Cyril Connolly is pretty much forgotten now, which is not a terrible injustice, but this is a nice pungent passage from his 1938 essay “Illusions of Likeness” (courtesy of Michael Gilleland at Laudator Temporis Acti):
The last ten years have witnessed a welcome decay in pedantic snobbery about dead languages. A knowledge of Greek is no longer the hallmark of a powerful intellectual caste, who visit with Housmanly scorn any solecism from the climbers outside it. The dons who jeer at men of letters for getting their accents wrong command no more sympathy than doctors who make fun of psychiatrists or osteopaths; the vast vindictive rages which scholars used to vent on those who knew rather less than themselves seem no longer so admirable, like the contempt which those people who at some time learned how to pronounce Buccleuch and Harewood have for those who are still learning. The don-in-the-manger is no longer formidable. There was a time when most people were ashamed to say that The Oxford Book of Greek Verse required a translation. That time is over. We shall not refer to it again except to say that if people as teachable as ourselves couldn’t be taught enough Greek in ten years to construe any piece unseen, as we can with French, or with any other modern language, then that system by which we were taught should be scrapped, and those stern nincompoops by whom we were instructed should come before us, like the burghers of Calais, in sackcloth and ashes with halters round their necks.
Gilleland quotes it from Connolly’s collection The Condemned Playground. Essays: 1927-1944 (London: Routledge, 1945), which is available online if you want to investigate further. Also, Buccleuch is pronounced /bəˈkluː/ (bə-KLOO) and Harewood /ˈhɑːrwʊd/ (HAR-wood) — at least in Harewood House, which presumably retains the traditional pronunciation; the village it is in, sadly, has succumbed to the obvious /ˈhɛərwʊd/ (HAIR-wood). O tempora, sic transit!
Bloody nightmare. The kind of place German spies were told to avoid.
The most remarkable thing to me about Cyril Connolly is his repulsive appearance. Otherwise it’s all about who he went to school with so references to him in magazines and biographies, in the days before the google, entailed hours of not very fruitful research . In both aspects he’s the most enormous red herring.
Cyril Connolly?
No, *semi-carnally*!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlrsqGal64w
I may have mentioned this before, but J.J. Thomson, who won a Nobel prize for discovering the electron, complained in his autobiography about the “utterly wasted” hours he had put in as an undergraduate to pass the ‘little-go,’ a sort of watered-down classics exam for the non-classics students. The textbook of Greek written specifically for this exam “contained a long list of words which were irregular to the point of impropriety, not one half of which my classical friends had ever come across.”
This would have been in the mid-1870s.
Ooh, this has not aged well. Osteopathy, the claim that all ills are caused by bone problems as if pathogens didn’t exist and the microscope had never been invented, is immediately obvious pseudoscience; and psychiatry in 1938 was certainly no better.
Well, Connolly has not aged well in general. That’s certainly a striking example.
The funny thing is that in the U.S. nowadays DOs are exactly equivalent to MDs in training and licensing; I’ve been seen by one on several occasions. They just attend different schools and get slightly more emphasis on whole-patient treatment. Allopathy, the direct ancestor of scientific medicine, was just as pseudo-scientific for a long time.
If things had gone just slightly differently, the guy on TV who tells you what the weather will be might have been called an astrologer rather than a meteorologist, or you might well take your kid to the doctor to get a shot for a childhood dwarf.
Oh yes, though it wasn’t that bad in 1938 anymore.
I don’t get that one.
Buccleuch is pronounced /bəˈkluː/ (bə-KLOO)
By the Duke, yes. But I bet in Scots it’s still [bʌkl(j)ux]. A cleuch (Eng. clough) is either a narrow ravine or a tall cliff, depending on whether you’re at the top or the bottom, I suppose.
Talking of dukes, TIL that the present (13th) Duke of Argyll (in the peerage of Scotland) is also the present 6th Duke of Argyll (in the peerage of the UK). The Government of the day wanted the Duke to have a seat in the House (Scottish peers only sat if elected by other Scottish peers), so gave him a second dukedom, there being no available higher rank. Among his other titles are Chief of Clan Campbell and Admiral of the Western Coasts and Isles. He is also captain of Scotland’s elephant polo team (which is exactly what you think it is).
As for the dwarf, one of the twelve surviving Old English metrical charms begins: Wið dweorh man sceal niman VII lytle oflætan, swylce man mid ofrað, and writan þas naman on ælcre oflætan ‘Against a dwarf, you should take seven little wafers such as you would offer [in the Mass] and write these names …”, namely the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, and then sing the following verse three times.
Oh yeah. Plausible. But what is the illness? Why are you supposed to tell the patient you’re his stallion? It’s a bit like Yiddish – the vocabulary is such that I understand everything except the topic…
hæfde him his haman on handa is a masterpiece of alliteration, though.
Buccleuch Place at least is pronounced buKLOO*, although I suppose it must be named after the duke. I think it just is irregular, though – I’ve never heard of any other pronunciation (although this doesn’t mean that none exists).
Cleuch has the ch at the end, as someone said.
*Except when it’s just called BP, to the mild bafflement of newcomers
oflætan
This word (meaning “wafers”) immediately reminded me of modern Czech oplatky (most famously of Karlovy Vary); apparently the two words are indeed cognate, both ultimately originating from Latin oblāta.
As for the dwarf
Medicine is not an exact science.
Nobody knows exactly what the illness is. The charm to be recited begins with the words “Her com in gangan inspidenwiht” and runs to the end. So the beast (whatever it is) is the one who’s saying that the patient is his horse, i.e. the patient is being ridden, as by a nightmare. It’s plausible that the disease involves fever, though, because the patient starts to turn cold before the beast’s sister swears that nobody will be harmed by all this.
Jen in Edinburgh: I’ve never heard of any other pronunciation
Nor have I. It’s Bu-CLUE.
The duchess of Argyll & the headless man (and how appropriate that they should appear here, in a Cyril Connolly article). I think that a duke of Argyll was somehow connected to the Nazis in the 1930s but I can’t find a Wiki reference to it.
I can’t trace any connection between the D of B and BP or B Street, but it must indeed exist somehow.
It occurs to me that a Scot would only be surnamed “Scott” (as the Duke is) if the ancestor was a remigrant who had spent time in England and acquired the surname there before returning home.
The not-yet-Duchess and her chiropodist, Dr. Bunbury.
Since its presence in The Mayor of Casterbridge was pointed out, I have started using the word hagrid for cases of fitful sleep.
Osteopathy, et al.: All forms of medicine started out as a combination of old wives’ tales which might or might not be helpful, backed by theory that, upon sober reflection, was complete woo. This was true of the most respectable physicians. If you doctor today diagnosed you have having humors out of balance, you would run screaming out of the office, and quite rightly so.
By chance, the mainstream respectable tradition of medicine also was the first to hit on the germ theory of disease. This was initially dismissed as woo: invisible bugs get into your blood and make you sick. Yeah, right. Now pull my other one. Some, though not all, of the other traditions gradually merged with it. Modern osteopathy is the biggest example. The vast majority of chiropractors, at least in the US, are perfectly respectable specialized therapists. Some woo chiropractors are still around, but they are curiosities.
Respectable medicine hitting on the germ theory first also had the effect of giving a retrospective scientific cast to the profession’s earlier history. This is quite unearned. Galan was utter woo, no matter traditionally respectable he was thought to be.
Oh, and I had no idea who Cyril Connolly was, apart from the Monty Python reference. Back when this might have motivated me to find out more about him, this was difficult enough that I never bothered. I suspect that any decent public library would have had the resources necessary, but any motivation I felt was quite limited. I hadn’t thought of him in years.
Osteopaths vs. psychiatrists vs. MDs comparison might not have aged well, but “burghers of Calais” turned out to be better (IMHO) than Connolly probably intended.
Medicine is not a science at all, since it lacks an underlying theory that can generate testable propositions that can be verified experimentally; it’s really more akin to a skilled trade.
Medicine is an application of science, like engineering.
(And science is an application of science theory.)
Medicine is not a science at all, since it lacks an underlying theory that can generate testable propositions that can be verified experimentally
This is a truly extraordinary statement and I can only think that it’s using “theory” and “verified” in some obscure sense derived from critical theory, rather than in any sense I would recognise.
By the Duke, yes. But I bet in Scots it’s still [bʌkl(j)ux].
Not in my experience. Though I admit it’s an obscure place name – I had to look it up (it’s near Hawick) and I’m not sure I’ve ever heard it spoken referring to the tiny place in the Borders, rather than to the Duke and things named after him like streets, etc. Originally it was Buck Cleugh.
It occurs to me that a Scot would only be surnamed “Scott” (as the Duke is) if the ancestor was a remigrant who had spent time in England and acquired the surname there before returning home.
Not necessarily. The Scotts in question trace their name back to various Scots landowners in the 11th and 12th centuries called either “le Scot” or “Fitz Scott”. At a guess, the point of the name was to make it clear to actual Normans that this landowner was actually a Scot rather than a Norman like them.
The Scott name was then given by Norman authorities (or due to the presence of such authorities). Compare Fingal and Dougal (resp. light and dark foreigner) presumably given in places where the authority was Gaelic-speaking.
Hawick is pronounced Hoyk.
As in “oik” ? Or rather “ho-ik” ?
Daniel Jones says HAW-ik (two syllables).
I only know it as one syllable, as in ‘oik’.
Daniel Jones, the NY Giants’ quarterback?
It’s Hoik, as in ‘oik’.
I can’t believe anyone’s discussing with Americans the possibility that Buccleuch might be pronounced any other way than the way we all know it’s pronounced.
I only know it as one syllable, as in ‘oik’.
And thus the language continues to degenerate. Soon we’ll all be grunting in sludgy monosyllables, like Danes.
I can’t believe anyone’s discussing with Americans the possibility that Buccleuch might be pronounced any other way than the way we all know it’s pronounced.
I blame participatory democracy and empowerment. Of course it all boils down to impertinence.
Edit: on the part of Americans, natch.
Oik has been a monosyllable since the dawn of time. Great danes have a huge vocabulary (some can recognise more than seven words).
There are good bits in Connolly. I particularly remember a line from his (pre-Orwell) vision of justice in a totalitarian state: “How do you plead? Guilty, or very guilty?”
It occurs to me that a Scot would only be surnamed “Scott” (as the Duke is) if the ancestor was a remigrant who had spent time in England and acquired the surname there before returning home.
That’s exactly how it is with “Cornish” — it’s not unknown as a surname in Cornwall, but it’s not nearly as common as it is in Devon, and it’s a fair bet that most Cornish Cornishes are descended from remigrants. (“Devenish” is far more common in Somerset than in Devon.) My own ancestors appear to have migrated from Cornwall to Devon in the 15th century.
I twice met the historian A. L. Rowse, and on both occasions (separated by about 20 years) he asked me the same question: was I Cornish? I found it little short of amazing that a historian, even one obsessed with his Cornish background, as Rowse was, had never made the simple analysis that John did.
That is strange, but what comment are you talking about? You’ve only made one in this thread, the one in which you talk about trying to edit a comment.
Now my whole comment has vanished into the aether.
That is strange, but what comment are you talking about? You’ve only made one in this thread, the one in which you talk about trying to edit a comment.
No, this is the 4th. The only substantive one was the first, a response to one of John Cowan’s.
I’ll see if it’s still in my clipboard, and if it is I’ll post it again. No, it isn’t. When I feel confident that the server is working correctly I’ll try to post it again (after making sure I have a copy saved).
I just checked and found one in the spam folder; I’ve released it. Sorry about that!
“How do you plead? Guilty, or very guilty?”
