earth / middle-earth

The blue-and-white earth, half in shadow, set against the inky blackness of space with the cratered surface of the moon in the foreground

“Earthrise,” the iconic 1968 photo of the earth appearing above the surface of the moon, taken by astronaut Bill Anders onboard Apollo 8 as it orbited the moon

20 February 2023

The word earth dates back to the Old English eorþe, and the Old English word carried the basic meanings we still use today. It can refer to the ground or the soil, and it can refer to the globe, to the planet—although those living in the medieval period did not classify the earth as one of the planets, cf. planet.

We can see earth being used to mean the ground in this passage from Beowulf, in which the titular hero is fighting Grendel’s mother:

Eft wæs anræd,    nalas elnes læt,
mærða gemyndig    mæg Hylaces:
wearþ ða wundenmæl    wrættum gebunden
yrre oretta,    þæt hit on eorðan læg,
stið ond stylecg;    strenge getruwode,
mundgripe mægenes.

(Again, Hygelac’s kinsman was resolved, not at all slow to courage, glory in mind: the angry hero cast away the damascened weapon, bound with ornaments, so that it lay on the earth, stiff and steel-edged; he trusted in his strength, in the hand-grip of the mighty man.)

And we can see earth used to mean the globe in this passage from the poem Exodus, in which God reveals himself to Moses on Mount Sinai:

                                Ða wæs forma sið
þæt hine weroda god    wordum nægde,
þær he him gesægde    soðwundra fela,
hu þas woruld worhte    witig drihten,
eorðan ymbhwyrft    and uprodor,
gesette sigerice,     and his sylfes namen,
ðone yldo bearn    ær ne cuðon,
frod fædera cyn,    þeah hie fela wiston.

(That was the first time the God of Hosts spoke to him, where he said many true and wondrous thing to him, how the wise Lord created the world, the circle of the earth and the heavens above, establishing his victorious kingdom and his own name, which, though they knew much, the sons of men, kin of the wise patriarchs, did not know before.)

Contrary to popular belief, those living in antiquity and the Middle Ages did indeed know the earth was round. Prior to Copernicus, the idea of a heliocentric solar system was not widely accepted, but people knew full well the earth was a sphere. Here is a demonstration of this in Ælfric’s De temporibus anni (About the Seasons of the Year), written in the closing years of the tenth century, in which the monk compares the globe to a pine nut, indicating both that it is not flat and that it is insignificant in relation to the scope of the cosmos:

Witodlice se emnihtes dæg is eallum middanearde an & gelice lang & ealle oðre dagas on twelf monðum habbað mislice langsumnysse; On sumum earde hi beoð lengran on sumum scyrtran for ðære eorðan sceadewunge & ðære sunnan ymbgange; Seo eorðe stent on gelicnysse anre pinnhnyte & seo sunne glit onbutan be Godes gesetnysse.

(Truly, the equinox day is unique in all middle-earth and equally long, and all other days in the twelve months have various lengths. In some lands they are longer, in some shorter, because of the overshadowing of the earth and the circuit of the sun. The earth stands in likeness of a pine nut, and the sun glides around by God’s decree.)

Ælfric also refers to the earth as middanearde, or in its later forms middel-erþe or middle-earth, so called because it was considered to be in between heaven and hell. J.R.R. Tolkien adopted this medieval term as the name for his fantasy world in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien would write of his naming in notes he made about W.H. Auden’s 1956 review of the third book in the trilogy, The Return of the King:

I am historically minded. Middle-earth is not an imaginary world. The name is a modern form (appearing in the 13th century and still in use) of midden-erd > middel-erd, an ancient name for the oikoumenē, the abiding place of Men, the objectively real world, in uses specifically opposed to imaginary worlds (as Fairyland) or unseen world (as Heaven or Hell). The theatre of my tale is the earth, the one in which we now live, but the historical period is imaginary. The essentials of that abiding place are all there (at any rate for inhabitants of N.W. Europe), so naturally it feels familiar, even if a little glorified by the enchantment of distance in time.

