seed

25 October 2021

Portion of the page of the Lindisfarne Gospels containing Matthew 13:3 and the use of the verb to seed, meaning to sow or plant. An eighth-century Latin text with a tenth-century Old English (Northumbrian) gloss. London, British Library, Cotton MS Nero D.iv, fol. 51v.

In sports tournaments, the participants are often seeded, or ranked, so that those judged to be of near equal skill do not face each other until the later stages of the competition. But why seeded?

With a little thought, the answer is obvious. The participants are planted in places on the roster best suiting to generate the highest quality of play. In a random placement, the two best participants might face each other in the first round, with the winner of that match romping to easy victories in rest of the tournament. That would not create the greatest number of exciting matches or generate the most income for the tournament promoters.

The word seed, both noun and verb, come out of Old English and a common proto-Germanic root. The noun, for instance, can be found in the poem Exodus, a versification of portions of that biblical book. The use here is particularly interesting in that it is used to denote a plant seed, but its placement in a portion of the text addressing the generations of biblical patriarchs alludes to the generative capacity of humans. The seeds Noah carries on the ark are not just plant seeds, but also the seeds of future generations of people:

On feorh-gebeorh     foldan hæfde
eallum eorð-cynne     ece lafe,
frum-cneow gehwæs,     fæder and moder
tuddor-teondra,     geteled rime
missenlicra     þonne men cunnon,
snottor sæ-leoda.     Eac þon sæda gehwilc
on bearm scipes     beornas feredon,
þara þe under heofonum     hæleð bryttigað.
Swa þæt wise men     wordum secgað
þæt from Noe     nigoða wære
fæder Abrahames     on folc-tale.

(In refuge from the world, he had the eternal remnant of all the creatures of the earth, the first generation of each, father and mother of the offspring-makers, the wise sailor reckoned a more diverse number than people know. Also, the men carried in the bosom of the ship each seed that humans under heaven enjoy. Thus, wise people say in words that Abraham was the ninth father from Noah in the line of descendants.)

The verb to seed, meaning to sow or to plant, is also found in Old English, in particular in the Northumbrian dialect. It can be found in the Lindisfarne Gospels, an eighth-century, illuminated Latin text of the gospels that has a tenth-century, interlinear, Old English gloss inscribed over it. From Matthew 13:3, the beginning of the parable of the sower:

Et locutus est eis multa in parabolis dicens ecce exiit qui seminat seminare.

& spreccende wæs him feolo uel monigo in bissenum cuoeð uel cuoeðende heonu geeade se ðe sawes sede uel gesawe uel sedege.

(And he was speaking of several or many things in parables, he said or saying, “behold, the sowers went forth to seed or to sow or to seed)

Since the text is a gloss rather than a regular translation, it provides Old English alternatives for certain Latin words; hence the multiple choices separated by or, including two variants of the verb to seed.

The sports sense of seed comes about nearly a thousand years later. It was first used in tennis in the late nineteenth century. From an article about a tennis tournament in the Boston Daily Advertiser of 29 April 1895:

Out of the 49 players entered two were unknown to the handicappers, and 10 others could be judged only by their isolated records with players whose skill was known. The men of equal rank were “seeded” in the drawing so as to keep them from meeting as long as possible.

The same word is being used in both the botanical and sports contexts, but for different kinds of generative capacity, one literal, the other metaphorical.

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Sources:

Anlezark, Daniel, ed. “Exodus.” Old Testament Narratives. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 7. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2011, lines 369–79.

The Lindisfarne and Rushworth Gospels. Publications of the Surtees Society 28. Durham: George Andrews, 1854, 117–118. HathiTrust Digital Archive. London, British Library, Cotton MS Nero D.iv, fol. 51v.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2018, modified September 2021, s.v. seed, n., modified June 2021, seed, v.

“Tennis Talk.” Boston Daily Advertiser (Massachusetts), 29 April 1895, 8. Gale Primary Sources: Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers.

 Image credit: London, British Library, Cotton MS Nero D.iv, fol. 51v. Portion of a mechanical reproduction of a text produced before 1926 used to illustrate the topic under discussion.

secretary

Swedish models displaying the latest in fashionable, secretarial wear, 1952. A black and white photo of nearly identically dressed women sitting at typewriters.

22 September 2021

In current usage, one sense of secretary is that of a person who handles correspondence or clerical duties for an executive or an office. It is not considered a particularly prestigious position. But a secretary can also be a nation’s or state’s cabinet official, the person who heads a government department. That is a rather prestigious and high-ranking position. How did this dichotomy arise?

