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Those of you who follow my blog will know that this year has been a little patchy for me so I thought a good way of giving myself a kick up my creative backside was by taking part in NaNoWriMo - yes, I really thought that writing 50,000 words in one month would be a good idea... Emma from NaNoEssex asked me to write a post for her blog and I thought it would be nice to share with you.  So here we go - this is my NaNo blog, I hope you enjoy it!

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Autumn is here again – in England, the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, in the US also the season of Thanksgiving. On the fourth Thursday in November, schoolchildren across the country will stage pageants, some playing black-suited Puritans, others Native Americans bedecked with feathers. By tradition, Barack Obama will ‘pardon’ a turkey, but 46 million others will be eaten in a feast complete with corncobs and pumpkin pie. The holiday has a long history: Lincoln fixed the date (amended by Roosevelt in 1941), and Washington made it a national event. Its origins, of course, lay in the Pilgrim Fathers’ first harvest of 1621.

Who now remembers who these intrepid migrants were – not the early ‘founding fathers’ they became, but who they were when they left? The pageant pilgrims are undifferentiated. Who knows the name of Christopher Martin, a merchant from Billericay near Chelmsford in Essex? He took his whole family on the Mayflower, most of whom, including Martin himself, perished in New Plymouth’s first winter. They died Essex folk in a strange land: there was nothing ‘American’ about them. And as for Thanksgiving, well that habit came from the harvest festivals and religious observances of Protestant England. Even pumpkin pie was an English dish, exported then forgotten on the eastern side of the Atlantic.

Towns like Billericay, Chelmsford and Colchester were crucial to American colonization: ordinary places that produced extraordinary people. The trickle of migrants in the 1620s, in the next decade became a flood, leading to some remarkable transformations. In 1630 Francis Wainwright was drawing ale and clearing pots in a Chelmsford inn when his master, Alexander Knight, decided to emigrate to Massachusetts. It was an age of austerity, of bad harvests and depression in the cloth industry. Plus those who wanted the Protestant Reformation to go further – Puritans – feared that under Charles I it was slipping backwards. Many thought they would try their luck elsewhere until England’s fortunes were restored, perhaps even that by building a ‘new’ England they could help with this restoration. Wainwright, aged about fourteen, went with Knight, and so entered a world of hardship and danger and wonder.

One May dawn, seven years later, Wainwright was standing by the Mystic River in Connecticut, one of seventy troops waiting to shoot at approaching Pequot warriors. According to an observer, the Englishmen ‘being bereaved of pity, fell upon the work without compassion’, and by dusk 400 Indians lay dead in their ruined encampment. The innkeeper’s apprentice had fired until his ammunition was exhausted, then used his musket as a club. One participant celebrated the victory, remarking that English guns had been so fearsome, it was ‘as though the finger of God had touched both match and flint’. Another rejoiced that providence had made a ‘fiery oven’ of the Pequots’ fort. Wainwright took two native heads home as souvenirs. Unlike many migrants, he stayed in America, proud to be a New Englander, English by birth but made different by experience. He lived a long life in commerce, through many fears and alarms, and died at Salem in 1692 during the white heat of the witch-trials.

The story poses hard historical questions. What is identity, and how does it change? Thanksgiving pageants turn Englishmen into Americans as if by magic; but the reality was more gradual and nuanced. Recently much scholarly energy has been poured into understanding past emotions. We may think our emotions are private, but they leak out all the time; we may even use them to get what we want. Converted into word and deed, emotions leave traces in the historical record. When the Pilgrim William Bradford called the Pequot massacre ‘a sweet sacrifice’, he was not exactly happy but certainly pleased that God’s will had been done.

Puritans are not usually associated with emotion, but they were deeply sensitive to human and divine behaviour, especially in the colonies. Settlers were proud to be God’s chosen people – like Israelites in the wilderness – yet pride brought shame, followed by doubt that God liked them at all. Introspection led to wretchedness, which was cured by the Holy Spirit, and they were back to their old censorious selves. In England, even fellow Puritans thought they’d lost the plot, as did most (non-Puritan) New Englanders. But godly colonists established what historians call an ‘emotional regime’ or ‘emotional community’ in which their tears and thunder were not only acceptable but carried great political authority.

