line, he wanted me to try out the treatment plan the long covid clinic had prescribed to me in June 2022 in order to get the covid induced migraines under control. These are primarily triggered whenever I am cognitively multitasking, that is, socializing, for any amount of time.
In addition, I have noticed an odd new symptom. It's a kind of tinnitus when I lie down to go to bed when I am fatigued. The low grade, but persistent noise 'sounds' like an air-conditioner, generator, or vacuum-cleaner in the distance. Luckily, it doesn’t prevent me from falling asleep because the simple meditation my sister taught me still works like a charm. After some testing with sound-meters and earplugs, I realized the sound is purely cognitive. I only 'hear' it at night when I go to bed, but again only when I am especially tired or migraine-y. (Upon reflection, I suspect I have had this symptom since last Fall and I hereby apologize to the Kimpton hotel in Cambridge in insisting on a room change because of the outside noise I heard.)
Problem is that the official June 2022 treatment plan involves rather serious meds, which were originally developed to treat high blood pressure, depression and/or epilepsy--all have serious (cognitive) side effects. I have not been especially eager to try any, especially if they prevent me from teaching, reading, and writing.
Now, a weird big glitch in the NHS is that the specialist generally does not send you home with the meds required (unless it falls under urgent care), and so I would need to go back with my treatment plan to my GP before I could start any of the treatments the neurologist prescribed. And at the moment any non-urgent appointment at my GP takes a lot of time to schedule. So by the time I met my NHS GP, I had devised an alternative plan.
As it happens when I first met my better half she suffered from awful, debilitating migraines that could last three or four days. But after a while she started a new treatment that has been very successful for her: Botox shots in the neck. Basically one poisons the muscles with Botox so that they can't reinforce a developing migraine with extra stress, and one cuts short the migraine cycle. In the NHS this is an approved treatment for migraine, but only after you try treatment with all the pills first. (Unfortunately, in Holland it's not an approved treatment of migraine so I can't get coverage there either.) Both the NHS neurologist and my GP warned me that if I skipped the pills I could never get reimbursed for the Botox shots, even if it worked. But the GP encouraged me to try it anyway, because he understood my apprehensions about the treatment plan.
So, about twelve days ago, I found myself in the most beautiful physician's office I have ever been in with one of the leading cosmetic eye surgeons of the UK (an old friend of my better half, who -- it was my birthday after all -- paid for my first treatment). fter going through the treatment with me, and ruling out some other medical issues, I got my first eight Botox shots at half dosage. (No, I didn't add a secret cosmetic treatment for eyes or chin!) The plan is to give it two to three weeks, and then, if necessary, add another dosage. If the treatment works, I would need the shots about two or three times a year.
After the first week of shots, I wasn't so sure. But in the second week I am seeing grounds for optimism. So, I'll report back later this Summer if the Botox shots have improved the quality of life structurally. It would be nice if it did because I start a full load of teaching in September. Before then, I am also key-noting this week in Utrecht and chairing a job search in the next few weeks so it would be nice not to live on Naproxen during this period. (I am not counting on that because I pulled a muscle in my back yesterday morning and I have had painful back spasms during the last 27 hrs! Hopefully, I can stand for my keynote on Thursday!)
So much for the Covid diaries update. As hinted in the previous paragraph, I expect to do almost no or very infrequent blogging until the second week of June. (This is the blog house-keeping.) Apologies for that in advance.
I want to close with sincere thanks to all the subscribers to my Substack. The good news is that since I switched to Substack, I seem to have doubled my readership, especially because a sizable chunk of my audience continues to read these posts at Typepad (where, for the time being, I re-post them a day later).
Unfortunately, less than 10% of my substack subscribers pays, so it's too early to contemplate a career switch or even reducing my professional appointment. I had been kind of hoping to blog my way to more structural sabbaticals as a way to manage my long covid on my own terms; but so far no cigar.
Going forward, I will experiment with giving my paying subscribers -- thank you, you are the best! -- more frequent, exclusive content during the Summer. (I have done that only once during the first month.) If you have any suggestions or requests, please don't be a stranger.
Either way, I am really enjoying the more intense engagement that Substack generates. I receive a lot more correspondence again about my near daily musings. Merci. And watch this space in June.
Frances Gavin’s recently declared that “the gap” between policymaking and academic research “has been bridged!” As evidence of International Relations’ newfound influence on the making of U.S. national-security policy, Dr. Gavin points to a handful of scholars who, having crossed the Gap on their own two feet, now occupy prominent government positions. This underscores, he argues, that programs like the International Policy Scholars Consortium and Network and the Nuclear Studies Research Initiative—as well as his own Texas National Security Review—have successfully constructed a communications channel between academia and policymakers.
This is a common line of argument among “gap-bridgers”—scholars who emphasize the importance of forging close connections between the academic study of international relations and the world of policymaking. The Bridging the Gap team’s recent, thorough review provides a good example. It focuses on opportunities and challenges for connecting academic knowledge to policymakers, while also celebrating the influence of a number of scholars on the policy landscape.
The gap-bridgers do, indeed, have much to celebrate. But I worry that the bridges that they aim to construct and maintain suffer from some critical design flaws. Chief among them: they are made by academics for academics. The engineers ask little of the policymakers on the other side.
Bridge-building must move beyond catering to policymakers. Academics bridge no gaps if they, for example, content themselves with providing validation for policymakers’ existing beliefs. It means little if someone with an academic background occupies an influential policy position if they perform their role no differently than would any other appointment.
The problem is that gap-bridgers tend to start with the wrong set of questions. Instead of asking “What do policymakers want from us?” we need to ask ones like “What should policymakers want from us?” and “What do we want from policymakers?”
Perhaps no scholar did more to advance the conversation about the divide between academia and policymaking than Alexander George. In Bridging the Gap: Theory and Practice in Foreign Policy, he identified three types of policy-relevant knowledge: abstract conceptual models of foreign policy strategies, generic knowledge (that is, empirical laws and causal patterns), and actor-specific behavioral models.
Other scholars have built upon George’s arguments. Dan Reiter wrote that scholars help policymakers know their tools. Michael Horowitz offered four measures of policy-relevant knowledge: policy significance, accessibility, actionability, or agenda-setting impact on the public debate.
