Pedantry Archive

This archive will be dedicated to posts based on
digging around in dictionaries,  libraries, and the internet looking for obscure things.

The Power of Google: "On Eagle's Wings"

Starting with nothing but the title of a song, with fifteen minutes or so of Googling I was able to come up with the name of the composer, the school of liturgical music to which he belonged, some writings by the religious and musical adversaries of that music school, and the history of the religious adversaries. I do not believe that there is any pre-Google research method which could have done anywhere near as well anywhere near as quickly. The only alternative that I can think of would be a phone call to the research librarian of a Christian music school. (The topic I was researching was one in which I had had no prior interest).

From the Shores of Tripoli

The American wars against the "Barbary pirates" around the turn of the nineteenth century featured an American suicide bomber attacking Muslims, a peace treaty declaring the United States not to be a Christian nation, and the namesakes of several naval vessels: first, the inadvertent suicide bomber Lt. Richard Somers, and second, one Reuben (or Ruben) James. A few decades later, a mutiny on the USS Somers, commanded by Herman Melville's' cousin Guert Gansevoort, was the likely prototype for Melville's Billy Budd (and perhaps also his story "Benito Cereno"). Later still, the WWII USS Reuben James lent its name to a famous pro-war agitprop folk song -- which was later retrofitted as an anti-war song.

"Darwin" in American Life

I was at least able to find the statistics on the use of this name. If I'm reading this graph correctly, between 1910 and 1960 "Darwin" ranked between about #380 and about #500 among male given names. In 1970 the name plummeted to about #800, and then even lower, before recovering recently. For the year 2003 the name ranked #800; for males of all ages, in the 2000 census the name ranked #583.
 

Yule's "Hobson-Jobson"

If you navigate to the page, you will find out about temple prostitutes, the Assyrian and Gujarati roots of two everyday English words, and the shocking truth about the words shampoo, pariah, and orangutang.

Le Real is a kind of Sturgeon
 

So we could paraphrase Kant, “A hundred real reals do not contain a centavo more than a hundred possible reals.” Seemingly, The Real is the cash value -- the kingly, the important, the inherited realm, landed property, and the gold and silver coins. Philosophical realism is the philosophy for which Ideas or Forms are important because they are royal, and real because they are thinglike – which seems to destroy the purpose of the Ideas, which supposedly gain their power via their distinction from mere physical objects. And in Spain and Portugal, royalty remains "real" to this day, whereas in France since 1789, even the word real itself has been banished from the language. (What does Lacan have to say about all this? “The Real is impossible.” Thanks a lot, Jacques!)

Etymological Vaginas

To me it's an open-and-shut case. The Yule-Pelliot theory assumes an alternative universe where Italian sailors, given a chance to make a smutty remark, failed to do so -- or even worse than that, an alternative universe where Italian sailors inadvertently made remarks which only later were discovered by others to have had a lewd connotation. Sorry, but I don't think of that as a possible world.

Real Gothic Cathedrals

The Gothic cathedrals you always read about are fake, constructed centuries after the disappearance of the Goths. Here are pictures of two real Gothic structures, built by Theodoric in Ravenna ca. 500 AD.

The Coming of the Age of Iron

In several respects the island of Cyprus had a special importance in the development of metallurgy. It is even sometimes thought that the name “Cyprus” was derived from the word “cuprum” for copper, but the truth is more interesting than that. The Greek word for copper was “aes”, but Cyprus was so important in the copper trade that the phrase “aes Cyprium” (copper of Cyprus) became common in Latin, later to be shortened to “Cyprium” and then “cuprum”.

Starting from Greenland (or, the Turkish Kayak)

"Kayak" is probably a Turkish word, and the word "caique" has entered the European languages from Turkish as the name of an entirely different boat. The two words met in Scandinavia ca. 1700, having circumnavigated the globe between them. The Ivory Road from Greenland to China ca. 1000 AD. The Varangian (Norse) circumnavigation of Europe at the time of the Fourth Crusade.

The Translation of the Ruins of Rome

Poetry is supposed to be "what's lost in translation", and the translator has been defined as a traitor, but there's one poem which has become part of the canon in at least five different languages.

Rome and Turkey

The migrations of Rome, and where did the turkey get its names, and why do some peoples call Turkey "Rome", and what's the difference between "Romanian" and "Rumanian" in Romanian, and where is Guinea, anyway?

I am emersonj at gmail dot com.

Original materials copyright John J Emerson

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