Burma / Myanmar

1991 map of Burma / Myanmar

25 January 2023

Is the country called Burma or Myanmar? And what’s the difference between the two names?

The name of the country has always been spelled မြန်မာ (Myanma) in the Burmese alphabet, but until 1989 the official English translation of the name was Burma. Burmese is a diglossic language, and in the low dialect the ethnonym for the Burman people is Bama, while Myanma is used in the high dialect. The Burmese name is also sometimes transliterated as Mranma. The letters < r > in Myanmar and Burma are found only in English transliterations and are not meant to be pronounced but rather are supposed to mark vowel length. (The original transliteration assumed a British, non-rhotic accent.)

In 1989, the military junta that ruled the country changed the official translation/transliteration to Myanmar. The reason for the change that the junta gave was that the name Burma was a legacy of British colonialism. Because it was instituted by an oppressive and illegitimate military government, many democratic governments refused to recognize the name change and officially continued to refer to the country as Burma. Following the democratic reforms in that country in 2011–12, many of those governments recognized Myanmar as the official name, but the United States still uses Burma in its official communications.

The adjective Burma, referring to the Burmese people, and the noun Burma as the name for the country appear in English writing as early as February 1801. The Monthly Epitome of that month has this:

One curious custom relating to the Burma physicians may be mentioned. If a young woman is dangerously ill, the doctor and her parents frequently enter into an agreement, the doctor undertaking to cure her. If she lives, the doctor takes her as his property; but if she dies, he pays her value to the parents: for in the Burma dominions, no parent parts with his daughter, whether to be a wife, or to be a concubine, without a valuable consideration. I do not know whether the doctor is entitled to sell the girl again, or if he must retain her in his family; but the number of fine young women, which I saw in the house of a doctor at Myeda, makes me think the practice to be very common.

And the Hampshire Chronicle has an article with a dateline of 7 February 1801 that reads, in part:

The last advices from India state, that in consequence of some commotions which had taken place in Burmah, the King of Siam had ordered an immense army to assemble throughout his dominions. This force had already given the Burhams [sic] battle, and a most sanguinary conflict of two days duration ensued, in which the Siamese completely defeated their opponents with immense slaughter.

And there is this geographical description from the Edinburgh Philosophical Journal of April 1820 that refers to both Burma and Myanmar:

North from the country of the Talain, on both sides of the Erawadi and Khiænduæn, is the proper country of the Mranmas, who, for two centuries past, have in general been the most powerful nation in the peninsula; but acknowledge a descent from the Mranmas of Rakhain. Their country by Europeans is commonly called the Kingdom of Ava, from a corrupt pronunciation of Ænwa, the vulgar name for the capital; and the names Mranma, Burma, Birma and Brahma, often given to the nation, are all probably corruptions of Marama, used by the people of Rakhain, from whom, I have said, those of Ava derive their origin.

The names Myanma and Bama are often thought to come from the name of the Hindu god Brahma, but this etymology lacks evidence.

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Sources:

“XVII. Asiatic Researches.” The Monthly Epitome (London), 5.44, February 1801, 103. Gale News Vault: American Historical Periodicals from the American Antiquarian Society.

Everett-Heath, John. Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Place Names, sixth ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2020, s.v. Myanmar. Oxfordreference.com.

Hamilton, Francis. “Art. IX.—An Account of a Map of the Countries Subject to the King of Ava.” Edinburgh Philosophical Journal, 2.4, April 1820, 265–66. Nineteenth Century Collections Online.

Liberman, Mark. “Myanmar Is Mama.” Language Log. 15 October 2007.

“London” (7 February 1801). Hampshire Chronicle (England), 9 February 1801, 4. Gale News Vault: British Library Newspapers.

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

Wells, John. “Myanmar, Shar Peis and Sarnies.” John Wells’s Phonetic Blog, 11 October 2007.

