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Helping verbs are curious, AND fascinating
English has a big bagful of auxiliary verbs. You may have learned these as “helping verbs” in elementary and middle school, since they are sometimes described as verbs that “help” the main verb express its meaning. There are even schoolroom songs about them. They are a curious bunch.
The auxiliaries include the modal verbs (can and could, shall and should, will and would, may and might, and must). The verb that follows a modal is in its bare, uninflected form: can go, could go, must go, and so on. There are also a number of semi-modal auxiliary verbs (such as dare, need, ought to, had better, have to, and used to). Some are compound words spelled with a space and several have unusual grammatical properties as well, such as being resistant to contraction or inversion. And in parts of the English-speaking world, modals can double up, yielding expressions like might could, may can, might should, and more.
Aside from the modals, semi-modals, and double modals, the primary auxiliaries are forms of have, be, and do, which are inflected for tense (is versus was, has versus had, do versus did), number (is versus are, has versus have), and person(is versus am versus are, do versus does). These auxiliaries help to indicate verbal nuances like emphasis, the perfect and progressive aspects, and the passive voice. Here are some examples, adapted from Ernest Hemmingway’s The Old Man and the Sea:
Those who did catch sharks had taken them to the shark factory on the other side of the cove … (emphatic do and perfect aspect had)
The old man opened his eyes and for a moment he was coming back from a long way away. (progressive aspect)
His shirt was patched so many times that it was like the sail … (passive voice)
The primary auxiliaries come before the negative adverb not and allow contraction to it.
They didn’t catch sharks.
His shirt wasn’t patched.
He hadn’t taken the sharks.
And they play a role in questions by hopping to the left over the subject
Did they catch sharks?
Was his shirt patched?
Had he taken the sharks?
or by being copied at the end in a tag question.
They caught sharks, didn’t they?
His shirt was patched, wasn’t it?
He had taken the sharks, hadn’t he?
Main verbs like see and go and walk don’t do any of those tricks.
Things get even curiouser, however, because the helping verbs have and do have doppelgangers that actually are main verbs.
The old man did his chores.
His shirt had a tear in it.
How do we know these are main verbs and not helping verbs? Well, for one thing, they are the only verbs in the sentence. For another, they can occur with other helping verbs:
The old man had done his chores.
His shirt had had a tear in it all day.
And if you make the sentences questions or negate them, you have to add a form of auxiliary do.
Did the old man do his chores?
Did his shirt have a tear in it?
The helping verb be also has a doppelganger main verb, but the forms of main verb be behave pretty much just like the helping verb. More curious behavior, keeping us on our toes. The first sentence below has past tense main verb was followed by an adjective; the other two have the past tense helping verb was.
The shark was tenacious. (main verb was)
The shark was never caught. (auxiliary was)
The old man was trying his best. (auxiliary was)
But all three was forms hop to the left in questions.
Was the shark tenacious?
Was the shark ever caught?
Was the old man trying his best?
The curious behavior of helping verbs goes on and on, with different dialects doing different things. If you’ve read many British novels or watched British television you might have noticed forms of helping verb do popping up in elliptical sentences. Here’s an example from J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Two Towers: “Sam frowned. If he could have bored holes in Gollum with his eyes, he would have done.” (For a study of these forms, check out Ronald Butters’s 1983 article “Syntactic change in British English propredicates.”)
In African American English, the auxiliary done lends a completive meaning to events. You can see it in these dialogue examples from August Wilson’s Fences and from Walter Mosely’s Blond Faith: “Now I done give you everything I got to give you!” and “Didn’t she tell you that Pericles done passed on.” For more on this use of done, take a look at the chapters by Lisa J. Green and Walter Sistrunk and by Charles E. DeBose in the Oxford Handbook of African American Language.
We’ve just scratched the surface of auxiliaries. I hope you’ve become curious about these curious words.
Featured image by Alexander Grey via Unsplash (public domain)
Is a 15-week limit on abortion an acceptable compromise?
A recent opinion piece by George F. Will, “Ambivalent about abortion, the American middle begins to find its voice” in the Washington Post made the startling claim that the overturning of Roe v. Wade (Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 2022) has resulted in “a partial healing of the nation’s civic culture.” One might think exactly the reverse. The Dobbs decision energized voters, especially women and young people, resulting in numerous Republican electoral defeats across the country. However, Will argues that the return of abortion policy to the states gives voters the opportunity of choosing moderate restrictions on abortion. Since most Americans support early abortion while opposing late-gestation abortion, Will thinks that a 15-week ban on abortion would be an acceptable compromise.
Why 15 weeks? Two reasons can be given. Almost all abortions in the US—93%—occur within the first 15 weeks of pregnancy. For this reason, making abortion illegal after 15 weeks would not, it would seem, impose serious burdens on most people seeking abortions.
Another reason is that several European countries limit abortion on request to the first trimester, leading some US lawmakers to suggest that a 15-week ban would bring our abortion law in line with theirs. This is disingenuous, to say the least. While elective abortion is limited in some European countries, it is not banned afterwards, but is allowed on other grounds, including economic or social reasons, or a threat to the woman’s physical or mental health. Moreover, in most European countries, patients do not have to pay for abortion; it is covered under universal health coverage. The fact is that the trend in Europe has not been to limit abortion, but to expand access to it. Countries in Europe “… have removed bans, increased abortion’s legality and taken steps to ensure laws and policies on abortion are guided by public health evidence and clinical best practices.”
