whore

Colored version of an illustration of the Whore of Babylon that appeared in Martin Luther’s 1534 translation of the Bible

22 March 2023

Whore is an old word, and its core meaning, that of a prostitute, has remained unchanged from its Old English origin, although it has acquired a few supplementary senses along the way. The Old English hore is inherited from a Proto-Germanic root, and the word has cognates throughout the Germanic languages. Its Proto-Indo-European forbear is *ka, which carried a sense of desire, the same root that gives us caress, charity, cherish, and Kamasutra.

The Old English hore appears as a gloss to Aldhelm’s prose De virginitate (Regarding Virgins) in a passage about the fourth-century Christian martyr Daria. She had been a Vestal Virgin who converted to Christianity and was subsequently forced to live as a prostitute because under Roman law virgins could not be executed. In telling the tale in the opening years of the eighth century, Aldhelm writes “ista ad prostibula scortorum et meretricum contubernia truditur” (She is driven to the brothels of prostitutes and the concubinage of whores). Much later, an Old English hand has glossed the word meretricum (of prostitutes/courtesans) as horena

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)

By the twelfth century, whore had acquired another, more general sense of a sexually promiscuous woman and was used as a term of abuse. It appears in another gloss, this time in a manuscript of homilies by Ælfric of Eynsham, where Ælfric’s original, late tenth-century fracodan myltestran (wicked prostitutes) is glossed with fulan horan & byccan (foul whores & bitches). The context here is not one of sex work, so whore is not to be taken literally. The word miltestre (prostitute) would disappear from the language by the end of the twelfth century, so the glossator was probably substituting a term that would be more familiar to the sermon’s audience and adding the editorial bitch for emphasis. (This instance is also the first known use of bitch as a term of abuse for a woman, cf. bitch)

Whore would also acquire a sense of something generally sinful or idolatrous, most famously in the phrase Whore of Babylon. This sense appears in a Wycliffite translation of Revelation 17:1 from c. 1384:

And oon of the seuene aungels cam, that hadde seuene viols: and spake with me, seide, come thou; I schal schewe to thee the dampnacioun of the greet hoore that sitteth on many watris.

Again, the Latin Vulgate has meretrices in this this passage. The original Greek is πόρνης (pórnis, prostitute).

The verb to whore makes a single appearance in the fourteenth century in the text of the Ancrene Riwle, a manual for anchoresses, where it is used to mean to commit adultery, with a metaphor of being unfaithful to Christ. But it does not appear again in the extant literature until the mid sixteenth century, when it becomes firmly established.

Discuss this post

---

Sources:

Ælfric. “Sermo ad populum in octavis Pentecosten dicendus” (Sermon to the People on the Octaves of Pentecost). In John C. Pope, Homilies of Ælfric: A Supplementary Collection, vol. 1 of 2. Early English Text Society 259, London: Oxford UP, 1967, 436. Cambridge, Trinity College MS B.15.34, p. 270.

Aldhelm. De virginitate. In Rudolf Ehwald, ed. Aldhelmi Opera. Monumenta Germaniae Historica (MGH Auct. Ant. 15). Berlin: Weidmannos, 1919, 279–80. Digital MGH.

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

The English Hexapla: Exhibiting the Six Important English Translations of the New Testament Scriptures. London: Samuel Bagster, 1848(?), 1246. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v., hor(e, n.2, miltestre, n.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2020, s.v., whore, n., whore v.

Image credits:

Whore of Babylon: Workshop of Lucas Cranach, 1534. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

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

Uranus

Uranus, imaged by the Hubble space telescope

20 March 2023

[22 March 2023: clarified the history of the pronunciation]

Uranus is the seventh planet and the first to be recognized as such in modern times. It is at the limits of human vision and can only be seen with the naked eye by keen observers in near-perfect conditions. Over the centuries it was observed multiple times, but because its orbital period is 84 years it was not recognized as a planet until the late eighteenth century.