None of this knowledge matters, however, if government officials ignore it. Henry Kissinger, perhaps the most (in)famous academic-turned-policymaker, noted that policymakers have no time to study while on the job; they can only bring to the table what they learned before entering the policy arena.
Bridge-builders encourage scholars to ‘hide’ their methods and evidence
“Even the most highly developed general knowledge of a strategy cannot substitute for competent policy analysis within the government,” Alexander George wrote. But participants in the policy process suggest that, in recent years, it has gone from bad to worse. A report from two influential officials called the State Department’s clearance process “hell.” Putatively serious analysis in foreign policy occurs infrequently, and much of what does emerge is ad hoc rather than rigorous and systematic. It almost never includes consultations with academics or draws from scholarly research.
Even if policymakers do engage with academic work, there’s no guarantee that officials will understand it. Preparation for careers in foreign policy rarely emphasize training in methods and methodology. Surveys of policymakers demonstrate their deep distrust of social science methods.
Many, as I have learned in my frequent interactions with policymakers, are downright hostile to them.
Gap-bridgers must pay more attention to the degree that the foreign policy community simply dismisses much of the knowledge produced by social scientists. “It’s almost impossible to quantify what we do, and in fact, I think that there’s a great danger in trying,” said an influential former Ambassador at a recent event on the State Department’s Congressionally-mandated Learning Agenda. A high-ranking official concurred, “Diplomacy is an art, not a science.”
When policymakers extol the art of foreign policy, they are advancing a theory of knowledge—that is, they are taking a position on epistemology that ex ante rejects a lot of what we do in social-scientific research.
This is not, at heart, a matter of ‘qualitative versus quantitative methods,’ or ‘constructivism versus rationalism.’ Rather, their stance entails a rejection of the usefulness of systematic method altogether. It is a claim that the most important tools for policymaking are rooted in the ‘gut instincts’ and idiosyncratic beliefs of professional policymakers—and that the only ones qualified to assess foreign-policy decisions are, naturally, those who share the necessary experience to develop comparable instincts and hunches.
Dominant methods of policy analysis and decision making are badly outdated
The epistemology of the U.S. foreign-policy community bears a strong resemblance to what scholar Robert A. Kagan termed “adversarial legalism.” Instead of prioritizing solutions aimed at achieving policy objectives, the policy process weighs legal and political risks between entrenched bureaucratic interests. The “right policy” is whatever emerges from that process. The “top expert” is the official who has achieved decision-making authority.
Social-scientific epistemology is very different. Its goal is to produce the “right” answers. Even if one believes—as many academics do—that we will probably never know the exact “truth” or provide the “best” answers, social-scientific training emphasizes self-consciousness and transparency when it comes to epistemic choices.
The defining features of academia—the practices of citations, peer-review, hypothesis testing, university training and certification, a focus on methodology, and so on—aim to facilitate intellectual progress. In principle, scholarly authority derives from the quality of scholarship, not the other way around.
Efforts to “bridge the Gap” need to better wrestle with these differences.
Bridge-builders often encourage scholars to ‘hide’ their methods and evidence when speaking with policymakers. But this renders even the best scholarship indistinguishable from opinions, guesses, and even misinformation.
It is this state of affairs, not the nature of social science itself, that makes “lab leaks” from social science so dangerous.
At the very least, academics should avoid validating the anti-scientific views of many policymakers who dismiss social science as irrelevant.
Alexander George understood the challenge. In Bridging the Gap, he explained:
Quite obviously, substantive knowledge of foreign affairs can have no impact on policy unless it enters into the process of policymaking. Substantive knowledge must combine with the effective structuring and management of the policymaking process in order to improve the analytic (versus the political) component of policymaking.
But George never answers the question of how policy analysis within the government should work. One of the most important tasks of bridge-building involves providing answers.
Scholars should push policymakers to think more like scientists.
At the very least, scholars need to use their privileged position to hold policymakers accountable for making decisions that violate basic scientific norms. They must speak up when officials subordinate hard-won substantive knowledge to intuitive judgment and parochial political considerations. In the words of the longest-serving member of Congress in history, John Dingell, “If I let you write the substance and you let me write the procedure, I’ll screw you every time.”
Dominant methods of policy analysis and decision making are badly outdated, if not outright anti-scientific. Rather than expecting scholars to conform to policymakers’ ‘ways of seeing,’ scholars should push policymakers to think more like scientists.
If social scientists believe their work has value, then they (necessarily) believe in the value of their methods and epistemological beliefs.
Scholars have the tools and training to help improve every stage of the policy process. An improved foreign policy epistemology must:
Upgrading policy processes might include finding ways to improve, for example:
In short, a true “bridge” between scholarship and foreign-policy making should be constructed around the evidence-based policy movement and other efforts to improve the effectiveness of foreign policy.
The U.S. foreign policy community can learn a great deal from those other sectors of government that foster a much closer connection between research and practice, including public health, economic policy, and education. Even within the national security community, some agencies do a better job than others. Evidence-based methods play a larger role in international development, the intelligence community, and the Department of Defense than in the State Department or the National Security Council.
The good news is that bureaucratic footholds are emerging for scholars interested in advancing more scientific foreign policymaking. The Department of State recently launched its Learning Agenda, which Congress requested in the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act of 2018. The Global Fragility Act is prioritizing evidence and learning to reform the way the US government prevents and responds to conflict. Both the Departments of Defense and State are making high-profile investments into analytics and data.
Ultimately, the responsibility of building a bridge does not lie solely with academics. Those of us who care about the quality of foreign policy must help policymakers help close the Gap between research and practice. Neither academics nor policymakers have all the answers. But Americans – and billions around the globe affected by our decisions – deserve the best possible foreign policy.
On cowards and custard from a strictly linguistic point of view
It is curious what a multitude of synonyms for “brave” Modern English has (bold, courageous, valiant, fearless, and at least a dozen more), while coward ~ cowardly have practically none. For coward only a few rather unexciting nouns like poltroon and dastard turn up, and for the related adjective we chiefly find compounds like chicken-hearted and faint-hearted. It appears that language endows courage with many shades, while cowardice has only one hue. Such picturesque metaphors as scaredy-cat and milksop don’t count.
