mastodon

Painting of a mastodon (Mammut americanum). A hairy, elephant-like creature with long tusks.

9 November 2022

The mastodon is an extinct animal belonging to the genus Mammut and the order Proboscidea, which includes the mammoth and the present-day elephant. Mastodons ranged throughout North and Central America. They went extinct some 12,000 years ago, at the end of the Pleistocene era.

Mastodon is also the name of a social media platform similar in some respects to Twitter.

The name mastodonte was coined by French naturalist Georges Cuvier in 1806 from the Greek μαστός (mastos, breast) and ὀδούς (odous, tooth) because projections on the crowns of mastodon molars resemble nipples. The form mastodon appears in English by 1811. In those early years, the distinction between and classification of mammoths and mastodons were not firmly set, and it can be difficult to determine in writing from that era which of the present-day classifications those two words refer to.

The English word is borrowed from Cuvier’s French. Thomas Jefferson used mastodont in a 10 September 1809 letter to William Clark, of Lewis and Clark expedition fame:

the bones of this animal are now in such a state of evanescence as to render it important to save what we can of them. of those you had formerly sent me I reserved a very few for myself, got Doctr Wistar to select from the rest every piece [sic] which could be interesting to the Philosophical society, & sent the residue to the National institute of France. these have enabled them to decide that the animal was neither a Mammoth nor an elephant, but of a distinct kind, to which they have given the name of Mastodont, from the protuberances of it’s [sic] teeth. these from their form & the immense mass of their jaws, satisfy me this animal must have been arboriverous. nature seems not to have provided other food sufficient for him; & the limb of a tree would be no more to him than a bough of Cotton tree to a horse.

In 1811, paleontologist and surgeon James Parkinson, who was also the first to describe what we today call Parkinson’s disease, was among the first to use the form mastodon:

Walch, Wallerius and Gmelin, have supposed the fossil jaw found in the neighborhood of Bologna, De Monum. Diluv. In agro bonon. detecto, to have belonged to the walrus; but Cuvier has plainly shown, that it is the remains of a small species of the mammoth (Mastodon), as will be more particularly noticed in a succeeding letter.

I am unable to speak decidedly of a fossil tooth, said to be found in a bed of alluvial matters, in Norfolk. Its substance is very considerably changed: it is about fifteen inches in length, and appears to be nearly perfect at its extremities; although one side of it, and considerable portion of its internal substance is removed. The fineness of its grain and its edge not manifesting the peculiar lozenge-formed decussations observed in the ivory of the elephant and of the mammoth (Mastodon), with the size and form of the tooth, lead to the suspicion of its having belonged to an animal of this genus.

Cartoon drawing of a mastodon used as the mascot for the social media service

The social media service named Mastodon was launched on 5 October 2016 by its creator Eugen Rochko. He announced it on the site Hacker News:

Plans for the project: I'm a realist so I don't think that it will be able to compete with Twitter. However I would like this project to become the go-to option for people who are already inclined to prefer decentralized/self-hosted solutions, and simply be better than the other software in that space.

No, I don't plan to monetize. Mastodon is open-source, licensed under AGLPv3. However I do have a Patreon through which interested people could support me while I work on it.

The social media service gained widespread public attention in November 2022 after Elon Musk purchased Twitter and users of that service sought an alternative. Rochko’s choice of Mastodon as the name was apparently random. He commented on the name in Time in November 2022:

That got me thinking that, you know, being able to express myself online to my friends through short messages was actually very important to me, important also to the world, and that maybe it should not be in the hands of a single corporation that can just do whatever it wants with it. I started working on my own thing. I called it Mastodon because I’m not good at naming things. I just chose whatever came to my mind at the time. There was obviously no ambition of going big with it at the time.

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Sources:

Conniff, Richard. “Mammoths and Mastodons: All American Monsters.” Smithsonian, April 2010.

Jefferson, Thomas. Letter to William Clark, 10 September 1809. The Papers of Thomas Jefferson Digital Edition, University of Virginia.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2001, s.v. mastodon, n., mastodont, n. and adj.