In 128 BCE, the astronomer Hipparchos may have observed it and entered it into his star catalog. But it was definitely observed by John Flamsteed in 1690, who catalogued it as a star and labeled 34 Tauri. Other astronomers after Flamsteed also recorded it as a star.

The first to recognize that what would come to be called Uranus was not a star was English astronomer William Herschel, who observed it on 13 and 17 March 1781 and, seeing that the object had moved between those two dates, mistook it for a comet. He announced his discovery of the “comet” to the Royal Society on 26 April 1781. The following year, astronomers Anders Johan Lexell and Johann Elert Bode independently determined that the object’s orbital trajectory meant that it was a planet, not a comet.

Realizing his mistake and that he had discovered a new planet, Herschel decided to call it Georgium Sidus (George’s Star), after King George III. The Latinate name appears in A New Review of November 1782:

The observations of all the first astronomers of Europe concurring to prove the new star discovered by Mr. Herschel to be a primary planet, he, who, as the discoverer, has the best right to give it a name, wishes it to be called the Georgium Sidus, in honour of the Prince under whose reign it was discovered, and as a debt due to that Prince by Astronomy, for taking the discoverer from a mechanical employment, end enabling him to continue to enrich science.

Herschel described his naming process in a letter to naturalist Joseph Banks, which was published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1783:

This consideration then makes it necessary to give it a name, by which it may be distinguished from the rest of the planets and fixed stars. In the fabulous ages of ancient times the appellations of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, were given to the planets, as being the names of their principal heroes and divinities. In the present more philosophical æra, it would hardly be allowable to have recourse to the same method, and call on Juno, Apollo, Pallas, or Minerva, for a name to our new heavenly body. The first consideration in any particular event, or remarkable incident, seems to be its chronology: if in any future age it should be asked, when this last-found planet was discovered? It would be a very satisfactory answer to say, “In the reign of King George the Third.” As a philosopher then, the name of Georgium Sidus presents itself to me, as an appellation which will conveniently convey the information of the time and country where and when it was brought to view.

But in the meantime, Bode had dubbed the planet Uranus, after the father of Saturn in classical mythology. In 1784, Bode wrote:

Bereits in der am 12ten März 1782 bei der hiesigen naturforschenden Gesellschaft vorgelesenen Abhandlung, habe ich den Namen des Vaters vom Saturn, nemlich Uranos, oder wie er mit der lateinischen Endung gewöhnlicher ist, Uranus vorgeschlagen, und habe seit dem das Vergnügen gehabt, daß verschiedene Astronomen und Mathematiker in ihren Schriften oder in Briefen an mich, diese Benennung aufgenommen oder gebilligt.

(Previously in the treatise read at the local natural history society on 12th March 1782, I have proposed the name of the father of Saturn, that is Uranos, or as it is usually with the Latin suffix, Uranus, and since then I have had the pleasure of various astronomers and mathematicians, in their writings or letters to me, recording or approving this designation.)

Uranus quickly became the standard name throughout Europe, with only Britain, for obvious reasons, opting for Georgium Sidus. The name Georgium Sidus remained in regular British use until the mid nineteenth century, when long after George III’s death, the British astronomical establishment finally bowed to the inevitable and went along with the nomenclature everyone else was using.

Regarding the pronunciation of the planet’s name, in Greek (and classical Latin, which follows the Greek) the stress is on the first syllable. The traditional English pronunciation, however, which is presumably modeled after the pronunciation of Latin adjectives ending in -anus, as in Romanus or paganus, places the emphasis on the second syllable: /jʊˈreɪnəs/. But to avoid the inevitable laughter of schoolchildren, and those adults with minds like schoolchildren, nowadays it is often pronounced with the emphasis on the first syllable and a shift in the second vowel to a schwa: /ˈjʊrənəs/. But the original pronunciation is also problematic in that the first two syllables are pronounced like the word urine. Perhaps the only solution is Futurama’s:

Discuss this post

---

Sources:

Bode, Johann Elert. Von dem neu entecten Planeten. Berlin: 1784, 88. Google Books.