The origin of coward is known, and I’ll say nothing about it that cannot be found elsewhere, but the story will take us to other, more interesting words. The strangest thing is that coward, a single common name in English for a person lacking fortitude, is a borrowing from Old French. Where, we would like to know, is the Germanic coward lurking? We’ll discover that ignoble person later but will first note that people seem to have resented this lack of native, grassroots diffidence and mobilized folk etymology to fill the gap. Time and again, coward has been explained as an alteration of cowherd. Why should cowherds be or have been prototypical cowards? The silliness of this derivation did not bother its proponents. Folk etymology seeks an easy explanation rather than logic. The same approach to word origins connected coward with the verb cower, but neither cower nor incidentally, the verb cow has anything to do with coward, even if cower may have reinforced the meaning of our noun.
The source of coward is Old French couard, ultimately, from Latin coda “tail.” In the immensely popular and beautiful poem Reynard, The Fox, translated into Middle English from Old Flemish by the great William Caxton (1415-1490), the hare is called Cuwaert and Kywart. Perhaps the original allusion was to a frightened dog with its tail between its legs. It has also been noted that in heraldry, a lion with its tail between its legs, called couard in Old French, has the deprecatory suffix –ard and means “having a short, drooping, or otherwise ridiculous tail.” The reference to the tail is sometimes called obscure, but on the whole, the existing explanation is not bad. As for the suffix, which we can see even in the name Reynard, it also occurs (among others) in drunkard, dotard, sluggard, and the already mentioned dastard.
Now back to the Germanic coward. We find him in German and Scandinavian: German feige and Dutch veeg mean “cowardly,” while Old Icelandic feigr means “doomed, fated, destined to die.” In Modern Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish, the cognates of feigr mean “fearful; unusual; crazy,” but this change happened under the influence of German. The sense in Old Icelandic is the original one. In German, the transition from “doomed” to “cowardly” went through several stages, one of which was “hated.” The distant origin of our word is unclear and need not bother us. I should only note that the most usual Indo-European root cited in this connection looks unconvincing. The development must have been from “doomed to die” to “afraid of death.” Perhaps one of the intermediate stages was “ready to die.” In some southern German dialects, the related adjective means “almost ripe” and “rotten.” The most ancient root may have had that meaning, as suggested long ago but dismissed by later scholarship without discussion. And this brings us to English fey “fated to die,” an exact cognate of German feig(e), Dutch veeg, and Old Icelandic feigr, now and for many centuries, chiefly Scottish. Such is one of the verbal sources of Germanic fear.
Yet it is not the only one. German Angst “fear” has made its way into English dictionaries, along with the untranslatable Zeitgeist and Schadenfreude. The word, whose specific meaning goes back to Freud, is at least a century old in English, but it still exists only as a synonym for “anxiety.” Itis related to German eng “narrow” and a host of words outside Germanic. When you find yourself in a narrow spot, you experience anxiety, you are afraid. This etymology highlights the development of abstract concepts from concrete ones, about which more will be said below. Here we will only note that the root of Angst can also be seen in anger, anguish, angina, anxious, agnail (!), and so forth. The related words in Greek and Latin sound almost like those in Germanic, and we recognize their English offspring without any trouble.
Fear is also a Germanic word. Its Old English source meant “sudden calamity; danger.” Its cognate in Old Saxon (another West Germanic language) turned up with the sense “ambush.” By contrast, “danger” is the only meaning of Modern German Gefahr and Dutch gevaar. Our knowledge of the subtler meanings of words in the oldest texts is imperfect, because we depend on a limited number of contexts and on occasional, often untrustworthy Latin glosses. Even though such a rigorous semantic law does not exist, it makes sense to assume that abstract senses tend to be derived from more concrete ones. In our case, “ambush” (a source of fear) may have developed into “danger” and “fear.” Yet our material is too scanty for bold generalizations. Though great perils awaited a traveler (ambushes, highwaymen, inhospitable terrain), English fare and its numerous congeners, including German fahren, are not related to fear, because the noun fear had a long vowel in the root, while the vowel in fare and the rest was short. Such niceties did not bother our oldest scholars, but all modern etymological research depends on them.
Here then is a short summary of what we have found. Cowards, those mean-spirited, pusillanimous people who treasured their lives more than the common good, have always existed, but the oldest Germanic words for the lack of bravery seem to derive from the ideas of being fated (doomed, destined) to die. When French words for the spiritual sphere flooded Middle English, the native nouns designating the lack of courage were lost, and coward, a loan from Old French, replaced them. However, fear, an old word, survived, though its original meaning was more concrete, namely, “calamity” or perhaps “accident.” German Angst preserves its status of a foreignism in English, but fear is native and thus makes amends for the imported word coward.
For dessert, I would like to quote the phrase cowardly, cowardly, custard, an alliterative taunt used by boys and reported in 1872 in the biweekly Notes and Queries by a correspondent from Philadelphia. He wrote: “It is supposed to have its origin in the shaking, quivering motion of the confection called ‘custard’. In Microcosmos (1687) [by Johann Martini], Act iii, Tasting says “I have a sort of cowardly custards, born in the city, but bred up at court, that quake foe fear.” The date of the OED’s earliest citation of the phrase is 1833. The explanation given in 1872 seems to be correct: a quivering heart has always been associated with cowardice. In an Old Icelandic poem from the Elder Edda, one of the heroes sees a heart, allegedly cut out of the breast of his brother, but gives the messenger the lie: the heart is quivering. And indeed, the heart belongs to a cook. Then they kill the brother, whose heart looks right! My questions is obvious: Does any of our readers know the taunt? If so, where is it still used?
Featured image: “Two Jack Russell terriers chasing a rabbit into a burrow”, Wellcome Images via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)
Etymology gleanings for April 2023
Since my previous attempt to glean on a half-frozen field, I have received quite a few letters and suggestions. All of them deserve a response. But first, as always, let me thank our correspondents for consulting the blog, asking questions, and offering words of encouragement.
Since my subject was hooker “prostitute,” I stayed away from the other senses of the word. Therefore, I apologize to the correspondent who excels in rugby, calls himself a proud hooker, and found nothing about the game in my post. I share his pride, feel his pain, and have two things to say. First, a hooker is obviously anyone who wields a hook. In fishing, for example, a hooker is distinguished from a netter, and of course, a hooker is a filcher, as explained at length in my post. Consider also hook it “to make oneself scarce,” discussed at some length in my recent dictionary of idioms. As to hockey, yes, the word may be related to hook, but some details are obscure.