The word secretary is related to secret. It comes from the medieval Latin secretarius, which could mean a sanctuary or hiding place, a person in charge of a church’s vestments, or a confidential advisor or agent. We can see this last sense in Roger Bacon’s thirteenth-century edition of the Secretum secretorum, a treatise on a range of topics relating to governance and science. It purports to be a letter by Aristotle to Alexander the Great but was probably composed in Arabic in the tenth century CE. It was first translated into Latin in the twelfth century. Bacon’s table of contents includes this:

Capitulum .16. de eleccione nunciorum dignorum, sive de nunciis et secretariis eligendis.

(Chapter 16. Regarding the choice of a worthy ambassador, or regarding the ambassador and secretary to be chosen.)

Secretary makes its English appearance in the sense of a ruler’s confidential advisor or subordinate who could be trusted with tasks that had to be kept secret. We see it in John Trevisa’s c.1387 translation of Ranulf Higden’s Polychronicon, a chronicle of history and theology. Higden, a Benedictine monk, wrote the work in the early fourteenth century. Secretary appears in a passage that relates a story Herodotus told about the Persian king Cyrus the Great. Trevisa’s translation reads:

Þat dreem rederes undrede þe sweuene, and seide þat his douȝter schulde haue a childe þat schulde be lorde of Asia, and putte hym out his kyngdom. Þan þe kyng dradde, and ȝaf his douȝter to a symple knyȝt þat was priuileche i-bore, for his douȝter schulde bere noon nobil childe; and also whan his douȝter was with childe he took hire to hym, and whan þe childe was i-bore he took it to oon Arpagus, þat was his secretarie, for he schulde slee þe childe.

(The dream interpreters unlocked the vision and said that his daughter would have a child who would be lord of Asia and put him out of his kingdom. Then the king became afraid and gave his daughter to a lowly knight of humble birth, so his daughter would not bear any noble child; and also when his daughter was with child, he took her to him, and when the child was born, he took it to one Harpagus, who was his secretary, so that he would slay the child.)

Higden’s Latin uses secretarius.

You may guess the outcome, as the plot has been recycled since time immemorial. The child was left in the forest, to the ravages of the elements and of predators. But he was found by a cottager, who raised him as his own son. The boy would go on to become Cyrus the Great and to depose his grandfather, King Astyages. Modern historians discount this story as a fabrication.

A later, anonymous fifteenth-century translation uses the spelling secretary:

By whiche dreame hit was seide by coniecture, that his doȝhter scholde haue a son, which scholde be lorde of Asia, and scholde expelle Astiages from his realme. Astiages dredenge this, mariede his doȝhter to a poore knyȝte, that a childe of nobilite scholde not be getten of his doȝhter. Whiche knowenge his doȝhter to be with childe, toke the childe to Arpagus to be sleyne; for he was secretary to the kynge.

(By which dream was said by interpretation that his daughter would have a son, who would be lord of Asia and would expel Astyages from his realm. Astyages dreading this, married his daughter to a poor knight, so that a child of nobility would not be begotten from his daughter. And knowing his daughter to be with child, took the child to Harpagus to be slain, for he was secretary to the king.)

Around the same time as this latter translation of Higden, the sense of secretary as one who assists in correspondence of an important person arises. We see it in one version of the Romance of Sir Bevis of Hamtoun. The Romance dates to c.1330, but this particular manuscript is from the fifteenth century:

Tho seyde kyng Armyne:
“As þou haste seyde, so schall hyt byn!”
And cawsyd hys secretory a lettyr to make
All for syr Befyse sake.

So, we start to see the senses of secretary diverge. On one hand you have a high-level advisor or agent, and on the other a personal assistant.

The modern use of secretary in the title of high-level government officials dates to the sixteenth century. This use makes sense when you think of a secretary as the agent of the sovereign, one empowered to act on behalf of the crown or president. The use of secretary as a government title can be seen in a 1583 passport. Originally written in Italian, it was translated by Richard Hakluyt in 1589:

Dated at Algier in our kingly palace, signed with our princely signet, and sealed with our great seale, and written by our Secretarie of State, the 23. of Januarie, 1583.

The Italian reads nostro reggio Secretario.

But the personal assistant sense of secretary was not always low-level. For centuries, to be the secretary to an important person was a coveted position, and often given to young men who were being groomed for important work. Working closely with a senior official was considered to be training for eventually assuming a similar position. It wasn’t until the twentieth century, when women started to be hired for secretarial work, that the position started to be coded as menial and unimportant and the dichotomy between office secretary and Secretary of State started to become obvious.

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Sources:

Bacon, Roger. Secretum secretorum. Opera, vol. 5. Robert Steele, ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1920, 34. Internet Archive.

Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources. R.E. Latham, D.R. Howlett, and R.K. Ashdowne, eds. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013, s.v. secretarius. Brepols: Database of Latin Dictionaries.

Hakluyt, Richard, ed. “Passeport in Italian granted to Thomas Shingleton Englishman, by the king of Algier. 1583.” Principal Navigations, Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation. London: George Bishop and Ralph Newberie, 1589, 189. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Lumby, Joseph Rawson, ed. Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden, vol. 3. London: Longman, et al., 1871, 3.4, 139. HathiTrust Digital Library. Oxford, Bodleian Library, Christ Church MS 89 (Higden), Cambridge, St. John's College MS H.1 (Trevisa). London, British Library, Harley MS 2261 (Anon, 15 cent).

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. secretarie, n.1.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. secretary, n.1 and adj.

The Romance of Sir Beues of Hamtoun. Early English Text Society, extra series 46, 48, 65. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1885–84, 58. Google Books. https://books.google.com/ Cambridge, University Library, MS Ff.2.38.

Image credit: Erik Holmén, 1952. Nordiska Museet. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

sea change

An 1850 painting by John Everett Millais depicting the scene from Shakespeare’s The Tempest in which the spirit Ariel sings to Ferdinand. An airy spirit, surrounded by others, sings into the ear of a young man amid an Edenic setting.

21 October 2021

The digital age has not been kind to Shakespeare’s reputation as a coiner of words and phrases. As more and more texts are digitized, we’re finding more terms, thought to have been coined by him, were actually coined by earlier writers. But his coining of the phrase sea-change rests on solid ground.

A sea-change is a complete transformation of someone or something into someone or something wholly new. Shakespeare uses it in The Tempest, Act 1, Scene 2, c.1616, when the spirit Ariel sings of Ferdinand’s father, who had drowned at sea:

Full fadom fiue thy Father lies,
Of his bones are Corrall made:
Those are pearles that were his eies,
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a Sea-change
Into something rich, & strange:
Sea-Nimphs hourly rink his knell.

The lines are occasionally quoted throughout the late seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, but it is in the 1830s that the phrase separates itself from the context of Shakespeare’s play and starts to be used in other contexts. Four quotations, appearing over a span of only two years, demonstrate how the phrase underwent a sea-change of its own.

A discussion of the poet James G. Percival that appeared in the New-England Magazine of 1 May 1832 uses the phrase in reference Percival’s poem The Coral Grove. Here the reviewer is quoting Shakespeare, and The Coral Grove is about the sea:

Having mentioned these two beautiful and popular little poems, we cannot help stopping for a moment to express our admiration of them. We never read them without thinking “O si sic omnia dixisset.” [Oh, if he had said all things thusly] The latter, in particular, is one of the most exquisite pieces of fancy ever wrought in the brain of man. His whole mind, in conceiving it, seems to have “suffered a sea-change.” It is one of those things which have a peculiar power over a reader’s mind, and which throw it into the same track of thought in which the writer’s must have been when he composed it. We forget the land and all its sights and sounds; we hear the dash of the waves and see their foamy crests; our imagination brings up before us all the beautiful images and forms with which poetry and nature have peopled the deep.

Then two days later, on the other side of the Atlantic in the Devizes and Wiltshire Gazette of 3 May 1832, we see sea-change being used again. This time without directly quoting Shakespeare, although the agent of the change is still the ocean:

SEA-CHANGE OF LINEN.—“I merely wish (says the Captain) to give a hint to those who never tried the experiment, that there is a prodigious difference between a shirt scrubbed in salt water, and one which has been washed in fresh. We all know the misery of putting on wet clothes, or sleeping in damp sheets. Now, a shirt washed in salt water is really a great deal worse than either.

Back to America, an anonymous poem published in the New-York Mirror of 10 August 1833, uses the phrase in a context divorced from the sea, although it still quotes Shakespeare. The context is that of a transformation of woman, the daughter of a seamstress and yarn saleswoman, into a fine lady of society via clothes and jewelry:

And there, in stanhope rolling by,
Another Phœnix I espy,
     Whose mother often dandled
The little urchin on her knee,
Whilst with her hand industriously
     Her scissors she has handled.

How oft some “suffer a sea change,”
And “into something rich and strange,”
     Adorned with glittering jewels,
Who would suppose that dashing belle
Could, if she pleased, this hist’ry tell,
     “My mother she sold crewels?”