Herschel, William. “Account of a Comet” (26 April 1781). Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 71, Part 1 (1781) 492. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

———. “On the Name of the New Planet.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 73 (1783) 1. In Philosophical Transactions (abridged), vol. 15 (1781–85). London: C. and R. Baldwin, 1809, 325. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

A New Review, November 1782, 438. Adam Matthew: Eighteenth Century Journals.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2012, s.v. Uranus, n., Georgium Sidus, n.

Photo credit: NASA/Space Telescope Science Institute, 2009. Public domain image.

Video credit: Groening, Matt (creator), “A Big Piece of Garbage,” Futurama, Season 1, Episode 8, 11 May 1999. Fair use of a brief clip to illustrate the topic under discussion.

March Madness

Butler's Andrew Smith and Connecticut's Alex Oriakhi battle for the opening tip at the 2011 NCAA Championship game on April 4, 2011.

17 March 2023

March Madness is the originally popular, later trademarked, name for the US National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) basketball championship tournament held each year in that month. But the phrase did not originate with the NCAA, or even with basketball for that matter.

The original sense of march madness was quite literal, referring to someone’s unusual or wild behavior in the month of March. Presumably the onset of spring was thought to alter one’s mental state. We see this literal sense in an article published in London’s European Magazine in May 1825:

It has been exceedingly well observed, that true politeness consists in ease, to which good sense is a happy auxiliary. Form and false parade stick close to the ignorant and the vulgar.

Should we not think it a very March madness to stickle for precedency, when a matter of consequence demanded that we waste not a single moment? And yet Mistress Snooks, from the city, will stand bobbing and curtseying to her neighbour, Madam Higginson, and exclaim—“La, no, madam—indeed, ma’am—’pon my honour, I can’t go first”—and all about—the rain coming down by bucket-fulls the while—who should first ascend the steps and ensconce themselves on the leathern seats of a dirty hackney-coach.

Around one hundred years later in the United States, the phrase made the leap to basketball. March marks the end of the basketball season, and in Indiana, the various high-school championship tournaments started to be referred to as March madness. The earliest example I know of is from the Rushville Republican of 11 March 1931, which connects the earlier, literal sense with the fever of a sports fan:

March Madness

The elimination of Anderson Tech, Columbus and Shelbyville were only mere flurries of what is to follow this week at the various basketball conventions in sixteen regional cities.—Newcastle Courier-Times.

Bob Stranahan evidently became afflicted with some of his own March madness, for Columbus was not eliminated, as Shelbyville can likely tell you.

Keep thinking about Lawrenceburg until supper time Saturday evening. Then if everything turns out right, BEAR DOWN ON THE SPARTANS.

Other references to various tournaments quickly appear in other Indiana papers, and over the next few decades March madness becomes a sportswriter’s term of art for any championship basketball tournament.

The earliest reference I’ve found to the NCAA championship is in the New York Daily News of 11 March 1958:

The annual March madness tips off tonight at the Garden with a tripleheader, involving four conference champions and two at-large selections, in the first round of the Eastern NCAA regionals.

The NCAA trademarked March Madness in 1989.

Discuss this post

---

Sources:

“The Basketeer.” Rushville Republican (Indiana), 11 March 1931, 2/2. Newspaper Archive.com

“Crooked Customs.” European Magazine, May 1825, 413/1. Gale Primary Sources: American Historical Periodicals from the American Antiquarian Society.

O’Day, Joe. “W.Va. Tests Jaspers in NCAA Tilt Tonight.” Daily News (New York), 11 March 1958, 25C. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2000, s.v. March, n.2.

US Patent and Trademark Office. Trademark Electronic Search System (TESS), accessed 17 March 2023.