Were states to guarantee access to abortion prior to 15 weeks, a 15-week ban might be acceptable. However, even before Dobbs, many women in the US lacked access to abortion, due to a dearth of providers, especially in rural areas. They often had to travel many miles to find an abortion clinic, which meant that they had to arrange childcare if they have other children or take time off work. Delay is also caused by the need to raise money for an abortion, which is not paid for by Medicaid in most states, except in cases of rape, incest, or a life-threatening condition. To be sure, even if there were none of these roadblocks, some women would still not be able to have early abortions because they do not know that they are pregnant, due to youth, being menopausal, chronic obesity, or a lack of pregnancy symptoms. Any time limits will pose hardships for some people. But if access to early abortions were guaranteed, a compromise on a 15-week limit might be worth it.
I suspect that time-limit advocates are not particularly interested in making sure that women who have abortions get them early in pregnancy. They want to place roadblocks in the way of getting abortions, full stop. That these roadblocks increase the numbers of late abortions is of little concern to them, however much they wring their hands over late abortions. Abortion can be reduced by reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies, something that has been shown to be achieved by access to contraceptives and science-based sex education in the schools. Remember when pro-lifers emphasized those methods? Me neither.
“Some US lawmakers suggest that a 15-week ban would bring our abortion law in line with European countries. This is disingenuous, to say the least.”
My second concern is with abortions sought after 15 weeks. The reason for a late abortion may be that the woman has a medical condition that has not developed, or has not been detected, until later in pregnancy. In such cases, the pregnancy is almost always a wanted pregnancy, and the decision to terminate imposes a tragic choice.
It may be responded that all states allow abortions to be performed when this is necessary to save the pregnant woman’s life, and many allow for abortions to protect her from a serious health risk. The problem is that these exceptions conflict with standard medical care, especially in the case of miscarriage. Once the woman has begun to miscarry, the failure to remove the fetus is likely to cause her sepsis, which can be life-threatening. However, in states with restrictive abortion laws, doctors cannot perform an immediate abortion, which is the standard of care in such situations. They have to wait until her death is imminent and, in some states, they cannot remove the fetus until its heart stops.
Ireland’s restrictive abortion law was repealed after a woman who was denied an abortion during a miscarriage died from septicemia. To the best of my knowledge, no woman in the US has died as a result of restrictive abortion laws, but some have come close. An OB-GYN in San Antonio had to wait until the fetal heartbeat stopped to treat a miscarrying patient who developed a dangerous womb infection. The delay caused complications which required her to have surgery, lose multiple liters of blood, and be put on a breathing machine. Texas law essentially requires doctors to commit malpractice.
Conservatives often portray those in the pro-choice camp as advocating abortion until the day of delivery, for trivial reasons. This is deeply unfair. If they want us to compromise on time limits, they should be willing to guarantee access to abortion before 15 weeks. They should be willing to compromise on pregnancy prevention through contraception and sex education. And they should agree to drop all restrictions on late-term abortions that make legislators, rather than doctors, in charge of deciding what is appropriate medical care for their patients.
Featured image: Gayatri Malhotra via Unsplash (public domain)
During the news coverage of the COVID pandemic, I enjoyed seeing Dr Anthony Fauci on television and hearing his old-school Brooklyn accent, still shining through in his late seventies in words like Pfizer, because, data, here, and that.
But my favorite expression to listen for was his use of “down the pike” to mean “in the future.” Fauci explained once that “you don’t see for days or weeks down the pike.” Another time he said “before you know it, two to three weeks down the pike, you’re in trouble.” Discussing vaccine testing he said “So we go into phase one, it’ll take about three months to determine if it’s safe. That’ll bring us three or four months down the pike.”
“Down the pike” is an expression I grew up hearing all the time in my home state of New Jersey. And, of course, many people say it besides Anthony Fauci. Joe Biden talks about how government and the private sector should “anticipate and respond to shortages that may be coming down the pike.” If you Google “down the pike” you’ll find it everywhere, even in New York Times headlines like “Is a Trans-Atlantic Pact Coming Down the Pike?” and (with an attempted pun) “Hydrogen Cars, Coming Down the Pike.” You can find occasional instances of things coming “up the pike,” and there is an early twentieth-century slang expression “hit the pike,” meaning “hit the road” or “leave.”
Not everyone is familiar with “down the pike.” Some mislearn it as the semantically plausible “down the pipe” rather than “down the pike.” It’s “down the pike,” but where does it come from?
I had assumed that “down the pike” had something to do with the New Jersey Turnpike, the 117-mile toll highway that runs from New York City to Delaware. The New Jersey Turnpike Authority was created in 1948 and the Turnpike itself was completed in 1951. It’s been collecting tolls ever since, along with the Garden State Parkway, which was completed in 1957.
There are lots of turnpikes, however, and the word goes way back. The Oxford English Dictionary gives examples from the early 1400s. It originally meant “a spiked barrier fixed in or across a road or passage,” and was used as a defense against attacks by men on horseback.
Later turnpike became extended to the sense of a turnstile to block horses. Samuel Johnson offered this definition: “Turnpike… a cross of two bars armed with pikes at the end, and turning on a pin, fixed to hinder horses from entering.” By the late 1600s, the turnpike was a toll booth of sorts, and a late seventeenth-century Act of Parliament refers to “collecting the said [toll]… by setting up a Turnpike or otherwise.”
Turnpike, or the clipping pike, was often used to refer generally to roads in the nineteenth century, and the expression “coming down the pike” was another way of saying “coming down the road.”
By the late 1800s, figurative senses were emerging and taking hold. An 1898 story in the Dayton Herald had the line “Bowling, if dead, is the liveliest corpse that ever ’came down the pike’, as they say on the bowery.” The quote marks suggest that figurative “down the pike” was a newish expression at the time.
