swing state

Fivethirtyeight.com graphic showing voting behavior in four swing states, 2000–2020; 2020 projection based on 25 August data

3 November 2020

In U.S. politics, a swing state is one that either political party has a reasonable chance of winning. The metaphor is, obviously, that of oscillating back and forth. The term swing state dates to the mid twentieth century, but the use of the verb to swing in political contexts is much older.

Use of the verb this way dates to at least 1900, and I’m sure it can be antedated into the nineteenth century. It appears in the Philadelphia Inquirer in its 21 October 1900 reporting of a New York Herald poll of the presidential election that year:

Nebraska . . . . . . Democratic . . . . . 8,000
Idaho . . . . . . . . . Democratic . . . . . 8,000
Montana. . . . . . . Democratic . . . . . 8,000
Utah—Mormons can swing State either way.

Swing state itself appears in the pages of the Dallas Morning News of 16 August 1948. The columnist, Lynn Landrum, errs in predicting a Thomas Dewey victory in that year’s election (to be fair, as pretty much everyone knows, she wasn’t the only one), but she was right in that had Texas gone for Dewey the outcome of the election would not have changed and Truman would still have been re-elected, and she was correct in predicting what happens to states that reliably vote for one party—they are often ignored by the political process:

The likelihood now is that Tom Dewey will be the next President, no matter how Texas votes. The only thing that Texans might change by their votes is the amount of weight Texas will be given in future party convention plans.

Once Texas is known to be a “swing” state, no major political party will ever again ignore Texas.

Texas would become competitive in the next election cycle, with Eisenhower wining it in 1952. And it would remain competitive until 2000, by which time it had become solidly Republican. Although it once again is showing signs of becoming a swing state.

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Sources:

Landrum, Lynn. “Thinking Out Loud.” Dallas Morning News, 16 August 1948, 3. NewsBank: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. swing-, comb. form.

“Result of the Herald’s Poll in ‘Doubtful States.’” Philadelphia Inquirer, 21 October 1900, 1. NewsBank: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Image credit: Fivethirtyeight.com, 1 September 2020.

college / electoral college

Map of the United States showing state sizes in proportion to their electoral college voting power as of the 2010 census

2 November 2020

In the United States, at least, the term college is usually synonymous with university, an institution of higher education. But we also have the electoral college, an arcane body that actually chooses the president and vice president. It seems odd to apply the same word to both.

College comes from the Old French collége, which in turn is from the Latin collegium, meaning society, brotherhood, guild. One of the word’s early appearances is in a Wycliffite tract from c. 1380 that uses college to refer both to Christ and his apostles and to contemporary religious orders:

And siþ criste and his colage myȝt not be dispensid wiþ ne be exempte fro þe bondis of þe olde lawe in þis mater, I merueyle where þe pryuelegis commen alonde wherby owre colagis of monkis, chanons or eny oþer endowid prestis þat dwellen in siche conventycles claymen to be exempt fro þis bonde of þe olde lawe in this poynte.

(And since Christ and his college might not be dispensed with nor be exempt from the bonds of the old law in this matter, I marvel where the privileges common in this country whereby our colleges of monks, canons or any other endowed priests that dwell in such gatherings claim to be exempt from this bond of the old law on this point.)

And at roughly the same time, the word is used in reference to a university, only in Latin, not English. From the royal patent of New College, Oxford, 30 June 1379 (“new” is a relative term here):

prædictus Episcopus aut Custos et scholares collegii, domus sive aulæ, prædicti sic fundandi,

(the aforementioned bishop or custodian and scholars of the college, house or hall, of the aforementioned thus founded)

Use of college in reference to a university reference is because students and scholars originally lived and ate together, akin to cloistered monks and nuns. And by c. 1387 the word is being used in English to refer to an institution at a university. From Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Reeve’s Tale:

Greet sokene hath this millere, out of doute,
With whete and malt of al the land aboute;
And nameliche ther was a greet collegge
Men clepen the Soler Halle at Cantebregge;
Ther was hir whete and eek hir malt ygrounde.

(Surely, this miller has a great monopoly,
With wheat and malt from all the land about;
And in particular there was a great college
That men call the Soler Hall at Canterbury
There their wheat and also their malt was ground.)