Parkinson, James. “Letter 22. Fossil Remains of Mammalia.” Organic Remains of a Former World, vol. 3 of 3. London: Sherwood, Neely, and Jones, 1811, 310. Gale Primary Sources: Nineteenth Century Collections Online.

Perrigo, Billy. “Thousands Have Joined Mastodon Since Twitter Changed Hands.” Time, 6 November 2022 (updated 7 November 2022).

Rochko, Eugen (pseudonym Gagron). “Show HN: A New Decentralized Microblogging Platform.” Hacker News, 5 October 2016.

Image credits: Charles R. Knight, 1897. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image; Rochko, Eugen, 2018, licensed under a GNU Affero General Public License.

calculus

A graph depicting a tangent line and its derivative

9 November 2022

[14 November 2022: added the final sentence for clarification]

For many, if not most, calculus is associated with suffering, whether it be suffering through a math class or passing a kidney stone. The word calculus comes from Latin, where it means stone, either a pebble or a hard accretion that forms in the body. Calculus is a diminutive of calx, literally meaning “little stone.” That explains why calculus is a medical term for a kidney stone, but where does the mathematical sense come from?

You’ve probably guessed the correct answer. It comes from calculations using stone counters or abaci.

English use of calculus to mean a small, hard object, be it formed geologically or biologically, dates to Middle English. John Trevisa uses it in his translation of Bartholomæus Anglicus’s De proprietatibus rerum (On the Properties of Things), which was completed sometime before 1398:

Calculus is a litel stoon ymedled with erthe and is round and most hard and pure and most smoþe and playn in euerich syde, and haþ þat name calculus for it is ytrodden with feet wiþoute gref of his smeþenesse and playnnes. And contrarie herto is a litel stoon þat hatte scrupulous “cheselle” and is most rough and scharpe and ful light. If it falleþ betwene a mannes foot and þe schoo it grieueth ful sore. And no such stones þat [ben] scharpe and harde ben cleped scrupea, as Isider seiþ libro xvi. Capitulo iii. And ofte in the body of a beste þis stoon bredeþ of hoote humours and glemy, now in þe bleddre and now in þe reynes, as Costantyn seiþ. Loke byfore libro vii. De passionibus renum.

(Calculus is a little stone mixed with earth and is round and very hard and pure and very smooth and plain on all sides, and has the name calculus for it is trod upon by feet without injury because of its smoothness and plainness. And in contrast to it is a little stone that is called scrupulous “cheselle” and is very rough and sharp and very light. If it falls between a man’s foot and the shoe it hurts very sorely. And no such stones that are sharp and hard are called scrupea, according to Isidore, book 16, chapter 3. And often in the body of a beast this stone grows from hot and viscous humors, sometimes in the bladder and sometimes in the kidneys, according to Constantine [the African]. Look in book 7 of About Diseases of the Kidneys.)

Both scrupulous (Latin) and cheselle or chesil (English) mean small, sharp pebbles or gravel, such as those found on some beaches. The English word comes from the Latin cisellum, a diminutive of caesum (cutting), which is also the root of chisel and scissors.

The mathematical sense of calculus starts to develop in the mid seventeenth century. It is first used to refer to stones or counters used for counting. We see this use in Charles Hoole’s 1649 Latin textbook, although he uses it as a Latin, not an English, word:

a counter, Calculus, li. m.
ship-counters, or counters to cast account with, Abaculi.

But a dozen years later it is recorded as an English word in Thomas Blount’s 1661 Glossographia, a dictionary of “hard words”:

Calcule (calculus) and account or reckoning; a Table-man, Chess-man, or Counter to cast accounts withal.

And by the end of the seventeenth century, calculus is being used to mean a method of calculation. From John Arbuthnot’s 1692 Of the Laws of Chance:

The Calculus of the preceeding Problems is left out by Mons. Hugens, on purpose that the ingenious Reader may have the satisfaction of applying the former Method himself; it is in most of them more laborious than difficult.