Then there is Gowachin Law, which is based on the principle that everyone is guilty: the froglike Gowachin are r-selectors, and the ones who become adults are the ones who during their tadpole phase have most successfully eaten their relatives and peers. In the Gowachin Courtarena, if you are found Gowachin-guilty, you go free (but can’t leave the Gowachin planet); the Gowachin-innocent and their lawyers are torn to pieces by the judge, the opponents, and the spectators. The parties decide which role, plaintiff or defendant, they will take, and the decision can go for or against either party or indeed anyone else present.
pedantic snobbery about dead languages
I’m know no Greek whatsoever but it seems to me that a little historical perspective is needed. ‘Dead languages’ is a modern obsession, like ‘We’re modern people; we don’t need all that fuddy-duddy old stuff. It’s just dead’.
But it wasn’t always so. As my potted understanding of history goes, until the fall of Constantinople, people in the West weren’t very familiar with Greek. Sudden access to writings in Greek were one of the stimuli for the Renaissance. In other words, Greek was a breath of fresh air, the discovery of a whole new world.
The rejection of Latin and Greek as ‘dead languages’ in the 20th century gives me mixed feelings. That something that gave rise to so much of our modern thought should be rejected as old and fuddy-duddy is sobering. It’s also ironic because people in the West instinctively and unquestioningly trace their intellectual tradition back to the Romans and ancient Greeks, whose writings they mostly (and I include myself here) can’t read.
@John Cowan: Only the actual defendant found “innocent” would be torn apart by the crowds upon leaving the court-arena; otherwise the protagonist of The Dosadi Experiment (as well as his girlfriend, with whom he is sharing a body) would have been killed after he “successfully” defended the magister of the Running Phylum. However, while the court-arena is actually in session, everyone who has a part in the proceedings (including attorneys, judges, witnesses, and jurors) is supposedly at risk of their life, although it is not even slightly clear how this could actually work in practice (even without the potential bizarre kinship vendettas that become possible in the novel with the certification of a Ferret Wreave alien as a servant of the box). I remember all this despite having a pretty poor opinion of the novel.
In college (having access at MIT to a collection of practically all modern science fiction and fantasy written in English), I read a fair number of science fiction books based on references to them I found elsewhere. The Gowachin were featured in Barlowe’s Guide to Extraterrestrials.* Barlowe’s illustrations and descriptions were the primary reasons that I read Fire Time, Masters of the Maze, Ensign Flandry, The Legion of Space, The Word for World is Forest, Midnight at the Well of Souls, and The Voyage of the Space Beagle, and influenced my choices to read many other books. For The Dosadi Experiment, I was also fascinated by the cover blurb when I picked it up:
Generations of a tormented human-alien people, caged on a toxic planet, conditioned by constant hunger and war—this is the Dosadi Experiment, and it has succeeded too well. For the Dosadi have bred for Vengeance as well as cunning, and they have learned how to pass through the shimmering God Wall to exact their dreadful revenge on the Universe that created them.
… which turned out to describe a much more interesting novel than the one I actually read. (It is not a good sign when a book leaves a reader with the impression that they could have written better story, based just on the cover blurb.) Among other problems, the Gowachin, with their systematic infanticide and murderously nonsensical “respectful disrespect” for the law, were unconvincing in the extreme, and Herbert’s inability to show what makes an effective character effective is on glaring display.
* I tried to find other, similar sources that might guide me to further interesting fiction. Barlowe’s later Guide to Fantasy was, in comparison to the Guide to Extraterrestrials, a disappointment, and it took me a little while to figure out why. The reason I found it, on the whole, less compelling, was that so many of the illustrations were of human characters; there just wasn’t the breadth of weird beings that Barlowe had depicted in the earlier work. I flipped through The Dictionary of Science Fiction Places when it came out and was even more disappointed. The author, Brian Stableford, had clearly never read the original descriptions of many of the locations he was writing about (such as Shayol) and profoundly misunderstood some other settings (even the iconic Airstrip One).
I blame participatory democracy and empowerment. Of course it all boils down to impertinence.
Participatory democracy, empowerment, impertinence and Brexit. Four. Four reasons…and Trump. Five.
I’m know no Greek whatsoever but it seems to me that a little historical perspective is needed. ‘Dead languages’ is a modern obsession, like ‘We’re modern people; we don’t need all that fuddy-duddy old stuff. It’s just dead’.
You’re reacting to something nobody said. The quote was “pedantic snobbery about dead languages,” not “we don’t need all that fuddy-duddy old stuff,” and Connolly’s point is not that dead languages are dumb and nobody should bother with them but that it is not a good thing to use superior knowledge of them as a mark of general intelligence, capability, and human worth.
otherwise the protagonist […] would have been killed after he “successfully” defended the magister of the Running Phylum.
That’s assuming more consistency between theory and practice than is at all likely either in a Frank Herbert novel or in real life. It is not unheard-of, for example, for someone to be found American-guilty of three serious crimes, each punishable by two years’ imprisonment or more, and end up serving only three months for them.
Connolly’s point is that it is not a good thing to use superior knowledge of dead languages as a mark of general intelligence, capability, and human worth.
Now that we have Jacob Rees-Mogg as a living example this is quite clear to most people, at least in Europe.
I’m inclined to like Jacob Rees-Mogg purely for his wife’s name: Helena Anne Beatrix Wentworth Fitzwilliam de Chair (the only child of Somerset de Chair and his fourth wife Lady Juliet Tadgell).
Wow! I thought that the name of his daughter, Annunziata Rees-Mogg, was unusual enough, but apparently it runs in the family.
It is a forlorn fate to be bequeathed to posterity as the Arbiter Of Taste of an era whose tastes we largely do not share.
Annunziata is JRM’s sister. His children are:
Peter Theodore Alphege,
Mary Anne Charlotte Emma,
Thomas Wentworth Somerset Dunstan,
Anselm Charles Fitzwilliam,
Alfred Wulfric Leyson Pius
Sixtus Dominic Boniface Christopher.
Somerset Lloyd-James, possibly the nastiest character in Simon Raven’s nasty-character-packed novels, was said to be based on the author’s personal acquaintance with Jacob Rees-Mogg’s father. Like father, like son, apparently.
Annunziata is JRM’s sister.
Known to her acquaintances as Opinionata, I understand. She’s also in politics – she’s running for parliament for the far-right Brexit Party.
The list of JRM’s children’s names looks like something Monty Python came up with…
That’s an accomplishment, because I think he goes out of his way to be disliked – he’s a meatspace troll. Yesterday I got to hear him (livestreamed on YouTube). His voice is mocking and over-the-top condescending before he even says any content words, and once he reaches that part, it’s just as bad – nothing but bad jokes that punch down, and insultingly bad reasoning or simply none at all. I think all of that is deliberate.
That, too, may be part of the trolling.
Thanks for the epigram and for the DJ Taylor link, Squiff. Cyril Connolly is an example of someone in contact with midcentury upper-class life (see also the Farm Street* crew of Oxbridge Catholic converts: Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh & co). It’s so provincial, as it was with Bloomsbury’s Omega Workshop compared to the Cubists, a generation earlier. Meanwhile the real action was going on in Paddington. See The Lives of Lucian Freud, by William Feaver, reviewed today by Alexandra Harris. It makes a remarkable contrast.
However obnoxious he may or may not have been face-to-face, Willliam R-M’s public statements make it clear that he was no such extreme social conservative as his son.
The list of JRM’s children’s names looks like something Monty Python came up with…
Evelyn Waugh’s children have names like Septimus and Auberon, Mogg just made an exaggerated imitation. Smoggy is a compulsive copier of the men he admires.
the nastiest character in Simon Raven’s nasty-character-packed novels, was said to be based on the author’s personal acquaintance with Jacob Rees-Mogg’s father
William Rees-Mogg, editor of the pre-Murdoch Times is nowadays only famous for quoting Pope, ‘Who breaks a butterfly (up)on a wheel?’ in an editorial protesting Mick & Keith’s prison sentences (the 1967 Redlands’ drugs trial). He came to speak at my school during the Vietnam war. I’m pretty sure he was in favour, but it was SO dull I wasn’t paying much attention.
Indeed, the entire constitution did not get through. Instead of an EU-wide referendum on a single day, which would have been the logical course of action, the constitution was ratified by the parliaments of different countries on different days, until two countries held referenda (again on different days), voted against it basically out of protest against this undemocratic procedure without even reading what was in the proposal, and the whole thing blew up and had to be abandoned. No second attempt has been made in the years since then.
The only British novel of “midcentury upper-class life” posterity needs is Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy which is, as I have described at length elsewhere essentially a novel about the steamed puddings in gentlemen’s clubs where forlorn middle-aged public schoolboys go to regret their failing marriages and conduct a little desultory spycraft as Britain shabbily declines in the background
(Bonus: You can also amuse yourself trying to figure out whodunnit, if you manage to bring yourself to care)
Where is this “elsewhere”, Squiff? Elsewhere at Language Hat?
John le Square isn’t exactly dead yet but it’s probably too late for him to document the end of his era (ie now) as a novel. I think he got a bit sidetracked when the Soviet Union packed up.
The names of JRM’s children get more Pythonesque going from oldest to youngest. Mary Anne Charlotte Emma is positively plebeian, except that she has enough names for two or three ordinary people. But poor old Alfred Wulfric and Sixtus Dominic. Their only plausible professions are headmaster of a public school or avant-garde jazz musician.
Having multiple middle names (from birth) is extremely rare in the U.S. but apparently notably less rare in the UK although I expect there are some social-class angles to who does and doesn’t do it.* It strikes me as an outsider that if you’re going to have more than one middle name you ought to be striving for something more exotic/unusual with each name added at the margin. I will admit I have no feel for who goes beyond two middle names (and thus four names total including first and sur-) to 3 (=5 total), as is the case with some-but-not-all of the Rees-Mogg brood.
*OTOH two out of four of the original members of the Kinks had an “extra” middle name. David Russell Gordon Davies is definitely from a working-class background (he was the youngest child of eight; his older brother and bandmate Raymond Douglas has had to get through life with but one middle name) and I don’t have the impression that the late Peter Alexander Greenlaw Quaife was from that much posher a background although I’m less certain of that. (Wiki suggests he was born out of wedlock and subsequently took his stepfather’s surname but had started off with the P.A.G. part from birth.)
I never know whether to pronounce Davies as Davis à l’anglaise or whether that’s too pretentious for a Yank.
I have always pronounced the surname of Ray and Dave to rhyme with “navies.” Maybe that’s not how they say it in Muswell Hill, but I’ve never actually been prescriptively corrected by an obsessive-compulsive Kinks enthusiast and that seems like the sort of thing that cultish American fans would latch onto as a shibboleth. So if my own anecdotal experience means they haven’t made that a shibboleth, that ought to mean something. I suppose one could try to find recorded evidence on youtube of them saying their own names, but you’d have to filter out bootlegs from the period in the Seventies where Ray frequently introduced himself on stage by saying “I’m Johnny Cash.” (He might have done this to culminate a let’s-introduce-everyone-in-the-band sequence where he might have pronounced his brother’s surname, but I’m too lazy to go looking right now.)
I suppose one could try to find recorded evidence on youtube of them saying their own names
Oh, I’ve heard them say it, and they say it like Davis, which is the normal UK pronunciation. And normally I try to pronounce names the way their bearers pronounce them. But, as I say, it feels a bit pretentious because to an American Davis is Davis and Davies rhymes with “navies.” But on the other hand I have no problem pronouncing other English names in ways unintuitive for Americans. I’m a land of contrasts.
If Tim Rice’s third daughter married the son of the synthesiser inventor Robert Moog, she’d become Charlotte Cordelia Violet Christina Rice-Moog and would fit right in down in Somerset.*
*(where the Mogg family lurks)
David M.: Indeed, the entire constitution did not get through.