Image credit: US Central Intelligence Agency, 1991. Library of Congress. Public domain image.

hijack / skyjack

Captain John Testrake and a hijacker onboard TWA Flight 847 in Beirut in June 1985

23 January 2023

To hijack is to waylay a vehicle in order to steal it or its cargo. The word also has an extended sense meaning to take control of something and directing it where you want to go, as in hijacking a conversation. The word arises in American criminal slang of the early twentieth century, but exactly why it is called hijacking is unknown.

The hi- or high- may refer to the highway, as early hijackings were of cargo trucks, but that’s just a guess. The -jack element could refer to a metaphorical lifting or hoisting something, although the sense of the verb to jack meaning to steal appears later and seems to be a clipping of hijack rather than the source of that word.

The earliest uses of hijack that I have found come from Oklahoma in 1915–16, with the earliest referring to hijackings of trucks carrying liquor. Interestingly, from what I gather by reading these early newspaper accounts, since Oklahoma was a “dry” state where possession of liquor itself was illegal, stealing it was not actually a criminal offense, and police often didn’t bother to pursue such bandits.

The earliest use of the word that I have found is in the Tulsa Daily World in an article with a dateline of 31 December 1915 and published the following day:

OFFICERS KNOW THE FIELD “HI-JACKERS”
Special to the World.
SHAMROCK, Okla., Dec. 31.—It developed today that the authorities know the names of the seven men who are working as “hi-jackers” on the 18-mile prairie northeast of Shamrock, holding up liquor consignments and confiscating it for their own use and to sell.

And there is this story in the Tulsa Daily World of 26 January 1916 where a posse did in fact pursue and shoot at liquor-truck hijackers:

They explained their failure to stop when so ordered by those of the posse to their opinion that they were being “hi-jacked.” They declared they had absolutely no intention to participate in a holdup when they went to Sand Springs, and were quite surprised when the shooting began.

And this story from the same paper of 5 March 1916 about a man who made a lucrative business out of transporting workers to and from the Oklahoma oil fields uses the word without quotation marks, indicating that the term was already becoming part of the general vocabulary, at least in that part of the country:

He rises as do the Bohemians, before sunrise, and takes his place on the assembling corner where during a day is created business that sometimes amounts to $700 or $800. He takes no chances on stickups and hijackers who go on their beat after dark and put fear into the hearts of night travelers.

In the latter half of 1916 we start to see the word crop up outside of Oklahoma. From an article on criminal slang that appeared in Ohio’s Columbus Dispatch on 10 September 1916:

And just as characteristic are the names that the gentlemen who make faces at the law, have for each other. A paperhanger is an honest profession but over at the penitentiary he’s a forger. Sneak thief, the crooks call him a “healer.” A highway robber is a “highjacker,” and the familiar ones are, burglar, “prowler,” pickpocket, “dip”; police informer, “rat.”

The earliest application of the word I’ve found to waylaying an airplane is in an Associated Press report from 16 April 1959:

4 CUBANS HIJACK AEROPLANE
MIAMI, Fla. (AP)—Four gunmen—three of them former members of dictator Fulgencia Batista’s secret police—captured a Cuban airliner in flight today and forced the pilot to go 325 miles out of his way and land in Miami.

The plane, carrying 17 American and Cuban passengers, landed at Miami International Airport. Police surrounded it immediately and took the hijackers into custody.

From the late 1950s through to the mid 1970s, aircraft hijackings were rampant, with many, like the example above, being flights between Cuba and the United States. In 1961, the variant term skyjack appeared to describe the practice. From the San Antonio Light of 9 August 1961:

Congress is proceeding with admirable if unaccustomed speed to make skyjacking a crime that doesn’t pay.

Legislation to make life imprisonment mandatory for pirating planes has passed the senate aviation subcommittee without dissenting vote and hearings are under way on a companion bill in the house.

The recent wave of skyjacking of U.S. airliners by sympathizers of Cuba’s Communist Castro regime has given impetus to this legislation, which has long been needed to protect passengers and crews in the air.