Photo credit: Texan Photography, 2011. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

bohrium / nielsbohrium

Niels Bohr, 1922

17 March 2023

Bohrium. element 107, symbol Bh, is named for physicist Niels Bohr (1885–1962). The element was first synthesized in 1981 at the Gesellschaft für Schwerionenforschung (Institute for Heavy Ion Research) in Darmstadt, Germany. But the discoverers originally proposed the name be nielsbohrium. And further complicating things, element 107 was not the first one for which Bohr was proposed as its namesake. Back in the 1970s, Russian researchers had proposed the name nielsbohrium for element 105.

Researchers at the Joint Institute of Nuclear Research at Dubna in Russia synthesized element 105 in 1968, and in 1973 they proposed the name nielsbohrium at a conference in Hamburg, Germany:

Recent works of several Dubna groups on the transactinide and superheavy elements are reviewed. New experiments on the volatility properties of kurchatovium and nielsbohrium halides were performed. Some fast techniques, based on gas thermochromatography of volatile inorganic species, were developed for the chemical identification of elements beyond 105 as well as for the superheavy elements.

But in 1970, a team at the University of California, Berkeley independently synthesized the element and proposed the name hahnium, after German chemist Otto Hahn (1879–1968). Credit for the discovery and the naming of the element, therefore, became embroiled in Cold War politics. In 1997, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) officially credited both teams with the discovery, but officially named the element Dubnium.

In 1981, while the name for element 105 was up in the air, researchers at the Institute of Heavy Ion Research in Darmstadt, Germany synthesized element 107, and in 1992 they proposed the name nielsbohrium. From Nature, 17 September 1992:

The heaviest known chemical elements—with half-lives of around 5 ms.—were finally named last week by scientists at the Institute of Heavy Ion Research in Darmstadt, Germany, where they were created by fusion reactions in the early 1980s. Element 107 is to be called nielsbohrium, after the atomic physicist Niels Bohr. Element 108, a fusion product of Pb208 and Fe58, is now hassium, named for the German state of Hessen, which supports the institute financially. Element 109–meitnerium—is a tribute to Lise Meitner, whose theoretical interpretation of Otto Hahn’s experiments was fundamental to the discovery of nuclear fission.

Unlike some previous attempts to name transuranic elements, this terminology is expected to be accepted by the international scientific community. During the cold war, element 104 was discovered concurrently in the Soviet Union and the United States, but debate continues on whether its name should be kurchatovium or rutherfordium, after the leading English and Soviet nuclear physicists of their time.

The naming was partially successful this time. In 1994, the IUPAC shortened the name to bohrium and gave it official status:

Elements 106 and 107 were named after Ernest Rutherford (New Zealand) and Niels Bohr (Denmark), respectively, to recognize their distinguished contributions to our knowledge of atomic structure. The Commission recommends the name Bohrium (Bh) for element 107, instead of the proposed Nielsbohrium, so that it conforms to the names of the other elements named after individuals.

Discuss this post

---

Sources:

“Names and Symbols of Transfermium Elements (IUPAC Recommendations 1994)” Pure and Applied Chemistry, 66.12, 2421.

“News in Brief.” Nature, 359.6392, 17 September 1992, 180. ProQuest.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2012, s.v. bohrium, n.; September 2003, s.v. nielsbohrium, n.

Zvara, I. “Studies of the Heaviest Elements at Dubna” (abstract). 24th NPAC Congress, Hamburg, 2 September 1973. OSTI.gov.

Photo credit: A. B. Lagrelius and Westphal, 1922, courtesy AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, W.F. Meggers Gallery of Nobel Laureates Collection. Public domain image.

blackmail

Poster for the 1929 Alfred Hitchcock film Blackmail, the first British “talkie”

15 March 2023

[16 March 2023: clarified the Norse origin]

Whence blackmail?

The mail in blackmail is unrelated to either a type of armor or the postal service. It comes from the Old Norse mál, whose root means discussion or agreement, although the English usage corresponds more closely to the Old Icelandic derivative máli meaning contract or payment. The Old English mal, meaning payment, first appears in reference to the Danegeld, cash given to Vikings to prevent them from raiding. The uncompounded word survives in Scots and northern English dialects.