And what didn’t get through wasn’t even close to the original proposal from the constitutional workgroup. It was turned into something much less democratically ambitious when it reached the national governments in the Council — who admittedly had to deal with stern British opposition to anything beyond a free market.
Where is this “elsewhere”, Squiff? Elsewhere at Language Hat?
Maybe twitter? (I may also have slightly lied about the length of my ruminations. It felt like a long rant about a very long book at the time, given as how I carelessly read it in the original Dutch.)
And are you twittering as Squiffy, Squiffy?
You can also amuse yourself trying to figure out whodunnit, if you manage to bring yourself to care
I never care. It’s one of the great misunderstandings of our time that guessing the solution to the mystery is important in detective fiction. I care for the descriptions, be it of the underbellys of glimmering cities or of the Last Good Etonians. The only thing I demand from the solution is that it won’t make me grind my teeth.
David Marjanović: re the abortive European Constitution, you said “No second attempt has been made in the years since then”. Didn’t you notice? The European Constitution, rejected in free and well-informed referenda by the voters of France and the Netherlands (fairly important EU countries) was then repackaged as the Treaty of Lisbon, which could be imposed without the inconvenience of consulting such subject peoples.
That was when I started having serious doubts about the EU.
Re pronouncing names the way their bearers pronounce them, does anyone really try to do that consistently? In particular, lots of common Anglo-American surnames (not to mention some common given names) are pronounced differently by different bearers depending on whether the particular bearer’s native variety of English is rhotic or non-rhotic, but does anyone consistently use both a rhotic and non-rhotic pronunciation of such names as needed to match up with the accent of the particular bearer being referred to? I rather suspect it’s some smaller subset of pronunciation variations that at least some people feel some sort of politeness-based obligation to try to adopt, and it might be interesting to try to identify and describe the boundaries of that subset to assess what’s in it and what’s not in it.
But hat, leaving your own land-of-contrasts-ness out of it, do you agree with me both that: a) obsessive-compulsive American Kinks fans have *not* made an insider shibboleth out of the pronunciation of Davies; and b) it’s kind of interesting in a dog-that-didn’t-bark way that they haven’t?
Re pronouncing names the way their bearers pronounce them, does anyone really try to do that consistently? In particular, lots of common Anglo-American surnames (not to mention some common given names) are pronounced differently by different bearers depending on whether the particular bearer’s native variety of English is rhotic or non-rhotic
I certainly wouldn’t go that far, any more than I’d pronounce Spanish names with proper Spanish phonetics when speaking English.
do you agree with me both that: a) obsessive-compulsive American Kinks fans have *not* made an insider shibboleth out of the pronunciation of Davies; and b) it’s kind of interesting in a dog-that-didn’t-bark way that they haven’t?
No idea, since I know no obsessive-compulsive American Kinks fans (and in fact haven’t moved in rock-adjacent circles for several decades now).
If an L1 anglophone with an accent different from mine tells me their name, I will attempt to discern the sequence of phonemes and stress, and map that to my accent. Mimicking their accent might well be seen as mockery.
OTOH the aforementioned mapping may not be one-to-one. Even within Ireland, I recall a letter in the Irish Times complaining about people mispronouncing then-Taoiseach Bertie Ahern’s name as “Burtie”.
/insert joke about Wanda Landowska, Howard Hughes, Henry Kissinger, and serial monogamy here
“Well-informed” my ass, this was a protest vote much like the Brexit referendum. The important points, which amount to it being a constitution, were not repackaged, and a constitution is something the EU still needs.
But the democracy deficit is real, and that’s what the protest vote was about. Funnily enough, it goes in the opposite direction from what the Brexiteers in the House of Commons have been claiming the last two days (and no doubt before): instead of an authoritarian central government dropping from the heavens, landing in Brussels and lording it over “subject peoples”, the national governments – each of them two or three steps away from a democratic election – negotiate things with each other and impose them, then go home and brag to their voters about how much of the supposed national interests they protected against the other member countries. The EU parliament has way too little power; it is not even allowed to propose legislation, only to vote on what the commission feeds it. And while it is the result of a direct election, the election is still held separately in each country, with the national parties running instead of any EU-wide ones; sometimes, national parties cut across fractions of the EU parliament, and if, for example, you lived in the UK and wanted to vote for the largest and most moderate conservative fraction, for a long time you simply couldn’t, because no party in the UK happened to be a member until Change UK was formed and joined that one. (Cameron had taken the Tories out and moved them into the next more conservative fraction. Before he did that, of course, you couldn’t vote for that fraction if you lived in the UK because no UK party was a member of that fraction.)
Phonemic mergers do that. I’ve read about an American being amazed that another American named his son Don and his daughter Dawn – the first had the LOT-THOUGHT merger, the second didn’t. In Ireland, the various mergers between er, ir and ur have some complex distribution that I don’t know anything further about.
WP s.v. “Hiberno-English” defines the tern-turn non-merger as follows: “In the local [most traditional] Dublin and West/South-West accents, /ɜr/ when after a labial consonant (e.g. fern), when spelled as “ur” or “or” (e.g. word), or when spelled as “ir” after an alveolar stop (e.g. dirt) are pronounced as [ʊːɹ]; in all other situations, /ɜr/ is pronounced as [ɛːɹ].”
Of course in Scotland NURSE, TERM, and DIRT are all distinct and all pronounced as spelled.
“All pronounced as spelled”. That’s a good one, following on your example showing that spelling alone tells one nothing about pronunciations !
It appears one knows how a word is pronounced only by knowing how it is pronounced, by various people in various places. This is definitely going to make the six o’clock news.
Ir is complicated in Irish English. Firm and dirt are (mostly) pronounced differently to mirror, squirrel, whirlpool, and the names Cyril and Birrell. I do not know how the name Irma is pronounced, probably with I by analogy with Iarla.
In RP at least, the assimilation that produced [ɜ] generally does not operate across what seem to be syllable boundaries, so mirror, squirrel, Cyril and presumably Birrell retain [ɪɹ]. I’m not sure why whirl is an exception, but would guess it has merged with whorl.
(Americans of course turn squirrel into a vowelless monosyllable: [skwɹ̩l].)
people mispronouncing then-Taoiseach Bertie Ahern’s name as “Burtie”.
An east coast Scottish accent would definitely make that distinction: it’s the difference between “bear” and “burr”.
Carl Lewis and his sister Carol competed in men’s and women’s long jump at the 1984 Olympics, causing problems for some Irish commentators.
The EU parliament has way too little power
As an American living in Europe, I agree with David 100%. The idea that the EU has too much power is laughable. A true centralized EU would have slapped down Orban years ago, and maybe forced the Polish government to recognize the rule of law. If anything the EU is far too weak, which allows larger states like Germany, France (and formerly the UK) to manipulate fiscal policy and trade to their benefit, and permits (even encourages) rampant corruption in smaller states. Brexiteers probably have a point that the current situation is untenable but being unconstructive and simply leaving strikes me as incredibly irresponsible.
Here’s Sir Ray Davies himself on the pronunciation of his name: https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=121833760
Vindicated!
Too little power in the Parliament and too much still in the Council, where any question is a possibility for grandstanding on national interests. When the history of the rise and fall of Europe is written, Wolfgang Schäuble will be given a harsh judgment for his theatrical role in the handling of the 2008 crisis.
When the European Convention was still working on the draft fot a constitution, I remember wishing they would come up with something bold, both clearly democratic on a European level and clearly respecting the national electorates. What I most believed in was a sort of three-chamber system:
The European Parliament, with members elected on party lists from multi-seat constituencies, having full powers of budget and law (in the areas covered by the treaty) and making decisions by simple majority. It would be permanently assembled.
The European Constitutional Assembly, with the same number of members as the Parliament, but made up of members of the national parliaments (and each national group would form a committee in the parliament back home). The assembly would have the power to amend treaties or reject a budget or a law (by deeming it unconstitutional) according to rules of qualified majority. It would be assembled once or twice a year.
The European Council, consisting of heads of government, also assembled once or twice a year, would have the right to make propositions for the two other chambers, but only making decisions when an unanimous decision is needed. Declarations of war. Dissolution of the union. Overturning decisions in the two other chambers.
A knowledge of Greek is no longer the hallmark of a powerful intellectual caste
It’s hard to be a powerful intellectual caste when all of you can fit in a telephone box …
(It demands a lot of multitasking.)
Eat, for god’s sake, eat!
No time … must … lead … public … opinion …
During the mid-60s, Raid Avis’s name came up twice a week (once on TV and once on BBC radio). There was never any question of Dayveez. Isn’t that pronunciation for the -ies spelling Welsh? Day-viz is good for a norf-London pronunciation, like he said. The opposite of night-viz.
In German we’re pretty merciless with spelling-pronunciations of last names. Strasser is obviously from Straße (“street”), which has a long vowel, but ss imposes a short one, end of discussion. Kümmell is obviously Kümmel (“caraway”), but double consonant letters mark preceding vowels as short, which is only necessary if they’re stressed, so the name gets a fake-French pronunciation with final stress precisely because the ll is counterintuitive.
Only phonological necessities override this. Baur simply cannot be differentiated from Bauer in a non-rhotic accent, so it isn’t – in my experience; I wonder what happens in rhotic Switzerland.
Isn’t that pronunciation for the -ies spelling Welsh?
No.
Baur
Although my pronunciation is normally non-rhotic, I go rhotic in such cases, as a pronunciation [baua] would imply a spelling “Bauer” for me (and, in case anyone wants to know, I do the same to distinguish e.g “Mayr” from “Mayer”).
Wow, I’ve never encountered that.
Are you partially rhotic to begin with, i.e. preservation of a consonant (somewhere around [χ]) when r follows a short vowel? Do zart and hart rhyme for you?
They do. It’s more that I can switch between a rhotic and a non-rhotic mode, with non-rhotic as default, but rhotic whenever I want to sound literary or make clear distinctions that exist in spelling, like in this case.
John le Carré isn’t exactly dead yet but it’s probably too late for him to document the end of his era (ie now) as a novel.
Nope, his latest retelling of the story includes Brexit. Here is a bit.
(Americans of course turn squirrel into a vowelless monosyllable: [skwɹ̩l].)
I don’t. For me it’s [ˈskwɹ̩l̩], two syllables, vowelless, [w], consonant cluster, [ɹ] or rather [ʑ̞] (it’s usually an alveolo-palatal approximant for me, not an alveolar one), Old Uncle Tom Cobleigh and all. No wonder non-anglophones almost always stumble over the word.
And similarly with earl: [ˈɹ̩l̩].
For me it’s [ˈskwɹ̩l̩], two syllables […] And similarly with earl: [ˈɹ̩l̩].
Same here (minus the alveolo-palatal approximant).
Ah. How many syllables do you give to prayer?
I was almost surprised. But then I remembered flying to Dallas-Fort Worth, the latter being repeatedly pronounced [fɻ̩ˈʔɻ̩θ] (or maybe I should transcribe retroflex vowels: [o˞]).
How many syllables do you give to prayer?
One; it’s exactly like the first part of prairie.
Prayer for me, like flower, power is a hypermonosyllable (this word has a different meaning in Greek prosody, apparently): it can be one syllable or two depending on context. Poets used to write flow’r, pow’r, pray’r to indicate what scansion they wanted you to hear or say, but that’s gone out now.
This is the Londonderry pronunciation of flour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZygIEzHqtjQ
I wonder if it’s homophonous with flower in that dialect.
I am sure derry people know when they are saying “flyers” and when they are saying “flowers”. It is really our problem ☺
I bet it is, because flour is just a different spelling for the flower of meal.
Edit: so YIVO-Standard Yiddish isn’t the only one to turn [au] into [oj]!
