Taps

May 30, 2022

30 May 2022

The bugle dirge that signals “lights out” and is used at funerals in the US military is called Taps. But the name Taps predates the creation of the bugle call we know today. At the end of the day, the bugle would sound Tattoo, and shortly afterward, usually about fifteen minutes, the call Extinguish Lights would be sounded. Extinguish Lights consisted of the first few bars of Tattoo, followed by several isolated beats on a drum—hence the name Taps.

The bugle call we know today as Taps is a variation of an earlier bugle call, the Scott Tattoo, named for General Winfield Scott. Tradition has it that Taps was arranged in 1862 by Brigadier General Daniel Butterfield. Its first use during military funerals was also in 1862, when, being in a combat zone, it was deemed unwise to fire the traditional volleys of gunfire over the grave. Taps was sounded instead, and the custom quickly spread.

But Taps could be beat at other times; it was simply the name for isolated beats on a drum. For instance, there is this list of drum signals from US Army regulations of 1812:

The Signals
Adjutant’s call. First part of the troop.
First sergeant’s call. One roll and three flams.
All non-commissioned officers’ call. Two rolls and five flams.
To go for wood. Poing stroke and ten-stroke roll.
To go for water. Two strokes and a flam.
To go for provisions. Roast beef.
Front to halt. Two flams from right to left, a full drag with the right, a left hand flam and a right hand full drag.
For the front to advance quicker. The long march.
For the front to march slower. The taps.
For a fatigue party. The pioneers’ march.
For the church call. The parley.

And from the same source, this reference to taps being played at the beginning of the day:

At the first appearance of day, the officer of the guard will cause the taps to be given on the orderly drum; the musicians will assemble on the parade; and in five minutes after the taps have been given, they will commence the reveillé; every officer and soldier will instantly rise; so soon as it is finished, the rolls shall be called.

The use of taps to signal lights out dates to at least 1824, as this regulation from the US Military Academy at West Point shows:

At thirty minutes after reveille, each superintendent will visit and inspect every room in his division, noticing particularly the state of police, and all infractions of regulations, and report to the officer in command of the barrack in the following form, viz:
I certify that I have carefully and thoroughly inspected the rooms of my division (N.B. or S.B.) at the taps last evening, and thirty minutes after reveille this morning, and that I have reported all infractions of regulations, and such rooms as are not in good order.
______ ______,
Superintendent Division, S.B.
It is his duty, in the event of noise, scuffling, or any improper conduct whatever, to repair instantly to the spot, order the parties to their rooms, and forthwith make report of the circumstances to the commandant of the barrack, or, in his absence, to the officer of the week; to visit his rooms, at the taps; see that the lights are extinguished; the fires properly secured; the occupants present, and in bed.

It's difficult to pinpoint when exactly Taps switched from a drum signal to a bugle call. There are many references to Taps in 1862 and 1863, but most are ambiguous as to the instrument used. But there is this description of a night patrol leaving camp in Harper’s Weekly of 18 April 1863 where the use of the verb blew indicates that Taps is a bugle call:

I thought it darker that it had ever seemed before as our little party stole quietly out of camp before tattoo, and felt our way down to the river. In a leaky boat, two at a time, we managed to cross, the noise of the skiff in the water sounding to our ears all the time as if it must be audible at least five miles; and just as taps blew, dismissing the rest of the regiment to bed, we started to leave it, perhaps forever.

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Sources:

“Condition of the Military Academy at West Point” (21 February 1824). Documents, Legislative and Executive, of the Congress of the United States, from the First Session of the Sixteenth to the Second Session of the Eighteenth Congress, Inclusive, vol. 2. Washington, DC: Gales and Seaton, 1834. 656. Google Books.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. tap, n.2.

Regulations for the Field Exercise, Manœuvres, and Conduct of the Infantry of the United States. Philadelphia: Fry and Kammerer, 1812, 175–76, 205. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

“Stealing a March.” Harper’s Weekly, 18 April 1863. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Audio credit: US Army. Public domain recording.