By the mid sixteenth century, college is being applied in political contexts. Thomas Eliot refers to the Roman Senate as a college in his 1541 Image of Governance:

And these counsaylors for their age shulde be called Senatours, (for Senes in latyne are olde men) not withstandynge beinge saluted or spoken to, they shulde be named fathers. Also the college or company of theym was incorporate by the name of the senate. Moreouer of this colledge, shulde be elected the great Iudges and offycers in the weale publyke, to whome shulde be committed the determination of Iustyce, the execution of ceremonies and solemne sacrifices, and other authorities, whiche do belong vnto gouernance.

And the term electoral college appears by the mid seventeenth century. This is, obviously, not a reference to the United States, which had yet to exist, but rather to the group of electors who chose the Holy Roman Empire. From a May 1658 letter to Robert Boyle:

The electoral college hath written to the king of Sweden, promising not to proceed to the imperial election, till the Austrians and Poland have first made their peace with him.

The U.S. electoral college was established by the 1787 constitution, but the term does not appear in that document, nor does it appear in the Federalist Papers. The earliest such use of the term I can find is from a 25 August 1800 letter by Representative John Fowler to his constituents in Kentucky, but Fowler is not referring to the U.S. electoral college as we know it, but rather to a super-electoral college that had been proposed to oversee the conduct of the presidential election:

And to shew the length to which the party were disposed to go on, attempt was made to introduce a regulation paramount to the constitution, to create a conservative senate, or electoral college of thirteen members, six from each house and the chief justice to preside, who were to be authorized to investigate the election of the several states for President and Vice-President; and to determine in secret conclave, the legality of the votes, and finally to declare who shall be the next President of the United States. This measure so repugnant to every principle of the constitution, was fortunately defeated.

The earliest use of electoral college to refer to the electors of the U.S. president that I have found is from a month later, in the pages of the Washington Federalist of 30 September 1800:

The object is to elect a President—not to employ this or that instrument to elect him: to vote for a President, not to transmit the vote by this or that man to the electoral college. This object is effected by united the vote of the state. Whether the people shall vote for the President by electors chosen by their representatives in the legislature, or by persons deputed by themselves to the electoral college, the vote will be the same. In either case the vote of the state will be united, and will be given in the same person. The same object therefore is attained by either mode.

Of course, nowhere in this discussion is the idea that people should directly elect the president without the mediation of state legislatures or electoral colleges.

Discuss this post

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Sources:

Chaucer, Geoffrey. “The Reeve’s Tale.” The Canterbury Tales, 1.3987–91. Harvard’s Geoffrey Chaucer’s Website.

“The Clergy May Not Hold Property.” The English Works of John Wyclif. F.D. Matthew, ed. Early English Text Society, O.S. 74. London: Trübner and Co., 1880, 366. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Eliot, Thomas. The Image of Governance. London: Thomas Berthelet, 1541, 62r. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Fowler, John. “Extracts from a Letter of John Fowler, Member of Congress from the State of Kentucky, to his Consitutients.” Impartial Observer (Providence, Rhode Island), 25 August 1800, 1. NewsBank: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Hart, Samuel. “Letter to Robert Boyle” (May 1658). The Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle, vol. 6 of 6. London: W. Johnston, et al., 1772, 107. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. college, n.

“New College, Oxford: Royal Patent of Foundation” (30 June 1379). Statutes of the Colleges of Oxford, vol. 1. Oxford: J. H. Parker, 1853, 268. Google Books.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. college, n.

“To the People of Maryland.” Washington Federalist (Georgetown, District of Columbia), 30 September 1800, 2. NewsBank: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Image credit: Wes Colley, 2011, used under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

red state / blue state / purple state

Journalists Tim Russert and Tom Brokaw broadcasting on Election Day 2000 (or more likely in the wee hours of the next day) in front of a map of red and blue U.S. states

2 November 2020

In current American political parlance red represents the Republican Party, blue the Democratic Party, and purple something in between. But it wasn’t always this way. Before the 2000 presidential election, the colors switched back and forth, and the colors weren’t inherently associated with a particular party.