Pike was also used as a synonym for boardwalk or midway, and in 1903 the organizers of the St. Louis World’s Fair announced that the upcoming fair would call its promenade “The Pike,” to distinguish it from Chicago’s Midway. Perhaps St. Louis got the idea from Long Beach, California, which debuted a boardwalk amusement zone called “The Pike” even earlier—in 1902. In any event, St. Louis encouraged visitors to “Come Down the Pike,” and there was later a Broadway musical titled “Down the Pike” whose second act took place at the 1904 World’s Fair.
The figurative sense of “coming down the pike” took hold but remained sporadic in the early twentieth century. A 1905 Portland, Maine, newspaper talked about “nothing but anarchy coming down the pike” and “chaos coming down the pike.” A 1936 issue of the International Stereotypers’ and Electrotypers’ Union Journal which refers to “The fall election… coming down the pike.” Both examples are clearly oriented toward time and events rather than space.
By the 1950s the sense of “coming down the pike” to mean happening in the future was increasingly common and it took off in the 1960s and 70s, after the completion of the Interstate Highway System.
With language, you never know what’s coming down the pike.
Featured image: the New Jersey Turnpike, 1992, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.5)
What does a technical writer do?
When people think about careers in writing, they may focus on writing novels or films, imagining themselves as the next Stephen King or Sofia Coppola. They may aspire be a poet like Tracy K. Smith or Ada Limón. They may lean toward non-fiction, aiming to become an author like Jill Lepore or Louis Menand. But for steady work, there is nothing like technical writing for science, medicine, manufacturing, finance, retail, and other specialized fields.
According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are more than 55,000 technical writing jobs in the US, projected to hit 59,000 by 2031. And while there are advanced certifications available in specialty fields and even master’s degrees in technical communication, technical writing is a career path open to writers with undergraduate degrees in English, communication, linguistics, and related fields. It usually helps though to have some experience in design, business, science, or technology.
Technical writers prepare instruction manuals, guides, technical articles, descriptions, posts, and documents for all manner of processes, products, and procedures. One student of mine working as an intern said that her first task was to write instructions for packing jars of peanut butter in shipping boxes. Another developed a safety manual for a supermarket’s deli kitchen. A third got assigned to explain procedures for using water softeners and filtration systems. And I once worked for a time documenting an automated query system for real estate listings.
When I’ve invited career technical writers to visit my classes, they’ve shared some of the work they do at any given time. They’ve written clinical evaluation reports and protocols in the medical field and instructions for financial and business systems and software. They have written explanations of how environmental data is collected and analyzed and procedures for compliance with federal and state regulations. One rewrote hospital incident reports to make sure they were understandable to staff and insurers. Another developed a design proposal for an event venue. The writing itself is tremendously varied.
A writer friend once told me, “A lot of writing is not writing,” meaning that there was more to it than words on paper. That’s certainly true for technical writing. Research and consultation are large parts of the technical writer’s work. Figuring out the needs of the users takes time, curiosity, and perseverance. Technical writers consult with designers, developers, managers, technical staff, and end-users to understand the products or processes involved. They may be responsible for recommending the most appropriate medium and design for materials and for ensuring that content is uniform across various modes of delivery.
Some technical writers may also be responsible for collecting and analyzing user feedback and usage patterns. And they may work as technical editors for projects developed collaboratively or drafted by others: scientists, clinicians, programmers, and engineers may not be familiar with writing for the general public or for their end-users.
At times, technical writers can also find themselves doing some feature writing in addition to the technical bread and butter. A writer might profile staff members explaining their work and write newsletter, blog, or magazine copy to tell the backstory of a new discovery, promote an innovative product, or explain a live-saving procedure.
Our fiction-writer colleagues like to remind us that “all writing is creative writing.” If you enjoy research and can write clearly, technical writing may be the place to put your creativity to work.
Featured image by Amy Hirschi via Unsplash (public domain)
What is subject marketing? An interview with Hana Purslow, philosophy marketing manager
In this interview, our marketing manager for philosophy, Hana Purslow, outlines OUP’s approach to subject marketing. She provides examples of campaigns and channels that we use to promote our content and reveals what she enjoys most about her job and how she sees her role evolving in the coming years.
Subject marketing promotes a particular topic or subject to a research community by showcasing relevant content in that area, regardless of format. This can include book chapters, journal papers, or articles from our reference products. By marketing the subject, we showcase key content for academics to use in their teaching or research. Through the dissemination of OUP’s scholarly research in this targeted way, we can have a direct and positive impact within the subject community.
Our focus in subject marketing is building our brand and OUP’s profile in a particular discipline. We concentrate our efforts on building a strong subject community around our content; it is only through researchers reading, sharing, and citing our content that we can be sure of the real-world impact our publishing has. Our job in marketing is to ensure that the academic community is aware of OUP’s high-quality, cutting-edge, and impactful research.
I am responsible for leading our philosophy subject marketing. I take huge enjoyment in working with OUP philosophy content and learning from the greatest minds across all areas of philosophy. I find working with OUP Philosophy Editors Peter Momtchiloff, Peter Ohlin, and Lucy Randall extremely rewarding—their knowledge of philosophy is second to none, and with so many interesting areas within the subject to cover, it’s a marketer’s dream when choosing which topics to highlight!
A good example is the “Philosophy in Focus” campaign I run each month. This is our most successful thematic campaign, where we host a selection of thought-provoking free content around a particular theme. We market each collection through a range of channels including social media, advertising, email, and a dedicated collection web page—always evaluating our results to hone our strategies for increased reach, awareness, and engagement with our OUP philosophy content.