Photo credit: US Army, 2009. Public domain image.

Taliban

May 30, 2022

30 May 2022

The Taliban are a politico-military governing force in Afghanistan who espouse a strict, fundamentalist interpretation of Islamic law. The word Taliban is from the Farsi/Pashto Talib, meaning seeker or student, especially a student of Islamic law. The Farsi word is a borrowing of the Arabic talib, which is a clipping of talib al-ilm, or seeker of knowledge; the -an is a plural marker. (Because in Farsi and Arabic Taliban is a plural, some object to English usage labeling individuals as “a Taliban,” but the grammar rules of one language do not apply to others, and part of the process of adoption into a different language is that the word takes on the grammar of the adopted language.)

The Taliban got their start in the early 1990s as a loose confederation of radical Afghan student groups, both within Afghanistan in in exile in Pakistan, who shared a version of conservative Sunni Islam. They emerged in 1994 as an organized and powerful politico-military force and by 1996 had become the dominant faction in the country, capturing the capital, Kabul. They were overthrown in 2001 by a US military intervention, only to return to power in 2021 with the withdrawal of American troops from that country.

The name Taliban starts appearing in English-language newspapers in late 1994. From the Times of India of 19 December 1994:

Recently on November 30, some 2,000 heavily armed Afghan students seized control of Lashkargarh, capital of Helmand province where they ousted from power the Akhundzada family, reportedly the world’s biggest heroin traffickers.
This student group, Taliban, is believed to be backed by the Saudi and Pakistani intelligence and has the tacit support of western countries.

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Sources:

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2006, s.v. Talibanization, n.

Subrahmanyam, K. “Pakistan Disputes U.N. Report on Drugs.” Times of India, 19 December 1994. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Image credit: Voice of America, 2021. Public domain image.

bear arms

May 27, 2022

Black and white security video frame showing the two shooters in the 20 April 1999 shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado. The pair murdered 12 students and a teacher and wounded 21 others before committing suicide.

27 May 2022

tl;dr The U.S. Supreme Court’s current interpretation of the Second Amendment, expressed in the 2008 case D.C. v. Heller, rests on a misunderstanding of the historical meanings of the idioms to bear arms and to keep arms, and if one is to remain true to an originalist interpretation of the U.S. Constitution, one must conclude that an individual right to possess weapons does not exist.

[The research for what follows was not conducted by me. I am relying on the work of others, notably Dennis Baron, Neal Goldfarb, and Alison LaCroix. Links to their work are in the sources section below. The framing and presentation of the argument here is my own, and any errors or omissions are mine and not theirs.]

The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States reads

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

In 2008, in the case District of Columbia, et al., v. Heller, the U.S. Supreme Court, in an opinion written by Justice Antonin Scalia, interpreted the Second Amendment to include an individual right to possess firearms. Scalia wrote:

The Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home.

In this opinion, the court also held that the right to possess firearms, and in this case specifically handguns, was not absolute. Prohibitions on concealed weapons were constitutional, according to Scalia, as were restrictions on “M-16 rifles and the like.” But the court did hold that individuals had a relatively unrestricted right to possess handguns in their homes.

In his argument, Scalia separated the two clauses of the amendment and nullified the first. (A violation of his own “whole-text canon” in which a law must be interpreted in its entirety and every provision given effect.) He also referenced an “ancient right of individuals to keep and bear arms,” a purported right for which no evidence exists. (To the contrary, traditionally governments have sharply limited the ability of individuals to possess weapons.) And until this case, the Supreme Court had, in the limited jurisprudence about the Second Amendment that existed, always held that the amendment referred to a state’s power to maintain a militia independent of the federal government, not to an individual’s right to possess weapons.