And the specific terms differential calculus and integral calculus are in place by first half of the eighteenth century. These are not direct developments within English, but rather calques of French and German to describe the work of Leibniz.

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Sources:

Arbuthnot, John. Of the Laws of Chance. London: Benjamin Motte, 1692, 48. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Blount, Thomas. Glossographia, or, a Dictionary Interpreting All Such Hard Words of Whatsoever Language Now Used in Our Refined English Tongue. London: Thomas Newcombe for George Sawbridge, 1661, s.v. calcule. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Hoole, Charles. An Easie Entrance to the Latine Tongue. London: William Dugard for Joshua Kirton, 1649, 309. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Lewis, Charlton T. and Charles Short. A Latin Dictionary. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1879, s.v. calculus, n. Brepols: Database of Latin Dictionaries.

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

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. calculus, n., integral, adj. and n.; third edition, March 2016, s.v. differential, adj. and n.

Trevisa, John. On the Properties of Things: John Trevisa’s Translation of Bartholomæus Anglicus De Proprietatibus Rerum, vol. 2 of 3. Oxford: Clarendon Press: 1975, 16.20, 837–38.

Image credit: Cristian Quinzacara, 2021. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

earl

Statue of Byrhtnoth, the English earl who died leading the English forces against Danish raiders at Maldon in 991 CE. The statue was created by sculptor John Doubleday and stands at the battle site. Statue of a bearded man in helmet and mail armor, holding a round shield at his side and a sword aloft.

7 November 2022

Earl is a title of English nobility, corresponding in rank to the Continental count. It comes to us from the Old English eorl, although that term did not have quite the same meaning as it would in later periods. It’s cognate with a number of words in other Germanic languages, such as the Old Saxon erl (man), the Old Icelandic and Danish jarl, the Norn iarl, and the Old Swedish iärl. Its further etymology is uncertain, but it could come from the same root as the Old Icelandic jara (battle) or ern (vigorous, which would give us earnest).

Early medieval England did not have the complex hierarchy of rank that would be present in later periods, and originally eorl wasn’t a specific rank or title, but was rather a generic designation for a nobleman. As such, it contrasted with ceorl (churl), which referred to a free commoner, a peasant. Here is an example of this general sense from the poem The Battle of Maldon. The battle was fought in 991 CE, and the poem was probably written within a few years of the battle:

Wod þa wiges heard,    wæpen up ahof,
bord to gebeorge,    and wið þæs beornes stop.
Eode swa anræd    eorl to þam ceorle,
ægþer hyra oðrum    yfeles hogode.

(The battle-hardened one advanced, his weapon upraised, his shield as protection, and stepped toward that man. The earl approached the churl just as resolutely, each of them intended harm to the other.)

While The Battle of Maldon uses the word in its usual meaning, there was also a poetic use of eorl meaning a warrior, which makes sense given that noblemen were essentially professional warriors. We can see this poetic use in Beowulf, in the scene where Beowulf has come into Heorot and is about to greet Hrothgar:

Hwearf þa hrædlice    þær Hroðgar sæt
eald ond anhar    mid his eorla gedriht;
eode ellen-rof,    þæt he for eaxlum gestod
Deniga frean;    cuþe he duguðe þeaw.

(He then quickly turned to where Hrothgar sat, old and gray, with his retinue of earls; he went boldly until he stood before (lit. “before the shoulders”) of the king of the Danes; he knew the custom of that people.)

While in its early use eorl simply meant a nobleman of any rank, in later use it took on the additional sense of a specific title. This sense was borrowed from Old Norse, where jarl was a specific noble title, a result of the Danelaw and Danish occupation of much of England. An example of its use as a title can be found in a charter from c.1058 in which King Edward the Confessor affirms the traditional right and title to lands held by priests in Herefordshire. The charter opens with a formulaic greeting that refers to the nobles of that region:

Edward king gret Alred Eurl and Harald Eurl and all his underlynges in Herefordshire ffrendelich.