Use of skyjack has become far less common since the mid 1970s, paralleling a decrease in the number of aircraft hijackings.

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Sources:

Associated Press. “4 Cubans Hijack Aeroplane.” Calgary Herald (Alberta), 16 April 1959, 1. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

“A Bohemian King Now Drives Auto” (4 March 1916). Tulsa Daily World, 5 March 1916, 7. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“Capture Bandits After Pistol Duel.” Tulsa Daily World (Oklahoma), 26 January 1916, 2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2022, s.v. hijack, v., hijack, n.

“Noah Webster of Pen Takes Dip into Crook Talk.” Columbus Dispatch (Ohio), 10 September 1916, 14. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“Officers Know the Field ‘Hi-Jackers.’” Tulsa Daily World (Oklahoma), 1 January 1916, 2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. hijack, v., hijacker, n.

“Piracy Penalty.” San Antonio Light (Texas), 9 August 1961, 42. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Image credit: US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), 1985. Wikipedia Commons. Public domain image.

antimony

A chunk of antimony mined in Andalusia, Spain

20 January 2023

Antimony, atomic number 51, is a lustrous, gray metalloid. The element has been known since antiquity, but the name dates to the medieval period. In classical Latin, the element was called stibium, hence its atomic symbol of Sb. The medieval Latin antimonium is of unknown origin but was probably taken from an unidentified Arabic word into medieval Latin and thence into English. Antimonium was used by Constantinus Africanus of Salerno in the eleventh century and the word appears in Gilbertus Anglicus’s thirteenth-century Compendium medicinae.

The word appears in English c.1425 in the Middle English translation of Guy de Chauliac's Grande Chirurgie (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale angl.25):

Antymoyne is a myne colde in þe firste degre, drye in þe secounde degree.

(Antimony is a cold mineral in the first degree, dry in the second degree.)

In using colde, Guy is associating the mineral with the elements of earth and water and the humors of phlegm and black bile. And in using drye he is associating the mineral with earth and fire and choler and melancholy.

I usually don’t like to refer to a false etymology unless it is one that has some popular currency and needs to be debunked, but Samuel Johnson gives a delightfully incorrect origin for antimony in his 1755 dictionary:

The reason of its modern denomination is referred to Basil Valentine, a German monk; who, as the tradition relates, having thrown some of it to the hogs, observed, that, after it had purged them heartily, they immediately fattened; and therefore, he imagined, his fellow monks would be the better for a like dose. The experiment, however, succeeded so ill, that they all died of it; and the medicine was thenceforward called antimoine; antimonk.

I believe that Johnson knew full well that the etymology was bogus, but he just couldn’t resist it. Neither could I.

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Sources:

Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, 2013, s.v. antimonium, n.. Brepols: Database of Latin Dictionaries.

Johnson, Samuel. A Dictionary of the English Language, vol. 1 of 2. London: W. Strahan, 1755, s.v. antimony, n. Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary Online.

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

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

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

Image credit: Robert Lavinsky, before 2010. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

tongue in cheek

President Barack Obama literally has his tongue in his cheek as jokes about his birth certificate

18 January 2023

To speak with one’s tongue in cheek is to speak whimsically or with insincerity. It’s an idiom that makes no literal sense today, but it dates to the eighteenth century and a practice of making a bulge in one’s cheek with one’s tongue as a gesture of contempt, a 1700s equivalent of extending one’s middle finger.

The use of the gesture is recorded in a description of process serving in a 1735 Scottish legal case:

But Donaldson, to prevent that, proposed to the Declarant, to trust him with the Money, and he would deliver the Process, and the principal Decreet arbitral, and that, in the Space of half an Hour, he would call for the Declarant at the Laigh Coffee-House, and deliver him the Discharge and that he would shut his Tongue in his Cheek at James Wright, and tell him that the Money was in his Pocket, and obtain from him the Discharge.

