speed

12 January 2014

Speed is a word with a rather straightforward etymology, but one with several archaic meanings that may be surprising to some. It is from the Old English word sped, which, among other senses, carried the meaning of quickness, swiftness that we are familiar with today.

In Old English the sense of quickness was a secondary and rarer sense of the word. In the extant literature it only appears in the dative plural form spedum and is used adverbially to mean speedily. (In Old English the dative plural of a noun can function as an adverb.) For example, there are these lines from the Old English poem Genesis, 2033–35:

                    Him þa broðor þry
æt spræce þære    spedum miclum
hældon hyge-sorge    heardum wordum.
(In that conversation, the three brothers very speedily healed his heart-sorrow with hard words.)

In Middle English speed is still mainly used adverbially, but as part of an adverbial phrase, often with a preposition. An example from the mid-thirteenth century poem The Story of Genesis and Exodus, line 1598:

Fro bersabe he ferde wið sped.
(He went from Beersheba with speed.)

It isn’t until the Early Modern period that speed starts to be widely used as a general noun meaning quickness, as in these lines from Milton’s 1667 Paradise Lost, 2:699–700:

Back to thy punishment,
False fugitive, and to thy speed add wings.

Going back to Old English, the Anglo-Saxons more commonly used sped to mean abundance, wealth and power, might. These senses died out in the early part of the Middle English period, not being found after about 1250, so they are among the words and meanings that didn’t survive the transition from Old to Middle English.

The Anglo-Saxons could also use sped to mean success, good fortune. This sense of speed was somewhat more successful and is commonly found into the early modern era. It is still found in Scottish dialect and in the old-fashioned, but not quite obsolete, wish of good speed.

The verb to speed follows a similar pattern. The Old English verb spedan means to succeed or prosper. It isn’t until the Middle English period that it starts to be used to mean to hasten.

In its Indo-European roots, speed is part of a larger group of words relating to swaths of time and distance and movement toward a goal. Some examples from other languages include the German spät (late), the Latin spatium (space), and the Old Slavic speti (to thrive).

Speed also has some specialized meanings that have developed with technology. The sense meaning the gear ratio of a bicycle, as in a ten-speed bike, dates to 1866 and the early forerunner of the bicycle, the velocipede. The application of the word to photographic film dates to 1892. One wonders how long this photographic sense will survive into the digital age—probably for quite a while as digital cameras also have a speed setting and film will probably remain in use for specialized applications for decades to come. And the use of speed as a slang term for methamphetamine is first attested to in 1967, one of the children of the Summer of Love.

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Sources:

Bosworth and Toller, “sped,” “spedan,” An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, 1898.

Liberman, Anatoly, Word Origins...And How We Know Them, Oxford University Press, 2005, 192.

“sped(e (n.),” “speden (v.),” Middle English Dictionary, University of Michigan, 2001.

“speed, n.,” “speed, v.,” Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989.

sophisticated

3 January 2014

Our current senses of sophisticated, meaning either refined, cultured or highly developed, complicated, are surprisingly recent. The application of the word to people meaning experienced, refined can only be dated to 1895, when it appears in Thomas Hardy’s novel Jude the Obscure:

Though so sophisticated in many things she was such a child in others that this satisfied her.

The sense applied to things that are complex, advanced is even more recent. From C. S. Lewis’s 1945 science fiction novel That Hideous Strength:

The man was so very allusive and used gesture so extensively that Mark’s less sophisticated modes of communication were almost useless.

The noun sophisticate, meaning a worldly, cultured person, is from 1923.

Other senses of the adjective are older, however. Sophisticated originally meant mixed with a foreign substance, adulterated or altered from a natural state; a sense that dates to at least 1607, when it appears in Thomas Dekker’s play The Whore of Babylon:

The drinke euen in that golden cup, they sweare
Is wine sophisticated, that does runne
Low on the lees of error.

And when applied to literary works, sophisticated can mean having been altered during copying or printing.

It makes sense, then, that the adjective comes from the verb to sophisticate, meaning to mix with a foreign substance, which dates to around 1400 when it appears in a version of The Book of John Mandeville:

It fallez oft tyme þat marchands sophisticatez peper.
(It happens oftentimes that merchants sophisticate pepper.)

