meritocracy

30 April 2019

The term meritocracy arose in socialist circles in the 1950s as a derisive term for a new system of class oppression. The first known use of the term is by Alan Fox in the journal Socialist Commentary of May 1956. Fox writes:

[Social stratification] will remain as long as we assume it to be a law of nature that those of higher occupational status must not only enjoy markedly superior education as well but also, by right and necessity, have a higher income in the bargain. As long as that assumption remains—as long as violation of it are regarded as grotesque paradoxes—then so long will our society be divisible into the blessed and the unblessed—those who get the best of everything, and those who get the poorest and the least. This way lies the “meritocracy”; the society in which the gifted, the smart, the energetic, the ambitious and the ruthless are carefully sifted out and helped towards their destined positions of dominance, where they proceed not only to enjoy the fulfillment of exercising their natural endowment but also to receive a fat bonus thrown in for good measure.

This is not enough. Merely to devise bigger and better “sieves” (“equality of opportunity”) to help the clever boys get to the top and then pile rewards on them when they get there is the vision of a certain brand of New Conservatism; it has never been the vision of socialism.

(I include this lengthy quotation because copies of the original source are difficult to find—as far as I know, it hasn’t been digitized—and the brief quotation in the Oxford English Dictionary doesn’t fully convey the context or tone of its use.)

The term made its way into mainstream discourse via the publication of Michael Young’s 1958 The Rise of the Meritocracy, 1870–2033: The New Elite of Our Social Revolution. Young’s book is a satirical look at 1950s British society from the perspective of someone writing from the distant perspective of the year 2034. Young writes:

Before the meritocracy was fully established, age-stratification as a substitute for the hereditary order may have been necessary for the sake of social stability.

Young is basically echoing Fox’s sentiment that the meritocracy is simply a replacement of one class of bosses with another. In this case, the hereditary rulers of Britain had been replaced by a seniority system (“age-stratification”), which, in the 1950s, was being replaced by one based on perceived merit. Young’s book made something of a splash, and was much commented upon in the mainstream press upon its publication.

Young later claimed to have coined the term, and he may have used it without conscious awareness that it was already in use. And many writers have followed suit, crediting Young with coining the term. But he did not—as any quick look at the OED, which contains the Fox citation from two years earlier, would confirm. Young was simply using a term that was already in use by those discussing the problems of social and economic stratification.

Meritocracy was originally derisive, not satirical, although Young’s book is definitely satire. But it is certainly ironic that twenty-first century capitalism has adopted this socialist slur as justification for its existence.

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Sources:

Fox, Alan. “Class and Equality.” Socialist Commentary. May 1956, 13.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition. September 2001. s. v. meritocracy, n.

Young, Michael. The Rise of the Meritocracy, 1870–2033: The New Elite of Our Social Revolution. New York: Random House, 1959, 71–72. (Published in Britain by Thames and Hudson the previous year.)

Zimmer, Ben. “A ‘Meritocracy’ Is Not What People Think It Is.” The Atlantic. 14 March 2019.

meme

26 October 2019

Boromir meme with caption “one does not simply create a meme”

Most of us are familiar with memes, those images with varying text that propagate, often virally, through the internet, but where does the word meme come from?

It may be surprising to many, but the word meme was coined by biologist and famed promoter of atheism Richard Dawkins in 1976. Dawkins was trying to label those bits of culture that spread and become iconic. He considered these bits of culture to be analogous to biological genes. From his book The Selfish Gene:

The new soup is the soup of human culture. We need a name for the new replicator, a noun which conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. “Mimeme” comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like “gene.” I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme [...] It should be pronounced to rhyme with “cream.” Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches.

It wasn’t until around 1998 that meme was applied to the internet images we know today. While this is a more specific application of Dawkins’s original sense, it is true to general principles: they are cultural units; they spread, with successful ones outcompeting less prolific ones; and, like biological genes, they can mutate (the changing text that overlays the images).

The first citation in this newer, more specific, sense in the OED is from the CNN program Science and Technology Week of 24 January 1998, in reference to the computer-generated image of a dancing baby that had appeared on the television show Ally McBeal that month:

The next thing you know, his friends have forwarded it on and it’s become a net meme.

From Richard Dawkins to Ally McBeal to internet phenomenon, but a bad start for a short, little word.

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Sources:

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2001, s. v. meme, n.

Mecca

25 May 2019

Mecca is a place name, a toponym, that has acquired a figurative meaning over the years. Literally, it is a city in Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of the prophet Muhammad, to which devout Muslims are required to undertake a pilgrimage to at some point in their lives. Figuratively, it is used to refer to any place that attracts a certain group of people or that is the center of their activity, as in, Las Vegas is a Mecca for gamblers or the new mall is a mecca for shoppers. The pilgrimage metaphor underlying the figurative sense is obvious, but when did the sense develop?

Mecca is a variation on the Arabic name for the city, Makka or Makkah. An earlier name for the city is Bakkah, but in present-day usage that word is generally reserved for the sacred space around the Kaaba within the modern city. The ultimate etymologies of both names are obscure.