The choice of colors is arbitrary and comes from the electoral maps that television news programs show on their election night coverage. Before 2000, the practice was to represent the incumbent party in blue and the challenger in red. So in the 1992 election, when Democrat Bill Clinton was running against the incumbent Republican George H.W. Bush, the states that went Democratic were shown in red, as can be seen in this Boston Globe article of 15 October 1992 previewing the election night coverage:

But when the anchormen turn to their electronic tote boards election night and the red states for Clinton start swamping the blue states for Bush, this will be a strange night for me.

And in their 2000 election coverage, the networks used the same criterion. Since Democrats held the White House, states that went for Al Gore were blue states, while states that went for the Republican challenger George W. Bush were colored red. Again, from a preview of the coverage on CBS News, this time many months ahead, on 8 May 2000, we see Democratic states designated as blue states:

BRYANT GUMBEL: Let's take a look at the fancy map that you've had us make up. And you—you explain it if you would—the state-by-state support.

CRAIG CRAWFORD: It—it's not as complicated as it might seem. What we have are, you know, Bush and Gore, their core states here. And then the tossup states. You see Bush in—in red and you see the blue states are—are for Gore.

And this from NBC’s Today on 30 October 2000, just prior to the election, uses both blue state and red state:

MATT LAUER: The red states we have here, you have going for Al—I mean for George Bush, the blue states for Al Gore. What does the count look like so far?

TIM RUSSERT: Well, Matt, first the viewer will see a lot more red than blue and they'll say 'Uh-oh, is this race over?' Far from it. The electoral college is based on population. So if you win a lot of states, but they have small numbers of people, it means less than if you win California, Illinois, and the big states that Gore is winning.

As Matt Lauer’s hastily corrected error shows, the fact that the colors were not consistently associated with particular parties from election to election meant that at first glance one might be confused about which party was leading. Even an experienced journalist could be momentarily confused.

But the 2000 election was so close, the election coverage continuing for weeks after Election Day, and the political climate so polarizing, that the terms red state and blue state became locked in as representing the Republicans and Democrats, respectively. And the colors became not only representative of which party a state typically votes for, but became representative of that state’s cultural ethos, as well. From NBC News coverage of George W. Bush’s address to a joint session of Congress on 27 February 2001, following the election. Pennsylvania had voted for Gore in the election:

TOM BROKAW: The country is weary of ideological wars. That was the message of this past election, and both the congressional leaders now and the president of the United States are responding to that.

BRIAN WILLIAMS: A red state president reaching out to…

TIM RUSSERT: Also note, Brian, that the tax family was also from Pennsylvania.

WILLIAMS: That's right.

RUSSERT: It's a swing state.

WILLIAMS: It's a red state president reaching out to a blue state tonight…

And the red state/blue state started to be used outside of political contexts. From a Time magazine obituary for NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt of 5 March 2001:

Dale Earnhardt left school in the ninth grade and entered his first race, legend has it, for grocery money. At the time of his death, his income had reached nearly $27 million a year. Mostly the money came from sales of merchandise: hats, jackets and the No. 3 logo sticker on the back of my family car that occasionally earns me a knowing honk and a wave from a like-minded fan, even during my blue-state commute to New York City.

Of course, not every state votes reliably for either the Democrats or the Republicans, and such swing states came to be designated as purple, a blend of blue and red. From a CNN show of 20 May 2002:

With an exploding and changing population, younger and more diverse by the year, Florida is reliably nothing. In the 2000 election year of red states or blue, Florida was purple. It is up for grabs, in play, a toss-up state, ergo a high traffic area for politicians.

Of course, the color designations are gross over-simplifications. No state is entirely red or blue in its political leanings. For example, Salt Lake City in deeply red Utah reliably votes Democratic, and counties in upstate New York, a state that is deeply blue overall, reliably vote Republican. The more accurate division would be blue urban areas, red exurban and rural areas, and purple suburban areas. Whether a state is blue, red, or purple largely depends on the relative populations living in these three areas.

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Sources:

“The Early Show.” CBS News Transcripts, 8 May 2000. Nexis Uni.

Glowka, Wayne, et al. “Among the New Words.” American Speech, 80.2, Summer 2005, 207–15.

Nyhan, David. “Ending Up in the Clinton Column.” Boston Globe (City Edition), 15 October 1992, 19. ProQuest.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2009, s.v. red state, n. and adj.; June 2009, s.v. blue state, n. and adj.; September 2007, purple, adj. and n.