Our first topic was “race,” which we launched during Black History Month in October 2021. Other topics, which often coincide with observance months, include emotions, disability, feminism, technology and AI, and democracy.
“Through subject marketing, academics can discover our new research in an engaging way, with a topic lens.”
Choosing content around important events or areas in philosophy is a team effort between myself in marketing and my colleagues in editorial, ensuring we share key research within the subject and shine a light on topics that matter. This means that academics can discover our new research in an engaging way, with a topic lens beyond individual titles. Sharing content in a way that engages our audience and showcases the OUP Philosophy brand in the best possible light is something I take great pride in. I am grateful to have so many brilliant authors to work with and feel privileged to share their influential work in campaigns like Philosophy in Focus.
The OUPblog—this really helps to increase the discoverability of our content, which is how our books are found on search engines like Google. As we publish across such a broad range of topics, we can get creative when working with authors on blog posts. For instance, in our most read philosophy blog of 2022, Kristin Gjesdal brings a unique viewpoint to the relationship between philosophy and theatre by focusing on the work of playwright Henrik Isben.
Our philosophy blog posts aim to be accessible to non-specialist academics so have a wider reach than our published content itself. We share OUPblog posts widely on social media, particularly through our dedicated philosophy Twitter channel, @OUPPhilosophy.
“We choose channels for promoting our content based on what we want the broader campaign to achieve.”
It’s worth noting that we choose channels for our content based on what we want the broader campaign to achieve, so while not all our campaigns will feature a blog post, this doesn’t make them any less valuable—we align the strategy or channel with the campaign objective.
I have always been passionate about marketing, which led to numerous paths in the events, public, and private sectors before joining the publishing industry, which I soon realized was the place for me! Working in marketing for an academic publisher means that I can give back to the world by helping to advance knowledge and learning.
At OUP, we use digital marketing to share high-quality academic content from thought-leading authors around the world. This is something that really drives me; being a lover of all things digital, targeted marketing allows me to build creative strategies that showcase the breadth of publishing we have to offer at OUP, alongside our vision to grow and maximize the impact of our content.
A large part of my role involves working with authors, which is a real highlight for me. I help authors learn how to promote their books by providing guidance and explaining how they can build their profile to increase long-term engagement with their work. Seeing this come to fruition is so rewarding!
Creating campaigns for conferences—such as American Philosophical Association, Philosophy of Science Association, or The Joint Session of the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association—is another highlight. Whether we’re attending in person or promoting our content digitally, it’s exciting to showcase our cutting-edge publishing with conference delegates and researchers from around the world.
“I help authors learn how to promote their books and build their profile. Seeing this come to fruition is so rewarding!”
Overall, I’m motivated by seeing the impact that marketing can make, from campaign planning right through to the end results. It’s exciting to see how marketing can influence online usage and more, depending on what we’re trying to achieve for that campaign.
Everything evolves, and so does my role and offering as a marketer. This will be based on the challenges and opportunities we face in the market—from open access growth to the way people find research, and the ever-changing digital landscape. There is always more to learn, and I am excited to see what’s coming next.
“Of Socrates we have nothing genuine but in the Memorabilia of Xenophon,” Thomas Jefferson wrote to a friend in 1819, comparing Xenophon’s work favourably with the “mysticisms” and “whimsies” of Plato’s dialogues. More recently, many philosophers have taken the opposite view; a typical verdict is that of Terence Irwin in 1974, who described Xenophon as a “retired general” who presented “ordinary conversations.” The idea that Xenophon’s Socratic dialogues entirely lacked the philosophical bite or intellectual depth of Plato’s had become a commonplace in a philosophical discourse which prioritised abstract knowledge over broader ethics.
Both Jefferson and Irwin were right in identifying the characteristics of Xenophon’s depiction of his teacher—his overwhelming concern with providing practical advice for living a good life, and for managing relationships with family and friends. But both missed Xenophon’s lively wit, and his use of the dialogue form to put Socrates in conversation with Athenians, both friends and family and more public figures whose identity adds some spice to the discussion. Xenophon depicts a Socrates who offers pragmatic solutions to the difficulties his Athenian friends face, from Socrates’ own son’s rows with his mother to his friend Crito’s difficulties with vexatious lawsuits targeting his wealth. Where Plato shows Socrates leaving his conversation partners numbed and distressed by their recognition of their ignorance, as if attacked by a stingray, Xenophon takes more care to show how Socrates moved friends and students on from the discomfort of that initial learning moment. He offers practical solutions and friendly encouragement, whether persuading warring brothers to support each other or finding a way in which a friend can support the extended family taking refuge in his home. His advice is underpinned by an ethical commitment to creating and maintaining community.
It is not that Xenophon’s Socrates is afraid to show the over-confident the limits of their capabilities; while he offers encouragement and practical advice on personal and business matters, he rebukes those who want power and prestige without first doing their homework. His Socrates demonstrates to the young Glaucon that he needs to be much better informed about the facts and figures of Athenian civic and military resources before he proposes policy to his fellow citizens in Athens or seeks elected office. Socrates’ forensic uncovering of the young man’s ignorance of practical matters is sharpened for readers who recognise that this is Plato’s brother, depicted in his Republic as an acute interlocutor, able to follow Socrates’ most intellectually demanding arguments. In the conversation Xenophon presents, Glaucon is reduced to mumbling one excuse after another:
“Then first tell us,” said Socrates, “what the city’s land and naval forces are, and then those of our enemies.”
“Frankly,” he said, “I couldn’t tell you that just off the top of my head.”
