ale / beer

A glass of pale ale

1 February 2023

In Present-Day usage, beer is more commonly used than ale, and for many beer is a more general category of which ale is a subset. But there are those who distinguish between the two. The distinction between the two, however, has changed over the centuries.

Both words trace back to Old English. In Old English, ealu (ale) was by far more common than beor (beer). Ealu appears some 225 times in the extant corpus, while beer appears only about 60 times. Ealu usually referred to what today we would recognize as ale or beer, and it was also used to gloss the Latin cervisia and caelia, but it could be used more generally to mean any intoxicating drink, including wine. Beor, on the other hand, was used to refer to a sweeter brewed beverage, made with fruits or honey. This passage about John the Baptist from one of Ælfric of Eynsham’s late tenth-century sermons makes use of both terms:

Iohannes ða ða he gestiðod wæs ða wolde he forbugan ða unðeawas þe men begað. and ferde ða to westene. and ðaær wonode oð þæt he fullweaxen wæs. and ðær swiðe stiðlice leofode. ne dranc he naðor ne win. ne beor. ne ealu. ne nan ðæra wætena ðe men of druncniað

(John, when he had grown strong, then he would abstain from vices that men practice, and then went into the wilderness and dwelled there until he was full grown, and lived there very abstemiously, he drank neither wine, nor beer, nor ale, nor any of those liquors that men drink of.)

Beer remained the rarer word until the sixteenth century, when hops began to be widely used in the brewing industry, and it became the term for a brew made with hops. Ale remained, for a time, a hop-less beverage.

But that too changed, and eventually ale began to be brewed with hops, and that distinction between the two words was lost. Instead, ale began to refer to a brew fermented at a higher temperature and where the yeast gathered at the top of the cask, whereas beer was brewed at a lower temperature and the yeast would fall to the bottom. And today, ales tend to be hoppier than beers. Those are the technical distinctions that most brewers observe today, although there is considerable overlap between the two in common usage, and relatively few consumers of the beverages are aware of the technical distinctions.

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Sources:

Ælfric. “#3. “VIII. Idus. Ianuarii. Sermo in Aepiphania Domini.” In Malcolm Godden, Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies: The Second Series Text. Early English Text Society, SS 5. London: Oxford UP, 1979, 19.

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

Godden, Malcolm. Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies: Introduction, Commentary, and Glossary. Early English Text Society, SS 18. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000, 364.

Google Books Ngram Viewer, 4 January 2023, s.v. beer, ale.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2012, s.v. ale, n.; second edition, 1989, s.v. beer, n.1.

Image credit: Alan Levine, 2016. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

die

“The Garden of Death” (“Kuoleman Puutarha”), by Hugo Simberg, 1906

30 January 2023

We expect that basic vocabulary words trace back to Old English, and that is the case with the verb to die, except there is a twist with this one. The verb to die comes from the Proto-Germanic *dawjan, but this word only survived in the North Germanic languages. It does not seem to have made it directly into Old English or into the East Germanic Gothic, and it fell out of use in the Continental West Germanic languages in the early medieval period.

Old English had several other verbs meaning to die: sweltan, which survives in the Present-Day adjective sweltering; steorfan, the Present-Day form of which is to starve, although in Old English it could mean dying by any means, not just lack of food; and cwelan and acwelan, which give us the Present-Day to quell.

The verb was introduced in the north of England, via the Old Norse deyja, in the late Old English period, and we see uses of the variants deadian and *gedeþan, in the past participle form gedeþed, in Northumbrian glosses of Latin gospels and liturgical texts. From this we can surmise that it had currency as a dialectal term in the north during the late Old English period—Old Norse having had the strongest influence on English in the north.

We start seeing wider use of the verb in the twelfth century. It appears in the c.1135 poem bearing the modern title of History of the Holy Rood-Tree:

Eala þu leofæ freond ic halsiȝe ðe þurh god sylfne þ[æt] ðu underfo minne sunæ & þa ȝestreon þe ic him læfe forþan ðe ic nu deȝen sceal.

(Lo, you dear friend, I beseech you by God himself that you take charge of my son & the possessions that I leave him, because I shall now die.)

And it is found in the c.1175 manuscript known as the Ormulum. From one of the homilies in that manuscript:

& off þiss illke seᵹᵹde þuss
   Daviþþ þe Sallmewrihhte
Till defless þewwess, þatt he sahh
   Þe flæshess wille follᵹhenn;
ᵹe shulenn deᵹenn all se men;
   Forr þiss iss tunderrstanndenn
Alls iff he seᵹᵹde þuss till hemm
   Wiþþ all full open spæche;
ᵹe shulenn deᵹenn ifel dæþ
   To dreᵹhen helle pine,
Forr þatt ᵹe follᵹhenn i þiss lif
   All ᵹure flæshess wille.

(& of this same thus said
   David the Psalm-writer
To the devil’s servant that he saw
   Following the flesh’s will;
Certainly all the men must die
   For this is understood
And if he said thus to him
   With full open speech
If he should die an evil death
   To suffer torment in helle
Because you follow in this life
   All your flesh’s will.)

