be

24 October 2022

The verb to be is highly irregular. The different forms of the word appear very different, with no apparent logic underlying the conjugations:

PRESENT-DAY TO BE:

INFINITIVE	to be
PRESENT INDICATIVE
1st Person Sing.	am
2nd Person Sing.	are
3rd Person Sing.	is
Plural	are
PAST INDICATIVE
1st Person Sing.	was
2nd Person Sing.	were
3rd Person Sing.	was
Plural	were
PARTICIPLES
Present Participle	being
Past Participle	been

This situation is a result of our modern verb being a jumble of three distinct Proto-Indo-European roots: *‌‌bheuə-, *es-, and *wes-. The first of these conflations occurred before English was a recorded language. By the time we reach the Old English period, the *es- and *wes- forms had already combined into a single verb, wesan. The conjugation of wesan in the West Saxon dialect is:

OLD ENGLISH WESAN:

INFINITIVE	wesen
PRESENT INDICATIVE
1st Person Sing.	eom
2nd Person Sing.	eart
3rd Person Sing.	is
Plural	sindon, sin, sint
PAST INDICATIVE
1st Person Sing.	wæs
2nd Person Sing.	wære
3rd Person Sing.	wæs
Plural	wæron
PARTICIPLES
Present Participle	wesende
Past Participle	(ge)wesen

Note: the conjugations I’m presenting here are greatly simplified. Not only am I omitting forms, such as the subjunctive, but I’m also eliding regional and temporal differences. Both Old and Middle English were spoken over the course of several centuries and those languages comprise multiple dialects. In actuality, there has been a great deal more variety in the forms of to be, but the main thrust of the development of the verb is perhaps best seen in this simplified presentation.

Our modern present and past indicative forms are taken from wesan: am, are, is, was, and were. The present indicative forms of wesan are taken from the *es- root, and the past indicative forms are from *wes-.

The second verb in Old English meaning to be is beon. The West Saxon inflections are as follows:

OLD ENGLISH BEON:

INFINITIVE	beon
PRESENT INDICATIVE
1st Person Sing.	beo
2nd Person Sing.	bist
3rd Person Sing.	biþ
Plural	beoþ

Note that beon has no past tense, it can only denote the present. As a result, Old English use of beon sometimes connotes a sense of futurity, of continuous existence now and into the future. Our modern infinitive and participial forms be, been, and being, are from beon.

The conflation of beon and wesan occurred during the Early Middle English period and was complete by the beginning of the 13th century. Some of the older forms, however, survive to this day in regional dialects. Here are the inflections in the thirteenth-century dialect of West Midlands of England:

MIDDLE ENGLISH:

INFINITIVE	beon
PRESENT INDICATIVE
1st Person Sing.	am, beo
2nd Person Sing.	art, bist
3rd Person Sing.	is, bið
Plural	beoð
PAST INDICATIVE
1st Person Sing.	wes
2nd Person Sing.	were
3rd Person Sing.	wes
Plural	weren
PAST PARTICIPLE	ibeon

You can clearly see the resemblance to the Present-Day conjugation in the Middle English forms.

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Sources:

American Heritage Dictionary Indo-European Roots Appendix, 2022.

Burrow, J.A. and Turville-Petre Thorlac. A Book of Middle English, third edition. Maldon, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 2005, 36–37.

Mitchell, Bruce and Fred C. Robinson. A Guide to Old English, eighth edition. Maldon, Massachusetts: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012, §127, 51.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, November 2010, s.v. be, v.

hot

An image of the sun taken with the Extreme Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (EIT) aboard the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) spacecraft on 14 September 1999 depicting a huge prominence erupting from the sun’s surface.

21 October 2022

Being a basic word, hot unsurprisingly traces back to the Old English hat. Besides its literal meaning relating to heat, hot also has a myriad of figurative senses, many of which are also quite old. I’ll outline the appearance of a few of the more popular figurative senses, but only a few. One could write a book on the different meanings of hot.

The use of hot to denote passion or intensity of feeling also dates to before the Norman Conquest. One such use is in the poem known as The Seafarer, in a passage that may be my favorite in all of English literature:

Forþon nu min hyge hweorfeð    ofer hreðer-locan,
min mod-sefa    mid mere-flode
ofer hwæles eþel    hweorfeð wide,
eoþan sceatas,      cymeð eft to me
gifre ond grædig;     gielleð anfloga,
hweteð on hwæl-weg    hreðer unwearnum
ofer holma gelagu.     Forþon me hatran sind
Dryhtnes dreamas    þonne þis deade lif,
læne on londe.