I was looking for a thread to attach this to, because it didn’t seem to have come up here before. This should do. The words for ‘flour’ and ‘flower’ are homophonous in (older) Welsh, too, viz. blawd; but whereas in English they are doublets connected by a semantic shift, in Welsh the homophony is a coincidence between two words deriving from unrelated roots.
Oddly, I learned about it not from the resident Cambrian, but from a Yiddishist.
blawd:
So the former is related to millet, the latter to bloom.
And no doubt with Blüte “blossom”… and thus with blood.
The original protagonist of Bloom County was Milo Bloom (and, unlike a lot of the early characters, he remained a major part of the cast right up until original strip ended). However, I assume that was not a obscure Celtic etymology joke on Berke Breathed’s part.
I have recently been reading a couple more science fiction novels inspired by my perusal of Barlowe’s Guide to Extraterrestrials, including Hal Clement’s Mission of Gravity (highly recommended). However, I was barely into Kieth Laumer’s A Plague of Demons,* when I encountered a word that stymied me:
The Web seems to know naught of the word. Google gives me links to A Plague of Demons itself, along with Tabuk, Saudi Arabia; nor do I find it in the dictionaries. Is it a misspelling?
* When I visit that page from my phone, the entire book is available; however, on my desktop computer, the publisher’s site only shows a teaser sample.
If it’s not in your copy of Mission of Gravity, you might like Clement’s Astounding essay “Whirligig World”, which explains where Mesklin is and why, and how Clement designed it.
If you haven’t read any other Clements, I can recommend Close to Critical (as in temperature, physical and psychological) and Star Light, which is a sequel to both Mission and Critical, thus constituting a partially ordered set, something (but not much) like the Alexandria Quartet.
Needle and its very belated sequel Through the Eye of a Needle (author’s title: Thread) are the “Clement juveniles”; the first one is among the claimants for the title of “first SF novel that is also a formal mystery”. Then there is:
Cycle of Fire, in which Dar Lang Ahn asks the bizarre-looking creature he meets “When do you die?” and gets the very thought-provoking answer “I don’t know.”
Still River, which is about six planetary-science grad students doing a field project on the planetoid Enigma 86, one money quote being “I admit the liquid water you drink isn’t quite the same as lava, but the distinction is a bit academic.”
The Nitrogen Fix, or how to live in a world whose atmosphere is almost pure nitrogen and whose oceans are 0.01N nitric acid. “Were you trying to think?” “Of course. If you don’t think before you act, you can kill people. […]” “Thinking may be all right inside a city, but outdoors […], you don’t let thinking interfere with your hangups. Thinking is too slow to keep you alive.”
Iceworld: sending a secondary-school science teacher (much like Clement) undercover to investigate the source of a novel and extremely addictive drug, unfortunately unanalyzable because doses can only exist at liquid-air temperatures. “Gold! Tofacco! Gold! Tofacco!”
But do you have any thoughts about “tabukuk”?
I didn’t put “Tofacco!” as the last word by accident.
@John Cowan: Yes, I read “Whirligig World” after I finished Mission of Gravity. (I also discovered that, some years later, after there had been improvements is scientific algorithms, the MIT Science Fiction Society* provided a calculation of what the polar gravity of Mesklin actually would have been.) Cycle of Fire is also on my list to read soon.
* Some years later, the MITSFS students organized a protest at a Larry Niven reading, chanting that the Ringworld was unstable.
Some thoughts, but no answers: I recalled that Laumer wrote his Retief stories based on some real-life experience, and checking his WP article, I see that he was in the US Foreign Service, stationed in Burma. So as a penciled-in note for when I or someone else feels up for deeper digging, perhaps “tabukuk” is from Burmese or some other Southeast Asian language.
Some more penciled-in noodlings:
1) A prominent frog goddess is Heqat. Could tabukuk be from an Egyptian term?
2) Wondering if a consonant had changed let me to the goblet drum, which has a large number of roughly similar terms: “tarabuka, tarabaki, darbuka, derbake, debuka, doumbek, dumbec, dumbeg, dumbelek, toumperleki, tumbak, or zerbaghali”
Could it be that a drum that was made very small in the shape of a frog was intended?
3) Searching on [frog drum] brought me back to southeast Asia; apparently the Karen people use(d) frog drums. However, the terms used for them seem to be pazi in Burmese and pam klo’ in Karen.
Excellent research! I wonder if we’ll ever know the answer.
Googling leads to a bunch of Norwegian porn pages, probably not relevant.
tabukuk is cromulent Swedish for taboo cock. Seems they have perverted the Norwegians too. A good word for practicing your compressed rounding.
(TIL that the Swedish word is in fact cognate with the English one, going back to PG though senses other than male galliform birds are seemingly not attested until well after WG and NG parted way. Danish actually has the cognate in fasankok but uses hane for the domesticated ones — the homophone kok = ‘cook’ is much more common).
I can’t remember what made me think Norwegian, but I had some reason. Probably I was just confused though. I didn’t study carefully. Maybe it was a mix. Though Google Translate will translate the phrase no matter whether you say it’s in Swedish, Norwegian, or Danish. But going from English it does use “pik” rather than “kuk” for Norwegian and Danish.
So coq is a Frankish loan?
@DM, so Wikt, but TLFI takes it back to an Imperial Latin cocococo imitative of its call. The same would go for PG *kukkaz, so in a sense it’s the same origin.
Now I’m wondering if Gockel(hahn) is a back-loan from Romance that came in after the HG consonant shift. Or maybe roosters count as hooded, cucullati…?
Tabukuk is not lexicalized as such, but it’s a regularly formed compound with a transparent meaning “taboo dick”. That there’s a bunch of Norwegian language pornsites on the subject is a bit surprising, but the area may be underresearched.
The word is kuk or kukk depending on dialect, which may point to an old short syllable, though I’d rather think it’s borrowed from WGmc. through different paths. There’s no trace of a meaning “rooster”, only “penis (vulg.); unsympathetic male (vulg.)”, as e.g. the prototypical Northern Norwegian hestkuk “horseprick”.
One more mysterious titbit from Laumer: Near the end of the novel (chapter 15), as the final battle shapes up, one of the combatants expresses some doubt about the battle plan.
The speaker is not actually identified, but it is probably (the captured brain of) a nineteenth-century sailor. Regardless of who it is, I do not understand his reference to “stockfish.”
It’s maybe because stockfish is dead and therefore can’t put up resistance or escape? Basically, a more extreme version of shooting fish in a barrel?
Stockfish used to be trounced to shorten the softening process before consumption. I learn that nowadays it’s instead machine rolled before it’s packed and distributed.
“If one wanted to follow the medieval stockfish recipes and prepare a dish, the handiest tool to start with would be a hammer. It was used to break the fibers of the stockfish, which resembled more a piece of wood than a foodstuff.” (Wubs-Mrozewicz 2009:187)
Impossible. The acid would dissolve all the limestone in the sea – every reef and every mollusk shell. Consequently, there’d be a lot of carbon dioxide in the air, a few % perhaps.
That would rather beautifully disprove the Gaia Hypothesis in favor or the Medea Hypothesis: the super-efficient nitrogen fixers would kill themselves and everyone else, too.
Still pondering “tabukuk” . . .
1) It seems obvious, in context, that the object in question is detected as having a listening device inside it. Just before the character, Felix, takes out the gadget, is the sentence Then he gave me the trick wink that was service code of “The Enemy May Be Listening.”, and just after the quoted paragraphs are the lines:
The word tabukuk occurs again after Felix has a conversation with the protagonist that he presumably does not want overheard: he removes the object from his bag, replaces it, and leaves.
So it seems clear that something hollow is probably intended. Not a solid carved stone, nor a solid cast metal figurine.
2) I now think that the frog-drum of the Karen people is probably a false lead — it looks too large to fit in even a large briefcase, and the frogs that are on it are tiny little things presumably added after the initial casting. And that’s besides the point that the terms don’t look even vaguely similar.
3) I do still think that a musical instrument might have been what was intended. WikiP has a list of percussion instruments; a small slit drum or wooden “fish” (aka “temple blocks”, which can be in different shapes — indeed, here’s a frog) seems plausible, but I have found no terms resembling “tabukuk” yet for either slit drums or wooden fish, except very vaguely indeed (an Aztec slit drum was called “teponaztli”, and there’s a Philippines (Maranao) drum called the “tagutok”; the Manchu term for the wooden fish is “toksitu”).
4) Other musical instruments cannot be ruled out. One term that has some vague resemblance is the tamburica, a stringed instrument which has a small version that looks like it’s about the size of a ukulele.
there’s a Philippines (Maranao) drum called the “tagutok”
Kagul: “Also called tagutok (Maranao), bantula or tagungtung (Bukidnon) and kuratung (Banuwaen).” Well, “tabukuk” certainly sounds like it could fit into that list…
I would have guessed this to be is an alien world and not Earth, which then might have instead gone thru a history with some other major mechanism of bio/geochemical carbon fixing, or for some reason might be originally low on it entirely.
But I would have questions on non-presence of oxides in general in the atmosphere of a place that apparently has enough oxygen for the seas to contain nitric acid, which will reduce to NOₓ or nitrite as soon as you show something halfway oxidizable to it.
I asked about the “tabukuk” on Stack Exchange, and quickly got an interesting suggestion—that it may refer to a dabqaad (“Somali for ‘fire raiser,’ says Wikipedia), a kind of tabletop incense burner.
That does indeed sound promising.
After enjoying Mission of Gravity and based again on Barlowe’s Guide to Extraterrestrials, I read Cycle of Fire, and again I really enjoyed it. There are a lot of thematic similarities between the two books. In each one, Clement depicts an extraordinarily deadly world,* which nonetheless has intelligent autochthonous inhabitants. However, the demands of survival have prevented the natives from developing much advanced technology. Through interactions with humans—at first bilateral, between a single alien voyager and a human visitor to the planet; then between larger numbers of participants on either side—the locals realize that what they really need to learn from humans is not any specific scientific knowledge, but rather the scientific method.
Of course, all the details are different—including how much is understood about the peculiar dangers of each planet involved. As I was only a little way into Cycle of Fire, I realized that, generally speaking, the astronomical scenario in the book was actually very similar to the one in Poul Anderson’s Fire Time (which also has its main alien race featured in Barlowe’s book). The planet exists in a system with two stars, and when the more distant star gets too close, it causes habitability problems for the planetary inhabitants. It’s a really cool idea, and Clement does a lot with it, while Anderson unfortunately does very little. Actually, Poul Anderson’s novels frequently have problems with wrapping up their threads, but I cannot think of any examples of his writing in which the ending represents such a failure to make good on all the interesting ideas he has introduced as in Fire Time.
* Clement’s hazardous planets are much more compelling, in my opinion, than Frank Herbert’s, with the probable exception of Arrakis. Herbert’s picture of the dangers of Dosadi, for example, was a colossal failure; according to the dubious “showing, not telling,” criterion, Herbert doesn’t really show the reader what is going on, but he doesn’t actually tell the reader much either!
The acid would dissolve all the limestone in the sea – every reef and every mollusk shell. Consequently, there’d be a lot of carbon dioxide in the air, a few % perhaps.
That process is still in progress; it’s less than a millennium since the Big Fix. NO² clouds are dimming the sun, which opposes global warming: nobody knows enough atmospheric science at present to figure out which will win.
the super-efficient nitrogen fixers would kill themselves and everyone else, too
Almost. There are at present four basic types of life forms on Earth (it is Earth, specifically a sealed city within Hemenway Hill, Massachusetts (138m above mean pre-Fix sea level) and a raft on the surrounding shallow ocean):
1) Pseudo-life, anaerobic artificial life forms with the ability to evolve both naturally and under the control of other pseudo-life.
2) Nitro-life, single-celled and anaerobic.