Snow, Kate, et al. “Miami; Bush Denounces Castro; Cuban-Americans Applaud Bush's Decision; Cuban Dissidents Criticize.” CNN, 20 May 2002. Nexis Uni.

Sullivan, Robert, et al. “The Last Lap.” Time, 157.9, 5 March 2001, 67. EBSCOhost Academic Search Ultimate.

“Today.” NBC News Transcripts, 30 October 2000. Nexis Uni.

Williams, Brian, et al. “President Bush Takes His Policy Agenda Before Congress. MSNBC Show: The News with Brian Williams, 27 February 2001, Nexis Uni.

Photo credit: NBC News, 7–8 November 2000.

Halloween

A Halloween jack o’ lantern

30 October 2020

[Edit 31 October 2021: revised the wording of the possible connection with Samhain]

Halloween is a Scottish shortening of All-Hallow’s Eve, or more exactly its older form All-Hallow-Even. It is, of course, the day before All Saint’s Day, which falls on 1 November. Many people associate the Celtic, pagan festival of Samhain with Halloween, largely because it falls on the same day and because some of the elements of the modern practice of Halloween are similar to practices associated with the Celtic holiday. But the connection to the Celtic holiday is disputed. In the early Christian church the celebration of all saints was held in the spring, associated with Easter or Pentecost. Pope Gregory III changed the date to 1 November in c.731. Why Gregory III changed the date is unknown. Some contend it was to align the holiday with Samhain—it was a common practice for the Christian church to co-opt pagan festivals in this manner—but others contend that the date was chosen because that’s when Gregory dedicated an oratory to all saints in Old St. Peter’s Basilica.

References to All Saint’s Day go back to Old English. For example, here is a reference to it from Ælfric’s homily for the feast day, written in the closing years of the tenth century:

Halige lareowas ræddon þæt seo geleaffulle gelaþung þisne dæg eallum halgum to wurðmynte mærsie.

(Holy teachers have instructed that the faithful church celebrate this day to piously honor all saints.)

A decade or so later, Wulfstan, the Archbishop of York refers to the day before All Saint’s Day in a list of days when contributions to the church are due. All Saints Eve is one of the three days of the year when payments to keep the churches lighted are due:

Ærest sulhælmessan xv niht ofer eastran, geogoðe teoðunge be pentecosten, Romfeoh be Petres mæssan, eorðwæstma be ealra halgena mæssan, cyricsceat to Martinus mæssan, and leohtgesceotu þriwa on geare, ærest on easteræfen, and oðre siðe on candelmæsseæfen, þriddan siðe on ealra halgena mæsseæfen.

(First plow-alms 15 nights over Easter, tithe of the young beasts at Pentecost, Peter’s penny by St. Peter’s mass, crops by All-Saint’s mass, church-payment at St. Martin’s mass, and the light-payment three times a year, first at Easter-Eve, and the second time at Candlemas-Eve, and the third time at All-Saint’s-Mass-Eve.)

We get a reference to All Hallows’ Eve in the Metrical Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester, found in the manuscript London, British Library, Cotton Caligula A.11, which was copied c.1325. The date is mentioned because Robert died on 31 October 1147:

Roberd erl of gloucestere · of wan we speke er ·
An alle halwe eue deide · þulke sulue ȝer ·
& in þe priorie of seint iame · at bristowe ibured was ·

(Robert, earl of Gloucester, of whom we speak here,
On All-Hallow’s Eve died, this same year,
And in the Priory of Saint James at Bristol was buried.)

John Shillingford, the mayor of Exeter, England, mentions the date in a letter of 2 November 1447, not a happy day for him either, evidently:

The morun tuysday al Halwyn yeven y receyved the answeris to oure articulis at Westminster of the whiche y sende yow a true copy, yn the whiche articulis as hit appereth they have spatte out the uttmyst and worste venym that they cowde seye or thynke by me.

(The Tuesday morning of All-Hallows’ Eve I received the answers to our articles at Westminster, of which I am sending you a true copy, in these articles as it appears they have spat out the utmost and worst venom that they could say or think about me.)