(Therefore, now my thought turns throughout my breast, my heart with the sea’s flood turns widely over the whale’s home, [over] the surface of the earth, [and] comes back to me, gluttonous and greedy; the lone-flyer cries, whets my heart irresistibly onto the whale’s road, over the expanse of the waves. Therefore, for me the joys of the Lord are hotter than this dead life, fleeting on land.)

And of all the passions, anger is often thought to run the hottest. There is this passage from Beowulf that uses hot both figuratively and literally. Here, the dragon has just discovered that a cup has been stolen from its hoard and the word simultaneously describes both the dragon’s wrath and its breath:

                                   Hord-weard sohte
georne æfter grunde,     wolde guman findan,
þone þe him on sweofote    sare geteode;
hat ond hreoh-mod    hlæw oft ymbehwearf
ealne utanweardne;     ne ðær ænig mon
on þam westenne—    hwæðre wiges gefeh,
beadwe weorces.

(The hoard-keeper zealously sought over the ground, wanting to find the man who had caused him harm in his sleep; hot and enraged he often circled all around the outside of the barrow; there was no one in that wasteland—but he desired conflict, the action of battle.)

Hot is also used to describe spicy food, and this sense is a bit later, appearing in the Middle English period. John Gower’s Confessio Amantis, written at the end of the fourteenth century, uses it this way in a passage about Nebuchadnezzar II, whom God changed into a beast as a punishment, at least according to Daniel 4:31–33 that is:

Thurgh his pouer dede him transforme
Fro man into a bestes forme;
And lich an Oxe under the fot
He graseth, as he nedes mot,
To geten him his lives fode.
Tho thoghte him colde grases goode,
That whilom eet the hote spices,
Thus was he torned fro delices.

(Through his power [God] transformed him from a man into a beast’s form; and like an ox he grazes under foot as he needs to get himself his food. Though he thought cold grasses good, where once he ate hot spices, thus he was turned from delights.)

Hot has also long been associated with sexual desire, and this sense also appears in Middle English. Here is Chaucer’s description of the summoner from the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales:

A somonour was ther with us in that place,
That hadde a fyr-reed cherubynnes face,
For saucefleem he was, with eyen narwe.
As hoot he was and lecherous as a sparwe,
With scalled browes blake and piled berd.
Of his visage children were aferd.

(A summoner was there with us in that place,
That had a fire-red cherubim’s face,
For he was pimpled he was, with eyes narrow,
He was as hot and lecherous as a sparrow,
With black, scabby brows and mangy beard,
Of his visage, children were afeared.)

The summoner may have had a hot libido, but he was anything but hot himself. And the use of hot to refer to people who were sexually attractive, as opposed to being lustful, or to things that were lewd or obscene would take a surprisingly long time to appear, not until the latter half of the nineteenth century to be specific. Here is a passage from the 19 June 1878 issue of Punch, a “letter” written by ’Arry, a Cockney creation of humorist Edwin James Milliken that uses hot in the lewd sense:

The prog and the lotion was lummy, the chaff and the spoonin’ was prime,
The jokes jest as ’ot as they make ’em, and Loo was one larf all the time.
Her cheeks did go pinkish at fust, but lor bless yer, that quickly goes off,
And the world ain’t pertikler yer know if yer does the ’ole thing like a toff.

To be sexual is one thing; to be wanted by the police is quite another. That sense of hot also dates to the nineteenth century. Here is the definition of hot from George Matsell’s 1859 glossary of criminal slang:

HOT. Too well known. “The cove had better move his beaters to Dewsville, it is too hot for him here; if he stops, he’ll be sure to be sick for twenty stretches,” the fellow had better go into the country, for if he stays, he will be sent to prison for twenty years.

And criminals were not the only thing that could be hot. Stolen property could be also. From the Illustrated Times of 11 January 1862:

Slung around his waist and hidden by the lappets of his coat are half-a-dozen flashy squares of Brummagem-like fabric, the wholesale price of which is about sixpence each. Whenever this dodger sees a “party” whom by his appearance he judges to be rogue or fool enough for his purpose, he just touches him on the shoulder to attract his attention, and then, quick as lightning, lifts a corner of his skirt, and exposes the supposed-to-be stolen goods. If the green one bites, and asks in a whisper “How much?” the dodger whips one off the string, and rapidly ejaculates “Two bob; it’s the best of the lot, but the hottest, so I wants to drop it;” which means that in consideration of its being the last stolen, and consequently the most likely to get the holder into trouble, it shall be sold at the low price of two shillings. If the guilty goose gives but half the sum asked, the dodger comes off with a swinging profit.