John Winthrop, the leader of the fleet that carried Francis Wainwright to New England, was an intensely emotional man who loved his wife and children almost as much as he loved God. Gaunt, ascetic and tirelessly judgmental, he became Massachusetts Bay Colony’s first governor, driven by dreams of building a ‘city upon a hill’. It didn’t quite work out: Boston grew too quickly, and became diverse and worldly. And not everyone cared for Winthrop’s definition of liberty: freedom to obey him and his personal interpretation of God’s designs. But presidents from Reagan to Obama have been drawn to ‘the city upon the hill’ as an emotionally potent metaphor for the US in its mission to inspire, assist, and police the world.

Winthrop’s feelings, however, came from and were directed at England. His friend Thomas Hooker, ‘the father of Connecticut’, cut his teeth as a clergyman in Chelmsford when Francis Wainwright lived there. Partly thanks to Wainwright, one assumes, he found the town full of drunks, with ‘more profaneness than devotion’. But Hooker ‘quickly cleared streets of this disorder’. The ‘city upon the hill’, then, was not a blueprint for America, but an exemplar to help England reform itself. Indeed, long before the idea was associated with Massachusetts, it related to English towns – notably Colchester – that aspired to be righteous commonwealths in a country many felt was going to the dogs. Revellers did not disappear from Chelmsford and Colchester – try visiting on a Saturday night – but, as preachers and merchants and warriors, its people did sow the seeds from which grew the most powerful nation in the world.

So if you’re celebrating Thanksgiving this year, or you know someone who is, it’s worth remembering that the first colonists to give thanks were not just generic Old World exiles, uniformly dull until America made them special, but living, breathing emotional individuals with hearts and minds rooted in English towns and shires. To them, the New World was not an upgrade on England: it was a space in which to return their beloved country to its former glories.

Featured image credit: Signing of the Constitution, by Thomas P. Rossiter. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

The post Give thanks for Chelmsford, the birthplace of the USA appeared first on OUPblog.

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Burly & Grum are great sports fans and are so excited that the Tour de France is coming to Essex. They have been busy preparing for days and are now well and truly ready to cheer on the cyclists as they come speeding through! 

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<!--[if !mso]> v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} <![endif]--> A very warm welcome to Glynis Smy with the launch of her book Ripped Genes. Glynis is someone who encourages self-published authors in so many ways, and it is a delight to see her here.                               A year

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(The first word was larrup.)

By Anatoly Liberman

Lunker seems to be well-known in the United States and very little in British English.  Mark Twain used lunkhead “blockhead.” Lunker surfaced in books later, but lunkhead must have been preceded by lunk, whatever it meant.  In today’s American English, lunker has several unappetizing and gross connotations, and we will let them be: one cannot constantly deal with turd and genitals.  Only two senses bear upon etymological discussion: “a very big object” and “big game fish.”  From the meager facts at my disposal I am apt to conclude that “big fish” is secondary, so that the word hardly arose in the lingo of fishermen.  Also, lunkhead probably alluded to someone with a big head “typical of an idiot,” as they used to say.