“Well, if you have some notes of it, please fetch them,” said Socrates. “I would be really glad to hear what they say.”
“Frankly,” he said, “I haven’t yet made any notes either.”
(Memorabilia 3.6.9)
Xenophon might be making a very ordinary claim here, that good leadership decision-making rests on a firm grasp of practical detail. But it gains depth when read against Plato’s argument in the Republic for handing over political leadership to philosopher kings, trained in theoretical disciplines. Xenophon argues that rule should be grounded from the bottom up; he is a firm believer in transferable skills, and that the ability to manage a household might equip someone to lead an army or their city.
Xenophon does not leave Glaucon quite as discomfited as Socrates’ interlocutors in Platonic dialogues become, such as the Euthyphro where the titular character hurries away rather than go through another round of being disabused of his opinions. He shows how Socrates moves on from the low point of the realisation of ignorance and starts to rebuild his interlocutors’ self-confidence, now underpinned by knowledge and self-awareness. Socrates offers Glaucon a careful recommendation for developing his management skills and gaining credibility before returning to public debates as a more impressive contributor. With another student, Euthydemus, Socrates switches from the argumentative mode familiar from Plato’s work—the Socratic “elenchus” or refutation—to exhortation and encouragement, as teacher and student become more familiar with each other and learn together cooperatively.
“Responding to Plato’s dialogues with a less intellectualist account of the capacities that leaders need, Xenophon made a case for the importance of leadership skills and knowledge as the basis of public trust.”
One reason that Xenophon was motivated to show a Socrates who encouraged his students to make useful contributions to public life was to rebut critics who presented him—not entirely without cause—as the teacher of some of the leaders of the brutal regime of the Thirty, which briefly overthrew Athens’ democracy after the end of the Peloponnesian War. Xenophon insists that these former students had abandoned Socrates’ teaching in favour of an aggressive pursuit of power.
Xenophon recognised the usefulness of a wide range of practical experience. A businessman might well make a useful general. But he makes Socrates insist that leaders must show practical knowledge and analytical skills in order to persuade others to follow them and to deliver successful outcomes, whether in business or in battle. The combination of knowledge and skill, which his students label basilikē technē, the “royal art”,” is an essential attribute of leadership. By responding to Plato’s dialogues with a less intellectualist account of the capacities that leaders need, Xenophon made a case for the importance of leadership skills and knowledge as the basis of public trust. In a contemporary context where trust in leaders and educators alike is low, perhaps there is a powerful and accessible case for the role of expertise in government and society, which Xenophon makes through his memories of Socrates’ conversations.
Featured image: “The Death of Socrates” by Jacques-Louis David via The Met (public domain)
The realization started with the word akimbo. I had first learned it as meaning a stance with hands on the hips, and I associated the stance with the comic book image of Superman confronting evildoers. Body language experts sometimes call this a power pose, intended to project confidence or dominance.
From time to time, I had encountered akimbo used to mean haphazardly sprawled, in expressions like “arms and legs akimbo,” but I assumed it was an error. And I’d seen the occasional phrasing “legs akimbo,” which referred to a splayed position.
Then I ran across “studiously akimbo hair,” which seemed to connote an intentional messiness. It was time to check some dictionaries.
I found that akimbo comes from a Middle English phrase in kenebowe, which meant “at a sharp angle.” Arms and hands had been in kenebowe since the 1400s and a-kimbo from the 1800s. In the nineteenth century we find a tailor on a bench with his legs akimbo and a man dancing with knees akimbo. There are hearts akimbo, hats akimbo, curtains akimbo, and, yes, hair akimbo. Today there’s even an action movie called “Guns Akimbo.” The Oxford English Dictionary yields a 1940s Mayfair slang use for being on one’s high horse, with the example “She got terribly akimbo.” Bent out of shape, perhaps?
By now, it was clear to me that my narrow conception of akimbo had gone askew. I got curious about what other lexical preconceptions of mine might be in disarray, so I turned to penultimate and erstwhile.
Penultimate is still defined as “next to last,” though Merriam-Webster notes that it is sometimes used as an “intensified version of ultimate,” but not usually in edited prose. Erstwhile too is still defined as “former,” though it is sometimes used as a synonym for esteemed or as a fancy way ofsaying worthwhile.
It’s not hard to see how these meanings could shift in use. When someone refers to the “penultimate scene” of a play or “an erstwhile professor,” listeners may understand these as referring to a finale or an eminence. Vagueness permits some drift in common usage, but the specificity of the older definitions provides a strong counterweight. It’s one thing for a dictionary to go from akimbo to askew, but a bit harder to get from the meaning of final to next-to-last or of esteemed to former.
A word that has shifted like akimbo is cohort. From its beginnings as a tenth of a Roman legion, the word was later extended to other bands of warriors and to people united in a common cause. Later it also came to refer to a group sharing a demographic characteristic (such as an age cohort or a cohort of students).
Since a cohort is a group and groups are made up of individuals, cohort also came to refer to one’s compatriots. The Oxford English Dictionary gives the gloss “assistant, colleague, accomplice,” and one of the citations is a bit of snark from a 1965 issue of the Times Literary Supplement: “The new American vulgarism of ‘cohort’ meaning ‘partner’.”
And by the way, even though you might be in cahoots with your cohorts, the two words don’t seem to be related. Cahoot is most likely related to the French word cahute referring to a cabin or hut, where one might form a partnership away from prying eyes.
Words shift their meanings for a lot of reasons. For akimbo and cohort, the fuzziness of their early meanings (“limbs askew” and “band of individuals”) has left room for new standard meanings. In other cases, as with penultimate and erstwhile, dictionaries have resisted including the newer, casual uses. For now.