Tolkien’s dating to the thirteenth century refers to the Middle English and Present-Day forms, as he includes the Old English form in his discussion. He was too good a scholar of Old English to have missed the earlier form.

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Sources:

Ælfric. Ælfric’s De Temporibus Anni. Heinrich Henel, ed. Early English Text Society, O.S. 213. London: Oxford UP, 1942, 46, 6.4–9.

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

Fulk, R.D., Robert Bjork and John D. Niles, eds. Klaeber’s Beowulf, fourth edition. Toronto: U of Toronto Press, 2008, 52–53, lines 1529–1534a.

Krapp, George Philip. “Exodus.” The Junius Manuscript. Anglo-Saxon Poetic Record 1. New York: Columbia UP, 1931, 91, lines 22–29.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. erthe, n.(1), middel-erthe, n.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, November 2010, s.v. earth, n.1; March 2002, s.v. middle-earth, n. and middenerd, n.

Tolkien, J.R.R. “183. Notes on W.H. Auden’s Review of The Return of the King” (1956?). The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. Humphrey Carter, ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2013. Kindle edition.

Photo credit: Bill Anders, 1968, NASA. Public domain photo.

bitch / son of a bitch

30 September 2020 (Image added 19 February 2023)

Extract from Cambridge, Trinity College MS B.15.34, p. 270, showing the interlinear gloss of fulan horen & byccan (foul whores and bitches) for fracodan myltestran (wicked prostitutes)

Extract from Cambridge, Trinity College MS B.15.34, p. 270, showing the interlinear gloss of fulan horen & byccan (foul whores and bitches) for fracodan myltestran (wicked prostitutes)

The word bitch is used to refer to a female dog, and the word is also used as a derogatory term for a woman, and it is used in the idiomatic epithet son of a bitch and as a verb meaning to complain. It’s an old word, dating to Old English, but the practice of referring to women as dogs is much, much older than the English language itself.

The Old English bicce appears five times in the extant corpus. Two of these are simple glosses of the Latin canicula (female dog). Two others appear in a medical text:

Biccean meolc gif ðu gelome cilda toðreoman mid smyrest & æthrinest, butan sare hy wexað. Wearras & weartan onweg to donne, nim wulle & wæt mid biccean hlonde, wrið on þa weartan & on þa wearras.

(If you frequently smear and touch a child’s gums with bitch’s milk, the teeth grow without pain. To do away with corns and warts, take wool and wet it with bitch’s urine, bind it to the warts and corns.)

The fifth appearance of the word in the Old English corpus is an epithet for a woman. (One may quibble over whether this instance is Old English or Early Middle English, as it dates to the twelfth century.) The word appears in the manuscript Cambridge, Trinity College MS B.15.34, which contains a copy of Ælfric’s homily “Sermo ad Populum.” Ælfric wrote in the closing years of the tenth century, but a twelfth-century hand has emended the text in this manuscript. The text in this manuscript reads:

ða fulan forliras, and ða fulan horan and byccan
ðe acwellað heora cild ær þan ðe hit cuð beo mannum

(the foul fornicators and the foul whores and bitches
who kill their children before they can become adults)

The words “fulan horan and byccan” (foul whores and bitches) replace “fracodan myltestran” (wicked harlots) in Ælfric’s original.

But the practice of referring to women as dogs didn’t start in the twelfth century, but rather at the very least a thousand years before that. In Act 5 of his play Curculio, Plautus (c.254–184 BCE) describes a fight between a man and a woman over a ring:

ut eum eriperet, manum arripuit mordicus.
vix foras me abripui atque effugi. apage istanc caniculam.

(To get it away [from me], she seized my hand with her teeth. With difficulty I fled out of doors and escaped. Away with this bitch of yours.)

There are undoubtedly other such instances in various ancient languages. But while the derogatory use of bitch to refer to a woman may be ancient, in English, at least, it was rather uncommon until relatively recently. In American English, it was rarely heard before the 1920s, when its use suddenly exploded. The table here shows the word’s appearances in the Corpus of Historical American English in the first four decades of the twentieth century, broken down by sense: literal reference to a dog, reference to a woman, the phrase son of a bitch, and other uses (i.e., as a surname or as a general swear word).