Then on 23 November 1834, we see sea-change being used without quoting or directly alluding to Shakespeare and in a context having nothing to do with the sea. It appears in a review of a production of the opera Red Mask, which compares the production to the original novel:

He supplies some motive for the action, and makes its improbabilities more improbable. Nothing can be so exaggerated and unmeaning as the main conduct of the original. The most ordinary things in it are the things most emphatically presented. The quantity of circumstance is huge, the power and quality of effect infinitely little. We always want in this author, except when he undergoes a sea-change, the charm, the one perfect charm, of verisimilitude. Mr Planché restores a little of this to his plot.

That’s a rather fast transformation.

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Sources:

“Literary Portraits. No. III. James G. Percival.” The New-England Magazine (Boston), 1 May 1832, 412. Gale Primary Sources: American Historical Periodicals from the American Antiquarian Society.

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

“Sea-Change of Linen.” Devizes and Wiltshire Gazette (Devizes, England), 3 May 1832, 4. Gale Primary Sources: British Library Newspapers.

Shakespeare, William. The Tempest, 1.2. Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies (First Folio, Brandeis University). London: Isaac Jaggrd and Edward Blount, 1623, 5.

“Theatrical Examiner.” Examiner (London), 23 November 1834, 742. Gale Primary Sources: British Library Newspapers.

“Thinks I to Myself—Who?” New-York Mirror, 10 August 1833, 44. Gale Primary Sources: American Historical Periodicals from the American Antiquarian Society.

Image credit: John Everett Millais, 1850, Makin Collection (private collection). Public domain image as a mechanical reproduction of a work created before 1926.

scuttlebutt

WWII-era poster featuring a sailor named “Scuttlebutt Sam” pointing to another sailor’s insignia of rank, a pig’s head over three chevrons, and saying, “Don’t let them hang it on you! It Means Food Waster First Class!” The bottom of the poster reads in large letters, “Don’t waste food!”

20 October 2021

Scuttlebutt is slang for gossip and rumor. The word arises in nautical jargon of the days of sail where a scuttlebutt was literally a cask containing drinking water for those on-board ship. A scuttle is a hole, and a butt is a barrel or cask. Therefore, a scuttlebutt is a water cask with a hole punched in it from which water can be drawn.

Naturally, sailors would gather around the scuttlebutt and talk, much as twentieth-century office workers would gather around the watercooler. (That analogy is perhaps a bit dated now, though.) This practice is referred to in Herman Melville’s 1850 novel White-Jacket, which is based on his time aboard the frigate USS United States from 1843–44.

There is no part of a frigate where you will see more going and coming of strangers, and overhear more greetings and gossipings of acquaintances, than in the immediate vicinity of the scuttle-butt, just forward of the main-hatch- way, on the gun-deck.

But as steam replaced sails and pipes replaced wooden casks, the need for literal scuttlebutts on-board ship faded, but the word hung on in reference to the conversations and rumors that had once taken took place there. It is in the US Navy that we see scuttlebutt shift from a jargon term for a physical object to the slang sense of gossip and rumor.

In the transition from cask to rumor, we see the word first used as an adjective. From an account published by Henry Harrison Lewis from sailors aboard a US Navy vessel during the Spanish-American War of 1898:

The rumor committee, otherwise known as the “Scuttle-butt Navigators,” to which every man on board was elected as a life member the moment he promulgated a rumor, was soon actively engaged, and it was definitely settled the Yankee was to become the flagship of the whole fleet, our captain made lord high admiral, and the whole Spanish nation swept off the face of the globe in about thirteen and a half seconds by the chronometer.

And in 1910 we get this from the Our Navy newspaper:

Press stories and scuttle butt rumors put the Buffalo in the society class by stating a fair young demoiselle of the Hawaiian group secreted herself in the intricacies of the transport’s lower decks and rode undisturbed into San Francisco.

And there is this from William Richmond’s 1912 Nine Months on a Cruise. It’s unclear whether “Scuttle Butt News” was an actual publication, or just a nickname for rumor:

At each meal, and when groups gathered together in their part of the ship for a talkfest, speculation was rife as to where we were going and why. Extra editions of the “Scuttle Butt News” were published at frequent intervals, and each number contained the latest dope as to our future movements.

And by 1913 we start to see scuttlebutt used as a noun. Again, from Our Navy:

These desertions are not caused by discontentment on the ship, but as far as can be learned via “scuttle butt,” by lack of consideration for this class of vessel in the Department, and the idea of completing a four-year cruise on this Station, everyone believing that after two years they should be sent to duty in the United States, their home country, as the European navies do.

And this explanation isn’t just scuttlebutt; it’s documented.

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Sources:

“The Bulletin Board.” Our Navy, June 1913, 23. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

“Ess Dee Stowaways.” 19. Our Navy, September 1910. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2021, s.v. scuttlebutt, n.