Another observation concerns the impact of words related to the sexual sphere on their sources. Obviously, gay “homosexual” is an extension of gay “merry, etc.” The development of the now prevalent sense has been traced in detail, but what matters is that gay “homosexual” killed all the other senses. I once noted that in A. T. Hatto’s splendid English translation of The Lay of the Nibelungen, gay (that is, richly dressed) knights appear with great regularity (this usage was already known to Chaucer), much to the amusement of my undergraduate students. The same happened to queer. In the mid-1950s, I learned and was puzzled by the word because of my lifelong admiration for Oscar Wilde’s works. The phrase snobs queer caused the 1894 trial. Was it possible anywhere in the English-speaking world to say in 1957 “what a queer (= odd, quaint, bizarre) dress,” without making the interlocutor blush or giggle? Many older people can undoubtedly answer this question. The same happened to proud hookers, alas! Today even hooker “ship” is funny. On the other hand, only forty years ago, it sucks was taboo, and now my computer, this precocious child of artificial intelligence, stubbornly suggests three answers to every letter I receive and lists this variant as an expression of my indignant disapproval. Cool!
As for filch (see the post Prolegomena to the word hooker for 19 April 2023), the connection with filchman is obvious, and that is why I referred to Jamieson. The putative Romany etymology of filch is also well-known. But it is far from clear whether the Romany word is not a borrowing of the cant of English thieves. And this brings us to the serious question of alternate hypotheses of word origins. I was asked what I think of the derivation of the adjective secure. Latin had sēcūrus and apparently, sicurus, because the latter was taken over by the speakers of Old English as sicor (Modern English sicker is dialectal, but compare German sicher “certain,” from sihhur). Could the English word be borrowed from a similar-sounding Greek one and be traced to a cognate of Latin sīcut “like” and understood as sic-urus? When there is a secure explanation, why look for another one? How is the vowel length in sīc– to be explained away, and what is –urus? Our correspondent borrowed his etymology from someone who, apparently, had little exposure to historical linguistics. People not versed in etymology often have good ideas about the origin of slang, technical terms, puzzling idioms, and the like, but the history of old words is a special subject, and guesses about their past are seldom, if ever, profitable.
Trawl has traditionally, even if with reservations, been derived from Latin trahere “to draw.” All the senses of troll (“move about; roll; sing in full round voice”) may be related. The difficulty is that tr– and dr– verbs are often either sound-imitative, sound-symbolic, or both (compare trip, drip, trap, trickle, tread, tremble, trample, trill, drill, drawl, droll, drool, and so forth). This means that all of them might emerge in their respective languages independently of one another or influence their look-alikes, or serve as their sources, or be borrowed. Perhaps trawl has been borrowed or coined more than once with vaguely the same meanings. As regards the verb troll, the existence of stroll complicates the picture, and we wonder: is stroll a variant of troll with so-called s-mobile, mentioned in this blog more than once (a ubiquitous prefix without a clear function)? There is no way to answer this question, because we always face possible, even probable, but not definite solutions.
What is tizzy, part the phrase in a tizzy “in a state of agitation”? Given such a funny word as tizzy, it is almost natural to refer to it as an expressive coinage and to stop wondering about its origin. Compare drizzle, sizzle, swizzle “a frothy (!) intoxicating drink,” and fizz ~ fizzle. Once, tizzy also meant “sixpence,” apparently, an alteration of tester, itself an alteration of teston (the same meaning). Tizzy is a word easy to coin (the pun and half-rhyme are not intentional). There once was the word tuzzy-muzzy “a nosegay.” Dialectal tuzzy means “a tuft of hair” and must be related to touseled, which has respectable relatives but seems to be a member of the same group. The fuzzy Tootsie-Wootsie is also close by.
Can step change “a significant change” be an alteration of sea change? Similarly, can thin as a rake be an alteration of the much more transparent phrase thin as a rail? In the absence of recorded intermediate stages, this type of reconstruction leads nowhere. Also, in connection with rake, our correspondent noted that the Hebrew for “rake” is a word spelled with the consonants resh-het-tof. If rake is of sound-imitative or sound-symbolic origin, then the combination r-h ~ h-r looks natural, but, as always, sound imitation is absolutely obvious only in cases like blah-blah and barf–barf.
Sliding down in a handbasket to hell, I agree, is easy to visualize. It is the ascension to heaven by the same vehicle that remains a puzzle. What is the means of transportation? I asked our readers whether anyone could make sense of the phrase five miles to hell, where Peter pitched his waistcoat. The puzzle has not been solved, but one of our correspondents remembered an old man saying out where Jesus lost his sandals. This image makes more sense! Finally, I received a query whether I have any dirty idioms in my book. Alas, no! In the journals I screened for Take my Word for It, almost everything was prim and proper: in those days, smut and profanity were not allowed in print. The samples sent to me are a delight, but I dare not share them with the readership of this blog. In our speech, we are so squeamish, are we not?
Did both ever refer to more objects than two? No. Bo– in both has cognates in and outside Germanic and has the same meaning everywhere. I believe that in the phrase both Father, Son and Holy Ghost through all eternity, Father and Son was taken for one unit. I am also grateful to another reader who pointed out that the word sib is very much alive in the genetic community and means “sibling” in the speech of its practitioners. And one more. A teacher wrote me that explaining a spelling rule by reference to history is often helpful. I agree. We have rite, right, write, and wright. While dealing with an advanced learner who wonders why English has four written images for the same phonetic unit, a glance at the past may be valuable. But the problem is that spelling is taught (or should be taught) at an early age, and we cannot delve into the history of English while dealing with children. In explaining the spelling of Kate, cat, car, and care, history is good for dessert but not as the main dish.
Once again: please send me questions and notes, and I’ll do my best to comment on them in my gleanings.
Featured image by quintinsmith_ip via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)
Feminist foreign policies (FFP) are considered the latest contribution of feminism to global governance. Eleven countries around the world have embraced FFP, aiming to “systematically integrate a gender perspective throughout” foreign policy agendas.
In recent years, FFP has spread to Latin America: Mexico introduced an FFP in 2020 and the newly elected Chilean and Colombian governments have expressed their intentions of adopting the framework.