Uses of the word bitch in American speech during the first four decades of the twentieth century (Source: COHA)

Uses of the word bitch in American speech during the first four decades of the twentieth century (Source: COHA)

The phrase son of a bitch may literally be a derogatory reference to a woman, but as an idiom it often does not have that connotation and is used as a general term of abuse.

This surge in use of the insult corresponds with first-wave feminism and the women’s suffrage movement. As women started pushing for greater inclusion in public life, men started to tear them down.

The verb to bitch, meaning to complain, which comes from a metaphor of a nagging or complaining woman, makes a few appearances in eighteenth-century British speech. From Edward Ward’s 1745 A Compleat and Humorous Account of the Remarkable Clubs and Societies in the Cities of London and Westminster:

A Leaden-Hall Butcher would be bitching his Wife, for not only opening her Placket, but her Pocket-Apron to his Rogue of a Journeyman, and expensively treating the young strong back’d Rascal at the Ship Tavern, whilst himself was entering his Puppy at the Bear Garden.

And there is this from a letter by Edmund Burke of 9 May 1777. The speaker of the House of Commons, Fletcher Norton, gave a speech that some thought insulting to the king and objected to being entered into the record. But Burke, Charles Fox, and others supported Norton, and it was eventually entered.

Norton bitched a little at last; but though he would recede, Fox stuck to his motion for the honour of the House; and they were obliged to admit it.

The OED defines this as an early instance of to bitch with the sense of to hang back. But since there is another eighteenth century use of the sense of to complain, that would seem to have been Burke’s meaning, not a new sense of the word.

But these eighteenth-century uses are rare, and the verb doesn’t appear again until the twentieth century in the United States. It’s recorded by the journal American Speech in 1930 in a glossary of slang used at Colgate University:

Bitch: to become dissatisfied with something and complain about it. “He bitched about the course.”

The epithet son of a bitch, a way to insult someone’s lineage and in particular their mother, dates to the early seventeenth century and is first recorded in Jacobean theater. A variation on the insult appears in Shakespeare’s King Lear, Act 2, Scene 2, in one of the more famous passages of Shakespearean insults:

Ste. What do’st thou know me for?

Kent. A Knaue, a Rascall, and eater of broken meates, a base proud, shallow, beggerly, three-suited-hundred pound, filthy woosted-stocking knaue, a Lilly-liuered, action-taking, whoreson glasse-gazing super-seruiceable sinicall Rogue, one Trunke-inheriting slaue, one that would’st be a Baud in way of good seruice, and art nothing but the composition of a Knaue, Begger, Coward, Pandar, and the Sonne and Heire of a Mungrill Bitch, one whom I will beate into clamours whining, if thou deny’st the least siliable of they addition.

And the shorter, modern phrasing appears in Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher’s play The Coxcomb, Act 2, Scene 1, which was published in 1647 but had been performed by 1610, although the existing version was heavily edited after the playwrights’ deaths, so the 1647 date is the earliest we can date the present-day phrasing:

They had no mothers, they are the sones of bitches.

So, bitch is one of those terms that existed at a low level of use for a very long time before a sudden change in politics or society catapulted it into the spotlight, in this case its rise is part of the backlash to feminism.

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Sources:

Ælfric. “Sermo ad Populum.” Homilies of Ælfric: A Supplementary Collection, ed. John C. Pope, vol. 1 of 2. Early English Text Society (EETS), 259. London: Oxford UP, 1967, 436, lines 379–80. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Beaumont, Francis and John Fletcher. Comedies and Tragedies. London: Humphrey Robinson and Humphrey Moseley, 1647, 100. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Burke, Edmund. Correspondence, vol. 2 of 4, Charles Fitzwilliam and Richard Bourke, eds. London: F. & J. Rivington, 1844, 157. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

de Vriend, H.J. The Old English Herbarium and Medicina de Quadrupedibus. Early English Text Society (EETS), 286. London: Oxford UP, 1984, 234–73.

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

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2020, s.v. bitch, n.1., bitch, v., sonofabitch, n.