The English verb is taken from the Medieval Latin sophisticare, which in turn comes from the Greek σοφιστής (sophistes), meaning one who accepts payment for instruction. These sophists, were different from the philosophers, who engaged in intellectual pursuits and education for higher purposes and not for money, hence the sophists were considered by some to be tainted or adulterated by base and material motivations. As a result, their teachings became associated, often unfairly, with specious and poor reasoning, or sophistry. The Latin sophisma means a false conclusion or fallacy. Presumably by the time the verb appeared in English, this sense of false reasoning had given way to deception and adulteration of substances, as in the merchant adulterating the pepper in the Mandeville quotation, although the trail of citations is not complete enough to be absolutely sure that this is the semantic path the word took.

The key to understanding the modern shift in meaning of sophisticated is the sense of altered from a natural state. Something that is cultured or refined is also altered from its natural state. Also, something that is mixed or made up of many substances is complex. The development of the current meanings is not surprising, but what is a bit of a shock is the rapidity with which they have taken over. The senses of adulterated and altered have all but completely vanished, and you have to turn academic literary criticism to find sophisticated used to mean altered during printing.

So, if you mix with the right circle of people, you too can become sophisticated.

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Sources:

“sophisma,” Lewis and Short, A Latin Dictionary, 1879.

“sophistic, adj.,” “sophisticate, n.,” “sophisticate, v.,” “sophisticated, adj.,” “sophistry, n.,” Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989.

Saracen

5 June 2019

Saracen is term for a Muslim that is primarily used historically to refer to Muslims during the medieval period and especially in reference to the Crusades. But it dates to antiquity, long before Islam arose as a religion, and its original sense was much more circumscribed. Its correct etymology isn’t all that interesting, but it does have a fascinating false etymology that circulated widely in Europe during the medieval period.

Saracen enters English from Latin (saracenus), which got it from Greek (σαρακηνός, sarakenos). The Greek probably comes from the Arabic root sharq, meaning east, and it originally referred to a people dwelling in the Sinai peninsula and what is now northwestern Saudi Arabia.

The word is first recorded in Greek as an adjective describing a species of rush growing in the Sinai in Dioscorides’s On Medical Material, a pharmacology written c. 50 C.E. But it’s Claudius Ptolemy’s second century Geographia that first mentions Saracens as a distinct group of people. He uses sarakēnē to refer to a region in the northern Sinai peninsula and sarakēnoí as a name for a people in northwestern Arabia. Eusebius takes the word into Latin in his fourth century Historia Ecclesiastica, where he quotes a letter from Dionysius, bishop of Alexandria, that refers to the sarakēnoí of Arabia as existing c. 250 C.E.

The use of Saracen in English dates to the Old English period. For example, there is this from the Old English translation of Orosius’s History Against the Pagans:

Seo Ægyptus þe us near is, be norþan hire is þæt land Palastine, & be eastan hiere Sarracene þæt land & be westan hire Libia þæt land, & be suþan hire se beorg þe mon hæt Climax.
(Egypt is near us, to its north is the land of Palestine, and to its east is the land of the Saracens, and to the west of it is the land of Libya, and to its south is the mountain that men call Climax.)

In the medieval era, it was common for European writers to claim that the word Saracen derived from a claim of the Arab peoples that that they descended from Sarah and her son Isaac, rather than the slave Hagar and her son Ishmael, and in so doing, so the allegation claims, the Arabs were claiming a false genealogical legitimacy. Jerome gives this false etymology in his early fifth century commentary of the biblical book of Ezekiel. And Isidore, in his early seventh century Etymologiae, writes:

The Saracens are so called either because they claim to be descendents of Sarah or, as the pagans say, because they are of Syrian origin, as if the word were Syriginae. They live in a very large deserted region. They are also Ishmaelites, as the Book of Genesis teaches us, because they sprang from Ishmael, and Agarines, from the name Agar (i.e., Hagar). As we have said, they are called Saracens from an alteration of their name, because they are proud to be descendents of Sarah.