Finally, hot can also mean popular or trendy. That sense too is from the nineteenth century. From Hume Nisbet’s novel The Bushranger’s Sweetheart:

“That paper of yours is beginning to make a bit of excitement in the financial world,” observed the miner.

“Ah, you bet on that. We’re hot, and already have scored some points and bagged a few dimes; but hold on a bit, we’re only beginning with our muckrake.”

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Sources:

Beowulf. R.D. Fulk, ed. The Beowulf Manuscript. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 3. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2010, lines 2293b–2299a.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. “General Prologue.” Canterbury Tales. Harvard’s Geoffrey Chaucer Website, lines 623–28.

Gower, John. Confessio Amantis. G.C. Macaulay, ed. John Gower’s English Works, vol. 1. Early English Text Society, Extra Series 81. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1900, 116–17, lines 1.2972–78. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2022, s.v. hot, adj.

Matsell, George W. Vocabulum; or, the Rogue’s Lexicon. New York: 1859, 43. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Milliken, Edwin James. “’Arry on the Turf.” Punch, 29 June 1878, 297. Gale Primary Sources: Punch.

Nisbet, Hume. The Bushranger’s Sweetheart: An Australian Romance. London: F.V. White, 1892, 73–74. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2008, s.v. hot, adj. and n.1.

“A Scramble Through the ‘Ditch.’” Illustrated Times, 11 January 1862, 30. NewspaperArchive.

“The Seafarer.” Robert E. Bjork, ed. Old English Shorter Poems, Volume 2: Wisdom and Lyric. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 32. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2014, lines 58–66b.

Photo credit: ESA/NASA/SOHO, 1999. Public domain image.

exception that proves the rule

Sign that reads, “no parking this side.” This fact that there is an exception forbidding parking on one side of the street indicates that parking on the other side of the street is permitted.

19 October 2022

The exception proves the rule is an odd phrase for present-day speakers of English. It seems illogical to demonstrate the truth of something by using evidence that contradicts it. But it is a translation of an old Latin maxim that states the presence of an exception to a law is evidence that the law exists. For instance, if you see a sign that says “no parking on Sundays,” you can be sure that parking is allowed the other six days of the week.

English use of the Latin maxim starts appearing in the seventeenth century. In a 1617 tract holding that the king had authority over bishops, theologian Samuel Collins wrote:

Haue you not heard, that indefinites are equiualent to vniuersalls, especially where one exception beeing made, it is plaine that all others are thereby cut off, according to the rule Exceptio figit regulam in non exceptis.

The Latin translates as: the exception establishes the rule in [cases] not excepted.

And in his 1623 De augmentis scientiarum, Francis Bacon gives this aphorism as number seventeen in a list of such maxims:

In legibus et statutis brevioris stili, extensio facienda est liberius. At in illus quae sunt enumerativa casuum particularium, cautius. Nam ut exceptio firmat vim legis in casibus non exceptis, ita enumeratio infirmat eam in casibus non enumeratis.

This aphorism would be translated into English by Gilbert Watts in 1640 and included in an edition of Bacon’s Of the Advancement and Proficience of Learning:

In Lawes and Statutes of a compendious stile, extention may be made more freely; but in those Lawes which are punctuall in the enumeration of Cases Particular, more warily: for as exception strengthens the force of a Law, in Cases not excepted; so enumeration weakens it, in Cases not enumerated.

And the phrase in the wording we’re familiar with today appears in John Wilson’s preface to a 1663 edition of his comedic play, The Cheats:

For if I have shewn the odd practices of two vain persons, pretending to what they were not, I think I have sufficiently justifi’d the Brave man, even by this Reason, That the Exception proves the Rule.

The phrase is sometimes misinterpreted by using the archaic sense of prove meaning to test, that is, an exception tests the limits of a law. But that is not the original sense of the phrase.

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Sources:

Bacon, Francis. “Aphorisme 17.” Of the Advancement and Proficience of Learning. Gilbert Watts, trans. Oxford: Leon Lichfield for Robert Young and Edward Forrest, 1640, 440. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

———. “Aphorismus 17.” De augmentis scientiarum (1623). The Works of Francis Bacon, vol. 3. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, Douglas Denon Heath, eds. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, c. 1900, 141. Internet Archive.