3) Humans, dependent on pseudo-life forms that create oxygen by photosynthesis, eliminate carbon dioxide, and robotically perform other activities like picking panes of glass off the ocean bottom where they settled during the Fix.
4) Macroscopic anaerobic life forms, all a single species, variously known as natives, aliens, and Observers.
Herbert doesn’t really show the reader what is going on, but he doesn’t actually tell the reader much either!
With the exception of Doon (the Dessert Planet), Herbert never cared about the details of his worlds for evolving supermen, as long as they killed off the unfit as fast as possible.
Allopathy, the direct ancestor of scientific medicine, was just as pseudo-scientific for a long time.
I finally looked it up — Wikipedia suggests it’s simply a would-be insulting term for actual medicine invented by homeopaths (homeopathy, I hope we can all agree, is completely worthless).
I once read an article in the British Medical Journal which said that there was a watershed in orthodox medicine around 1900, when, for the first time, if you went to see a doctor, you were (on average) more likely to get better than if you hadn’t.
This is a particularly interesting observation in view of the high regard in which most cultures have held physicians over the last few millennia.
Homoeopathists and Kennedys wish to restore the status quo ante. Traditionalists …
homeopathy, I hope we can all agree, is completely worthless
Yesbut WP sez the main C21 use of “allopath” is among US osteopaths. I think LH has previously discussed how US osteopathy has migrated towards more reputable medicine with less woo, whereas non-US osteopathy has not so much. I don’t know if that makes “allopath” more or less pejorative in the US than Europe; ditto more or less well known.
My primary care physician is a D. O. All else being equal, I would have preferred a M. D., but it makes no real difference in practice nowadays. I don’t think I’ve ever heard him say “allopathic”; however, I have an appointment on Friday, and maybe I should see I can get him to use the word.
I have never heard “allopath(ic)” and have seen it only very rarely, in historical discussions; I am surprised whenever I run across evidence that it’s used in Real Life.
American chiropractors proved the scientific validity of their methods by the characteristically American method of a lawsuit:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilk_v._American_Medical_Association
In the same way, Elon Musk became a founder of Tesla by suing the actual founders:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk#Tesla
We foreigners can only marvel and admire the American respect for Law.
I have always felt that my own practice was essentially heteropathic, except when I was feeling a bit opisthopathic.
“O, I’ve pisthed my panths!”
Worst of all are the cyclopaths. They ride on the pavement and endanger law-abiding citizens.
I have never heard “allopath(ic)” and have seen it only very rarely, in historical discussions; I am surprised whenever I run across evidence that it’s used in Real Life.
My Punjabi friend says it’s commonly used in India to refer to Western medicine.
evidence that it’s used in Real Life
I have encountered it much, in an episode of Life [**] that went down a very dark vortex of homeopathy, chiropracty, acupuncture, sundry magical talking therapies, woo with a fancy name like “Myalgic Encephalomyelitis” as diagnosed by a borderline allopath; indeed clutching at any straw to avoid taking nasty medicine.
(I am therefore alarmed at the attempts to link ME with ‘long Covid’: getting Covid is a diagnosable condition; failing to recover in good time is also diagnosable. Whereas ME is a “diagnosis by exclusion” of all other possible causes of the symptoms. Since the symptoms are vague, hugely variable, intermittent, and heavily reliant on self-reporting, you can see the opportunity for woo.)
[**] It seemed all too Real at the time. Looking back now, I see it wasn’t.
Myalgic Encephalomyelitis
The background to coinages like this is often the deeply ingrained belief in our society that mental illness is unreal, or a kind of malingering, or essentially the sufferer’s own fault.* Rather than challenging these falsehoods head-on, the afflicted and their loved ones proclaim that their illness is in fact entirely physical, so as to escape the stigma. This has the further unfortunate effect that patients may reject proven effective psychological treatments for their condition.
When I was a neurosurgery resident, I often encountered patients who were relieved to be told that they had a brain tumour, because they were afraid that they were going mad.
Although, I think another factor comes into play there. We think of “physical” illness as a thing separate from our “selves”, whereas we tend to think of mental illness as something gone wrong with our “selves”, which is much more frightening.
In real life, there is no neat dividing line between mental and physical illness, which is why placebos objectively do work, and why even quite ordinary everyday illnesses may affect one’s mind.
The classic “psychosomatic” illness is asthma, which kills hundreds of thousands of people every year. More recent accounts of asthma systematically discount the psychological aspects of the disease, presumably because reference to them is felt to be derogatory to asthmatics.
* Our UK government is currently leveraging this bit of folk medicine in its propaganda campaign to justify cutting financial support for the long-term disabled.
Man, we need a complete civilizational reboot. Bring on Kang and Kodos!
we need a complete civilizational reboot
Patience! It won’t be long now …
Oh, you said “reboot.” I was thinking “shutdown.”
Just to show that it is not a priori impossible that a suspiciously vague illness characterised only by patient-supplied symptoms uncorroborated by objective signs may turn out to have a respectably “physical” cause:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glycogen_storage_disease_type_V
McArdle discovered his first patients with this condition in mental hospitals, where they had been consigned because nobody believed in their accounts of intense fatigue after minimal physical effort, when they had no symptoms relating to e.g. breathing difficulties. A cautionary tale for physicians, you might think. Or hope, anyhow …
The other deeply ingrained belief in society that’s at play here is the belief that all mental illness is that of the dangerous madman who occasionally endangers himself and others for reasons even he himself can neither understand nor empathize with. Anything more benign than that cannot then be “mental”.
it is not a priori impossible that a suspiciously vague illness characterised only by patient-supplied symptoms uncorroborated by objective signs may turn out to have a respectably “physical” cause
Yes, a cautionary tale. And with ME I’m not denying there are some objective signs; but they’re so diverse as to be unhelpful for diagnostic purposes. Furthermore they might be consequences of ‘leading a quiet life’ [**], rather than causes. There’s also a strong cultural element: it’s characterised differently in USA vs Britain; Australia tends to follow the USA pattern; NZ tends to follow the Brit. Overwhelmingly, sufferers — and they are suffering — are white, middle-class, high education level and ‘high achievers’. Exactly the people who are most affronted by suggestions of “malingering”/’it’s all in the mind’.
I suspect ME is getting used as an umbrella term — which is why putting ‘long COVID’ under the umbrella will be counter-productive — and that there might be several distinct “physical” causes, amongst those mostly with “no neat dividing line”.
Thank you for your measured comments. Oh! that GPs here [***] were more competent to tread so lightly and at least broach the subject, rather than rushing to write a scrip.
[**] wrt the brouhaha over this month’s reports of research identifying blood markers: “these individual abnormalities are not unique to people with ME/CFS and can be found in many other medical conditions. So individually they do not constitute a diagnostic blood test for ME/CFS.”
[***] Who are under the same financial pressure to hurry patients out the door, not stop and listen.
all mental illness is that of the dangerous madman …
I don’t know how it is in Germany, but in New Zealand Mental Health Services are so woefully under-resourced, you won’t even get on a waiting list unless you’ve killed/seriously injured someone (or yourself). Or you can afford a private consultation/private residential care — see above at “middle-class”.
There are quite a number of culture-specific “functional” diseases:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture-bound_syndrome
Surely the best (unless you happen to be so unfortunate as to actually suffer from it) is
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koro_(disease)
This is actually an area of medicine (not Koro specifically) in which I have had a longstanding subspecialist interest (“functional” eye disease is both common and understudied.) It’s not just laypeople who are muddled about the whole domain, unfortunately: many doctors have ideas about it quite at variance with the actual evidence. But if I go on, I shall get preachy on the subject.
In Meja Mwangi’s The Cockroach Dance (one of a number of books I bought for the title alone which turned out wonderful), there comes up a fearsome sexually-transmitted disease called nylon, known by the young men of Nairobi to be fatal. No one seems to know anything else about it.
I was curious about whether “allopath” was purely a derogatory exonym or if it was at least sometimes used as an endonym with seemingly neutral valence. I found someone on the WWW asserting that “I am an allopathic physician, but …” followed by some expression of sympathy and appreciation for the osteopathic position.* But that was on the website of the Communist Party USA, so it may not reflect more mainstream usage?
*Plus there are claims in some quarters that at least in the U.S. context the so-called osteopaths of today are in fact crypto-allopaths who have abandoned the osteopathic true faith while holding on to a few rhetorical/cosmetic bits of phrasing.
culture-specific “functional” diseases
A moderately topical Western one, with less controversy attached to it than some, but quite illustrative of some of the sociopolitical dynamics involved, is
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgellons
Joni Mitchell believes herself to be afflicted by this.
Although this particular example is pretty fringe, the question of who gets to say what is or is not a “disease” in any particular culture is an interesting one, and one which does not always have straightforward commonsense answers, even in the absence of deliberate misrepresentation by bad actors.
In a culture in a state of advanced epistemological fragmentation like the US, it’s especially fraught.
I think “I am an allopathic physician” would be rendered into Normal Medicspeak as “I am a physician.”
I imagine that the usage in JWB’s example was occasioned not so much by all-men-are-brothers communism but by the sheer syntax, involving as it did a following expression of non-hostility to some homoeopathic practice: the “allopathic” would be the μέv to the δέ of the following “homoeopathic.”
I too have the impression that US osteopaths are often OINOs, but I know very little about it. Not sure how things are in the UK, even: my GP sister-in-law would know much more about that than I.
Neither osteopathy nor homoeopathy seems to be perceived as a great threat to the profits of my more financially-motivated ophthalmic colleagues. Orthopaedic surgeons are the ones to go to for epic fulminations against osteopaths.
Neither osteopathy nor homoeopathy …
Yeah. They at least meet the criterion of ‘First, do no harm.’ And both of them rigorously engage in ‘consultation’ to take down the clients’ own reports of their unease. So talking therapy — especially for clients who’ve experienced medics not listening. My experience of osteopaths was as less effective than a sports massage or decent physio.
And both of them rigorously engage in ‘consultation’ to take down the clients’ own reports of their unease. So talking therapy — especially for clients who’ve experienced medics not listening
That is frequently named as one of the main reasons for the popularity of homeopaths in Germany – they actually take the time to listen to patients. So if our health system wanted to do something about that quackery (it doesn’t), it could reallocate the money given for homeopathic treatments and pay physicians more for time speaking with their patients.
Fun fact: Elon Musk’s grandfather — the American-born, Canadian, South African and all-round evil Fascist Apartheid supporter — trained as a Chiropractic, rising to Canadian ” representative to the board of control of the International Chiropractors Association.” [wp] I wonder how much of a sympathetic ‘consultation’ he’d give?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_N._Haldeman
—
Some commentators have noted a similarity between the name of Musk’s first child with Grimes, X Æ A-12, and the numbers that Technocracy members were required to adopt in place of names (such as 1x1809x56, or Haldeman’s number, 10450-1).A contemporary article in The Buffalo News said that these numbers, along with the uniforms worn by members and salutes they greeted each other with, “give [Technocracy] the tone of an incipient fascist movement”
—
Perhaps Trump should lease the Welsh village of Portmeirion , relocate the prison at Guantanamo there (the space on Cuba could be freed up to open a second Gaza Club resort) and place Musk in charge as Number 10450-2.
Technocracy members weren’t stern nincompoops, they were STEM nincompoops.
Ha!
@Rodger: You can take a bow for that one.
Just as, proverbially, one man’s meat is another man’s poison, I suppose that one man’s pluralism is another man’s “advanced epistemological fragmentation.”
FFS! This morning’s local paper brings me The Baileys: From medical doctors to germ theory denial
And after women’s health has had such a battle against the (mostly male) establishment to show endometriosis is real! grr grr I can’t even read any more of this bollocks. (Two whole broadsheet pages of it; front of the ‘lifestyle’ section.)