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

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. bitch n.1., bitch, v.2; third edition, June 2017, s.v. son of a bitch, n. and int.

Russell, Jason Almus. “Colgate University Slang.” American Speech, 5.3, February 1930, 238. JSTOR.

Shakespeare, William. King Lear. First Folio, 1623, Folger copy no. 68, 291.

Ward, Edward. A Compleat and Humorous Account of the Remarkable Clubs and Societies in the Cities of London and Westminster. London: Joseph Collier, 1745, 64. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Zhou, Li. “Use of the Word ‘Bitch’ Surged After Women’s Suffrage.” Vox.com, 19 August 2020.

Table: Davies, Mark. The Corpus of Historical American English (COHA), 2020.

Image credit: Cambridge, Trinity College MS B.15.34, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

barium

Pure barium in an argon atmosphere to keep it from reacting with the air

17 February 2023

Barium is a soft, silvery alkaline earth metal. It has atomic number 56 and the symbol Ba. It has few industrial uses and is perhaps chiefly known for its medical use as a radio-contrasting agent in medical imaging. Barium is highly reactive and, as a result, is not found in nature in its pure form. Its ore has phosphorescent qualities. Barium was isolated and named by Humphry Davy in 1808.

Those phosphorescent qualities of the ore have been known for centuries, and since quantities of the ore are found near Bologna, Italy, it came to be known in early modern Latin as lapis bononiensis (Bononian or Bolognian stone). The English name of the ore is recorded in a 1657 translation of Pierre Gassendi’s life of Nicolaus Claudius Fabricius:

Now he was of opinion, that as the light of the Sun, and its heat is imprinted upon a Bononian stone: so the light and whitenesse are imprinted upon the vitreous humor, and by reason of their corpulency, create there a certain shaddow of themselves: but he was afterwards of opinion, that the shadow externally appearing, was not produced from the crassitude of the light or whitenesse, but feigned by a fault which may happen, not only in the vitreous, but also in the watery, and especially in the Crystalline humor.

And we see Bolognian stone in a 1712 translation of Pierre Pomet’s Compleat History of Druggs:

17. Of the Bolognian Stone.

Pomet. This is a heavy Stone of a shining Silver Grey, very like in Figure to the Nephritick Stone, which is found very commonly about Bologna in Italy, whence it takes its Name. This Stone is of no other Use than, after Calcination, to make the Phosphorus, of which Mr. Lemery treats so largely at the End of his Book of Chymistry; and likewise Mr. Worms, he having writ a long Discourse of it, whither those who desire to make it may have Recourse: The Bolognian Stone is not yet well known amongst us, which is the Cause we sell so little of it. Some call this Stone calcin’d, the Sun or Moon Spunge, the illuminated Stone; Lucifer, Cassiolanus his Stone, or Kercher’s Phosphorus.

But in the eighteenth century, because of its weight, chemists took to calling the ore barytes or baryta, from the Greek βαρύς (heavy) + -ῑτης (-ites, suffix used in the names of minerals). There is this from Adair Crawford’s 1789 On the Medicinal Properties of Muriated Barytes:

In the year 1784 I made several experiments and observations on the medicinal properties of the Muriated Barytes, from which I concluded, that it might probably possess considerable powers as a deobstruent.

Chemist Humphry Davy isolated the element from its ore in 1808 and dubbed it barium. From his paper announcing the discovery:

These new substances will demand names; and on the same principles as I have named the bases of the fixed alkalis, potassium and sodium, I shall venture to denominate the metals from the alkaline earths barium, strontium, calcium, and magnium; the last of these words is undoubtedly objectionable, but magnesium has been already applied to metallic manganese, and would consequently have been an equivocal term.

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Sources:

Crawford, Adair. “On the Medicinal Properties of Muriated Barytes” (1789). Medical Communications, vol. 2. London: Joseph Johnson, 1790, 301. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Davy, Humphry. “Electrochemical Researches on the Decompositions of the Earths; with Observations on the Metals Obtained from the Alkaline Earths, and on the Amalgam Procured from Ammonia.” The Philosophical Magazine, 32, October–December 1808, 203. Nineteenth Century Collections Online.