Collins, Samuel. Epphata to F.T. Cambridge: Cantrell Legge, 1617, 100. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

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

Shapiro, Fred. “Proverbs 91.” The New Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale UP, 2021, 655.

Wilson, John. The Cheats: A Comedy. London: G. Bedell and T. Collins, 1663, sig. A2v. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Photo credit: Yinan Chen, 2013. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

dizzy

A photo pointing up at a tree and taken with the camera spinning, providing a representation of dizziness or vertigo

17 October 2022

Dizzy is a good example of a word whose meaning has shifted since its coinage. It now generally refers to a sense of vertigo and a tendency to fall down, but originally it meant foolish or in error. That early sense is not entirely lost—we see it contexts like the misogynistic dizzy blonde—but it has largely been overtaken by the newer meaning.

Dizzy traces back to the Old English dysig. We see it in the translation of Matthew 7:26:

And ælc þæra þe gehyrþ ðas mine word and þa ne wyrcð se biþ gelic þam dysigan men, þe getimbrode hys hus ofer sand-ceosel

(But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not implement them is like the dizzy man who built his house on sand washed by the tide.)

In Old English it was also a verb meaning to act foolishly or rashly, dysigian. Here is the verb in a poetic translation of Psalm 94:10 (Psalm 95 in the Hebrew and Protestant Bibles):

Nu ic feowertig    folce þyssum
wintra rimes    wunade neah,
aa and symble cwæð,     and eac swa oncneow,
þæt hi on heortan    hyge dysegedan.

(I have now lived near this people for forty winters, always and ever saying, and also observing, that they dizzied in their heart’s intentions.)

The vertigo sense appears during the Middle English period. The Oxford English Dictionary places this use of dizzy, found in the anonymous poem The Pricke of Conscience, written 1325–50, under the vertigo sense, but given that the context is dementia caused by old age, it would seem the original foolish sense is more apt.

Bot als tyte als a man waxes alde,
Þan waxes his kynde wayke and calde,
Þan chaunges his complexcion
And his maners and his condicion;
Than waxes his hert hard and hevy,
And his heved feble and dysy;
Þan waxes his gaste seke and sare,
And his face rouncles, ay mare and mare.

(But also quickly as a man grows old,
Then his nature grows weak and cold,
Then changes his complexion
And his manners and his condition;
Then his heart grows hard and heavy,
And his head feeble and dizzy;
Then his spirit grows sick and sore,
And his face wrinkles, always more and more.)

But we definitely see the vertigo sense by the early sixteenth century. It appears in John Skelton’s poem Magnyfycence, published posthumously in 1533

I blunder I bluster I blowe and I blother
I make on the one day, and I marre on the other
Busy, busy, and euer busy,
I daunce up and downe tyll I am dyssy
I can fynde fantasyes where none is
I wyll not have it / so I will have it this

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Sources:

Dictionary of Old English: A to I, 2018, s.v. dysig, adj., dysigian, v.

The Gospel According to Saint Matthew in Anglo-Saxon and Northumbrian Versions. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1858, Matthew 7:26, 60. Archive.org.

Metrical Psalm 94:10. Old English Psalms. Patrick P. O’Neill, ed. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 42. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2016, 374.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. dusi(e, adj. and n.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. dizzy, adj., dizzy v.

The Pricke of Conscience (1325–50). Richard Morris, ed. Berlin: A. Asher for the Philological Society, 1863, lines 766–73.

Skelton, John. Magnyfycence. J. Rastell, 1533, sig. Civ.v. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Photo credit: THX0477. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

Big Bang

The Andromeda Galaxy (M31), the nearest spiral galaxy to our own Milky Way, about 2,400 million light-years distant, and part of our local group of galaxies.

14 October 2022

The Big Bang is the name given to a variety of models that explain how the universe suddenly began expanding from an incomprehensibly dense and hot state some 13.8 billion years ago.

The modern idea of an expanding universe was first proposed by Belgian physicist (and Catholic priest) Georges Lemaître in 1927. Two years later astronomer Edwin Hubble would provide the observational basis that confirmed Lemaître’s model. Four years later, Lemaître updated his idea of an expanding universe with the proposal that the universe began with the explosion of l'atome primitive (the primeval atom). The theory was developed further in the late 1940s by physicists George Gamow and Ralph Alpher, resulting in a joint paper for which Gamow recruited physicist Hans Bethe as a co-author—even though Bethe had made no substantive contribution to the work—so he could make an alpha-beta-gamma pun. (Alpher, who was a graduate student at the time, objected to the pun as it diluted his contribution to the work—and in academia, credit is everything, especially to early-career researchers.)