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, state militias existed for three purposes: 1) to suppress slave revolts and hunt down escaped enslaved persons; 2) to engage in warfare against Indigenous people and seize new land to the west; and 3) assist in the defense of the nation in case of invasion. The states feared that due to abolitionist sentiments the federal government might disband their militias and that the federal government or, following the former policy of the British colonial government, might limit their expansion westward. Hence the need for an amendment to preserve this power of the states. While the founders were leery of creating a standing federal army, the idea that people themselves might have to resort to military means against tyranny or the need to possess weapons for self-defense did not enter into the discourse. The common-law right to self-defense did not include a right to arm oneself in preparation for an attack and was only operative when retreat was not practicable. These notions of individuals arming themselves to fight some vague, future threat of tyranny or in preparation for a possible attack on their persons are twentieth-century ones.

Scalia’s argument rests on the simple meanings of the verbs to bear and to keep, that is to carry and possess, and in so doing, Scalia separated the bearing and keeping of arms from the concept of militia service. His linguistic reasoning and evidence for doing so was superficial and incorrect, as was pointed out at the time in an amicus brief by linguists, the lead author being linguist Dennis Baron, which was cited in Justice Stephen Breyer’s dissent in the case. Furthermore, in the oral argument, Solicitor-General Paul Clement, arguing that the District of Columbia’s law was unconstitutional, acknowledged that “bear arms in its unmodified form is most naturally understood to have a military context.” And it wasn’t until the latter half of the twentieth century that entries for bear arms in major dictionaries included the sense of simply carrying a weapon. Furthermore, since the 2008 decision, several major new corpora of seventeenth and eighteenth-century English have been published, and these overwhelming confirm the conclusions of the historical linguists and show that Scalia was utterly wrong in his argument and conclusions.

Eighteenth-century usage of these verbs was different than today’s. To bear, for instance, was rarely used with the simple meaning of to carry a physical object on one’s person. And the phrase to bear arms is an idiom, that is a phrase whose meaning cannot be understood by breaking it apart into its component parts. To bear arms had two distinct meanings at the time of the Second Amendment was written. the first was to engage in military service or when combined with against, to fight a war. There are approximately 900 distinct uses of the phrase bear arms in the Corpus of Early Modern English and the Corpus of Founding Era American English (COFEA), and all but a handful are in the context of military service, soldiering, or waging war. A majority of these military uses of bear arms have a collective subject, an army or militia, and do not refer to an individual who is serving. And the non-military uses are mostly ambiguous, with only one, a translation from the French porter armes, being definitively non-military in nature.

This military sense dates to the fourteenth century and can be seen in the Metrical Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester, which dates to c.1325:

At þe feste of seint edward · þe king huld þo anon
At londone a parlement · & heiemen manion
Þere hii lokede þo · þat alle þat armes bere
Aȝen þe king in þe worre · oþer aȝen him were
At norhamtone at lewes · oþer at euesham
Barun erl oþer kniȝt · burgeis oþer freman
Þe burgeis of norhamtone · & of londone þer to
Were alle deserited · & hor eirs al so
(At the feast of Saint Edward the king then held at once
In London a parliament & many headmen
There they looked then at all who bore arms
Against the king in that war or who were against him
At Northampton, at Lewes, or at Evesham
Baron, earl, or knight, burgess or freeman
The burgesses of Northampton & of London in that place
Were all dispossessed and their heirs also.)

To bear arms had a second sense of possessing a title of knighthood or nobility (i.e., a familial coat of arms) or rightfully possessing some insignia of office or institution. This sense appears somewhat later, but is in place by the mid fifteenth century as we can see from the records of the parliament at Westminster of 1442:

The said Carrakes aryved and entred the Port of the Isle of Rodes [...] beryng the Armes of the Hospitall of Seint John Jerusalem.

The idiom to keep arms appears much less frequently, but in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it carried the same sense of military service. The combined phrase to keep and bear arms appears to be unique to the Constitution but can only be understood as also referring to military service at the time the Second Amendment was written.

