By: Lizzie Furey,
on 10/5/2016
As usual, let me offer my non-formulaic, sincere thanks for the comments, additions, questions, and corrections. I have a theory that misspellings are the product of sorcery, as happened in my post on the idiom catch a crab (in rowing). According to the routine of many years, I proofread my texts with utmost care.
The post Etymology gleanings for September 2016 appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Connie Ngo,
on 12/1/2014
As voting for the shortlist came to a close, Scotland took home the title of Oxford’s Place of the Year 2014. This region of the United Kingdom came into spotlight when nearly half its citizens fought to pass the Scottish independence referendum, which would have allowed Scotland to declare itself as an independent country.
But what happened in September wasn’t Scotland’s first effort to break away from the United Kingdom. Back in 1979, the majority of Scottish residents were in favor of devolution, which would pass the powers of the Parliament of the United Kingdom over to the Scottish Assembly. However, despite the public favoring this move, only 32.9% of the electorate voted “Yes” to this referendum.
Then Scotland appealed for power again. In 1997, the second devolution referendum made way for the formation of the Scottish Parliament, which effectively gave Scotland control of its domestic policy. At an overwhelming majority nearing 75% of citizens and 45% of electorates in favor, the Scottish Parliament was established and held its debut session in July 1999.
After surpassing the other shortlist contenders — Ukraine, Brazil, Ferguson, and Colorado — Scotland undoubtedly marked the history books despite the referendum failing to pass. But as evident in Scotland’s history, this probably won’t be the last we hear of them.
Read up on our Place of the Year archive, and remember to check back for more posts about Scotland. Let us know what you think of this year’s Place of the Year in the comments below.
Featured headline image: Calton Hill. CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay.
The post The Oxford Place of the Year 2014 is… appeared first on OUPblog.
By: RachelM,
on 11/30/2012
30 November is St Andrew’s Day, but who was St Andrew? The apostle and patron saint of Scotland, Andrew was a fisherman from Capernaum in Galilee. He is rather a mysterious figure, and you can read more about him in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. St Andrew’s Day is well-established and widely celebrated by Scots around the world. To mark the occasion, we have selected quotations from some of Scotland’s most treasured wordsmiths, using the bestselling Oxford Dictionary of Quotations and the Little Oxford Dictionary of Quotations.
There are few more impressive sights in the world than a Scotsman on the make.
J. M. Barrie 1860-1937 Scottish writer
From the lone shielding of the misty island
Mountains divide us, and the waste of seas –
Yet still the blood is strong, the heart is Highland,
And we in dreams behold the Hebrides!
John Galt 1779-1839 Scottish writer
O Caledonia! Stern and wild,
Meet nurse for a poetic child!
Sir Walter Scott 1771-1832 Scottish novelist
O flower of Scotland, when will we see your like again,
that fought and died for your wee bit hill and glen
and stood against him, proud Edward’s army,
and sent him homeward tae think again.
Roy Williamson 1936-90 Scottish folksinger and musician
I love a lassie, a bonnie, bonnie lassie,
She’s as pure as the lily in the dell.
She’s as sweet as the heather, the bonnie bloomin’ heather –
Mary, ma Scotch Bluebell.
Harry Lauder 1870-1950 Scottish music-hall entertainer
My poems should be Clyde-built, crude and sure,
With images of those dole-deployed
To honour the indomitable Reds,
Clydesiders of slant steel and angled cranes;
A poetry of nuts and bolts, born, bred,
Embattled by the Clyde, tight and impure.
Douglas Dunn 1942– Scottish poet
Who owns this landscape?
The millionaire who bought it or
the poacher staggering downhill in the early morning
with a deer on his back?
Norman McCaig 1910–96 Scottish poet
The Little Oxford Dictionary of Quotations fifth edition was published in October this year and is edited by Susan Ratcliffe. The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations seventh edition was published in 2009 to celebrate its 70th year. The ODQ is edited by Elizabeth Knowles.
The Oxford DNB online has made the above-linked lives free to access for a limited time. The ODNB is freely available via public libraries across the UK. Libraries offer ‘remote access’ allowing members to log-on to the complete dictionary, for free, from home (or any other computer) twenty-four hours a day. In addition to 58,000 life stories, the ODNB offers a free, twice monthly biography podcast with over 130 life stories now available. You can also sign up for Life of the Day, a topical biography delivered to your inbox, or follow @ODNB on Twitter for people in the news.