I suppose because they’re ex-‘allopaths’ [now struck off thank heavens], those who want to believe in the evil cabal of Big Pharma in cahoots with The Health System will give them extra credulity.
When a doctor goes wrong, he is the first of criminals.
Also sprach Semmelweis.
Underlying their advice is a belief that sickness is neither random nor inevitable. It does not come from a virus or a genetic defect; it is a type of moral failure, punishment for failing to live in accordance with natural law. …
Reminds me of that Republican politician who maintained that women cannot become pregnant when they have been raped for real (so a pregnancy proves that it wasn’t actually rape and abortion isn’t justified.)
I sometimes ask myself whether such people actually believe in their own nonsense or just are happy making up whatever is needed to support their partisan mantras.
@hans
It is comforting in a way to believe that Fate is not blind and that one can influence one’s own destiny (in fact, a complete absence of such belief would probably limit a person to performing only some necessary actions in line with instinctual drives). Then, as you say the belief can be rationalised in support of some nutcase ideology. I blame the parents.
Reminds me of that Republican politician who maintained that women cannot become pregnant when they have been raped for real (so a pregnancy proves that it wasn’t actually rape and abortion isn’t justified.)
That was presumably a branch of the idea that pregnancy required female orgasm, which was a standard theory held by all respectable thinkers for centuries — I don’t know when it retreated into minority crackpottery.
@hat
And who said rape (fantasies) never led to female orgasm? Maybe I have just been watching the wrong films/confessional chatshows.
We are not medieval people and have a hard time putting ourselves into that mentality.
I bet medieval people would have found it difficult to put themselves into our de-mystified and censorious mentality. Even I find it difficult.
They’d probably like the garish frenzies of TikTok.
I sometimes ask myself whether such people actually believe in their own nonsense or just are happy making up whatever is needed to support their partisan mantras.
I am uninterested in the inner thought processes of Illinois Nazis, but I don’t think they would make this distinction at all. It is not actually possible for reality to deviate from the party line. (This is why science is superfluous, at best – and dangerously subversive at worst. Similarly for all forms of disinterested rational enquiry, such as genuine historical research.)
These people possess for real the sentiment (pretty certainly falsely) ascribed to the Caliph Umar about the Great Library of Alexandria: “If those books are in agreement with the Quran, we have no need of them; and if these are opposed to the Quran, destroy them.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria#Arabic_sources_on_the_Arab_conquest
I gather, incidently, that rape victims actually may experience orgasm: the body may do its own thing regardless. The psychological damage in terms of ungrounded self-blaming is then all the worse.
It is really not uncommon for people to assume that there’s some amount of inbuilt justice in the universe and to draw logical conclusions from that.
For the record, if you’re sensitive enough, you will have an orgasm if you’re touched in the right places; some people have additional conditions like “at a certain frequency”, some don’t. Whether you like it doesn’t figure. Whether you’re in any particular mood doesn’t necessarily either. For some people, wearing badly fitting underpants can be enough to spontaneously trigger an orgasm all on its own.
It has often been said that scientific evidence showed that pregnancy was an unlikely (not impossible) result You can see some citation of that evidence in this antiabortion journal (search for “rape pregnancies”) and in this testimony by a physician about a proposed law to require a waiting period before abortions. There’s no detail about the reasons for that supposed phenomenon.
Both of those links seem to be from the antiabortion side, but I think I recall hearing the claim from a women who strongly supported a legal right to abortion. (And I believed it till today.)
I also found a nice snippet at Google Books with six footnotes, which of course I couldn’t see. What I didn’t find was any specifics about how any study defined rape or whether any took into account whether the victim was using contraception.
inner thought processes of Illinois Nazis
We apparently can blame “Austrian economics” for these particular nutters [apologies for not posting a link earlier, I was too much frothing at the mouth; but anyhoo it’s paywalled, I’m reading yer actual newsprint, through gritted teeth]. The poor hack who wrote this up couldn’t even spell out Austrian School of Economics, nor mention the link to von Hayek to Monetarism to the Peter Navarro nonsense running Trump’s economics.
Can I ask any Anarchists on the line: will the revolution begin by tearing down public hospitals?
Any individual act of “tab A in slot B” is unlikely to result in a pregnancy. Humans just aren’t that fertile. Couple who want children are advised to try often – and they know the hormonal cycles involved, while rapists tend not to…
Can I ask any Anarchists on the line: will the revolution begin by tearing down public hospitals?
I assume that was basically a rhetorical question, but as the resident anarchist I will provide the obvious answer: no, anarchists are not against public health and hospitals. Come the revolution, it will presumably be the jails that are demolished first (à bas la Bastille!).
@DM: That seems to be one of the things that people are missing, and there are others.
We apparently can blame “Austrian economics” for these particular nutters
Though I am by no stretch a fan of the Austerians, I think this is a bum rap: people of the Bailey type are attracted to Austrian School economics because it appears (to them) to justify solipsistic selfishness; I doubt if anyone has actually been converted to solipsistic selfishness by deep reflection on the frankly counterfactual Austrian economic doctrines (which do not, in fact, entail solipsistic selfishness, though they have led to deeply damaging economic policy-making, on account of their lack of correspondence with reality.)
I further strongly doubt whether the Baileys have actually studied much actual economic theory. This is more on the level of those who try to inculpate Darwin for their sociopathic political views (“realism”, as they would call them.) I doubt whether many of them have read any of Darwin’s works at all.
I suspect that the Baileys’ “devout Christianity” has a similarly loose attachment to the real thing. “Living by Biblical rules” is pretty much always a giant red flag as to what one is really dealing with in such cases.
For some people, wearing badly fitting underpants can be enough to spontaneously trigger an orgasm all on its own.
Lucky for them. Badly fitting underpants are usually a turn-off.
Might there not be a market for such things? One would obviously need to see some population surveys before stumping up the venture capital, of course.
On the other hand, there might be a lucrative niche market for artisanal badly fitting underpants.
ABFU! They practically sell themselves.
the Baileys’ “devout Christianity”
Thank you for taking the trouble to read the whole thing. I’d carefully not mentioned the Christianity gig, because it looked like a consequence of falling into the swamp, not a cause.
(Proselytising Christians were prominent in the COVID anti-vax campaigns here. There are still people who refuse the jags.)
Yeah: Christianoid fascism. Unfortunately some of these people are actual Christians. As Gibbon said: “Ambition is a weed of quick and early vegetation in the vineyard of Christ.” Or to put it another way: “Jesus wept.”
It is really not uncommon for people to assume that there’s some amount of inbuilt justice in the universe and to draw logical conclusions from that.
As in Martin Luther King’s “The moral arc of the universe bends toward justice.” To which I say, “Oh, come now, Pastor.” And the phrase was echoed once in Scientific American by ex-Evangelical secularist Michael Shermer.
Theodore Parker, 1858
Aha!
One finds that Theodore Parker was a Unitarian minister and abolitionist. Did MLK encounter him in seminary, or were his words passed down by preachers?
Parker’s words, but slightly modified and switched from first-person-singular to first-person-plural, were subsequently reused without attribution by the notorious Gen’l Albert Pike in e.g. _Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry_ (1881) and then passed forward attributed to Pike in other Masonic publications like e.g. the September 1912 issue of _Square and Compass_, side by side with a chain of attributions to Parker. By 1936 the key “bends toward justice” phrase appears to have been floating around w/o a specific authorial attribution in _Opinion: a Journal of Jewish Life and Letters_, possibly in a piece itself authored by Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, but snippet view makes it difficult to be sure.
The conclusion may be that the Rev’d Dr. King drew from the wells of multiple and interrelated currents of vaguely uplifting moralistic blather that were readily available in Anglo-American rhetorical culture.
vaguely uplifting moralistic blather
Talking of which, I had a very interesting conversation a couple of weeks ago with a fellow-guest at a wedding in Geneva. He was an American Unitarian by origin, though now a member of a notably High Anglican church in that city (same pathway as T S Eliot, though my fellow-guest seemed markedly less rigid in his outlook.)
But it made me realise that I knew really very little about Unitarians. They’re few and far between in the UK nowadays. WP tells me that the movement originated in Transylvania. I Did Not Know That. It casts Unitarianism in a whole new light …
I myself as a wee lad was sent by my mother to a Unitarian Sunday School in the early 1970’s. Where I learned that there are really quite a lot of verses that had by then been confected for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kumbaya (initially sung by non-Unitarians, but then it spread …). I think it was not there but rather at non-denominational-but-still-somewhat-vaguely-Protestant YMCA day camp where I was exposed at around the same time to “Morning Has Broken” in something approximating the Cat Stevens redaction.
You have my profound sympathy. I had no idea. No wonder you were soured for life on Protestantism.
The worst I was exposed to myself at Sunday school was “Jesus wants me for a sunbeam”, which has been, in my view, unfairly stigmatised by the non-sunbeam community. There are much worse songs, and its stirring exhortation to active Christian witness is surely unexeptionable.
My personal all-time unfavourite is “All Things Bright and Beautiful.” Even as a nine-year-old I could tell there was something deeply wrong with it.
@David Eddyshaw: When Americans talk about Unitarianism, we mean Unitarian Universalists. I’m not sure to what extent the Transylvanian Unitarians fit that model—although Eliot’s Boston Brahmin family certainly did.
@Brett: Unitarians and Universalists used to be rather different things and I don’t know that the institutional merger (circa 1960? presumably the internet knows the exact date) of the two U factions entirely did away with those differences although they may have subsequently dissipated what with neither party to the merger having an ethos that was well-constructed to be stable over time.
i think (and oughta know more surely, both as a new englander by upbringing and out of respect for my matriline’s internecine squabbles) that u.s. Unitarians are in intellectual/theological lineage a different branch of the same tree as the transylvanian ones, with a complicated historical relationship to Congregationalism, and that the more formalized denomination shifted gradually towards Universalism over time.
Can I ask any Anarchists on the line: will the revolution begin by tearing down public hospitals?
and chiming in as another of the resident (A) types to agree with our host! and to say that at least for me, a significant part of social transformation out of our current nightmarescape will need to be the shift from the state-controlled/supported institutional structures that take the name “public” in vain to actually public ones. that will be a complicated and messy process, not least because of the nasty effects of the longstanding use of “public” to mean state-controlled, but also because we’ll actually have to defeat the baileys and their ilk in ways that matter, instead of either dismissing/ignoring them or capitulating to them (which seem to be the only two strategies states can manage to come up with).
I think modern U-U differs from the Unitarianism of Eliot’s family in believing much less in God. After my father became a “Jewnitarian” in the 1980s, around the time of his second (and last) marriage, I went to a church service with him and his wife. It was about God, and the congregation was asked to sing “Nearer, My God, to Thee”. There were resentful murmurs in the congregation: “This is what I’m here to get away from.” After he moved and joined another church, I met the minister, who described himself as very unusual in the U-U clergy, being someone who believed in God.
I never became aware of any difference between former Unitarians and former Universalists.
capitulating to them
Hmm? Are any actual-functioning-democracies appointing vaccine deniers to positions of authority within public health? I’m all for dismissing them with severe prejudice[**] out of medical practice; no pussy-footing around with gentle persuasion when they’re in positions to do harm to others.
But yeah dealing with the social media lifestyle ‘influencers’ will be more Whac-a-mole/”A lie can travel halfway around the world …”.
[**] Me not an (A) type; only a softy-lefty democrat.
very unusual in the U-U clergy, being someone who believed in God.
Ah, yes. Hitchens’ quip that Unitarians believe there is at most one God.
As I understand it, the Old Testament acknowledges there are plenty of gods. The First Commandment’s “no other gods” isn’t denying they exist; merely relegating them to censured status. (They didn’t tell me that in Sunday School.)