(King Edward greets in friendship Earl Alred and Earl Harald and all his subjects in Hereforshire.)

It would be the Normans who would create the complex hierarchy of nobility in which an earl ranks above a viscount and below a marquess and equivalent to a Continental count. The female equivalent of an earl is a countess.

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Sources:

Dictionary of Old English: A to I, 2018, s.v. eorl, n.

Dobbie, Elliott Van Kirk. “The Battle of Maldon.” The Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems. The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Record 6. New York: Columbia UP, 1942, lines 130–33.

Fulk, R.D. The Beowulf Manuscript. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 3. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2010, lines 356–59. London, British Library, Cotton MS Vitellius A.xv.

“Harm 49.” Anglo-Saxon Writs. F.E. Harmer, ed. Manchester: Manchester UP: 1952, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson B.329, fol. 104.

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

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2015, s.v. earl, n.

Photo credit: Oxyman, 2008. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

mammoth

A wooly mammoth. A photograph of a model on display at the Royal British Columbia Museum in Victoria. A large, hairy elephant-like creature with enormous tusks.

4 November 2022

[5 November: made corrections to the discussion of Mansi in the second paragraph]

The mammoth is any of a number of extinct species of the genus Mammuthus in the order Proboscidea, an order whose only surviving members are the elephants. Temporally, the mammoth ranged from the Pliocene (some five million years ago) into our current epoch, the Holocene, as recently as some 4,000 years ago. Geographically, early mammoth fossils have been found in Africa, but for most of its existence the mammoth ranged across Eurasia and North America. Mammoth is also an adjective for anything large.

The name mammoth probably originates in a Mansi dialect from the compound *mēmoŋt, meaning earth-horn, a reference to the animal’s tusks. The word in present-day Mansi is maxar (earth-stag). Mansi, formerly known as Vogul, is a group of Uralic languages spoken in Siberia. The Uralic family is a grouping of non-Indo-European languages that includes Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian. The Mansi word was borrowed into Russian in the late sixteenth century as the word mamant (modern spelling mamont), and from there into English and other Western European languages in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The loss of the / n / and the gain of / θ / in these Western European languages is unexplained but may have been influenced by the pronunciation of behemoth.

The Russian word starts making its way into English in the early seventeenth century, but at first only as mentions of the Russian word rather than as Anglicized use. For instance, Richard Finch, a member of an expedition to Siberia on behalf of the London-based Muscovy company, wrote the following in August 1611 in a letter to his corporate masters:

Likewise being at Pechora, Oust Zilma, or any of those parts, there is in the Winter time to bee had among the Samoyeds, Elephants teeth, which they sell in pieces according as they get it, and not by weight. And I haue beene told, they sell the same at a very small rate. It is called in Russe, Mamanta Kaost.

The word appears in a Russian-English lexicon in 1618, but only as a Russian word. English scholar Richard James traveled to Russia in that year, and his notes include the first Russian-English dictionary, which included this entry, which references an old Siberian legend that has the mammoth dwelling underground, a giant mole of sorts, an explanation for why its remains are found buried:

maimanto, as they say a sea eleφant, which is never seene, but accordinge to the Samȣtes he workes himself under grownde and so they finde his teeth or hornes or bones in Pechore and Nova Zemla, of which they make table men in Russia.

(Samȣtes is a reference to the Samoyed people. A table man is a piece or counter used in a game, such as a chess piece.)

Such early references to the Russian word, found in obscure sources, do not appear to have influenced later adoption of mammoth into English.

By the end of the seventeenth century, the word was being used in English but with Russian inflections. From a 1698 translation of Henry William Ludolf’s Some Curious Observations Concerning the Products of Russia:

The Mammotovoy, which is dug out of the Earth in Siberia, is very well worth taking notice of. The common People in Russia relate surprising things concerning its Origin. For they say, they are the Bones of certain Animals, which exceed in bigness any living Creature upon Earth; They make use of it in Physick, as we do of the Unicorn. A friend of mine presented me with a piece of it, which he said was given him by a Muscovite, who had brought it himself out of Siberia, which appears to me to be nothing else than a true Ivory. The more understanding Sort believe them to be Elephants Teeth, which ever since the time of the Deluge, have lain thus under ground.