Writer Tobias Smollett referred to the gesture in a number of his novels. He did so twice in his 1748 Adventures of Roderick Random:

I saluted each of them in order, and when I came to take Mr. Slyboot by the hand, I perceived him thrust his tongue in his cheek, to the no small entertainment of the company; but I did not think proper to take any notice of it, on this occasion.—Mr. Ranter too, (who I afterwards learned was a player) displayed his talents, by mimicking my air, features and voice, while he returned my compliment:—This I should not have been so sensible of, had I not seen him behave in the same manner, to my friend Wagtail, when he made up to them at first.—But for once I let him enjoy the fruits of his dexterity without question or control, resolved however, to chastise his insolence at a more convenient opportunity.

And the second time:

He fixed his eyes on me and asked if I had seen him tremble.—I answered without hesitation, “Yes.”—“Damme, Sir, (said he) d’ye doubt my courage?”—I replied, “Very much.”—This declaration quite disconcerted him.—He looked blank, and pronounced with a faultering voice, “O! ’tis very well—d—n my blood! I shall find a time.”—I signified my contempt of him, by thrusting my tongue in my cheek, which humbled him so much, that he scarce swore another oath during the whole journey.

By the nineteenth century, tongues were being thrust in cheeks to signal that what one was saying was not serious. We have this passage from actor Samuel Ryley’s 1809 memoirs:

Luckily, the officer of justice said nothing, but seem’d to enjoy this warfare of words, by putting his tongue in his cheek, and winking at me, at the same time saying, “Twig the old one.”

The phrase tongue-in-cheek was being used as an adjective denoting insincerity by 1838, as this from Ireland’s Waterford Chronicle of 24 November 1838 attests:

The Mail was not Protestant enough for such a Protestant out-and out [sic] affair—its reporters were excluded; and thus the tactics of the wily Peel, of the imbecile Shaw, and the trading tongue-in-cheek Mail, laughing at the whole pack of dupes, is sacrificed to a newspaper juggle.

And there is this from an 1893 British Labour Party pamphlet which has Liberal Prime Minister William Gladstone speaking insincerely:

With its present slender majority the government could not move a step of its way, save at extreme peril, without their approbation and consent. This, of course, would be annoying to the government and we should no longer see the Grand Old Man unctuously spreading his hands towards them, and, tongue in cheek, commending them to an assembled world as exemplars of all that was wisest and best.

So, Obama was hardly the first politician to do so.

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Sources:

An Exact Copy of the Process Presently Depending Before the Sheriffs of Edinburgh. Edinburgh: 1735, 26. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

“The Feud and the Factions.” Waterford Chronicle (Ireland), 24 November 1838, 4. British Newspaper Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. tongue-in-cheek, adj. and adv., tongue, n.

Ryley, Samuel William. The Itinerant; or, Memoirs of an Actor, vol.1 of 3. London: Sherwood, Neely, and Jones, 1809, 293. Nineteenth Century Collections Online.

Smollett, Tobias George. The Adventures of Roderick Random, vol. 2 of 2. London: J. Osborn, 1748, 100, 196. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Tréguer, Pascal. “Meaning and Origin of the Phrase ‘(With) Tongue in Cheek.’” Wordhistories.net, 21 May 2017.

Washington, Samuel (Elihu). The Case for the 4th Clause. Manchester: Independent Labor Party, 1893, 11. Nineteenth Century Collections Online.

Photo credit: Associated Press, 2011.

at first blush

A scene from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight that makes one blush; Lady Bertilak in Gawain’s bedchamber

16 January 2023

The idiom at first blush means upon first sight or by initial and cursory examination. Like most idioms, it does not make literal sense anymore as blush, in Present-Day English, relates to the color red, in particular to the reddening of the face through either embarrassment or cosmetics. But in this case, the history of the term makes sense of the phrase.

The verb to blush can be traced back to the Old English ablysian. That verb appears some fifteen times in the extant Old English corpus, usually in glosses of Latin psalters. For instance, there is this tenth century gloss of Psalms 6:11:

ablysigen ł scamien & syn drefed ealle fynd mine syn gecerred on hinder & aswarnien swiþe hredlice ł anunga

(Let all my enemies blush / be ashamed & be troubled, let them be turned back & be confounded very quickly / rapidly)

Ablysian here glosses the Latin erubescent, to redden, to blush, to be ashamed.