This growing interest in FFP across Latin American raises important questions: What exactly is this feminist foreign policy and what is there to gain by naming foreign policies “feminist”? Should Latin American feminists engage, support, critique, or be suspicious of this global trend? What does FFP look like in a Latin American context?
FFP is emerging as a new subfield in feminist international relations. Building on women’s rights and peace movements around the globe, feminism occupies an important position within academic and political spaces since it provides a powerful source of intervention against different forms of discrimination.
The theoretical foundations of FFP, however, are still not clearly defined. What an FFP looks like depends largely on a government’s interpretation of the concept.
Sweden first proposed a general FFP model built on what they call the three R’s: resources, representation and rights. Their model went on to define “six long-term external objectives” centered on policy making with a gender perspective: freedom from different types of gender-based violence; women’s participation in preventing and resolving conflicts, and post-conflict peace building; political participation; economic rights and empowerment; and sexual and reproductive health and rights. This initial Swedish proposal served as a basis for other countries’ policies.
For many foreign policy observers and feminist activists these objectives were still too vague and ambiguous. First, what does foreign policy entail? This question underlies the discussion among academics and activists about feminism being co-opted for neoliberal economic purposes, or if it maintains its potential as a critical proposition. There are also questions concerning contentious topics for feminists. For instance, how is the gender perspective incorporated into defense and security? Given the long tradition of pacifism in the feminist movement globally and its demand for an active commitment to disarmament, how can countries like Canada simultaneously export arms and pursue an FFP?
International organizations have tried to provide definitional clarity. In its most ambitious expression, UN Women proposes that an FFP should aspire to transform the overall practice of foreign policy—including a country’s diplomacy, defense and security cooperation, aid, trade, climate security, and immigration policies—to the benefit of women and girls.
Feminist civil society, however, tends to take a more critical stance. The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) in Germany believes that “fixating on the production of a universally acceptable and concrete definition of a feminist foreign policy fails to consider the different and varied political realities that shape our global landscape.” Thus, it proposes five concepts to inform policy development that better accounts for this variation: intersectionality; empathetic reflexivity; substantive representation and participation; accountability; and, active peace commitment. Regardless of the concrete definition, FFP aims to achieve explicit normative and ethical goals. Yet, as Jennifer Thompson notes, FFP is a state invention in which foreign policy goals are often shaped by state interests rather than feminist activists’ normative principles. While civil society often formulates FFP demands, states implement foreign policies. In other words, it is states that ultimately decide what counts as FFP and what does not. As a result, FFPs may not fulfill their ethical promises—particularly in countries without strong accountability mechanisms. Mexico’s attempt to develop an FFP is a case in point.
In September 2022, Internacional Feminista, a Mexican feminist organization that I co-founded, published the first evaluation of Mexico’s FFP. My colleagues and I concluded that there is no clarity as to what the FFP actually entails and no policy roadmap detailing the FFP’s actions, outcomes, indicators, and intended impact. The Mexican FFP has stalled.
Regarding the question of what constitutes foreign policy, the Mexican FFP has a broad and ambitious scope. The Secretariat of Foreign Affairs seeks to mainstream gender perspectives across all foreign policy areas as one of its core objectives, yet we found this does not happen in practice. Discussion of the FFP is most visible in Mexico’s rhetoric in multilateral fora. However, tangible evidence that Mexico is actually considering a gender perspective is largely absent from other foreign policy issues, such as defense, trade, and diplomacy.
One innovation of Mexico’s FFP was prioritizing gender parity within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and its diplomatic corps. Nonetheless, it is not possible to assess whether there is gender parity across the ranks as the Secretariat has no available records of personnel demographic data, disaggregated by gender or rank. The lack of available data disaggregated by gender suggests that this is not as much of a focus area as it’s made out to be.
Another feature of the Mexican initiative was its aim of strengthening the protocols to address and prevent gender-based violence within the foreign ministry. However, there is very little information available regarding how these are implemented and if they have achieved their intended outcomes. The absence of information again suggests that this was not a priority task. In fact, two cases call into question Mexico’s commitment to FFP: one involved failures in consular attention to a Mexican woman victim of gender-based violence in Qatar, and another involved an attempt to appoint a man accused of sexual harassment as Mexico’s ambassador to Panama.
In its FFP plan, the Secretariat also announced funding for intersectionality-related efforts. However, data shows that the budget remained constant from 2018 to 2020. Following the austerity policies of the current administration, no additional resources were granted to support these efforts. Moreover, the budget document labeled these resources as “Expenditures for equality between women and men.” By continuing to interpret “intersectionality” and “gender perspective” as synonymous, the Mexican FFP dilutes the disruptive spirit of intersectionality that accounts for multidimensional identities beyond binary gender categories.
Without clear implementation guidelines and evaluation criteria, Mexican officials have struggled to navigate the contradictions within the government. The most notorious is the lack of support from the president himself who, according to Mexico’s Constitution, is responsible for defining foreign policy objectives. President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador is openly hostile towards the feminist movement, and a recent leak indicates that the Secretary of Defense spies on feminist activists. Yet, diplomats continue to uphold feminist principles in multilateral forums. The president’s hostility and the mismatch between secretariats obstructs necessary dialogue with feminist civil society and blocks the chances of effective policy accountability.
The Mexican experience highlights the challenges of implementing FFPs in Latin America.
First, it is clear that FFP is not as boundary-pushing as its supporters suggest. It is limited by the lack of accountability mechanisms, broad political support and budget constraints. As a result, FFP is often insufficient to drive change on critical issues. Yet, feminism in the region, as Claudia Korol puts it, “is a rebellious movement in which the plural and diverse bodies and the different struggles seek their place, and demand to be named.” In other words, feminism is in tension with the circles of institutionalized, disciplined and ordered practices, such as government-led foreign policies.
In countries with rampant economic inequality and high rates of gender violence against women, feminist principled policies are sorely needed. Due to institutional resistance, however, policy implementation is far from guaranteed. The design and implementation of foreign policies in the region have historically been a space for male elites and, as the example of Mexico illustrates, the FFP has been insufficient to break this inertia. In the words of feminist scholar Angela Davis, “if standards for feminism are created by those who have already ascended economic hierarchies and are attempting to make the last climb to the top, how is this relevant to women who are at the very bottom?”