And we finally get the form Halloween in the late eighteenth century. From a poem by Robert Fergusson, published in 1773:

Foul sa me gif your bridal had na been
Nae langer bygane that sin Hallow-e’en,
I cou’d hae teil’d you but a warlock’s art,
That some daft lyghtlyin quean had stown your heart.

(The foul [fiend] said to me if your wedding had not been
No longer ago than since Halloween,
I could have told you by a warlock’s art,
That some daft scornful woman had stolen your heart.)

Based on the contexts of these early citations of the word’s use, it’s no wonder why 31 October developed a bad and spooky reputation.

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Sources:

Ælfric. “Kalende Novembris Natale Omnium Sanctorum.” Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies, The First Series. Peter Clemoes, ed. Early English Text Society, S.S. 17, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997, 486.

Fergusson, Robert. “An Eclogue.” Poems. Edinburgh: Walter & Thomas Ruddiman, 1773, 86. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. al-halwe(n, n.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. Hallow-e’en, n.; third edition, September 2012, s.v. All-Hallows, n.

Shillingford, John. “IV. Shillingford to his Fellows (2 November 1447). Letters and Papers of John Shillingford. Stuart A. Moore, ed. Camden Society. Westminster: J. B. Nichols and Sons, 1871, 16. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Wright, William Aldis, ed. Metrical Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester, vol. 2 of 2. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode for the Stationary Office, 1887, lines 9536–38, 673. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Wulfstan. Canons of Edgar. Roger Fowler, ed. Early English Text Society, O.S. 266. London: Oxford UP, 1972.

Photo credit: Carole Pasquier, 2004, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

ghost / give up the ghost

The “Brown Lady” of Raynham Hall, Norfolk, England; 1936 image of a ghostly figure on a staircase; likely created by the photographers as a hoax using a double exposure, possibly of a photo of a Virgin Mary statue superimposed on that of the staircase

30 October 2020

The Present-Day English word ghost comes from the Old English gast, which carried most of the meanings that the word does today. For instance, gast could refer to the apparition of a dead person, which is perhaps the most common sense of the word today. The Old English Martyrology, a collection of some 230 saints’ lives written in the Mercian dialect has this entry for the feast day of St. Emiliana, 5 January:

On ðone fiftan dæg þæs monðes bið Sancte Emelianan tid ðære fæmnan, þæt wæs Sancte Gregorius faðe, ðæs þe us fulwiht onsænde. Hire ætywde on nihtlicre gesyhðe hire swyster gast ond cwæþ to hire: “Butan þe ic dede þone halgan dæg æt Drihtnes acennisse, ac ic do mid þe ðone halgan dæg æt Drihtnes ætywnesse, þæt is se Drihtnes halga twelfta dæg, Drihtnes fullwihtes dæg.”

(On the fifth day of the month is the feast of Saint Emiliana, the paternal aunt of Saint Gregory, who sent us baptism. Her sister’s ghost manifested to her in a nocturnal vision and said to her, I celebrated the holy day of the Lord’s birth without you, but I will celebrate with you the holy day of the Lord’s epiphany, that is the Lord’s holy twelfth day, the day of the Lord’s baptism.)

Presumably Emiliana died the next day, perhaps of fright, for having your dead sister appear to you and tell you that you’re going to die in a few days is a rather spooky occurrence.

But gast had other senses, many of them akin to the senses of the Latin spiritus, meaning breath, soul, spirit. And spirit may be the modern word with the range of meanings closest to that of the Old English gast. In the poem Andreas, gast is used to refer to the breath or spirit of life in a passage in which God has made and then commands a creature of stone:

Ða se Þeoden bebead    þryð-weorc faran,
stan on stræte    of stede-wange,
ond forð gan    fold-weg tredan,
grene grundas,    Godes ærendu
larum lædan    on þa leod-merce
to Channaneum,    cyninges worde,
beodan Habrahame    mid his eaforum twæm
of eorð-scræfe    æreest fremman,
lætan land-reste,    leoðo gadrigean,
gaste onfon    ond geogoðhade,
ed-niwinga    andweard cuman,
frode fyrn-weotan,    folce gecyðan,
hwylcne hie God mihtum    ongiten hæfdon.