Compare P. D. Q. Bach’s “Credo in at most unum deum” (1973).
I think you can find things in the Hebrew Bible that support the idea that there are other gods (e.g., Exodus 15:11) and things that support the idea that there’s only one (e.g., Isaiah 45:5). Some have argued that the parts that admit the existence of other gods are older, but I’m out of my depth, and others here know more.
I don’t quite remember if the Hebrew Bible actually denies the existence of other gods, like Ba‘al, or if it just says they are weak or wicked. In other words, are “false gods” false and mustn’t be worshipped because they are mere superstitions, or because they are unworthy usurpers?
@Y, the latter, according to One God Among Many: Rethinking the God of the Bible (“Ba’al” seems to be a proxy term for unspecific evil-gods-in-general; compare Beelzebub.)
I’ve no idea how much street cred Ehrman has amongst scholars. I do find a number of annoying personal tics, a distracting giggle/chuckle, especially a chronic inability to provide a straight answer to a straight question.
IIUC “false gods” doesn’t mean non-existent gods; but rather gods perfectly able to influence the world — indeed influence it in your favour for a time, providing you’re both worshipping and serving their (evil) plan. Eventually when you’re no longer useful, they’ll dump you.
A lawyer/biblical literalist might scrutinise “no other gods before me” to allow continuing to worship all sorts of gods, providing The God of Moses be most prominent. (Or that interpretation might be attributable to poor translation.)
Lucien Price (1954)
Dialogues Of Alfred North Whitehead p. 113
I’ve lost track of the (? musician, IIRC) who, when asked if he believed in God, said `Oh, no, I believe in something much greater’…
Evidently a fan of St Anselm.
St Anselm’s argument is familiar in mathematics as
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zorn%27s_lemma
without chain conditions…
There are certainly parts of the Hebrew texts that make fun of the heathen idolaters for worshipping non-existent fake things rather than real-but-deprecated-and/or-malign beings, e.g. from Psalm 113/115:
“Their idols are silver and gold, * even the work of men’s hands.
They have mouths, and speak not; * eyes have they, and see not.
They have ears, and hear not; * noses have they, and smell not.
They have hands, and handle not; feet have they, and walk not; * neither speak they through their throat.
They that make them are like unto them; * and so are all such as put their trust in them.”
@mollymooly: Thanks for the antedating and getting the context back to Unitarians.
However, I’m not convinced that Unitarian influence among American teachers, scholars, and professors was anywhere near as pervasive as Whitehead seems to imply. Or that the “at most” remark was really fair in regard to the late 19th century. A quick look at Wikipedia suggests that some prominent Unitarian clergymen of that time, such as Francis E. Abbott and Josiah Royce, were theists but not Christians. Abbott, I read, was a leader of the Free Religious Association, a non-Christian but mostly theistic movement, at least partly within Unitarianism, whose ideas were officially deemed acceptable in American Unitarianism in 1894.
A Britannica article says (have mercy on my links, Akismet!)
On the relation between Unitarian movements in different countries, it says
That doesn’t include a claim that Anglo-American and Continental Unitarianism were “genetically” related, and the article doesn’t say the founders of English Unitarianism knew anything about the Continental versions. But that’s as far as I got.
The usual early Christian view was that pagan gods were perfectly real, but were actually demons. (The idea that they must be either entities on a par with the God of Israel or completely nonexistent would not have had quite the syllogistic inevitability for them that it does for moderns.) A false god is not necessarily the same thing as a nonexistent god.
If one takes Genesis 1:1 as setting the scene for everything that follows (as such early Christians surely did), then presumably the Elohim of which it speaks is on a different ontological level altogether from all other gods.
So, in the absence of much extra-Biblical evidence bearing on the point, arguments that this view of the wholly exceptional nature of the God of Israel was a secondary development are necessarily dependent on trying to identify distinct historical layers in the Hebrew Bible. Of course, scholars of all kinds of persuasions have been trying to find non-circular ways of doing exactly that for a couple of centuries and more now. It’s probably true to say that this has proved less straightforward than it initially seemed in the nineteenth-/early twentieth-century heyday of the Higher Criticism, though also true that at least some broad outlines seem to be commonly accepted by most of those who are not ideologically opposed to the whole enterprise a priori.
(I actually don’t have a particular axe to grind in this myself: I’m not at all dead-set against the idea that the Bible contains notions of the nature of God that vary in sophistication. In fact, I find it hard to see how a Christian could avoid this: attempts to read Trinitarian interpretations back into the Hebrew canon always strike me as very much special pleading, venerable though the Christian tradition of such attempts may be.)
@jack: St Anselm’s argument is familiar in mathematics as Zorn’s lemma without chain conditions…
You’re saying that Anselm’s argument is like Zorn’s lemma in that it makes maximal claims, but without the concrete assumptions (chain conditions) that make Zorn’s lemma provable ?
Along those lines, every theological argument should be familiar to mathematicians. Trump’s maxed-out rantings as well.
The “What does the Bible say about” sites are helpful for people like me who aren’t familiar with the whole thing. This one gives the following [Edit: that seem to say other gods don’t exist], among many others relating or supposedly relating to other gods, in the “English Standard Version”. The order I’m presenting them in is the Jewish order of the books. I’m making no claim that that’s the historical order of the texts, or that the historical order of all references to other gods shows a development from (ObVocab) henotheism to monotheism, or that I know what the phrases translated “beside(s) me/him” mean.
Deuteronomy 4:35
To you it was shown, that you might know that the Lord is God; there is no other besides him.
Deuteronomy 32:39
See now that I, even I, am he, and there is no god beside me; I kill and I make alive; I wound and I heal; and there is none that can deliver out of my hand.
2 Samuel 7:22
Therefore you are great, O Lord God. For there is none like you, and there is no God besides you, according to all that we have heard with our ears.
1 Kings 8:60
That all the peoples of the earth may know that the Lord is God; there is no other.
Isaiah 43:10
“You are my witnesses,” declares the Lord, “and my servant whom I have chosen, that you may know and believe me and understand that I am he. Before me no god was formed, nor shall there be any after me.”
Isaiah 44:8
Fear not, nor be afraid; have I not told you from of old and declared it? And you are my witnesses! Is there a God besides me? There is no Rock; I know not any.
Isaiah 46:9
Remember the former things of old; for I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me,
Isaiah 45:5
I am the Lord, and there is no other, besides me there is no God; I equip you, though you do not know me,
Isaiah 45:21
Declare and present your case; let them take counsel together! Who told this long ago? Who declared it of old? Was it not I, the Lord? And there is no other god besides me, a righteous God and a Savior; there is none besides me.
Joel 2:27
You shall know that I am in the midst of Israel, and that I am the Lord your God and there is none else. And my people shall never again be put to shame.
Psalm 18:31
For who is God, but the Lord? And who is a rock, except our God?
Ah, but Zorn’s Lemma is not provable. It’s equivalent to the Axiom of Choice. Whereas Anselm’s ontological proof … er …
[Come to think of it, the Axiom of Choice is so non-constructive, maybe it implies the existence of God …]
If one takes Genesis 1:1 as setting the scene for everything that follows (as such early Christians surely did), then presumably the Elohim of which it speaks is on a different ontological level altogether from all other gods.
One that I didn’t include was
Nehemiah 9:6
You are the Lord, you alone. You have made heaven, the heaven of heavens, with all their host, the earth and all that is on it, the seas and all that is in them; and you preserve all of them; and the host of heaven worships you.
And another claim I’m not making is that the ESV translations are good. Would anyone here like to recommend a translation that’s available free on line?
[Come to think of it, the Axiom of Choice is so non-constructive, maybe it implies the existence of God …]
The arguments are equivalent.
@Jerry F.: the ESV is perfectly fine, if you’re looking for a “mainstream” and perhaps somewhat cautious translation. It has no radical new approach to offer. It’s easy enough using online resources to get a website to give you a few dozen different translations’ renderings of a given verse so you can compare them. Here’s such a selection for one of the verses you mentioned where the translation-to-translation variation is not particularly large when it comes to the relevant phrasing: https://biblehub.com/isaiah/46-9.htm
@ Stu, DE :
Tell it like it T I S my brothas
Thanks, J.W. Bible Hub seems to have a lot more variety than the last time I looked.
English speakers are really spoilt when it comes to Bible translations. A lot of them are really pretty good.
I have a soft spot for the New English Bible myself. (Though my tradition does not regard the Apocrypha as canonical, I still think it’s a good sign when translators include them.)
It’s not a translation for ideologues. I don’t approve of translations that introduce their ideology into the translation process, even when I actually agree with the ideology.
(Looking at you, New International Version. If Isaiah 7:14 just has “virgin” without even a footnote, you can’t trust the translation. The Kusaal version has pu’asadir “young woman who has not yet given birth.”)
The REAL test is whether or not “virgin” is used in a particular translation’s rendering of Gen. 24:43, where nothing particularly miraculous turns on it but merely the premarital conduct of the holy Matriarch Rebecca/Rebekah, and/or the criteria used by the unnamed servant of Abraham in seeking out a suitable bride for Isaac. I don’t know how the Kusaal versions handle that passage, and perhaps they should not in any event be judged by the same standards.
@JF [Edit: that seem to say other gods don’t exist]
I’m not seeing the point of that filter. Why not include passages from Exodus (generally taken to be of earlier authorship) that appear to allow there are many gods?
I’m not disputing that Christianity is monotheistic. I do find annoying the variety of Christians who cherry-pick from the Old Testament — or cherry-pick dubious translations, per DE — to support some twisted interpretation. I’m sure the Baileys can find plenty to oppose medical ‘conventional wisdom’.
OTOH (having just spent far too much time amongst a heavily proselytising community), if they can’t find a supporting passage, they’ll just make stuff up.
@JWB:
She, too, is a pu’asadir in Kusaal (and a pʋg-sada in Mooré.)
While you can perfectly well say pu’a kanɛ zi’ dau “woman who has not known a man” in Kusaal (as Matthew 1:23 actually does, translating the Greek rather than citing Isaiah directly), Kusaasi culture takes the not unreasonable view that giving birth for the first time is a more significant life-event for a woman than having sexual intercourse for the first time.
Mysteriously, the Mooré version of Isaiah 7:14 has pa-kuili, which Niggli’s dictionary glosses as “jeune fille nubile non encore mariée.” The second part of this must be related to the verb kuili “marry” (of a woman, marrying a man); the first bit could conceivably be a worn-down form of pʋg- “woman” (that sort of thing does happen with long-established compounds in Western Oti-Volta), but looks more likely simply to be pa “not be, not have.” But I don’t think Isaiah’s point is that the young woman is unmarried …
If the first bit is “woman” after all, pa-kuili might be a parallel formation to Kusaal pu’a-ɛliŋ “fiancée” (cf ɛl “marry.”) The Mooré version of Matthew cites the Isaiah passage verbatim, unlike the Kusaal version, and as Mary was in fact Joseph’s pu’a-ɛliŋ at the relevant point, rather than his yipu’a “principal wife”, I suppose that kinda works …
Actually, looking through Mooré version, it looks like pa-kuili is consistently used to render either בתולה “virgin” or παρθένος (or, more realistically, to render French vierge), so they’ve just gone with the traditional-but-questionable “virgin” in Isaiah 7:14. Bad show.
I see that the plural (not given in the dictionary) is pa-kuil-n-dãmba, which supports the analysis as a “forget-me-not” compound, where a clause or verb phrase is just used as a noun without formal change. So etymologically “unmarried”: but etymology, of course, is not a safe guide to meaning. Maybe the Mossi are more uptight about these things than the Kusaasi. Or maybe it’s just translationese.