In dictionaries I was able to find only one conjecture on the origin of lunker.  The Random House Unabridged Dictionary (RHD) suggested that it might be a blend of lump and hunk.  Unless we know for certain that a word is a blend (cf. smog, brunch, motel, blog, gliberal, Eurasia, Tolstoevsky, and the like), it is impossible to prove that some lexical unit is the product of merger: for instance, squirm is perhaps a blend of squirt and worm but perhaps not.  I suspect that RHD’s idea was suggested by The Century Dictionary, which, although it offers no derivation of lunkhead and does not list lunker, refers under lummox “an unwieldy, clumsy, stupid fellow” (“probably ultimately connected with lump”) to British dialectal lummakin “heavy; awkward.”  Lump turned up first only in Middle English.  It has numerous cognates in Dutch, German, and the Scandinavian languages and seems to have developed from the basic meaning “a shapeless mass.” No impassable barrier separates lunk- from lump-, for n and m constantly alternate in roots, and final -p and -k are also good partners (see the previous post).  German Lumpen means “rag,” and a rag may be understood as a shapeless mass or something hanging loose.  It is the semantics that complicates our search for the etymology of lunker: we need cognates that mean “a big thing,” and they refuse to appear.  Lump does provide a clue to the history of lunker; by contrast, hump may be left out of the picture: we have enough trouble without it.

Joseph Wright included lunkered (not lunker!) in The English Dialect Dictionary, but without specifying his sources or saying, as he often did: “Not known to our informants.”  His definition is curt: “(of hair) tangled; Lincolnshire.”  He also cited several other similar northern (English and Scots) words, of which especially instructive are lunk “heave up and down (as a ship); walk with a quick uneven, rolling motion; limp” and lunkie “a hole left for the admission of animals.”  Unlike larrup, discussed in the previous post, lunker did find its way into my database.  A single citation occurs in The Essex Review for 1936.  The Reverend W. J. Pressey quotes a 1622 entry in a diary: “Absent from Church, and for ‘lunkering’ a poor woman’s house in great Sampford, to the great fear and terror of the said poor woman.”  He comments:

“This word is derived from the Scandinavian.  ‘Lunkere

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Diva without a Cause Grace Dent

The British original was called Trainers V. Tiaras and the US hardcover was just called Diary of a Chav.

Shiraz Baily Wood is NOT a Chav, thank you very much. Even if the local paper does refer to her school as super-chav academy. Just because she likes track suits and gold hoops doesn't make her one!

(Ok, it kinda does, but chav really isn't a nice thing to call someone, so we can forgive Shiraz her denial.)

Her career goals are to go on Big Brother and create lots of controversalities, which she will, because she totally keeps it real, and then spin that into an empire and make two million pounds, just like Tabitha Tennant. Meanwhile her best friend's boyfriend is a bit minging, her older sister Cava-Sue is in drama school and dressing like a hobo, and her brother Murphy is just gross.

Hilarious. Dent's writing is pitch-perfect. Astoundingly so. I'm so glad that the American publication didn't touch the lower-working-class British dialect at all.

What I love most about this book is it's more than funny British chick-lit. There's a lot going underneath the surface, most of it class related. Going to college or university isn't a goal Shiraz's parents want for her. They don't even care about her A-levels-- her mum thinks she should get a job and start earning money and find a nice rich man to marry, preferably a builder because they can fix things around the house. A lot of the family tension comes from the fact that Cava-Sue is doing her A-levels. But, Shiraz has a new teacher who's forcing her to think about some things. This is not a side of British life we see in lit very often, especially the stuff that makes it over here. Most readers will think Shiraz's mum is crazy and that her ideas of what's classy are CRAZY (seriously, think Chardonnay from Footballers Wive$) but the way Dent portrays them isn't mockingly.

Some of the drama, like in most teen lives, is created by Shiraz, but a lot of the bigger issues are not. I loved her.

It's laugh-out-loud hysterical, but Shiraz has a lot of heart and is, really, a proper legend. As a note though, unless you're very, very good at British-English (and not just your regular ones such as "trainers" and "GCSEs" but you need to know words like "minging" "WAGs" and "ASBO"), you'll want to make use of the glossary at back.

The sequel, Posh and Prejudice comes out in December.

If you're good enough at your British to not need the glossary (like those of us who used to live in the dodgier parts of Manchester), this series is up to book 6 in the UK. BOOK 6!!!! And, may I remind you, for all of your British book buying needs, there is nothing better than The Book Depository. Regular prices and FREE WORLD WIDE SHIPPING with no minimum order. Yes, I make money off Amazon, but not Book Depository, I just love them. And I've ordered the rest of the series through them. Huzzah!