It also appears in one of the later copies of one of Ælfric’s homilies. The version of his homily for the first Sunday after Pentecost that is found in the c. 1175 Oxford, Bodleian MS Bodley 343 reads:

Nú ne sceole ge healdan eowre child to plihte
to lange hæþene, for ðan þe heo nabbað
infær to heofonum, gif hi hæþene dægeð.

(Now, should you not protect your child from the peril
of becoming heathen, because then he will not have
entrance to heaven if he dies a heathen.)

Earlier manuscripts containing this sermon use acwelan in this passage.

So, the English verb to die actually died and was reborn.

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Sources:

Ælfric. “Dominica I post Pentecosten.” In John C. Pope, ed. Homilies of Ælfric: A Supplementary Collection, vol. 1 of 2. Early English Text Society, 259. London: Oxford UP, 1967, 483, lines 106–08. Oxford, Bodleian MS Bodley 343.

Dictionary of Old English: A to I, 2018: s.v. degan, v., deadian, v., gedeþed, past. part.

Holt, Robert, ed. The Ormulum, vol. 2 of 2. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1878, 182–83, lines 15,428–39. Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Junius 1. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, dien, v.

Napier, Arthur S., ed. History of the Holy Rood-Tree. Early English Text Society, OS 103. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1894, 14. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. die, v.1.

Image credit: Hugo Simberg, 1906. Digital reproduction by Rafael Vargas, 2012. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image as a mechanical reproduction of a public domain work.

argon

A vial holding argon ice that is melting. The vial, containing argon gas, had been immersed in liquid nitrogen, causing the gas to freeze. It started melting upon removal.

27 January 2023

The existence of argon, element number 18, was hypothesized by British physicist Henry Cavendish in 1785, but the element was not isolated until 1894, when the 3rd Baron Rayleigh (John William Strutt) and William Ramsay accomplished that task. Rayleigh and Ramsay took the name from the Greek άργός (argos, meaning inactive) as the element is non-reactive.

Reference to Rayleigh and Ramsay’s discovery of argon was first reported in the medical journal the Lancet of 29 December 1894:

ARGON.

We learn that Lord Rayleigh and Professor Ramsay will read a paper at the meeting of the Royal Society on the 31st prox. on an element stated to exist in the atmosphere. As the element has actually received a name (argon), there seems to be no doubt that the new candidate is entitled to a seat among the earlier-known elements after all.

(The Oxford English Dictionary credits this announcement to the Daily News (London) on the day prior. But that paper credits the Lancet and repeats the announcement as it appears in that journal word for word. It seems that, as is often the case with journals, actual production and release of the issue preceded its official date of publication.)

Rayleigh and Ramsay delivered their paper, titled Argon, a New Constituent of the Atmosphere, to the Royal Society on 31 January 1895. In their paper, they wrote of the name:

We do not claim to have exhausted the possible reagents. But this much is certain, that the gas deserves the name “argon,” for it is a most astonishingly indifferent body, inasmuch as it is unattacked by elements of very opposite character, ranging from sodium and magnesium on the one hand, to oxygen, chlorine, and sulphur on the other.

The day following the delivery of their paper, the Daily Telegraph published the following rather nationalistic account of the discovery and the naming of the element, titled Mystery of the Air. A Triumph for British Science. The article is dissonant with the ethos of present-day science but is characteristic of the Victorian era:

Nature often eludes, but never tricks her disciple. “Here,” therefore said the patient investigators, “is an undiscovered form of matter. What are its properties?” One of these was an invincible reluctance to combine with anything else. It would have nothing to do with oxygen, chlorine, phosphorus, sodium, platinum, and various other substances. Even the gentle persuasion of the electric arc was in vain to make it take up companionship with anything else. Hence the philosophers have called their protégé Argon, from the obvious Greek roots signifying inert, or wanting in energy. Too much reliance must not be placed on this bland innocence of Argon. The nitrogen of the air is itself one of the quietest of substances. At first glance it seems as though its great use was to prevent the oxygen burning up everything. Without its presence in the atmosphere steel itself would blaze away, and every diamond in a lady’s tiara would scintillate into millions of dancing particles. Gentle nitrogen prevents all this; but try it in nitroglycerine, and how different its behaviour! Indeed the nitrogen compounds are the armoury of the Anarchist, and so it may happen that when more is known of Argon its character for meekness and inactivity may require modification.

Until 1957, the chemical symbol for argon was generally taken to be A. But that year the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC), which governs official chemical nomenclature, changed it to Ar, the symbol in use today, to bring it in line with the other noble gases, which all have two-letter symbols. Ar had been in occasional use since at least 1908.

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Sources:

“Argon.” Daily News (London), 28 December 1894, 3. British Newspaper Archive.

“Argon.” The Lancet, 29 December 1894, 1573. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Cavendish, Henry. “Experiments on Air” (2 June 1785). Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 75.75, December 1785, 372–84.

“Mystery of the Air. A Triumph for British Science.” Daily Telegraph (London), 1 February 1895, 3. Gale Primary Sources: The Telegraph Historical Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2011, s.v. Ar, n.2, A, n.; second edition, 1989, s.v. argon, n.

Rayleigh, Lord (John William Strutt) and William Ramsay. “Argon, a New Constituent of the Atmosphere” (31 January 1895), Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London (A), 186, 1895, 234. Nineteenth Century Collections Online.

Photo credit: unknown photographer, 2007. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a  GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2

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.