The figurative use developed in the early nineteenth century. Edward Baines, in his 1817 History of the Wars of the French Revolution, wrote of the conflict between the British East India Company and the Maratha Empire in India:

Colonel Harcourt accordingly proceeded to Jagarnaut, the Mecca of the Hindoos, and on the 18th encamped in the neighbourhood of this metropolis of idolatry, the Pagoda having been previously evacuated by the Mahratta forces.

Here the use is still in a religious context but is not a reference to Islam.

The metaphor is completely separated from religion within a few years. An anonymous writer, going by the name of Scotus, writes of the glories of an Edinburgh medical education in the pages of the Lancet in 1826:

It was consequently the “Mecca,” the “Delphic Oracle,” the “Vale of Egeria,” to which all studious pilgrims should resort to drink of the pure springs of knowledge.

Many Muslims consider the figurative use of Mecca to be offensive, and it’s easy to see why when a spiritual practice is associated with such materialistic pursuits like gambling or shopping. To ameliorate this, many style guides recommend using lower case and an indefinite article when using Mecca figuratively, but that doesn’t seem like much of a fix.

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Sources:

Baines, Edward. History of the Wars of the French Revolution, vol. 1 of 2. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1817, 451.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2011, s.v. Mecca, n.

Scotus. “Sketches of the Medical Schools of Scotland.” The Lancet, vol. 7, no. 169, 25 November 1826, 254–256: 254.

measles

2 July 2019

The measles is a potentially fatal disease caused by a Morbillivirus, and it is one of the most highly contagious diseases that infect humans. The disease, once rendered rare in the industrialized world, has made a comeback in recent years, largely due to low rates of vaccination. But the name measles is an odd one with an innocuous connotation that belies how dangerous the disease really is. Where does the name measles come from?

Measles comes from a Germanic root, but its exact route into English is uncertain. It appears by the early fourteenth century and is either a borrowing of the Middle Dutch masels or the Middle Low German maselen. Both of these Germanic etymons are plural, just like the English word. The Old Saxon masala is a blood blister, and the disease’s name comes from the red pustules that appear on the skin during the course of the disease.

The first known use of the word in English is from before 1325 in Walter of Bibbesworth’s Tretiz. Bibbesworth, an Essex knight, wrote the treatise to instruct English speakers in Anglo-Norman French vocabulary. He glosses the Anglo-Norman word rugeroles with maseles (or maselinges depending on which manuscript you consult). Rugerole literally means “red poppy” and was used to refer to the red rash caused by a variety of diseases. Here, Bibbesworth is referring not to the disease we now refer to as measles, but to a sexually transmitted one. And in early use the word was used to refer to any disease that caused red spots.

The form maselinges in one copy of Bibbesworth’s treatise can still be found in the form measlings in certain regions of Britain. This form comes to English via Scandinavia (compare the Swedish mässlingen, the Danish mæslinger, and the Icelandic mislingar—all plural forms), but this Scandinavian form comes from the Dutch/Low German word, just like the more common measles.

There is also the now obsolete mesel, originally referring to leprosy or other skin diseases and later extended to repellent individuals in general. This word also first appears in English around the year 1300, but it is of a very different origin, coming from the Anglo-Norman mesel, meaning “leprous, leper, repellent person” and ultimately from the Latin misellus, meaning “poor, wretched.” This word undoubtedly had and influence on the spelling and pronunciation of measles, but it’s not of the same origin.

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Sources:

Anglo-Norman Dictionary, 1977–92, s. v. rugerole.

Middle English Dictionary, 2018, s. v. masel, n.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2001, s. v. measles, n., measlings, n., mesel, adj. and n. n.

Sayers, William, “A Popular View of Sexually Transmitted Disease in Late Thirteenth-Century Britain.” Mediaevistik, vol. 23, 2010, 187–96.

livelong

8 July 2015

Livelong is not a common adjective. Its use, for the most part, is restricted to one expression, all the livelong day, although as late as the nineteenth century the livelong night was also common. In these expressions the word is simply an intensified version of the adjective long. But why live-? We don’t use that word to intensify anything else.

Well, the word goes back to the first half of the fifteenth century. Livelong is first recorded in Henry Lovelich’s poem The History of the Holy Grail, found in the manuscript Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 80:

And thus vppon the yl stood Nasciens there Al the live long day In this Manere.
(And thus upon the hill stood the nations there all the livelong day in this manere.

And

Al that leve longe Nyht Into the Se he loked forth Ryht
(All that livelong night he looked directly into the sea.)

Lovelich probably penned the poem around 1410. The manuscript dates from before 1450. And the date provides us with a clue for why live- is used in the word.

The live- in livelong does not refer to living. Instead, it’s from the Old English leof, meaning dear, beloved. It shares a common Germanic root with the Old English lufu, or love.

There is a less common use of livelong to mean for a lifetime or lifelong. This sense appears in the late eighteenth century and would appear to be the result of a misanalysis of the word’s origin.

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Sources:

“livelong, adj.” Oxford English Dictionary Online, 3rd edition, September 2009.

“leve-long (adj.).” Middle English Dictionary, University of Michigan, 2001.

“love, n1.” Oxford English Dictionary Online, 3rd edition, March 2008.