And sometimes, there is a split decision. Recognizing that some people blur amused and bemused, Merriam Webster gives the sense “wry amusement especially from something that is surprising or perplexing.” The OED sticks with the sense of confused, muddled, or stupefied.
I’m bemused for now but waiting to see how those meanings play out in the future.
Featured image by Leon ellDOT via Unsplash (public domain)
By George Berger.
I came straight up from nowhere, I’m not going straight back there.
* * *
And so we depart Beckenham Junction, but not Beckenham itself. Because Kent House is still part of Beckenham really.
The station – just seven miles from London Victoria, was named after Kent House Farm. Yes, there was a time when you could travel seven miles from the centre of London and come across farmland. One day they’ll say that about Sevenoaks. Maybe one day they’ll say that about Maidstone – the Japanese know how it works.
In the Petts Wood article, I mused on how my parents moved down from Merseyside for a better life. That was where we lived, but Kent House was where my dad worked for the main part, at Ravensbourne Registration Services. From the late 60s until a couple of strokes forced his retirement in the late 80s, whereupon he hi-tailed it back to the Wirral, got happier and never looked back.
RRS was something to do with shares, I never really understood what. It was also, as far as I could see, something to do with wearing suits, lots to do with feeling pressure and nothing to do with happiness.
Kent House, then, is immortally tied to the world of work in my eyes. To the concept of work, the protestant work ethic, the numerous morality tales and guilt trips laid on me as I tried to find my own way through early life from the ages of 5-25.
Of course, all this was seen through the prism of my dad’s experience only. Perhaps the other employees were happy as Larry. That’s how life works though, isn’t it? You only see what you want to see, and in a decidedly pre-internet world, that view could be quite narrow, almost the wrong end of a telescope.
From when you’re born up to roughly when you start school, your brain operates in theta state, forever downloading information without question, wherever it comes from. This becomes your subconscious programming – all downloaded without a virus checker – and it’s a bastard to shift if you want to change it later.
I mention this because, as in the Beckenham Junction piece, I was busy downloading pop-hippie song lyrics off the radio. Songs that suggested a better world but also often hinted that avoiding a lifetime of work was a great path to ‘feeling groovy’.
“Slow down, you move too fast…”
My dad left Merseyside before us, staying in a B&B for over 6 months while he earned enough for us to move down. Thus, the first thing Kent House did was steal my dad. He’d work 12 hour days, 7 till seven, in an attempt to improve his lot in life. OK, our lot in life. He was permanently stressed out.
This was held up before me as some kind of noble way of being. Train to Kent House every morning, home again in the evening, too tired to do anything except drain a bottle in a fumbling search for equilibrium.
Of course, a part of growing up is watching your parents morph from the omnipotent infallible beings you thought they were, into normal people doing their best to muddle through. You experience a similar loss of magic to that moment you realise Father Christmas doesn’t actually exist. My dad did his best, it took me a long time to realise that he had his own set of influences, experiences and circumstances to deal with. That he could feel doubt and pain and fear and all those things that never plague comic book superheroes.
“And you of tender years
Can’t know the fears
That your elders grew by
And so, please help
Them with your youth
They seek the truth
Before they can die”
– Teach Your Children, Crosby Stills Nash & Young
I sought my dad’s love and approval at every turn but our relationship was massively strained by my being a punk rocker and deciding not to get a job. The conflict of values would take decades to get over or more accurately just fade into the past. I was taught to seek his approval, but that approval was only ever measured in exam results, in conformity and in supposed ‘good’ behaviour. As puberty hit, I started failing these tests more and more.
At the time, I just thought he was being completely unreasonable, that he wouldn’t listen. That he put his values before any love for me. Nowadays, as I approach the 25th anniversary of his passing, I can see that I somehow tapped into his deepest fears and exposed them like bare nerve-endings. Like that moment when the dentist gets a filling wrong. That’s how I made him feel. Which isn’t a great realisation.
Whether he should have felt like that is almost beside the point. We were two strong characters and there could be no meeting point at the time. And Kent House was the HQ of these values, the temple where he devoutly practiced his beliefs five or six days a week, in exchange for the money to survive and feed his family. An impartial observer might almost start hating capitalism for the soul-crushing cruelty of all this.
And then, finally, I have a vision that changes everything. A vision of my father as a frightened little boy, one who had a far tougher upbringing than I did, for all my whinging. A scared little boy who doesn’t understand his harsh surroundings. A tear running down his five year old cheek. A barefoot boy who left school at 14 to get a job and look after his disabled mum, his father having passed away due to an accident on the docks. A boy forced to be a man way before his time.
But also a boy who could never know what he didn’t know, what he’d never been shown. Who became a man who did his ultimate best with the paltry toolkit he’d been provided with. Who did his best for me, and got little to no understanding in return at the time, or since. Until this vision. This vision that points out you can’t teach what you don’t know. You can’t give what you haven’t got. You can’t pour from an empty cup.
And the forgiveness pours out of me like healing light. And I relax – for the first time since I was born – about all this.
He was a victim in Kent House, but not of Kent House, as such. So the forgiveness spreads like heightened awareness, like some kind of benign goo from a kid’s cartoon. I would’ve got away with a cartoon vision of all this too, if it wasn’t for the pesky kids of awareness pulling my mask off.
It took me six months to write those last few paragraphs. You could say it took me 40 years to think them.
A bit of light relief, you say? Well, one of his workmates was a relative of Siouxsie Sioux. Tom Page, I think my mum said he was called.