After recent elections in Chile and Colombia, leaders are now developing their foreign policies and both countries have declared their interest in adopting an FFP. As consultations develop in Bogotá and Santiago, it is worth remembering that simply labeling a foreign policy as feminist without implementing policies that account for gender perspectives or advance women’s rights creates an illusion of change, while keeping systems of oppression intact and further setting back gender justice.
Genuine efforts to advance gender justice ought to reimagine traditional international relations and diplomacy. As I have argued elsewhere, this can be achieved by more fully considering local dynamics and actors in developing foreign policies. Feminist civil society has been at the forefront of driving successful changes in domestic policies—and we ought to incorporate their strategies and insights into foreign policy development.
This is not a mystery tale, but a few twists in the history of the word riddle are worthy of note. Riddles, it should be noted, played and play an outstanding role in world culture. To win a bride, suitors had to offer or solve an insoluble riddle, as happened, for example, to Samson and Turandot. Forever memorable is the riddle of the Sphinx. According to an Old Norse myth, when the shining god Baldr was killed, Odin (that is, Óðinn) whispered something to his dead son on the funeral pyre. For a long time, the best Scandinavian antiquarians have been trying to guess what Odin imparted to his son, a task as profitable as chasing a rainbow or nailing a pudding to a tree (in an earlier post, I referred to a sleeveless errand). Baldr is dead, to begin with, and if Odin wanted the secret message to be known, he would have pronounced it aloud. In principle, all riddles defy solution: they are meant to be insoluble. Collections of riddles from many cultures make such an unexpected conclusion clear. The scholarly literature on this genre of popular culture is a shoreless sea. Especially instructive is the excellent recent book byProfessor Savely Senderovich Riddle of the Riddle.
English has two homonyms: riddle “puzzle” and riddle “sieve” (the latter, I think, mainly northern English). Their origin has been known for centuries and can be found in any middle-sized dictionary, so that I won’t be able to say anything new about them. However, I have a tiny postscript, and it is for its sake I am telling this story. But first, here is a short and trivial note on the origin of riddle1 and riddle2.
The root of riddle “puzzle,” from rǣdels(e), is Old English rǣdan “to read.” Reading, it will be noted, is unlike swallowing or breathing: it is a skill, not an instinct. Literacy came to the Western “barbarians,” including the Anglo-Saxons, from Latin (with the conversion to Christianity), and they had to invent a word for the new occupation. Along that road, each tribe went its own way. Verbs meaning “think, guess; collect; count; carve, scratch,” and so forth were pressed into service. The closest cognates of English read are German raten “to advise,” Dutch raden “to advise; guess,” and Old Icelandic ráða (ð has the value of th in English this) “to rule, advise; explain.” Modern English still has the phrase to read a dream and another, semi-tautological, one, especially instructive in this context, “to read a riddle” (read “interpret”), though today the tautology is lost on us.
German Rätsel “riddle”is still an obvious cognate of raten, and the same holds for Dutch raadsel, related to raden. Such, however, is not the case of English riddle ~ read. Two sound changes severed the ties between the verb and the noun, and nothing connects those two words in the language intuition of today’s English speakers. Since the vowel in read is long, we might expect riddle to rhyme with beadle, but in the noun, that long root vowel was long ago shortened before the suffix. It might remain long, as happened in ladle (related to lade “to load”), bridle (related to braid), and many other similar words, but quantitative phonetic changes are rarely consistent.
Some words succumb to them, while the others manage to stay intact, and it is hard to account for their power of resistance. For example, English silly (with its short vowel) is related to German selig “happy” (with its long vowel preserved), while breeches is spelled with ee but rhymes with riches, rather than reaches. Likewise, sieve looks like a perfect rhyme for receive and deceive, but in fact, its poetic partners are live and give. To make matters even worse, the final consonant s in the old form of riddle was taken for the ending of the plural and dropped. The history of –s in English is a fitting plot for a short story. For example, alms, eaves, and riches were once singulars. Speakers misinterpreted –s in them but let it live, while in riddle, s was dropped, to reemerge only in the form of the plural.
Riddle “sieve” traces to Old English hriddel, related to the synonymous form hrīder and the verb hrīdrian “to sift” (sifts of course exist for sifting). The suffix –el in this riddle is the same as in riddle1, ladle, and the rest. Centuries ago, many English words began with hr-, hl-, hn-, and hw-. This initial h has been lost, except in the pronunciation of those who still distinguish between witch and which (in today’s erratic spelling, the old group hw– is reflected as wh-: consider which, when, who, and so forth). Thus, riddle1 and riddle2 became homonyms because of a series of phonetic changes, a most usual scenario. As a result, a modern proposal can be riddled with riddles to the despair of evaluators and the joy of punsters.
And now the promised desert should be served. There is another English word for “sieve,” namely, temes, going back to tamis “worsted cloth, originally used for straining sauces,” familiar from Indian cooking. Tamis “sieve, colander” is a living Modern French word. It has been known for centuries, but its origin remains disputed, and unambiguous facts do not support the suggestion that the Romance noun is an adaptation of the Germanic one. We will leave its etymology in limbo and only note that temes sounds like Thames. This fact gave rise to the hypothesis that in the popular saying to set the Thames on fire (usually about someone or some event that cannot set the Thames on fire) refers to that unfortunate sieve, rather than the river name.
Perhaps this wild guess would have been dead on arrival if it had not been supported, with a most dubious reference to material culture, by E. Cobham Brewer, the author of the once immensely popular Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. The book was on “everybody’s” desk. For years, people kept discussing whether in the process of sifting, some sieves or strainers may catch fire. Citations in my database go all the way from 1865 to 1921(!). Finally, sieves left the drama unscathed, and the Thames was allowed to remain inflammable. Analogs of phrases about rivers set on fire exist in several languages. The origin of the English idiom has not been found, and the OED has no citations of it before 1720. Such a late date makes one suspect that we are dealing with an adaptation of a similar idiom in a language other than English. Be that as it may, the entire argument looks like a parody of etymological research: some people who have more time on their hands than they need launch a ludicrous hypothesis, and the rest of the world keeps the ball rolling until the last thread disappears in the sand.