Lewis, Henry Harrison, ed. “A Gunner On ..... Board the ‘Yankee.’” The Commercial Appeal (Memphis, Tennessee), 25 September 1898, 11. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Melville, Herman. White-Jacket or The World in a Man-of-War (1850). Boston: St. Botolph Society, 1923, 265. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. scuttlebutt, n., scuttled, adj., scuttle, v.2.

Richmond, William E. Nine Months on a Cruise and Experiences in Nicaragua. 1912. 6–7. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Image credit: US Office for Emergency Management, War Production Board, 1942–43. US National Archives. Public domain image.

scot-free

19 October 2021

First, to get it out of the way, the word Scot, referring to a person from Scotland, is an entirely different word and has nothing to do with scot-free. Second, in the past, there was a common variant shot-free. That variant is much rarer now, but it can still be heard in certain places.

Note: the standard practice in linguistics is to use angled brackets, < >, to mark spellings and slashes, / /, to mark pronunciations.

Scot and shot come from the Old English sceot, meaning an arrow or other type of missile, a rapid movement, or a payment. Correspondingly, the Old English verb sceotan meant to shoot an arrow, to move quickly, or to make a payment. The sc- in Old English was pronounced as /ʃ/, similar to the <sch> spelling in modern German or the <sh> spelling in Present Day English. The payment senses of scot, shot, and to shoot have largely disappeared, except in the fossilized idioms of scot-free and shot-free, but you can still find the payment meaning in particular contexts and dialects. But in the twelfth century, the early Middle English period, the /skɒt/ pronunciation, with a hard <c> or /k/ begins to appear. This was apparently due to influence from cognates in Old Norse that had the /k/ phoneme—the Danes occupied and settled in much of North and Eastern England in the late Old English period, and by the twelfth century that linguistic influence was starting to appear in English writing. For several centuries, both the /sk/ and /ʃ/ pronunciations were used interchangeably.

Then in the later Middle English period we start seeing the <sh> spelling to represent the /ʃ/ pronunciation. And in the Early Modern period, we see the two forms start to diverge semantically. The /sk/ pronunciation, or scot, came to be used for the tax and payment senses, while the /ʃ/ pronunciation, or shot, came to be used for the ammunition and movement senses, with an exception being the word shot-free, which is synonymous with scot-free. And in Present-Day English, scot has largely dropped out of the active vocabulary, being used mostly in historical contexts and in scot-free.

Scot-free appears as early as 1054 CE, when it appears in a bequest of land to Westminster Abbey sanctioned by Edward the Confessor:

Ic cyðe eow þæt ic wille þæt þæt cotlif Leosne þe Ætsere ahte & becwæð Criste & Sancte Petre into Westmynstre ligge nu ðider inn to ðæra muneca fodan mid eallum ðæra ðingum þe þær to hyreð on wude & on felde, on mæde & on wætere & on ealle oðre þingum scotfreo & gafolfreo on scire & on hundrede swa ful & swa forð swa he hit Sancte Petre becwæð & ic ðes fullice geuðe.

(I say to you that that my will is that the estate of Lessness that Ætsere owned and bequeathed to Christ and to Saint Peter into Westminster now belongs to that habitation for the monk’s food with all the things that there belong to it in wood and field, in meadow and in water, and all other things scot-free and tax-free in shire and in hundred as completely and as freely as he bequeathed it to Saint Peter and I fully consent to this.)

By the seventeenth century, scot-free was being used more generally to mean free of penalty. We see this expanded sense in a 1622 translation of Matheo Aleman’s The Rogue, in a discussion about legal disputes over debt. One speaker contends that the plaintiff always gets the better of the defendant, so it is usually cheaper and easier to just pay, even if the debt is not legitimate:

But when such things come in question, the accuser hath commonly the better of the accused; the plaintiffe will bee sure to fare well, how ere it goe with the defendant; he hath that he lookes for, he cares for no more; for it is in this, as at Best be trusted, amongst Costermongers, the first speaker scapes scot-free

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Sources:

Aleman, Matheo. The Rogue: or the Life of Guzman de Alfarache, part two of three. London: Printed for Edward Blount, 1622, 231.

Harmer, F.E. Anglo-Saxon Writs. Manchester, England: Manchester UP, 1952, 343. London, Westminster Abbey Munimwnra xi.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. shot, n., scot, n.(2).

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2011, modified September 2021, s.v. scot-free, adj., modified December 2020, scot, n.2; second edition, 1989, shot-free, adj., shot, n.1, shoot, v.