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By: Kirsty,
on 5/18/2011
The Scottish Election of 2011 represents a watershed in Scottish politics. For the first time the Scottish National Party has come convincingly in first place, securing the absolute majority that was supposed to be impossible under proportional representation. Labour, having dominated Scottish politics for over fifty years, suffered a crushing defeat, losing seats even in its industrial heartland of Clydeside. Both of the parties of the ruling coalition of Westminster are reduced to minor players at Holyrood, without even the leverage that small parties enjoyed in the last parliament.
The immediate reason for the SNP triumph is clear; the collapse of the Liberal Democrat vote to less than half the previous level. What is less clear is why these voters should shift to the SNP and not to Labour. The answer lies in the changed nature of Scottish politics and the failure of Labour to adapt. They seemed to think that this was a ‘second order election’, in which voters use the opportunity to reward or punish the central government, irrespective of the local issues at play. Doubtless this was influenced by their good performance in Scotland in the UK election last year. So Ed Miliband and Ed Balls arrived in Scotland to tell electors that this was a chance to send a message to David Cameron and the coalition in London. This was not, however, a UK election and Scottish voters have learned the difference, being prepared to vote one way for Westminster and another way for Holyrood. Three of the four main parties in Scotland represent varieties of social democracy, so they have plenty of choice and nobody can take their votes for granted. Add to this the greater pulling power of Alex Salmond and the rather unplayed SNP message that they have done quite well in office (‘nae bad’ in Salmond’s words) and the campaign became quite one-sided. In the course of a six-week campaign, a Labour lead of 13 per cent, carried over from the UK election, was transformed into an advantage of nearly 20 per cent for the SNP.
If the result of the election is clear, its consequences are much less so. The SNP commands the political landscape, with support across all parts of the country and all sections of society, but has still to decide exactly what sort of party it is. Its policy prospectus combines support for more universal services with tax cuts for business in an impossible combination. Its social democratic and neo-liberal wings have lived so far in harmony, but there are now hard budgetary choices to be made.
Similarly, on the constitution, there is a historic division between fundamentalists, who want independence tomorrow, and gradualists, many of whom would settle for stronger devolution or some kind of confederal arrangement. Since the victory of 2007 there has been a truce between them, made easier by the fact that the party lacked the parliamentary majority to bring an independence referendum about. The present strategy is to pursue both strands. The SNP have already stated their demands for more tax powers, beyond those in the Scotland Bill currently before Parliament, control of the Crown Estate, and higher borrowing limits. At the same time, a referendum is promised in the latter part of the Parliament’s five-year term.
The UK government has already indicated that it will not make an issue of the legality of a referendum but will fight hard on the matter of independence. The SNP, for its part, has to define just what independence means. In the past I have argued that this is by no means an easy question in modern Europe, where many nationalist parties have adopted a ‘post-soverei
By: Kirsty,
on 4/26/2011
David Hume was born three hundred years ago, on 26th April 1711. He lived most of his life in Edinburgh, with only a few improbable interludes: one as tutor to a lunatic, one assisting in a comic-operatic military adventure, and one somewhat more successfully as Embassy Secretary, being a lion in the literary salons of Paris. Apart from these his life was devoted to philosophy, history, literature, and conversation. He is the greatest, and the best-loved, of British philosophers, as well as the emblem and presiding genius of the great flowering of arts and letters that took place in the Edinburgh of the eighteenth century—the Scottish Enlightenment. As with all philosophers, his reputation has gone through peaks and troughs, but today it probably stands higher than it ever has.
This may be surprising. Movements in twentieth-century philosophy were not, on the whole, kind to Hume. Analytical philosophy, initiated by Moore and Russell, took logic to be its scalpel and the careful dissection of language to be its principal task, yet Hume was neither a logician nor primarily interested in language. His empiricism, indeed, had echoes in the later work of the logical positivists. But he was widely regarded as having driven empiricism into a sceptical grave. Russell, for example, could assert in his History of Western Philosophy, that Hume ‘developed to its logical conclusion the empirical philosophy of Locke and Berkeley, and by making it self-consistent, made it incredible’, and this was a widely-held view. On the Continent it has usually been assumed that Hume was simply a curtain-raiser to Kant, who allegedly instructed us how to avoid his sorry descent into scepticism, on the grounds that any world in which we could find ourselves must have a nice regular structure, discernible by the light of reason alone.