But by the beginning of the eighteenth century we see mammoth being fully Anglicized. From a translation from the Dutch of E. Ysbrants Ides’s 1706 Three Years Travels from Moscow Over-Land to China:

But the old Siberian Russians affirm that the Mammuth is very like the Elephant; with this only difference, that the Teeth of the former are firmer, and not so straight as those of the latter. They also are of Opinion, that there were Elephants in this Country before the Deluge, when this Climate was warmer, and that their drowned bodies floating on the surface of the Water of that Flood, were at last wash’d and forced into Subterranean Cavities: But that after this Noachian Deluge the Air which was before warm was changed to cold, and that these Bones have lain frozen in the Earth ever since, and so are preserved from putrefaction till they thaw, and come to light; which is no very unreasonable conjecture.

The adjectival use of mammoth to refer to something that is large is in place by the beginning of the nineteenth century. Thomas Jefferson uses it to refer to a side of veal in two letters of 22 October 1801. In one, he thanks the senders of the meat:

I recieved [sic] on the 20th. your favor of the 17th. and this morning arrived the quarter you were so kind as to send me of the Mammoth-veal. tho’ so far advanced as to be condemned for the table, yet it retained all the beauty of it’s appearance, it’s fatness & enormous size. a repetition of such successful examples of enlarging the animal volume will do more towards correcting the erroneous opinions of European writers as to the effect of our climate on the size of animals, than any thing I have been able to do.

In the second, he notes the “Mammoth-veal” weighed 438 pounds.

One of the impetuses of the Lewis and Clark expedition (1803–06) was to combat the idea, common in Europe at the time, that American species were diminutive versions of European ones. Jefferson, enchanted by the finds of mammoth fossils in Russia, hoped the expedition would find living mammoths in the American west. Needless to say, while mammoth fossils can be found in North America, Lewis and Clark did not find any, much less any living specimens of the creature, but this hope may explain Jefferson’s preoccupation with the word.

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Sources:

James, Richard. Русско-Английскийй Словарь (Russko-Angliĭskiĭ Slovarʹ; Russian-English Dictionary) (1618–19). Leningrad: Leningrad University, 1959, 181–82.

Jefferson, Thomas. Letter to John Beckley, 22 October 1801. The Papers of Thomas Jefferson.

Jefferson, Thomas. Letter to Michael Fry and Nathan Coleman, 22 October 1801. The Papers of Thomas Jefferson.

Ides, E. Ysbrants. Three Years Travels from Moscow Over-Land to China. London: W. Freeman, et al., 1706, 26. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Ludolf, Henry William. Some Curious Observations Concerning the Products of Russia. Translated from Latin and included as a supplement to Adam Brand. A Journal of the Embassy from their Majesties John and Peter Alexievitz, Emperors of Muscovy, &c. Over Land into China. London: D. Brown and T. Goodwin, 1698, 122–23. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Merriam-Webster.com, 4 October 2022, s.v. mammoth, n. and adj.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2000, s.v. mammoth, n. and adj.

Purchas His Pilgrimes, vol. 3 of 5. London: William Stansby for Henrie Fetherstone, 1625, 537–38. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Photo credit: Flying Puffin, 2011. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

churl

2 November 2022

The portion of Exeter Cathedral Library MS 3501, fol. 90v quoted below. A tenth-century manuscript written in Anglo-Saxon Square Minuscule.

Churl is a word that isn’t used much anymore, although you will see the adjective churlish from time to time in present-day use, meaning boorish or rude. Churl has a rather straightforward etymology and it’s primarily interesting for its usage in the Old English period, when ceorl was a synonym for a male human.