(Then the Lord commanded that mighty work to go, stone on the street, from that place, and go forth, to tread the earth, the green ground, to carry God’s message as taught by the king’s words into the people’s-land of the Canaanites, to command Abraham, with his two sons, to perform a rising from the grave, to leave their tombs, to gather their limbs, to receive their ghosts and youthfulness, appear present once more, those wise ancient-counselors, to preach to the people what sort of God they had perceived through his might.)

Old English even had the idiomatic phrase give up the ghost, meaning to die, that is still used in Present-Day English. The Old English translation of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People found in Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 279 contains this passage about the death of Aidan of Lindisfarne:

& þa gelamp hit þæt se halga bisceop hine onhylde to anre þære studa, utan to þære cyricean geseted wæs þære cyricean to wraþe, & þær þa his gast ageaf

(And it happened that the holy bishop leaned on a post there outside the church that was set there to support the church and there he gave up his ghost)

Bede’s original Latin uses spiritum uitae exhalaret ultimum (finally he exhaled the breath of life).

Gast could also be used to refer to God, especially the third part of the Christian Trinity, the Holy Spirit, which is still often called the Holy Ghost in Present-Day English. From Ælfric’s homily Feria IIII de fide catholica:

Ælmihtig God is se fæder. ælmihtig God is se sunu ælmihtig God is se halga gast

(Almighy God is the Father; almighty God is the Son; almighty God is the Holy Ghost.)

And gast could refer to the soul or essential element of a person. Again, from Bede’s Ecclesiastical History:

Forþon þrim gemetum bið gefylled gwhilc syn, þæt is, ærest þurh scynnesse, & þurh lustfullnesse, & þurh geðafunge. Seo scynis bið þurh deoful, seo lustfulnes bið þurh lichoman, seo geðafung þurh gast.

(Because each sin is fulfilled in three ways, that is, first through incitement, and through lustfulness, and through consent. The incitement is through the devil; the lustfulness is through the body; the consent is through the ghost.)

Bede’s original Latin reads consensus per spiritum (consent through the spirit).

But there are senses of ghost today that did not exist in Old English. For example, there is the verb to ghost, meaning to cut off contact with a person, to suddenly stop returning their calls and texts. This sense is in place by 2010, when it’s recorded in Urbandictionary.com.

Ghost

To avoid someone until they get the picture and stop contacting you.

The mother fucker is annoying yo. I’m guna have to ghost him until he gets the point.

The example sentence given by Urbandictionary is fictional, but here is one from 20 June 2015 on the website Jezebel.com:

According to the rumor mill Charlize Theron broke her engagement with Sean Penn by ghosting (aka, the act of never returning calls, text messages, or e-mails). “Charlize wasn’t responding to his calls and texts,” a presumable person told Us Weekly. “She just cut it off.” Ghosting might be the shittiest breakup method, but generally a person worthy of ghosting has really done something really, truly terrible. It’s worth noting again that Theron did it to Sean Penn, which might alone be a worthy reason.

If Bede or Ælfric had cell phones, maybe they would have ghosted people too, but then again maybe not. After all, it’s hard to avoid people when you live in a monastic community.

Discuss this post

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Sources:

Ælfric. “Feria IIII de fide catholica.” (“Holy Day 4: About the Catholic Faith”). Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies, the First Series. Peter Clemoes, ed. Early English Text Society, S.S. 17. Oxford UP, 1997, 336.33–34.

Andreas. In Clayton, Mary, ed. Old English Poems of Christ and His Saints. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library, DOML 27. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2013, lines 773–785, 234–237.

Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Bertram Colgrave and R.A.B. Mynors, eds. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969, 3.17, 264 and 1.27, 100.

Bede. The Old English Version of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, part 1. Thomas Miller, ed. Early English Text Society, O.S. 95. London: Oxford UP, 1890, 86.25–28.

Dictionary of Old English: A to I, 2018, s.v. gast, gæst.

Edwards, Stassa. “Charlize Theron Broke Up With Sean Penn by Ghosting Him.” Jezebel.com, 20 June 2015.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2020, s.v. ghost n., ghost v.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. ghost n., ghost, v.

Rauer, Christine. The Old English Martyrology. Anglo-Saxon Texts 10. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2013, 42.

Urbandictionary.com, 6 October 2010, s.v. ghost.

Photo credit: Hubert Provand and Shira Indre, 19 September 1936, originally published in Country Life, 26 December 1936.