Gassendi, Pierre (Petrus Gassendus). The Mirror of True Nobility and Gentility. Being the Life of the Renowned Nicolaus Claudius Fabricius, Lord of Pieresk, Senator of the Parliament of Aix. London: J. Streater for Humphrey Moseley, 1657, 102. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. barium, n., baria, n., baryta, n., barytes, n., Bologna, n.

Pomet, Pierre. A Compleat History of Druggs, vol. 1. London: R. Bonwicke, et al., 1712, 409. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Image credit: Matthias Zepper, 2005. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

 

bedlam

Painting of an 18th-C lunatic asylum. A man, clothed in a sheet, lies on the floor attended to by a crying woman and a man, presumably family. Background: inmates, one dressed as a bishop, one playing a violin, & well-dressed women sightseeing

William Hogarth’s c.1733 painting In the Madhouse

15 February 2013

Bedlam is a state of madness, confusion, or uproar. This sense of the word comes from the Hospital of St. Mary of Bethlehem in London, which has served for centuries as a hospital for the mentally ill. Nowadays, it is officially known as Bethlem Royal Hospital and is run by the UK’s National Health Service.

Betleem as a form of the name of Bethlehem dates to the Old English period. It appears in the late tenth-century Blickling Homilies in the text of a sermon for Easter Sunday:

Arige us nu & miltsige se Drihten þe on engla endebyrdnesse wæs gehered, þa he on Betleem wæs acenned.

(May the Lord, who was lauded by the order of angels when he was born in Bedlam, now have pity and show mercy for us.)

But in Old English, as well as in Middle English, Bedlam was only used as the name of the town in Judea that tradition holds as the birthplace of Jesus Christ. The association with madness and confusion would not come until the sixteenth century.

The Hospital of St. Mary of Bethlehem was founded in 1247 at Bishopsgate, just outside the walls of the City of London. (It has moved several times over the centuries, and since 1930 has been located in Beckenham, London.) It was founded as the Priory of the New Order of Our Lady of Bethlehem. The first verifiable mention of the priory being used as a hospital treating the mentally ill dates to 1402. During the Dissolution of the Monasteries (1536–41) under Henry VIII, the hospital was given to the City of London. And in 1547 it received a royal charter and officially became a hospital for the mentally ill.

But by then Bedlam already had a reputation for a place of insanity. In his 1528 Obedience of a Christen Man, William Tyndale wrote:

In lyke maner is it for the most parte of oure most holy religion. For they of lyke imaginacion doo thinges which they of Bedle[m] maye se / that they are but madness. […] They ascribe heven vnto their imaginacions and mad invencions / and receave it not of the liberalite of God / by the merites and deservinges of Chirst.

The more general sense of madness or uproar, disassociated from the hospital itself, was in place by the end of the sixteenth century. In a 1598 satirical poem, John Marston wrote:

Whe[n] some damn'd vice, som strange mishapen sute,
Makes youths esteeme themselues in hie repute.
O age! in which our gallants boast to be
Slaues vnto riot, and lewd luxury!
Nay, when they blush, and thinke an honest act
Dooth their supposed vertues maculate!
Bedlame, Frenzie, Madnes, Lunacie,
I challenge all your moody Empery
Once to produce a more distracted man
Then is inamorato Lucian.

That’s how the name of Jesus’s birthplace came to be associated with madness.

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Sources:

Marston, John. “Satire #3.” The Metamorphosis of Pigmalions Image and Certaine Satyres. London; Edmond Matts, 1598, 53. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. Bedlem, -leem, n.

Morris, Richard, ed. “VII. Dominica Pascha” (# 7. Easter Sunday). The Blickling Homilies of the Tenth Century (1874). Early English Text Society, O.S. 58, 63, & 73. London: N. Trübner, 1967, 93. HathiTrust Digital Archive. Princeton, Scheide Library, MS 71.

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

Tyndale, William. The Obedie[n]ce of a Christen Man. Antwerp: Hans Luft, 1528, fol. 36v–37v. Early English Books Online (EEBO).