We see this sense in the poem Beowulf, when Beowulf speaks of how one of Hrothgar’s brothers killed another of his brothers, how he was sentenced to death, and how their father grieved:

Swa bið geomorlic    gomelum ceorle
to gebidanne,     þæt his byre ride
giong on galgan.     Þonne he gyd wrece,
sarigne sang,     þonne his sunu hangað
hrefne to hroðre,     ond he him helpe ne mæg
eald ond infrod    ænige gefremman,
symble bið gemyndgad    morna gehwylce
eaforan ellor-sið.

(Thus, it is mournful for an old churl to live to see his young son swing on the gallows. Then he may tell a tale, a sorrowful song, when his son hangs as a benefit for the raven, and he, old and wise, cannot help to be of any use to him, he will always be reminded each morning of his son’s journey elsewhere.)

It is worth calling out that Hrothgar’s father was a nobleman, so ceorl here carries no connotation of rank. (Cf. earl)

It could also be used more specifically. A ceorl could be a married man, as we see in this passage from the poem that has been dubbed Maxims I. The poem is a collection of proverbs, and this one describes a sailor bringing his dirty clothes back home for his wife to wash:

Scep sceal genægled,     scyld gebunden,
leot linden bord,     leof wilcuma
Frysan wife,     þonne flota stondeð—
biþ his ceol cumen    ond hyre ceorl to ham,
agen ætgeofa,     ond heo hine in laðaþ,
wæsceð his warig hrægl    ond him syleþ wæde niew,
liþ him on londe    þæs his lufu bædeð.

(A ship should be nailed tight, a shield, the light linden boards, bound fast, a dear one made welcome by the Frisian woman, when the ship moors—his boat will have arrived and her churl, her provider, at home, and she leads him inside, washes his dirty clothes and gives him new attire, is gracious to him on land, this his love requires.)

There was a verb form, ceorlian, meaning to marry a man, to take a husband.

And unlike its use in the Beowulf passage above, ceorl could also specify a member of the lowest class of free men, a peasant. Here is a passage from the ninth-century translation of Gregory the Great’s Pastoral Care. The translator was King Alfred (perhaps with help from tutors):

Wietodlice se mæra landbegenga—ðæt wæs sanctus Paulus—he underfeng ða halgan gesomnunga to plantianne ond to ymbhweorfanne, sua se ceorl deð his ortgeard.

(Thus, the great husbandman—that was Saint Paul—he undertook to plant and cultivate the holy congregation, just as the churl does his orchard.)

Prior to the Norman Conquest, a churl was a free man, a respectable estate. But after the Normans took over, many churls were reduced to serfdom, and the word acquired a negative connotation. By the fourteenth century, it had come to mean a person lacking refinement, a boor, and the word was used as a term of abuse. From Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale, written in the late fourteenth century:

He nys nat gentil, be he duc or erl,
For vileyns synful dedes make a cherl.
For gentillesse nys but renomee
Of thyne auncestres, for hire heigh bountee,
Which is a strange thyng to thy persone.

(He is not noble, be he duke or earl,
For a villein’s sinful deeds make a churl,
For nobility is nothing but renown
Of your ancestors, for their great virtue
Which is a thing apart from your character.)

That’s how churl moved from respectability to a low estate.

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Sources:

Chaucer, Geoffrey. “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale.” The Canterbury Tales. Harvard’s Geoffrey Chaucer Website, lines 1157–61.

Dictionary of Old English: A to I, 2018, s.v. ceorl, n., ceorlian, v.

Fulk, R.D., ed. The Beowulf Manuscript. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 3. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2010, lines 2444–51a.

———. The Old English Pastoral Care. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 72. Cambridge: 2021, Harvard UP,  3.40, 308.

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

Muir, Bernard J. “Maxims I.” The Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry, vol. 1 of 2. lines 93–99. Exeter Cathedral Library MS 3501, fol. 90v.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. churl, n., churl, v., churlish, adj.

Image credit: Exeter Cathedral Library and Archives. Public domain image as a mechanical reproduction of a public domain work.