Isidore’s Etymologiae impute theological significance to the etymologies of words and are, by modern standards, laughably wrong, but they were widely copied and read and do provide historical insight into the beliefs of medieval Europeans.

Isidore appears to be using Saracen in the original, narrow sense, of a particular group of people, but the meaning of the word would be expanded to refer to all Muslims or even more broadly to those non-Christians in lands to the east. Saracen was not used to refer to Christian Arabs. An early example of this broader sense is the Rituale ecclesiæ Dunelmensis (Rite of the Church of Durham), an early ninth-century collection of Latin liturgical texts and with an interlinear Old English gloss:

Beatus thomas apostolus requiesat emina, in india saracenorum.
ðe ead’ thom’ ap’ gerestað | gireste æt frvmma in ðær byrig on india saracina.
(The blessed apostle Thomas dwells in Emina, in India of the Saracens.)

So the word Saracen in medieval writing is a non-specific term, referring generally to non-Christians of the east, and in particular to Muslims, and to medieval Europeans carried negative connotations because it supposedly characterized them as making a false claim of being descended from a more favored line of descent.

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Sources:

American Heritage Dictionary, fifth edition, 2019, s. v. Saracen, n.

Bately, Janet, ed. The Old English Orosius, Early English Text Society, SS 6, Oxford University Press, 1980, 1.1.11.

Heng, Geraldine, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, Cambridge University Press, 2018, 110–12.

Isidore, The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, trans. and ed. by Stephen A. Barney, et al. Cambridge University Press, 2006, 195.

Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition, 1989, s. v. Saracen, n. and adj.

Retsö, Jan, The Arabs in Antiquity: Their History from the Assyrians to the Umayyads, RoutledgeCurzon, 2003.

redskin / red man

23 June 2014

Redskin, a now disparaging term for a Native American, is nearly two and a half centuries old. It is first recorded in a transcript of a speech given by Chief Maringouin, an Indian of the Illinois people, on 26 August 1769. It was interpreted by a Frenchman from the Illinois language and transcribed and translated into English by William Johnson:

I shall be pleased to have you come to speak to me yourself if you pity our women and our children; and, if any redskins do you harm, I shall be able to look out for you even at the peril of my life.

The French that redskin is translated from is peaux Rouges, and the original Illinois word is assumed to be *e•rante•wiroki•ta (person with red skin), but we don’t have a record of the original Illinois speech.

The term red man is older, dating to 1740, when it appears in the journal of John Wesley, and the French homme rouge dates to at least 1725. And the English use of the adjective red to refer to Native Americans is older still, dating to an appearance in the journal of Colonel George Chicken on 31 October 1725:

They desire always to be at peace wth [sic] the White people and desire to have their own way and to take revenge of the red people.

Like many ethnic slurs, redskin and red man did not start out as derogatory, but they acquired the disparaging connotation over time. The original reference is to skin color. Tales that the term redskin refers to the practice of scalping or the use of red dye by native peoples are false.

Regarding use of the name Redskins by the Washington, DC National Football League team, the name was never intended to be disparaging, and is part of a long tradition of using Native Americans as mascots of sports teams. Other examples in this genre include the NFL’s Kansas City Chiefs, and baseball’s Atlanta Braves and Cleveland Indians. (Not to mention my own high school teams, which were the Toms River South Indians.) But while the Redskins name was never intended to be so, it is nevertheless considered offensive by many Native Americans. Polls of Indians who live on reservations or are officially enrolled in tribes typically record 35–45% as wanting the Washington team to change its name. Polls that record the opinion of those that self-identify as having Native American heritage generally record a much lower figure, as many of those who self-identify as such have only a tenuous connection, at best, to actual native heritage and are seldom, if ever, subjected to the racist attitudes that those who are enrolled in tribes experience regularly.

The use of images and names of an oppressed minority as a sports mascot is, in and of itself, problematic. But the use of the name Redskins by the NFL is especially so, given the history of that particular word’s use in offensive contexts. Since the name offends a large segment of the Native American population, the NFL should change the name of the team.

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Sources:

Nunberg, Geoffrey, “When Slang Becomes a Slur,” The Atlantic, 23 June 2014.

The Papers of Sir William Johnson, v. 7, Albany: University of the State of New York, 1931, 133–38.