My parents told me another workmate would have a bottle of Guinness with his breakfast. In my everlasting naivety, I just thought this was gorgeously eccentric, rather than any kind of tip of the iceberg stuff. An impartial observer… etc.
As a young child, I remember proudly telling someone my dad was “fourth in charge of a skyscraper”. Cringeworthy stuff, for sure. Perhaps 7 stories high, his office was a skyscraper to me. I think I just made up the ‘fourth in charge’ bit. I desperately wanted him to be important. These were the values I was growing up in the presence of; in acute, deliberate hostility to the relative benevolence of Simon & Garfunkel and the Mamas & Papas.
And then I heard Patti Smith singing ‘Free Money’:
“Every night before I rest my head
See those dollar bills go swirling ’round my bed
I know they’re stolen, but I don’t feel bad
I take that money, buy you things you never had.”
And everything changed, again. She’d already bought my heart with ‘Birdland’. Another guy in my class went further with it, all the way to prison for armed robbery. Almost an antique crime now of course. He became good pals with my mum later, before tragically succumbing to cancer.
I watched from the sidelines, but I always knew which side I was on. Not my dad’s, sadly. Not Patti Smith’s either, ultimately. Nice words Patti, but none that you ever lived. You just painted them on sounds (and I thank you dearly for that, but…) then you walked away, backstage – to your tour manager and your backstage rider and your paycheck. I don’t begrudge you that, but it wasn’t much use to me.
Or my dad. Especially my dad.
Only Arista was pretty. And so it goes. But where it’s going, everyone knows – let’s not kid ourselves.
Fast forward to 1993 and the IRA put a bomb on a train which exploded at Kent House. By this point, my dad was back on Merseyside and I was in Brighton so I have no memory of this at all. Due warnings had been given and there were no injuries. I do wonder why they chose Kent House – or maybe they didn’t? Maybe it was just where the train happened to be when it was evacuated. Either way, it’s one of the more notable things to have happened on this trainline.
So, yeah, Kent House. My dad the unconsciously willing victim, like Woodward in Wickerman style. Led by the limits of his perception into a world populated by others with (I’ve always thought) a knowingly different reality going on. And here I am, the result of it all, writing about Kent House from some far off viewpoint.
You see, a short while later, I heard the Clash advising me to Stay Free. And, for all their faults, something in their song – maybe the south London setting – rang more true than Patti (and it hurts to say that TBH). So I thought fuck it and I decided to stay free.
Which I did – all the way to Sydenham Hill.
But first…
Barely any distance at all up the line is Penge East, which is more of the same. There really isn’t enough distance for anything to have happened since the last station.
Only something has happened – as you pull into the platform, everything suddenly feels more urban.
Because somehow Penge East in the 80s is an island of a more cosmopolitan society, unlike the stations before it and unlike the next couple of stations after it. It’s like a peninsula – or a needle – jutting into the side of the surrounding areas and gives off an accordingly different vibe.
In the six months it’s taken to write this piece, I’ve been reading Tracey Thorn’s book, Another Planet. Purportedly a book about the suburbs, I read glowing reviews about it and figured it would be a nice companion to this train journey. Only it’s actually about a place outside London completely – beyond even the M25, and she seems to look back on it all with more affection than I do. So it’s weird and makes me ask questions about myself – am I still fired by anger as I write this? I’d very much like to think not, but Tracey’s writing makes me think of comfort blankets, even when she’s being critical.
Far closer to my feeling is the recently departed lyrical genius Mark Astronaut, venting – indeed spitting – his disdain out: “I might crack up soon, but they won’t bury me in the suburbs”. Mark was from Welwyn Garden City, north of London and not far from where Tracey grew up. It gives me a pathetic kind of pleasure to think that my suburbs are more urban than theirs.
At least the train is heading in the right direction. We’ve crossed an invisible line and we’re now in the territory where people can catch buses into the West End as well as trains. Indeed, they seem to have more options in every direction. Proper destinations on the front.
In some respects, Penge East in the 80s was like Green Park tube in London, which should really be renamed ‘change at Green Park’, because that’s what you always do there.
‘Change at Penge East’ would be to a bus for me, but not into the centre: first to Crystal Palace football ground when Liverpool would visit, back in the 70s and 80s when we used to win everything and every game was a survival test outside the ground.
Then in the other direction, some years later to Forest Hill where Bill, the Flowers in the Dustbin drummer, lived for a wild while. Every time I see Forest Hill mentioned anywhere, it seems to be the venue for wild happenings – from legendary swinging sixties parties to the punk/reggae 70s at Don Lett’s house.
Then, later still, back to Crystal Palace to see the Sex Pistols play what I gather (hope) was one of their most disappointing gigs. Change at Penge East, the place that never changes.
Have you ever missed a station because your mind was elsewhere? I’m afraid I’m about to do that.
There’s a big hill just beyond this station. A hill that at some point had to be tunneled through to get the train line towards London, Rather like most of the train lines in Switzerland I guess. But the sound in my head is not the sound of music; not at all. It’s a darker sound altogether.
Every time I’m on this train, as it pulls out of Penge East, it enters the tunnel and, a slave to cliché, I involuntarily enter my own darkness.
Because the next station is Sydenham Hill. A place where… where words start to fail me through the sheer terror of remembering… not that I could ever forget… not that I would ever forget…
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
George Berger has resumed this 3:AM column after a 15 year hiatus. He’s written the official biographies of Crass and The Levellers, a book on mindfulness and various other books that can be found here. He’s also the singer in Flowers in the Dustbin. He’s recently finished his memoirs In Case Of Dementia, Break Glass.