In these early years, while there was a solid observational foundation for the expansion of the universe, the Big Bang theory lacked substantial observational confirmation. It wouldn’t be until the 1965 discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation, the residue of the Big Bang, that the theory became generally accepted. In these early years, the chief theory competing with the Big Bang was the Steady State theory, championed by English astronomer Fred Hoyle. And it was Hoyle who first coined the term big bang to describe the competing theory. He did so in a March 1949 BBC broadcast, a transcript of which was printed the following month in the BBC’s weekly magazine, the Listener:

We now come to the question of applying the observational tests to earlier theories. These theories were based on the hypothesis that all the matter in the universe was created in one big bang at a particular time in the remote past.

[…]

But [Hoyle’s “continuous creation” hypothesis] replaces a hypothesis that lies concealed in the older theories, which assume, as I have already said, that the whole of the matter in the universe was created in one big bang at a particular time in the remote past. On scientific grounds this big bang hypothesis is much less palatable of the two. For it is an irrational process that cannot be described in scientific terms. Continuous creation, on the other hand, can be represented by precise mathematical equations whose consequences can be compared with observation. On philosophical grounds too I cannot see any good reason for preferring the big bang idea.

That same issue of the Listener published a letter by an A.G. Walker responding to Hoyle’s broadcast that also used the term:

Mr. Hoyle suggests that his hypothesis is not additional but replaces a creation hypothesis in previous theories, and that in these theories the universe is assumed to have been created instantaneously, “with a big bang” as he put it. In fact these theories say nothing at all about the mechanism of creation. Scientists as individuals may have ideas on this subject but not science, at least not the theories prior to Mr. Hoyle’s. In cosmology the “epoch of creation” is the epoch when physical laws first existed pretty much as they are today, and no scientific theory can take us back beyond that epoch. What happened before then, whether matter existed in a different form or whether there was a “big bang,” is something about which science, the study of observables, can tell us nothing.

Hoyle would go on to give a five-part lecture series on the BBC in early 1950, and in the final part, broadcast in March 1950, he would use big bang again:

First I will consider the older ideas—that is to say the ideas of the nineteen-twenties and the nineteen-thirties, and then I will go on to offer my own opinion. Broadly speaking, the older ideas fall into two groups. One was that the Universe started its life a finite time ago in a single huge explosion, and that the present expansion is a relic of the violence of this explosion. The big bang idea seemed to me to be unsatisfactory even before detailed examination showed that it leads to serious difficulties.

[…]

From time to time people ask where the created material comes from. Well it does not come from anywhere. Material simply appears—it is created. At one time the various atoms composing the material do not exist and at a later time they do. This may seem a very strange idea and I agree that that it is but in science it does not matter how strange an idea may seem so long as it works—that is to say so long as the idea can be expressed in a precise form and so long as its consequences are found to be in agreement with observation. In any case the whole idea of creation is queer. In the older theories all the material in the Universe is supposed to have appeared at one instant of time, the whole creation process taking the form of one big bang. For myself I find this idea much queerer than continuous creation.

Hoyle’s use of the term was mildly derisive, but proponents of the Big Bang theory adopted it and made it their own. Hoyle was wrong in his assessment of the theory, but to be fair when he initially expressed his doubts, those doubts were justified given the state of the science at the time. But Hoyle never accepted the theory’s validity, even after the evidentiary support for the theory became overwhelming, which is a mark against him. Hoyle died in 2001.

And while the overall concept of the Big Bang is generally accepted by physicists, no single model of how it happened adequately explains all the observations, so the debate on the exact nature of the Big Bang and the subsequent expansion of the universe continues.

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Sources:

Hoyle, Fred. “Continuous Creation.” The Listener, 7 April 1949, 568. Gale Primary Sources: The Listener.

———. “Man’s Place in the Expanding Universe.” The Listener, 9 March 1950, 420–21. Gale Primary Sources: The Listener.

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

Walker, A.G. “Continuous Creation” (Letter). The Listener, 7 April 1949, 588. Gale Primary Sources: The Listener.

Photo credit: Dave Wilton, 2022.