When we read to keep and bear arms as referring to military service, the entirety of the amendment, including the prefatory clause, the “whole-text” makes perfect sense. The amendment was not intended to give individuals a right to own or carry weapons, rather it was intended to guarantee the states’ power to form “well-regulated militias,” that is in a modern context police forces and National Guard units. If one is to remain consistent with an originalist interpretation of the Constitution, this is the only correct reading of the text.

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Sources:

Baron, Dennis. “Antonin Scalia Was Wrong About the Meaning of ‘Bear Arms.’” Washington Post, 21 May 2018.

———. “Corpus Evidence Illuminates the Meaning of Bear Arms” (pdf). Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly, 46.3, Spring 2019. 509–22.

“The Bill of Rights: A Transcription.” U.S. National Archives, 19 January 2022.

Blackman, Josh and James C. Phillips. “Corpus Linguistics and the Second Amendment. Harvard Law Review Blog, 7 August 2018.

Corpus of Early Modern English, version 5.2.2-ga3469f9, accessed 26 May 2022. Brigham Young University.

Corpus of Founding Era American English (COFEA), version 5.2.2-ga3469f9, accessed 26 May 2022. Brigham Young University.

Goldfarb, Neal. “A (Mostly Corpus-Based) Linguistic Reexamination of D.C. v. Heller and the Second Amendment,” 27 February 2021, SSRN.

———. “Corpora and the Second Amendment.” LAWnLinguistics, 8 August 2018.

LaCroix, Alison L. “Historical Semantics and the Meaning of the Second Amendment.” The Panorama, 3 August 2018.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, armes, n. (plural).

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2016, s.v. arms, n.

Scalia, Antonin (opinion), and Stephen Breyer (dissent). “District of Columbia, et al. v. Heller,” 26 June 2008. United States Reports, vol. 554, Cases Adjudged in the Supreme Court at October Term, 2007. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2013, 570–723.

Torrez, P. Andrew and Thomas Smith. “OA21: Second Amendment Masterclass,” (podcast). Opening Arguments. Part 1, 3 November 2016 and Part 2, 6 December 2016.

———. “OA161: Gun Control & the Constitution,” (podcast). Opening Arguments, 2 April 2018.

Wright, William Aldis, ed. The Metrical Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester, vol. 2 of 2. London: H.M. Stationary Office by Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1887, lines 11,786–793, 767–68. HathiTrust Digital Archive. London, British Library, Cotton Caligula MS A.11., fol. 165v.

Image credit: Columbine High School security video feed, 1999. Fair use of a single frame from the video feed of a historic event to illustrate the topic under discussion.

tabloid

May 25, 2022

25 May 2022

When we hear the word tabloid, our minds immediately go to exploitative journalism of the lowest kind. But the word got its start in the pharmaceutical industry in the late nineteenth century.

Tabloid, with a capital < T >, was coined as a trademark in 1884 by Burroughs, Wellcome, & Company. It was the company’s name for a pill made of compressed medication and filler, a proprietary name for what was, and still is, otherwise known as a tablet. The tabl- in tabloid is taken from tablet—itself a borrowing from French that could mean a small ornament as well as a writing or painting surface—and the -oid suffix refers to something resembling or akin to the root’s meaning. So, a tabloid is literally something akin to a tablet.

But it did not take long for tabloid, with a lower-case < t >, to become genericized. On 4 July 1885 the medical journal the Lancet published a letter by a physician by the name of John Watson on the efficacy of cocaine in the treatment of hay fever:

I am desirous, with your permission, of calling attention to the value of tabloids of cocaine in the treatment of hay fever.

The letter and references to it were published in numerous journals and newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic. This one is from the 1886 Transactions of the Medical Society of New Jersey:

The profession of Camden are prompt to give new remedies a trial and place them at the proper worth. They express a satisfactory experience with tabloids of cocaine in hay fever and in surgical operations.

Given the news story’s popularity, it almost certainly came to the notice of Arthur Conan Doyle, himself a physician, who would go on to invent the fictional adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson. One cannot but help to wonder if the association of the name John Watson with cocaine formed part of the inspiration for the literary characters, Holmes being a user of the drug. Conan Doyle would write the first Sherlock Holmes story the following year (1887), and Holmes’s use of cocaine first appears in the 1887 The Sign of the Four. Of course, any such association could be mere coincidence.