One of the main criticisms leveled against ESG investing is that the movement is all talk, no action. The main reason for this is that there simply aren’t enough entrepreneurs providing adequately ESG-aligned investing opportunities. In fact, a third of VCs face difficulties with identifying suitable ESG investment opportunities, even though 97% of them find it important in making investment decisions, driven by the lack of adequate ESG disclosures and excessive costs for gathering and analyzing ESG information.
At the same time, ESG-focused assets under management are projected to increase from $18.4 trillion to $33.9 trillion in the coming years. Whether these figures become reality is increasingly up to entrepreneurs who need to get serious about delivering high-quality ESG data, fast.
There simply aren’t enough entrepreneurs providing adequately ESG-aligned investing opportunities.
Investors have lower levels of confidence in companies that do not collect investment-grade data (shorthand for data that meets high standards of timeliness, accuracy, completeness and auditability), and the majority of investors see unstandardized and poor quality data as their biggest barrier.
Regardless of your market and industry, the best way to get started with delivering investors with high-quality data is to embrace preexisting reporting and disclosure frameworks as early on as possible. There are many frameworks to choose from, including Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB), Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD), CDP (originally known as the Carbon Disclosure Project) and United Nations Global Compact (UNGC). Although founders may need to carefully consider which framework to prioritize in the beginning, most of the frameworks are complementary in nature and mature firms tend to lean on several of them in their reporting.
For example, the GRI framework examines a company’s influence on the broader economy, environment and society to identify material concerns, while SASB is more tuned to serve the interests of investors who are interested in ESG data that could significantly affect the financial performance of firms in their portfolio. In short, GRI is an ‘inside-out’ framework that examines the company’s impact on the world, while SASB is an ‘outside-in’ framework that looks at the effects of the climate on the company and the risks it faces.
What ends up working best for any given company at any particular time will be down to a number of unique factors, and effective prioritization is key.
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) introduced a proposed set of rules concerning mandatory climate disclosures last year. Under the proposed rules, firms who file with the SEC need to disclose a number of data points, including whether climate-related events are likely to push the needle on any of the accounts in its financial statements and what governance structures are in place to mitigate against climate risks. The disclosures envisioned in SEC’s proposal are largely in line with those of the TCFD and Greenhouse Gas Protocol, and if you are gearing up for an IPO, you would do well by ensuring that your ESG data is aligned with these frameworks as a matter of priority.
Investors want best-of-the-best ESG data. Here’s how to give it to them by Jenna Routenberg originally published on TechCrunch
When linguists talk about prosody, the term usually refers to aspects of speech that go beyond individual vowels and consonants such as intonation, stress, and rhythm. Such suprasegmental features may reflect the tone or focus of a sentence. Uptalk is a prosodic effect. So is sarcasm, stress, or the accusatory focus you achieve by raising the pitch in a sentence like “I didn’t forget your birthday.”
Scholars working with computer corpora of texts have extended the notion of prosody to aspects of meaning. The term “semantic prosody” was coined by William Louw in his 1993 essay “Irony in the text or insincerity in the writer: the diagnostic potential of semantic prosodies.” Building on work by John McHardy Sinclair, Louw used the term to refer to the way in which otherwise neutral words can have their meanings shaded by habitually co-occurring with other, positive or negative, words. He referred to it as a “semantic aura.”
How do you see the aura? Researchers use tools like the Key Word In Context (or KWIC) feature which produces a listing of collocates of a key word. As the term suggests, collocates are words that are co-located with the key word in the corpus and in some genre. Semantic prosody is not as in-your-face as a connotation, and as Louw’s title suggests, it can be used ironically. Perhaps because of this, dictionary definitions tend not mention prosodies in a word’s definition.
So, to take an example used by Susan Hunston of the University of Birmingham in her article “Semantic Prosody Revisited,” the word persistent often occurs with a following noun in negative contexts. We find examples like persistent errors, persistent intimidation, persistent offenders, persistent cough, persistent sexism, or persistent unemployment. That tone seems to carry over to examples like persistent talk or persistent reports. The reports and talk have a presumption of negativity to them. Hunston points out that persistent is not necessarily negative, however. One can be a persistent advocate, or a persistent suitor, or reach a goal by persistent efforts. Its aura comes from being often negative.
That carries over to the verb persist as well, I think. When Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren was silenced during a 2017 confirmation debate, the Senate majority leader’s comment that “She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.” was intended as a rebuke. Quickly, however, “Nevertheless, she persisted” and “Nevertheless, they persisted,” became a rallying cry of women refusing to be silenced and a renewed call to activism. The rebuke of “she persisted” was repurposed as defiance and determination.
Linguists are fascinated by phenomena like semantic prosody and the potential hidden patterns in language use. For writers who are not linguists, semantic prosody is worth pondering as one drafts and revises. How do our words shade our sentences with positive or negative associations? And how can we play with those associations to surprise readers.
Consider the example of break out, a two-word verb studied by Dominic Stewart in his 2010 book Semantic Prosody: A Critical Evaluation. What sort of things break out? Typically, it’s wars, crises, fires, conflicts, violence, insurrections, diseases, inflammations. As writers, we can reverse that tone with phrasings like “peace broke out” or “hope broke out,” giving peace and hope the sudden eruption often associated with negative events.
As readers, we ought to be aware of potential semantic prosody in the media we consume. When we encounter words like utterly, symptomatic, chill, threaten, rife, or give rise to, what subtle tones are being communicated to us? There’s not, as yet, a dictionary of semantic prosody where you can look up a word’s preferences, but you can certainly think about them.
Featured image by Pawel Czerwinski via Unsplash (public domain)
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