There is unquestionably a skeptical side to Hume’s philosophy. But there is another side as well, that is responsible for its current standing. Hume is indeed sceptical about the power of reason to determine what we believe. But he is not sceptical, for example, about whether the sun will rise tomorrow. He just has the calm understanding that our confidence in uniformities in nature, such as this one, is not the result of logic or of any exercise of pure rationality. It is just the way our minds happen to work—as indeed, do those of other animals.
Similarly when it comes to understanding the springs of action, Hume again dethrones reason, arguing that nothing that reason could discover would motivate us without engaging an inclination or ‘passion’. He entirely overturns the Platonic model of the soul in which reason is the charioteer, controlling and steering the unruly horses of desire. ‘Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them’. We can correct mistakes about the world in which we act, and choose more efficient means to gain our ends. We may even be able to persuade ourselves and each other to alter our courses, for better or worse. But we can only do this by mobilizing other considerations we care about. These concerns, or in other words the directions of our desires, are themselves a bare gift of nature, again. Hume excelled in adding detail to this: his account of the evolution of what he called the ‘artificial’ virtues—respect for such things as reciprocity, institutions of justice, social conventions, law or government—is the grandfather of all later decision-theoretic and game-theoretic approaches to the evolution of cooperation. But it took over two centuries before this would be recognized. Only recently has Hume’s naturalism become the gold standard for everyone at the cutting edge of contemporary investigation, whether in philosophy, psychology, evolutionary psychology, anthrop
By: SarahN,
on 7/22/2009
Scalawag, whose origin is (predictably) “uncertain,” seems to have surfaced in American English, which does not mean that it was coined in America. Its earliest recorded sense (“a favorite epithet in western New York for a mean fellow, a scapegrace”) goes back to 1848. Many people must have known it at that time, but its heyday had to wait until after the Civil War, when it swept over the country as a buzz word applied to native white southern Republicans. Consequently, scalawags should not be confused with carpetbaggers, northern men who came South after the war for economic, political, and other reasons.
In the fifties of the 19th century, scalawag had the variants scallywag, scallaway (as we will see, a form of some importance in the present context), and even scatterway (most probably, a fanciful alternation of scalaway). The spelling with y and two l’s was common, and it is still preferred in England, where this word enjoys much greater popularity than on the American continent, as evidenced, among others, by the clipped form scally, a competitor of the ubiquitous chav (a slang term for an asocial youth) that fortunately did not cross the Atlantic. I am pleased to report that chav is also a word of debated origin. In the 19th century, the phrase our American cousins cropped up with some regularity in British periodicals. Well, a chav is a twin brother of a scally and a cousin of a scalawag. No one has yet discovered the etymology of either denomination.
Not only a contemptible person but also an undersized, scraggy, or ill-fed animal of little value can be called a scalawag. No evidence supports the contention that scalawag was originally a drover’s word for ill-conditioned cattle, and we are still in the dark about which came first: “a mean man” or “worthless animal.” I am aware of only one ramification of the main sense. In The Nation for 1910, an anonymous reviewer of the OED wrote: “Dr. Bradley strangely neglects to remark that scallywag, like scamp (which formerly meant a ‘highway robber’), has lost much of its early savor, and is now largely employed as a term of endearment for particularly vivacious and heart-ravishing infants.” Bradley should hardly have been faulted for that omission. Almost any word meaning “rascal” can be used facetiously about a vivacious individual. Even The Century Dictionary did not say anything about heart-ravishing infants. Other sources are also silent on this point. Only The Oxford American Dictionary refers to the sense “a white southerner who collaborated with northern Republicans during Reconstruction, etc.” as historical but begins the entry with “informal a person who behaves badly but in an amusingly mischievous rather than harmful way; a rascal.” A term of political opprobrium has been ameliorated to a name for a whimsical pest. I wonder whether anyone in the United States ever uses scalawag except in jest.
The suggestions about the etymology of scalawag are few and inconclusive. There is a district in the Shetland Islands called Scalloway, in which small, runty horses are bred, and scalawag has been tentatively derived from this place name. The small port of Scalloway was once the capital of Shetland, and inferior cattle or ponies were indeed imported from the Shetland Islands. Also the existence of the short-lived variant scallaway gives this hypothesis some credence, but the history of a loanword consists of at least two chapters: identification of the etymon in a lending language and tracing its routes in the new home. Who popularized this term of cattle breeding in North America? Scallag, a Scottish Gaelic word for “vagabond; menial servant; bondsman; predial slave” in the Hebrides, looks like another probable sibling. (One of the researchers remarked “Interestingly, the Hebrides Islands are located off the northwestern coast of Scotland, not far from Shetlands”; this fact may be interesting, but the connection evades me. Are Scalloway and scallag related?). Scottish Gaelic scalrag “tatterdemalion” (still another candidate for the evasive etymon) clearly contains the same element scal- and sounds somewhat like scalawag. The fact that scalawag cropped up in western New York sheds no light on the ethnicity of those who may have brought this word to America.