Featured image: “The Great Fire of London” by Josepha Jane Battlehooke, Museum of London, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)
The promise, referred to in the title, was made last week (19 April 2023) in connection with the etymology of the verb filch. I also indicated that my exposition would be written in honor of and as a tribute to Professor E. Peter Maher, who had explored the history of hooker in exhausting detail. Everything I will say below, except for a few remarks in brackets, will be borrowed from his book-length publication “The Unhappy Hookers; Origin of hooker ‘prostitute’,” published as a special issue of the monthly journal Comments on Etymology 50, 6-7, 2021 (58 pages, with numerous illustrations and an exhaustive bibliography).
Maher’s main point is that hooker “prostitute” swept (American) English only after the publication of Xaviera Hollander’s (XH) book The Happy Hooker (1971). Twenty-five million copies were sold, and “everybody” read it. The author’s real name was Vera DeVries. There is an entry on Hollander in Wikipedia, and I’ll dispense with retelling it. XH of course did not coin the word hooker. Occasionally, it even had some connections with sex, but before 1971, it had not yet become common property (far from it). In his youth, Maher did not know hooker “prostitute.” Family names are often incredibly offensive, but the many Hookers faced no opprobrium. For example, the founder of the Connecticut colony was the Rev. Thomas Hooker and Harriet Beecher Stowe had a sister who was a Hooker, Mrs. John Hooker, i.e., Isabella Beecher Hooker.
At one time, hookers made hooks, just as carters made carts. But hookers also hook (players play, hookers hook, etc.). That is why thieves were called hookers. The Century Dictionary (a great American reference book) cites hooker ~ hoker “thief,” with an example from a 1598 dictionary: “A cunning filcher, a craftie hooker”, and Maher quotes Mark Twain: “…while Aunt Polly closed with a happy scriptural flourish, Tom hooked a doughnut,” that is, he “filched” it. Maher continues:
“Equipped with hooks, thieves snatched valuable clothes and bed-clothes through open windows and doors. Poor girls and boys of England and Ireland could be sentenced to transportation to Australia for stealing a handkerchief. [Those who have read Oliver Twist will know how true this statement is.] Shoplifters were termed hookers from their modus operandi.”
Indeed, they behaved like filchers (sorry for harping on the familiar note).
Hooker “a glass of whiskey” is “a word of unknown origin.” Was it not called this for its intoxicating purposes: it “sort of” hooked the drinker, did it not? We also find hooker “a boat for fishing with hook rather than net” (from Dutch). Amusingly, as late as 1979, there was an Irish ferry called The Happy Hooker. “The captain must have heard of Xaviera and hoped to attract American tourists,” Maher noted. Enter General Joseph Hooker (1814-1879). The morals of the servicemen in his army were notoriously low. Yet despite the obvious connection, the word hooker owes nothing to the Union general. Some websites keep clinging to this discredited etymology.
Maher found only one pun on hooker before World War II. Even before the 1960s, hooker appeared very rarely in magazines, and the word never made anyone blush. [By blushing I mean unwanted but inevitable associations. For instance, when we speak about the poop on a ship or see the word nincompoop, we cannot suppress our knowledge of what poop usually means.] Later, the word, though not yet vernacular, gained some popularity, but only in the early seventies, after Xaviera, did “all whoredom break loose.” That the 1901 volume of the OED missed hooker causes little surprise: such “vulgarisms” were not allowed in print and could be smuggled in only in the hope of being overlooked, as happened to the bird name windfucker, but more probably, the OED’s team did not have any convincing citations of the word. Once the censorship of this type was abolished, prohibited nouns and verbs swamped the printed page.
The OED team was of course familiar with John Russell Bartlett’s Dictionary of Americanisms. The post-World War Two Second Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary, cited hooker, as it cited the F-word, and referred to the relevant passage from Bartlett: “Hooker … strumpet, a sailor’s trull, so called from the number of houses of ill-fame frequented by sailors at the Hook (i.e., Corlear’s Hook) in the city of New York.” Maher remarks that Bartlett’s hooker indeed designated someone living or frequenting Corlear’s Hook in New York. [It was a word like Londoner or New Yorker. There is a village in Buckinghamshire, England, called Wing. I assume that its inhabitants are called Wingers. Some of them may be wingers.] Corlear Hook’s hookers were prostitutes, but that local name is not the beginning of the now universally known word. Bartlett discarded his entry on hookers as sailors’ trulls from the fourth and the fifth edition of his dictionary.
Though it is true that in the works of Hemingway and his contemporaries, hooker, denoting a woman who could be easily hooked, does occur at irregular intervals, those were occasional coinages. They were easy to understand, but their occurrences do not show that English had an accepted noun hooker “prostitute.” In 1845, a young man tells a friend that “he will find any number of pretty Hookers in the Brick row not far from French’s Hotel,” who do it for love (!). The story sounds almost too good to be true, but those selfless Hookers were obviously not prostitutes. In any case, they were not the immediate ancestors of Xaviera’s happy hookers. Maher’s ironic comment is: “Prostitutes hook a john. Honest women hook a husband.”
Hooker “prostitute” also turns up in later American English, and Maher quotes a passage from a tale told by an Englishman, a naïve outsider but not an idiot, about an encounter with a woman in 1863, whom, from his description, his interlocutors identified as a “hooker,” that is, a prostitute. Quite a few later occurrences make this sense of hooker certain. More examples follow that show the same: hooker “prostitute” existed, but though people understood it (the context was unambiguous and could not be misinterpreted), it remained a rarity.
“The Unhappy Hookers…” is a riveting personal memoir by a seasoned linguist who did not set out to “prove” anything. His aim was to dispel etymological myths by investigating the history of one word, and he did it in an exemplary manner (but I in general have a soft spot for monographs devoted to a single word, be it ginger, shyster, kibosh, or hooker). I’ll now quote a postscript, apparently, added in 2021:
“As I write this I’m a geezer though still ambulatory. My Cold War army hitch was over fifty years ago now, but it seems like yesterday. I can still see it, hear it, smell it, taste it. None of us in the ranks called a prostitute a hooker then. Novelists Wolfe and DosPassos and Steinbeck, born between 1898 and 1902, were now in early middle age. They were writing their novels in the twilight of the Civil War veterans. Some sixty years after the end of the Civil War Bonnie and Clyde were on the road. I was a baby. In this span of time the H-word spawned and spread….”