Blackmail was first used to refer to protection rackets run by Scottish clan chieftains against farmers in their territory. If the farmers did not pay the mail, the chiefs would steal their crops and cattle. The black probably comes from the unsavory nature of the practice. The earliest record of the practice that I’m aware of is from the trial of one, Adam Scot, who was beheaded in 1530 for blackmailing the people of the Scottish-English border counties:

Maii 18.—ADAM SCOT of Tuschelaw, Convicted of art and part of theftuously taking Black-maill, from the time of his entry within the Castle of Edinburgh, in Ward, from John Brovne in Hoprow: And of art and part of theftuously taking Black-maill from Andrew Thorbrand and William his brother: And for art and part of theftuously taking of Black-maill from the poor Tenants of Hopcailʒow: And of art and part of theftuously taking Black-maill from the Tenants of Eschescheill.—BEHEADED.

Eventually, blackmail generalized to refer to obtaining payment through threat of force. A 1774 letter by David Hume makes jocular reference to blackmail, using it in the sense of being friendly to a scandalmonger in hopes that he will say nothing bad about him:

I think I can reckon about twenty people, not including the King, whom he has attacked in this short performance. I hope all his spleen is not exhausted. I should desire my compliments to him, were I not afraid that he would interpret the civility as paying blackmail to him.

But a clear use of blackmail to mean payment obtained through threat of force doesn’t appear until 15 December 1818, when it makes its appearance in a letter from a British officer stationed in India that is published in the Calcutta Journal and later the London Times the following year:

The Coolies were in some measure surprised […] the fellows have, however, received a lesson they will not easily forget, and whether we shall march or not is uncertain. They have long been the dread of all the country, and levied black mail in all directions.

And the sense of obtaining payment by threatening to publish scandalous information about someone, a sense that is hinted at Hume’s 1774 letter, does not make a clear appearance until the mid nineteenth century. From New York’s Evening Mirror of 22 May 1848, in reference to a rival paper:

Not a day passes that this organ of scoundrelism does not in some way insult the American people, who, we must admit, seem to take it very meekly—not to say gratefully. We wonder what chance of success a low, dirty, blackguard penny-a-liner would have who should go from this city to London to establish a paper for the purpose of abusing everything English and blackmailing theatres, artists and all persons who could be made to “bleed,” or suffer!

There is also an archaic, sense of blackmail, dating to the seventeenth century, referring to rent or other payments that are made in something other than silver coin, such as cattle or labor. This sense dates to the seventeenth century. Payment in silver coin was sometimes referred to as white rent, which is a folk etymology of quit-rent, from the Anglo-Norman quiterente, meaning a nominal payment to a lord in lieu of providing services. If one goes searching for early uses of blackmail, especially in English, as opposed to Scottish, sources, it is this sense that one is likely to find.

Discuss this post

---

Sources:

Anglo-Norman Dictionary, 2017, s.v. quiterente, n. https://www.anglo-norman.net/entry/quiterente

Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue, 1971, s.v. male, mail, n.1. Dictionaries of the Scots Language (DSL).

“East-Indies.” Times (London), 16 July 1819, 2. Gale Primary Sources: The Times Digital Archive.

Hume, David. Letter to John Home, 4 Jun 1774. In J.Y.T. Greig, ed. The Letters of David Hume, Vol. 2: 1766–1776. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1932. Oxford Scholarly Editions Online.

“In Perfect Keeping.” Evening Mirror (New York), 22 May 1848, 2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2011, s.v. blackmail, n., blackmail, v; June 2000, s.v. mail, n.1; March 2015, s.v. white, adj. (and adv.) and n.; December 2007, s.v. quit-rent, n.

Pitcairn, Robert. Ancient Criminal Trials in Scotland, vol. 1, part 1. Edinburgh: Bannatyne Club, 1833, 145. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Scottish National Dictionary, 1941, s.v. black mail, n. Dictionaries of the Scots Language (DSL).

Image credit: Wardour Films, 1929. Public domain image as published prior to 1977 without copyright notice.