And the tones are wrong for pa- to be an eroded pʋg- (just checked with the online audio Mooré dictionary.)
So, yeah: bachelorette. With an implicature of virginity.
Kusaal for “unmarried woman” is yiwia, the etymology of which is a total mystery to me.The sole occurrence in the Bible version is the plural yiwies at Acts 21:9, where the Greek has παρθένοι; but as the concept is consistently paraphrased elsewhere, I’m pretty sure that one is translationese.
I’m not seeing the point of that filter. Why not include passages from Exodus (generally taken to be of earlier authorship) that appear to allow there are many gods?
Because people here seemed to accept that parts of the Hebrew Bible assume the existence of other gods, but after I’d given one reference to a quotation that seemed to deny it, Y said, “I don’t quite remember if the Hebrew Bible actually denies the existence of other gods, like Ba‘al, or if it just says they are weak or wicked.” So I thought evidence for monotheism was needed, but the case for henothesm was made.
yiwia, the etymology of which is a total mystery to me
The yi- part is probably “house”, as in yipu’a “wife.”
Formally, the second part is a good match for Mooré wɛɛga “fallow.” I suppose a culture of subsistence farmers might think of an unmarried woman/putative virgin as “fallow” …
Bit of a stretch. But if that’s actually the etymology, it would neatly demonstrate that not all cultures view virginity in quite the same light …
On topic (for once): this very interesting paper by Benjamin Suchard does an excellent purely linguistic takedown of the hoary old argument that the Hebrew form אלהים is a relic of polytheism:
https://www.academia.edu/129644513/Semitic_%CA%BEil%C4%81h_and_Hebrew_%D7%90%D7%9C%D7%94%D7%99%D7%9D_From_plural_gods_to_singular_God
not all cultures view virginity in quite the same light …
What I do find bizarre is that whatever Mary’s exact status, the Gospels are at pains to point out Joseph is not the father. But then the completely-made-up journey to Bethlehem for the completely-made-up census under the completely-made-up rule that you must return to the place of your birth is all predicated on _Joseph_’s lineage from David. If Jesus is not of Joseph, then he’s not of Joseph’s lineage, then Jesus is not king-of-the-Jews material.
(Also I thought Jewish lineage descends through the maternal line??)
(Another bunch of stuff they didn’t tell me in Sunday School.)
Also I thought Jewish lineage descends through the maternal line??
That’s a more recent development.
The traditional genealogy of Jesus on Joseph’s side actually includes at least one gentile woman (Ruth.)* And of a woman (Tamar) who pretended to be a prostitute in order to get her father-in-law to impregnate her.
I am (also) fond of the two genealogies of Jesus, because one moves forward in time while the other moves backwards, which leads to them providing a particularly neat illustration of how tense-marking operates in Kusaal.
* And the moral of this sermon is: Bugger racial purity.
the question of the tanakh’s monotheism / monolatry (and the place of straight-up polytheism in it) is, i think, one of those things where the talmudic principle is the best guide: “turn it and turn it, for everything is in it”. which is somehow rarely talked about in terms of its primary implication, which is that it’s a bad idea to decide anything based on it, since it can be used to prove anything.* (i suspect the more mathematically adept among us will be able to point to a corresponding axiom or lemma; all i’ve got is UU/JW hybrids knocking on doors for no particular reason)
.
* mandatory haym soloveitchik footnote: traditionally, the textual justification comes after the practice.
all i’ve got is UU/JW hybrids knocking on doors
An excellent opportunity to ask them about Tamar. Yay! for the sex workers, I say.
Bugger racial purity.
Buggering seems to be the least of the sins in that Tamar story. And that’s the “spills his seed” passage that’s been completely mis-represented to generations of 14-year olds. Good grief what a bunch of murdering, incestuous barbarians!
And the moral of this sermon is: Bugger racial purity.
And economic migrants contribute a lot.
The REAL test is whether or not “virgin” is used in a particular translation’s rendering of Gen. 24:43
Interesting point. I do check Isaiah 7:14, but I didn’t know about that one.
… prostitute … (and religious leaders)
Is there some sort of cosmic coincidence going on?
Today’s paper brings me the obit for Jimmy Lee Swaggart.
I’d forgotten about the evil fucker’s support of RENAMO.
His “I have sinned” performance suggests the adoption of the Swaggart as the SI unit of hypocrisy.
Like the Farad, it is, however, an inconveniently large unit:
https://xkcd.com/3106/
In practice, one would probably mostly use microswaggarts (except for US Congress Republicans, for whom even deciswaggarts might be useful.)
I have the comparatively unusual (I would guess) life experience of having as an undergraduate helped facilitate an appearance and speech by the Rev’d Mr. Swaggart on a high-prestige and quite-secular U.S. college campus, way back in 1985 before the scandal which has been alluded to. It was, I must say, an instructive experience, because truth be told those of us on the Executive Board of the hosting organization (the local colonial-cringe attempt to emulate the Oxford/Cambridge Union Societies) at some level thought he would be entertaining in a kooky rube kind of way. And of course (with hindsight this should not have been a surprise …) he turned out to be rather shrewder and cannier in worldly matters than we supposedly sophisticated elitists were.
I don’t recall him mentioning Mozambique (or even Angola, for that matter), although he did mention Haiti.
It is plausible that his career was on net less of an overall contributor to human flourishing and perhaps even to spiritual growth than that of his more secular first cousin Jerry Lee Lewis (1935-2022). That’s probably not uncommon for certain of those who self-consciously enter the so-called helping professions (whether clerical or lay) compared to those thought to be merely entertainers or something frivolous-sounding like that.
Jerry Lee scored considerably lower on the swaggartometer. In fact, I’m not sure that he really registered much at all.
The US is currently stress-testing the notion that TV entertainers do not significantly harm human flourishing. Possibly it is too early to draw conclusions; one can, however, at least admire the scientific spirit of the US electorate in its commitment to this important sociological experiment.
I don’t think hypocrisy was one of Jerry Lee’s many problems. He seemed genuinely baffled as to why people objected to his marrying his 13-year-old cousin. I like Robert Christgau’s reference to “his absolute confidence in the face of the void.” He was certainly a major contributor to human flourishing simply on the basis of “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” and “Great Balls of Fire.”
It was IIRC during the recording session for “Great Balls of Fire” that Jerry Lee got cold feet, theologically speaking, and worried that he was doing the Devil’s work, while Sam Phillips (who of course had a certain financial motivation to get the song recorded and released) tried to persuade him that his secular music could indeed contribute positively to the saving of souls. Sam was himself enough of a Southern boy to be able to argue religion in a Pentecostal-adjacent vein if the occasion arose, and because the tape was already rolling parts of their theological dialogue were preserved for the edification of future generations.
Not to mention that Jerry Lee took part in one of the great theological discussions of the 20th century. It’s long for a comment, but I can’t find a transcript online, and I don’t want any concerned parties to miss it, so I’ll copy it from Greil Marcus’s great Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘N’ Roll Music (it’s the very last thing in the book):
You can hear the discussion here.
And on preview, I see that great minds think alike.
Of course, it needs to be tidied up a bit and translated into Latin (with a few respondeo dicendum‘s for clarity.)
Diabolum in me habeo! Nisi haberem, Christianus essem!
There should be a technical Latin name (better, a technical Greek name) for the small-but-important role Billy Lee Riley plays in facilitating the dialogue.
The co-occurrence of Jerry Lee Lewis and Billy Lee Riley raises the interesting statistical question of the minimum number N of southern white males of a certain generation you need to have in the same place (e.g. a recording studio) before the odds that at least two of them have the middle name “Lee” are >50%.
@AntC: Jewishness is matrilineal, but the patriline can be and is used for boasting rights (King David, Rabbi So-and-so of So-and-so, etc.)
[Hat, what do you think: would one fully capitalize So-and-So in this context?]
@Jerry Friedman: A properly and correctly translated Old Testament would be unreadable, since so much of it would be broken up with bracketed phrases with question marks and footnotes full of well-referenced head-scratching. Of course, some places (Job) would be more so than others (Chronicles).
Case in point, nothing less than the the first (or second) of the Ten Commandments, which you mention. עַל פָּנָי ʿal pānāy, translated ‘before me’, is ambiguous. That prepositional phrase warrants a page in the Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament (11:612–613). Literally, עַל פְּנֵי ʿal pᵊnê means ‘on the face of’, e.g. in Genesis 1:2. In this case, says TDOT,
The Zorell reference is here.
In other words ʿal pānāy is not all that far from the near-literal translation ‘in my face’.
[Hat, what do you think: would one fully capitalize So-and-So in this context?]
An intriguing question! One could go either way; I think I would incline towards So-and-So as being more immediately legible as a name-substitute.
@Hat: Goodness gracious, that’s a remarkable conversation. Thanks for copying it!
Also, people need to say “Man alive” more often.
@J.W.B.: Up north, I can think of two people a generation later who had the middle name Lee (and I didn’t know many of my coevals’ middle names). I’m pretty sure neither of them was named after any of the Lees of Virginia.
But those Lees at Sun Studio bring us to James Earl Carter, James Earl Ray, and James Earl Jones. What was going on there?
James Earl Carter, James Earl Ray, and James Earl Jones
Next: Sugar Ray Robinson, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Billy Ray Cyrus.
“you’re so right you don’t know what you’re sayin’.”
“In fact, you are closer to the mark than you yourself perhaps appreciate, my dear fellow.”
is “james earl” the goyish “tsvi hirsh”?
Immo, rectior es quam ipse fortasse intellegis, care amice.
We unfortunately do not for middle names have the sort of readily-accessible-and-searchable massive datasets that we do (in the U.S.) for first names and surnames, so impressions about trends and patterns are almost inevitably anecdotal and impressionistic. I do think that certain monosyllabic options get used more frequently as middle names than as first names for prosodic/rhythmic reasons. A now-perhaps-archaic female example in American onomastics might be “Mae,” with “Lynn” being a female possibility for my own generational cohort that is probably harder to find among younger women.
Ann/Anne is perennial.
@DE it is not a priori impossible that a suspiciously vague illness characterised only by patient-supplied symptoms uncorroborated by objective signs may turn out to have a respectably “physical” cause:
Starting from “acute chest pains” brought on by Covid.
Poor thing! Any one of those scarey-sounding names would be enough for a 13-year-old.
This sentence brought to you by the widespread superstition that commas mark, pauses. It took me half a minute to parse.
There was, too, the Cuban sonic/microwave thing, aka Havana syndrome, “also known as anomalous health incidents (AHIs)” (WP).
nisht AHI un nisht aher…
It’s one of the great misunderstandings of our time that guessing the solution to the mystery is important in detective fiction.
My wife and I have been rewatching some of our favorite Britcop shows (Vera, Lewis, and so on) and while we frequently remember striking scenes (oh yeah, that guy’s about to fall over the railing to his death), we absolutely never remember whodunit or why.
(And I would like to state for the record that I refuse to believe a mathematician would murder a student because she had found a flaw in his proof of a famous theorem. Come on, writers, you can do better than that.)
Quite so. The proper mathematician’s response to such a thing would be to become so paranoid and cranky that even other mathematicians thought they were a bit odd.
Or, possibly, just to carry on and find a valid proof. I believe such things have actually happened. Strange but true …
Hat (quoting): It’s one of the great misunderstandings of our time that guessing the solution to the mystery is important in detective fiction.
That catches my … [stopping, scrolling up] … Rats.
@languagehat: Anyone could have murdered that student, just for her incredibly awful fake American accent.
Ooh, those fake American accents annoy the hell out of me — there was another one in the episode we watched last night.
(And, as I think I’ve said before, that was a constant irritation in The Crown — the actors playing Americans not only didn’t resemble the people they were supposed to be but had terrible accents.)