A few other hypotheses are even more daring. The word schalawag occurred once in a late medieval Swiss German poem; it seems to have meant “belled shackles” (German Schellenwerk). Those were put on criminals. “A term coined to apply to a criminal and social outcast, marked by society in such a fashion as to attract attention by his every movement, the term schalawag was ideally suited to apply to the scamp, loafer, or rascal who was a post-bellum ‘scalawag’ in the South.” The match is indeed close, but who in the English speaking world knew the word that even in Germany was hopelessly rare? Finding such a person would be more difficult than belling a cat. (A reminder to those who have forgotten the tale. A young mouse suggested that it would be a good idea to put a bell on the cat’s neck; then the beast would not be able to hide. Everybody agreed, whereupon an old mouse asked who was going to do the work. Apparently, there were no volunteers.)
From the Celts and the Swiss Germans, we will briefly turn our attention to the French. By a series of phonetic steps scalawag has been connected with the root of scavenger. The adventure was entertaining but unrewarding. Dictionaries suggest Scalloway or scallag as the etymons of scalawag or say: “Of unknown/uncertain origin.” About the only exception is Ernest Weekley (An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English, 1921), where we find the following cryptic remark: “? From scall.” Now scall is a skin disease, so that, if we follow Weekley, scalawag will be understood as a derogatory term of the same order as scab “blackleg, non-unionist.” (From the same root as in scab we have shabby, a word that, according to Samuel Johnson,” has crept in conversation and low writing; but ought not to be admitted into the language.” A losing battle, a forlorn hope: low words always triumph in the long run.)
I think no one came closer to the solution than Weekley. He did not say anything about the second half of the word, but here I have a suggestion. Scalawag may be scal-a-wag, a formation like rag-a-muffin and cock-a-doodle-doo, a compound with -a- in the middle. Wag “a mischievous person” (originally “a mischievous boy”!) is a noun in its own right; to play the wag is slang for “play the truant.” If it could be shown that scall had sufficient currency in American English (in western New York or elsewhere), a scalawag would emerge as a scabby wag, whereas diminutive horses, predial slaves, criminals wearing bells like the lepers of old, scavengers, and their daughters will stay where they belong: in Shetlands, Hebrides, Switzerland, and France. Good riddance if you ask me.
Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears here, each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to [email protected]; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”
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By: Pamela Ross,
on 8/19/2007
except hopping in a car and heading off to the sand and sea, accompanied by the people you love best, the books you love Right Now, and the manuscripts you better love right now.
While away, I'll be spending some Sublime Summertime hours talking about books and writing in Cape Cod with author Claire Cook and agent Tina Dubois Wexler. Call it a "Must Love Hanging Out" vacation with a wee bit of work thrown in to keep me grounded. I think I'll send the family (2 kids, one husband) on a whale watch while I take care of my creative juices. Knowing the frailities of my irritable stomach system, I'm sure the Atlantic Ocean can live without my vomit (also known as internal juices). ;>
My inner Rock Star wishes you all a sublime sayonara to summer-- where the living truly can be easy if you let it happen. Yes, I kicked back and chilled out, wrote when I wanted, tanned when I wanted, bought more books than I should have-- but what else is new?
I'm sealing this entry with a kiss from a woman who knew how to make poetry out of music-- and who knew how to put the time into Summertime. Thank you, Ira and George Gershwin, for the gorgeous lyrics and luscious melodies that help define the soundtrack of our lives. Thank you, George Gershwin, who flew off way too early. Just think of all the music the world will never know because he died so young. And yet just think of all he wrote in so short a time. He was gone by the time he was 39. Janis Joplin, the voice that lives on and defines women in rock.. gone at 27. Friends gone before they had a chance to live. I worry that time moves too fast for me. There's so much to do, too much to do. I want to live. I want to write. I want to... make sublime poetry out of life. {}
One of these mornings
You're going to rise up singing
Then you'll spread your wings
And you'll take to the sky...
Tell 'em, Janis. Tell 'em.
How sweet it Was. And Is. {}