The final picture on p. 49 is of Bonnie and Clyde.
Featured image by Anthony Mac Donnacha via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Prolegomena to the word <em>hooker</em>: the English verb <em>filch</em>
My initial idea was to write a blog post about the history of the word hooker, in order to celebrate the extensive research into this question by Professor J. Peter Maher, and I’ll do so next week, but it suddenly occurred to me that as regards meaning, the verb hook has some affinity with the verb filch, and I decided to write what I know about it. One can find an entry on filch in An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction,published fifteen years ago (2008). There is a brief mention of my hypothesis in Etymoline, but without reference to the source or even minimal discussion. Nor did the omnivorous and omniscient Internet take cognizance of what is said in An Analytic Dictionary about filch. Below, I’ll make the idea of that entry common property, assuming that the hungry readership will pound on this post.
Problems emerge the moment we begin to explore the history of filch, because two homonymous verbs exist: filch “to attack” and filch “to steal.” They are almost certainly unrelated. The earliest attestation of filch “to steal” goes back to the second half of the sixteenth century, and, most probably, the verb entered English at around that time. Therefore, searching for its Old English ancestor looks like a sleeveless errand (see the post for 26 April 2017, on this curious phrase). The first book-length dictionary of English etymology was published in 1617, so that its author (John Minsheu) knew filch, and indeed, he offered a hypothesis on its derivation. All his followers also wrestled with filch, and now, four centuries later, responsible sources have a solid answer to the problem: “Origin unknown.”
Those interested in etymology are well aware of the fact that in dealing with slang (and filch is of course slang), historical linguists seldom succeed in finding such words’ unquestionable sources. The same holds for filch (hence the shocking verdict “origin unknown”), but tracing the pathfinders’ way to the truth, even if it is a devious way with no dazzling light at the end, cannot be called a futile endeavor. At the very least, it prevents later researchers from repeating the mistakes of their predecessors. I’ll briefly go over the attempts to discover the etymon of filch, but without giving references. Those interested in the bibliography will find all they need in my dictionary.
For quite some time, Greek fēlós “deceitful” and Latin fallax “deceitful; fallacious” looked like the desired etymon, but filch was probably coined or borrowed by those English speakers who knew more about filching than about Greek and Latin. Besides, filch is a verb, rather than an adjective! Old Portuguese filhar “to seize,” perhaps allied to Italian pigliare “to seize” or French piler “to crush,” have also been pressed into service by ingenious word hunters. Thieves’ secret lingo has always been to a certain extent international, because at all times, criminals used to cross the borders of their native regions and made attempts to communicate with one another, ideally without being understood by the uninitiated. Their cant (as this language is called) has been explored by several excellent scholars. The Old Portuguese verb does look like a fairly good fit, but the source is suspicious: why Portuguese, and why no modern synonyms elsewhere in the Romance-speaking world?
Germanic words related to filch seem to hold out better promise. Therefore, filch has been compared with Old Icelandic fela “to hide” (however, the senses do not match!) and especially with Gothic filhan “to steal.” Apart from the -h ~ -ch mismatch, the latter verb looks like a feasible cognate of filch. Gothic, it will be remembered, is an Old Germanic language, known mainly from a fourth-century translation of part of the New Testament. Filhan may have a more secure cognate in English, namely, the regional verb feal “to hide,” though it should be repeated that “steal” and “hide” are not synonyms. Curiously, Stephen Skinner, the author of a 1671 etymological dictionary of English (the second ever published), seems to have cited a reasonable cognate of filch, namely, German filzig “feltlike,” with numerous figurative senses, from “sleazy” to “corrupt; greedy,” but no one seems to have taken his suggestion seriously. Filz is related to English felt, the name of a fabric.
Many old etymologists were content with stringing together various look-alikes, without even wondering how filch could develop from or be related to them. Dutch fielt “rascal,” Swiss German flöke “to steal,” French filouter “to cheat” (French filou “crook, rogue”). Irish Gaelic fealleaidch “knavish,” Old English flōcan “to beat, strike,” and quite a few others have been compared with filch. Filching presupposes a sleight of hands, and it may not be due to chance that in so many languages, words designating all kinds of quick and unsteady movement begin with the sound–symbolic group fl. Compare fly, flow, fleet, flimsy, and the like. However, spotting a vaguely similar word, without showing how it could reach English and yield filch, is a wild goose chase.
The consonant ch did not exist in the earliest form of English. Theoretically, filch can go back to some form like filk. Norwegian and Scottish pilk(e) ~ pilk mean “to pick,” and it has been suggested that filch is a rhyming synonym of pilk. This derivation is not impossible but rather improbable. As often mentioned in this blog, the more ingenious or convoluted an etymology is, the smaller the chance of its providing a clue to the riddle. I think the same also holds for the comparison between English filch and Danish regional filke “to scrape.” And we are facing the familiar question: how did the Danish dialectal verb become known in English? In my opinion, filke as the etymon filk looks as improbable as pilk. The answer should be closer to home.
The great Scottish lexicographer John Jamieson recorded filchans “rags, patched or fastened together, hooked in a bundle,” and we can return to Skinner’s idea. German verb filzen means “to comb through,” and in Middle High German (that is, in a language spoken many centuries ago), filzen already meant “to search a person” (from Filzer “comb”?). The inspiration for all such words was the name of the fabric felt (German Felz). An Early English filcher ~ filchman was, apparently, a person who could use his hook for stealing things. Let us note that English filch was recorded late, and filk, its putative base, has never been found. Most probably, it never existed. As far as we can judge, filch has always meant only “to pilfer.” Filch “hook” seems to be the best starting point for tracing the origin of filch “steal.” Also, hook is a familiar starting point for all kinds of slangy phrases. Compare hook it! “make yourself scarce,” hook up, and of course hooker, the subject of next week’s post.
Filch, it appears, is an English adaptation of German filzen,a term of the thieves’ (international) slang. The German verb ends in z, that is, ts, which, obviously, could not survive in English and was replaced with ch. In principle, I am returning to the suggestion first made in 1671. Three and a half centuries of fruitless wanderings? No, not quite fruitless. Rejecting implausible guesses is part of all good research. Hence the inevitable sleeveless errands and wild goose chases. Scholarship exacts a high price, but all is well that ends well.
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