And metaphorical use of tabloid quickly followed, referring to anything that was compressed or easily digestible, especially published material. The following description of a reference book appeared in the 24 January 1891 issue of the Pall Mall Gazette:

Another sixpenny marvel is “Kendal and Dent's Edition of Everybody's Pocket Cyclopædia.” It is slim, and daintily bound in cloth—a sort of tabloid of “useful knowledge.”

Tabloid entered the world of journalism that same year as a reference to newspapers printed on smaller pieces of paper, folded like a book. In large part because they are easier to handle on public transport, tabloid publications became a popular alternative to the more traditional broadsheet newspapers, but from the very beginning, tabloid papers were associated with low, gossipy journalism.

The following description of Alfred Harmsworth appeared in the March 1891 issue of The Forum. Harmsworth was a British newspaper publisher and a pioneer of tabloid journalism. His first paper was Answers to Correspondents (later shortened to just Answers), but he followed that paper’s success with many others:

One of the phenomena of the nineteenth century—one wonders if the same thing will continue during the present—was the fecundity created by a demand. When a demand existed and an attempt was made to satisfy it, instead of the public being satiated, a new appetite was born. In nothing has this been so marked as in cheap literature, including in the term newspapers and magazines as well as books. The circulation of newspapers and magazines has enormously increased since their reduction in price. One “Answers” could not supply the ever-increasing demand. Mr. Harmsworth's rivals, who were without his creative force, but intelligent enough to follow where he led, saw their opportunity and threw into the insatiable maw “Answers” under other names.
Nor did Mr. Harmsworth propose to suffer the fate of most pioneers and, after having cleared the ground, see others garner the crops. He duplicated and reduplicated his original production, the prototype of the whole family, until to-day the news stands of London are covered with “Answers,” “Tit-Bits,” “Smith's Scraps,” “Jones' Sayings,” “Brown's Hash,” and so on through a couple of score more until one wonders who reads them and how they manage to exist. But the question who reads them is quickly answered. Go into any bus or train or lunch room at any hour of the day or night and you see men and boys and women and girls taking and enjoying their tabloids.
The curious thing is that the reading is no longer confined to the class for whom it was originally intended, as the people of greater intelligence are not ashamed to acknowledge that they are addicted to tabloidism. Last summer, while going from London to Glasgow, I fell in with a middle-aged Englishman, whom I later learned was the executive of a large corporation. He had a bundle of papers and magazines, among them half a dozen brands of tabloids. We engaged in conversation, and he courteously handed me a tabloid. When I expressed a preference for nutriment in another form, he explained that he found in tabloids a mental diversion. “I get tired of ‘The Saturday Review’ and ‘The Spectator,’” he said, “and I read these things because they keep me from thinking.”

Harmsworth would later become the 1st Viscount Northcliffe, proof that no bad deed goes unrewarded, so long as it makes a lot of money.

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Sources:

Low, A. Maurice. “’Tabloid Journalism’: Its Causes and Effects.” The Forum (New York), March 1891, 57–58. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2008, s.v. tabloid, n. and adj.

“Reference Books for 1891.” Pall Mall Gazette (London), 24 January 1891, 7. Gale Primary Sources: British Library Newspapers.

“Report of the Standing Committee.” Transactions of the Medical Society of New Jersey, 1886, 129. Nineteenth Century Collections Online.

Watson, John. “Cocaine in the Treatment of Hay Fever” (letter). The Lancet, 4 July 1885, 50. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Image credit: The Globe, 2009. Fair use of a low-resolution scan of copyrighted material to illustrate the topic under discussion.

dilettante

May 23, 2022

1863 engraving by Joshua Reynolds of a group portrait of the Society of Dilettanti, c.1778. Seven well-dressed gentlemen arrayed around a table, drinking and discussing artwork that is laid out before them. Pictured, from left to right: Watkins William Wynn; John Taylor (standing); Stephen Payne-Gallwey; William Hamilton; Richard Thompson (standing); Spencer Stanhope (standing); and John Lewin Smyth.