There is also a single appearance of the verb blysian in the corpus, with the meaning of to flare or burn. Not only does the flame associate the word with the color red, but this form may be the source of our modern verb to blaze. The word’s sole appearance in the extant Old English corpus is in the prose translation of the Psalms that are commonly attributed to King Alfred the Great, which if the attribution is correct would date the composition to the late ninth century, although the surviving manuscript is from the tenth century. From the Old English prose translation of Psalms 17:8:

For þam astah smec for his yrre, and fyr blysede beforan his ansyne

(So smoke rose up because of his ire, and fire blazed before his face.)

The Vulgate uses the verb exardescet, to flare, to blaze

The sense meaning to shine or burn survived as the Middle English blishen, but the sense fell out of use by the Early Modern period.

But in Middle English, in addition to the continued use of blishen to mean to redden, to blush, we also see the verb used to mean to look or gaze at something. This use probably arose out of the optical theory that vision is enabled by beams of light emitted, or blazed forth, from the eyes. For instance, we see the verb used in the sense of to look in the fourteenth-century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in the passage where Gawain first encounters Sir Bertilak’s castle:

Þe walle wod in þe water wonderly depe
Ande eft a ful huge heȝt hit haled vpon lofte,
Of harde hewen ston vp to þe tablez,
Enbaned vnder þe abataylment, in þe best lawe;
And syþen garytez ful gaye gered bitwene,
Wyth mony luflych loupe þat louked ful clene;
A better barbican þat burne blusched vpon neuer.

(The wall waded wondrously deep into the water
And likewise it stretched aloft a very great height,
Of hard hewn stone up to the corbels,
Furnished with parapets under the battlement in the best fashion;
And followed by richly equipped garrets in between,
With many lovely loopholes with clear lines of sight;
A better barbican that knight had never blushed upon.)

And this sense of blush is how we get the phrase at first blush, in other words at first glance. The phrase itself appears by the late sixteenth century in an anti-Puritan tract written by Stephen Bredwell, who was a medical student at the time and who would go on to become better known for his medical treatises. The 1586 tract critiques a purportedly anonymous, radical Puritan text written by an Edward Glover, of whom little is known and whose identity is only known because Bredwell identified him. Bredwell writes:

In the rest of this diuision he hath promised to stand vpon two points. 1. To reconsile some scriptures which seeme at first blush to say the contrarie. 2. To shew what difference the holy Ghost maketh betweene the inner man of the good, and the inner man of the bad.

Although the sense of the verb meaning to look or to gaze became obsolete, the phrase at first blush became fossilized as an idiom. This sense of blush had largely fallen out of use by the time Bredwell wrote the above passage, so it is highly unlikely that Bredwell coined the phrase. Perhaps as more sixteenth-century works become digitized, earlier uses will be found.

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Sources:

Andrew, Malcolm and Ronald Waldron, eds. The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript, fourth edition. Exeter: U of Exeter Press, 2002, 237, lines 787–93. London, British Library, Cotton MS Nero A.x.

Bredwell, Stephen.51. Detection of Ed. Glouers Hereticall Confection. London: John Wolfe, 1586, Early English Books Online.

Dictionary of Old English: A to I, 2018, s.v. blysian, v., a-blysian, v.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, blishen, v.

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

Psalms 6:11. Roeder, Fritz, ed. Der Altenglische Regius-Psalter. Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1904, 8. London, British Library, MS Royal 2.B.5. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Psalms 17:8. O’Neill, Patrick, ed. Old English Psalms. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 42. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2016, 52. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, fonds Latin MS 8824.

Image credit: London, British Library, Cotton MS Nero A.x, fol. 129r. Public domain image as a mechanical reproduction of a public domain work.