“red, adj. and n. (and adv.),” “red man, n.,” “redskin, n.,” Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2009.

rapture

24 August 2019

The other day, a friend of mine who lives in Berkeley, California posted this on her Facebook feed:

Anyone not getting raptured want to go to Nerd Nite East Bay on Monday?

After someone asked what she was talking about, she went on to explain in a comment:

raptured = the burning man rapture, or what happens to the Bay Area when everyone goes to burning man. Nerd Nite east bay is a monthly night of entertaining science-based presentations. You know, for nerds.

Burning Man, for those unaware, is a week-long festival held in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada at the end of August. Around 70,000 people attend each year. The capstone event of the festival is the burning of a giant, wooden effigy of a man, hence the name. I was very familiar with Burning Man—I’ve never attended myself, but having lived in the Bay Area, I know many people who go each year—but before her post I’d never heard rapture used to describe the emptying out of the Bay Area each year.

Most people are at familiar with the word from the apocalyptic Christian doctrine of the rapture, but that’s a relatively recent development in theology. The word is much older.

The noun rapture comes from the post-classical Latin raptura, a participle of the verb rapio, meaning to snatch, seize, pillage. The Latin verb is also the source of our verb to rape. And many of the early uses of the word in English are in reference to the abduction and raping of women.

The earliest use of rapture recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary is from George Chapman’s 1594 poem Σκìα Νυκτòς (Shadow of Night):

It is an exceeding rapture of delight in the deepe search of knowledge [...] that maketh men manfully indure th’extremes incident to that Herculean labour.

Chapman, who we shall see was extraordinarily fond of the word, uses it here in the sense of a condition of delight or enthusiasm. And Shakespeare uses it in Coriolanus (1623):

Your pratling Nurse Into a rapture lets her Baby crie.

But the word has a darker sense, that of abduction and rape, which is just as old as the sense of a state of delight. Francis Sabie, in his 1595 Fissher-mans Tale, writes:

Priams famous towne, Nere bought so deare the rapture of faire Hellen.

And Chapman uses it to refer to sexual violation in his c. 1615 translation of the Odyssey:

My women servants dragg’d about my house To lust and rapture.

The idea of rapture being a carrying off to heaven is almost as old. Chapman (I warned you that he was extraordinarily fond of the word) uses the phrase divine rapture, albeit in a pagan rather than Christian sense, to refer to the transport of the mind into ecstasy in his 1598 publication of his translation of Seauen bookes of the Iliades of Homere:

This […] Diuine Rapture; then which nothing can be imagined more full of soule and humaine extraction.

Chapman’s use here is still more of transport of the mind to ecstasy than it is a physical carrying off, but he uses it in this latter sense in this 1609 poem Euthymiae Raptus; or the Teares of Peace:

A lightening stoop’t, and rauisht him to heauen, And with him Peace [...]: Whose outward Rapture, made me inward bleed.

The Christian doctrine of the rapture did not appear until the eighteenth century. The OED records this from Thomas Broughton’s 1769 Prospect of Futurity:

We have determined likewise, from the Circumstance of the Rapture of the Saints, [...] that the Air or Atmosphere will be the Place of the Judgement.

While there is some discussion of the bodily ascension into heaven of the believers among eighteenth-century theologians, the full flowering of the doctrine wouldn’t appear until the nineteenth century and the writings of the dispensationalist theologian John Nelson Darby. In his 1848 An Examination of the Statements Made in the Thoughts on the Apocalypse, by B. W. Newton, Darby writes:

It is certain that the immensely important fact of the rapture of the Church takes place between the two, whatever the interval, and that Christ cannot receive the power of His own peculiar kingdom below, till this has taken place. Nor can this rapture take place till after He has left the throne.

The doctrine that the saved will be bodily taken up into heaven has no place in Roman Catholic, Orthodox, or the mainline Protestant churches.

So there you have it. Ecstasy, rape, apocalypse, and Burning Man, all in one word.

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Sources:

Lewis, Charlton T. and Charles Short. A Latin Dictionary. Oxford University Press, 1879, s. v. rapio.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2008, s. v. rapture, n., rapture, v.