23 May 2022

In present-day speech and writing, dilettante usually refers to someone who unseriously engages in an endeavor, one who treats an art or science as a pastime rather than an object of serious and rigorous study. But the word is an early eighteenth-century borrowing from the Italian dilettante, meaning a lover of the arts, which in turn is from the Latin verb delectare, meaning to take delight or pleasure in. And at first, English usage echoed the positive connotation of the Italian word, but within a century the negative sense had developed. (Cf. amateur)

A group of English nobles and gentlemen founded the Society of Dilettanti c.1734 (the exact date of founding went unrecorded—minutes and records of the society were not kept until 1736). The society consisted of men who had made the “Grand Tour” of the Continent and were enamored with European culture and antiquities, particularly those of Italy. Their goal was to promote an appreciation of that culture in England, including bringing objects of interest back to England. In addition to the word, one of their other legacies is the quantity of looted material in British museums.

The Italian word started appearing in general English writing within a handful of years. John Brevel’s Remarks on Several Parts of Europe used it thusly, the italics denoting that the word had not yet fully anglicized:

In an adjoining Chamber I saw a noble Collection of Antiques, which were a Legacy to the Senate, partly from a Patriarch of Aquileia, of the Grimani Family, (a great Dilettante, who had made large Acquisitions in this way in Greece, and the Levant, as well as in Italy) and partly by a Contarini, of the Number of Procurators.

By the latter half of the eighteenth century dilettante had been fully anglicized, as can be seen by its appearance in a 1781 work by Scottish portraitist Allan Ramsay, who commented on the Riot Act using the penname “A Dilettante in Law and Politics.” (Cf. read the riot act) This use also indicates the word had not yet acquired its negative connotation. In calling himself a dilettante, Ramsay was simply indicating that he was not a professional lawyer, rather a painter who dabbled in law and politics.

But the negative sense of dilettante is in place by the early nineteenth century, as can be seen in this passage from Thomas Carlyle’s 1831 satire Sartor Resartus:

The man who cannot wonder, who does not habitually wonder (and worship), were he President of innumerable Royal Societies, and carried the whole Méchanique Céleste and Hegel’s Philosophy, and epitome of all Laboratories and Observatories with their results, in his single head,—is but a Pair of Spectacles behind which there is no Eye. Let those who have Eyes look through him, then he may be useful.
Thou wilt have no Mystery and Mysticism; wilt walk through thy world by the sunshine of what thou callest Truth, or even by the hand-lamp of what I call Attorney-Logic; and “explain” all, “account” for all, or believe nothing of it?
[...]
“Explain” me all this, or do one of two things: Retire into private places with thy foolish cackle; or, what were better, give it up, and weep, not that the reign of wonder is done, and God’s world all disembellished and prosaic, but that thou hitherto art a Dilettante and sandblind Pedant.

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Sources:

Breval, John. Remarks on Several Parts of Europe, vol. 1. London: H. Lintot, 1738, 215. Eighteenth Century Collections Online.

Carlyle, Thomas. Sartor Resartus. London: Chapman and Hall, 1831, 1.10, 46–47. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Cust, Lionel and Sidney Colvin. History of the Society of Dilettanti. London: Macmillan, 1914, 4–5. Archive.org.

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

Ramsay, Allan. Observations upon the Riot Act, with an Attempt Towards the Amendment of It. By a Dilettante in Law and Politics. London: T. Cadell, 1781. Eighteenth Century Collections Online.

Image credit: Original painting by Joshua Reynolds, c.1778. Engraving in A Catalogue of the Pictures and Drawings in the National Loan Exhibition. London: William Heinemann, 1909, 12. Archive.org. Public Domain Image.