And now, an excerpt:

I LOVE going to bingo with Nan. Nan is the bingo queen. Nan always reckons that she has a bad heart and bad eyesight, but when she gets to bingo she can do six bingo cards at once while smoking a Lucky Strike and talking about everyone else there with Gill. Nan don't even get shaky when they do the live national link up for ₤40,000!!! I only did one card and my hear was thumping like mad! Nan said that if she gets the big national one she's moving to Spain with Gill and they're going to sit in the sun and drink rum-and-Cokes and find themselves new fellas, seeing as their old ones have gone and died. Nan said I can come with her and get myself a Spanish fella with brown eyes. (Even Nan is obsessed with me getting a lad.)

...

It was a right bother getting Nan and her mates home after bingo 'cos Gill won a bingo line and spent the ₤30 on rum-and-Cokes for her, Nan, and their mate Clement. "You can't take it with you when you die," said Gill. They were singing on the bus all the way home. They are worse than us hoodies.

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Canadian author Deborah Ellis, recipient of the Order of Ontario for 2006 and the Governor General's Award for Looking for X has faced challenges to her books. When contacted about this "Banned Book Challenge," she promised to give it a go.

What a great idea! I can't promise, but I will try.

Paper Tigers recently interviewed Ellis.

Your books are often controversial - not least in your native Canada. In particular, Three Wishes: Palestinian and Israeli Children Speak has been both promoted and removed from reading lists in Ontario. What are your views on book censorship, particularly of children's and young adults' books?

I think all topics should be available in children's and YA novels, but not all writers have the talent to write about all topics in a way that is accessible to children. We put children in all sorts of situations around the world - prostitution, drug abuse, slavery, incest, etc - and it takes special talent to write about those things in a way that is respectful. There are topics that I won't touch because I know I don't have the talent to do them properly.

A Canadian challenged book list has the following information about the recent banning of Three Wishes: Palestinian and Israeli Children Speak

2006—In Ontario, the Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC) urged public school boards to deny access to this children’s non-fiction book about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to students in the elementary grades.
Cause of objection—The CJC said that Ellis had provided a flawed historical introduction to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The CJC also said that some children in the book portrayed Israeli soldiers as brutal, expressed ethnic hatred and glorified suicide bombing. The effect on young student readers, the CJC said, was “toxic.”
Update—Although the Ontario Library Association (OLA) had recommended Three Wishes to schools as part of its acclaimed Silver Birch reading program, and although schoolchildren were not required to read the book, at least five school boards in Ontario set restrictions on the text:
a) The District School Board of Niagara encouraged librarians to steer students in Grades 4–6 away from Three Wishes and to tell parents that their children had asked for the book.
b) The Greater Essex County District School Board restricted access to the book to students in Grade 7 or higher.
c) The Toronto District School Board restricted access to the book to students in grade 7 or higher and withdrew the book from school library shelves.
d) The Ottawa-Carleton District School Board refused to stock the book and refused to provide copies to students who asked for it.
e) In 2005, before the CJC made its views about Three Wishes public, the York Regional District School Board also withdrew the book from the Silver Birch program.
Protests by the OLA, The Writers’ Union of Canada, PEN Canada and the Association of Canadian Publishers failed to persuade the school boards to repeal their restrictions.

Sarah Elton wrote this article for the Globe and Mail in the wake of the controversy.

I am embarrassed to tell this blog's readers that I live within the boundaries of the District School Board of Niagara and at one time taught for them. I have read this book and find it to be a fair and balanced view of the conflict. It is powerful because it is in the words of the children themselves and it challenges the adults in their lives and even as far away as Canada to put a stop to the horrow. Our JT Book Club (ages 11-15) is reading Three Wishes this month.

Take the "Banned Book Challenge" yourself and let us know what your goal is.

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