Christian

An early eighteenth-century Russian icon, tempera on wood, depicting the First Council of Nicaea (325 CE)

21 June 2023

Christian doesn’t have a particularly surprising or unusual etymology, but it is a good example of the care one must take when consulting a dictionary. If one looks up Christian in a dictionary and then casually reads the entry, one may be deceived into thinking that the word’s use in English is surprisingly recent, dating only to the fourteenth century, and one may begin to wonder what English Christians called themselves before that time. Dictionaries are sophisticated references, edited and structured to suit different purposes, and one must understand how the dictionary you are using is edited before drawing such conclusions.

The etymology of Christian is rather straightforward. It comes from the Greek χρῑστός (christos) meaning anointed, used in that language as both an adjective and a proper noun. The Greek is a translation of the Hebrew māshia, meaning messiah or anointed one. So, Jesus Christ literally means Jesus the Messiah or Jesus the anointed one. The Greek was borrowed into Latin, Christianus. And it is here that the problem with dictionary dating occurs.

The Latin root christ- was borrowed into English during the Old English period, prior to the Norman Conquest of 1066. But in Old English, the word took on a Germanic suffix, becoming cristen. There are over a thousand instances of the word in the Old English corpus, that is texts from before c.1100 CE that survive, so cristen was a very common word indeed.

But when the William the Conqueror came along, a new form of the word was imported into English from Anglo-Norman. In that dialect of French, the -ianus ending of the Latin was rendered as -ien, making it cristien. And by the beginning of the fourteenth century, this French form of the word had made its way into English writing, rendered as either christien or christian, with the latter eventually winning out and becoming capitalized when that practice for proper nouns became standard.

That is why when you look up Christian in a dictionary the etymology section will give a fourteenth-century date for the word. The Oxford English Dictionary says it is “partly a borrowing from French. Partly a borrowing from Latin” and has an earliest citation from c.1300. Merriam-Webster gives a date of “14th century.” Both of these dictionaries consider Christian and Christen to be two distinct words, one from French and the other from Old English. The OED has a separate entry for Christen, giving the Old English origin and citations. And since Christen is no longer in common use, Merriam-Webster doesn’t address it. That’s not a flaw; that particular dictionary does not attempt to map out the complete history of words. It focuses on those in common use today.

The American Heritage Dictionary, however, considers both Christian and Christen to be one word. That dictionary doesn’t give a date for the word, but says Christian is from “Middle English Cristen, from Old English cristen, from Latin Chrīstiānus, from Chrīstus, Christ.”

One must take care when consulting a dictionary. It is worth taking a few moments to understand the editorial policies used in compiling it. For if one doesn’t, one can sometimes be misled.

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Sources:

American Heritage Dictionary, fifth edition, 2022, s.v. Christian, adj. and n.

Anglo-Norman Dictionary, 2006, s.v. cristien, adj. and n.

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

Merriam-Webster.com, 18 April 2023, s.v. Christian, n. and adj.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. Cristien, adj., Cristen, adj. and n.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2020, s.v. Christian, adj. and n., Christen, adj. and n.

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Source:

“Christ, n.,” “christen, adj. (and n.),” and “Christian, adj. and n.,” Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989.

nice

The Fool card from the Rider-Waite tarot deck

19 June 2023

Many words have changed their meaning over the centuries, but few so significantly, widely, and often as nice. Today, the word most often means pleasant, good-natured, attractive, and has a positive connotation. (At least in most contexts; describing a potential romantic interest as “nice,” for example, can be damning with faint praise.) But it was not always so.

Nice was brought across the English Channel with the Normans in 1066. It was originally an Anglo-Norman and Old French word meaning silly, simple, and unsophisticated, and it could also be a noun, meaning an ignorant or foolish person. The French word comes from the Latin nescius, meaning ignorant, and it survives today in some regional French dialects as niche. (It’s unrelated to the English word niche, which also comes from French, but later and from a different Latin root.) The Anglo-Norman nice is attested to in 1212, and it took until about 1300 for nice to filter down from the French-speaking nobles to the English-speaking populace.

The earliest known appearance of nice, meaning foolish, appears in the South English Legendary's life of Mary Magdalene, written c.1300:

Tho he hadde that word iseid, his wif bigan to wake,
Of a swume heo schok and braid, and sone bigan awake
And [seide,] "The hende Marie Maudeleyne, heo hath igive me space,
Fram dethe to live heo havez me ibrought thoru hire Loverdes grace.
Heo havez ifed me and mi sone and idon us alle guode;
To seggen it thee hwi scholde ich schone? That yelde hire the Rode!
Heo havez ibeon min houswif, mi mayde and mi norice,
And bote ich thee seide hou heo heold mi lif, for sothe ich were nice.

(Though he had said that word, his woman began to wake,
From a swoon she shook and trembled, and soon began to wake
And [said,] “The gracious Mary Magdalene she has given me time,
From death to life she has brought me through her Lord’s grace;
She has fed me and my son and provided us with everything good—
Why should I hesitate to tell you of it? May the cross reward her for it!
She has been my housewife, my maide, and my nursemaid,
And I would be truly foolish not to tell you how she has guarded my life.)

But by the end of the fourteenth century, we see an explosion in the number of senses of nice:

• wanton or lascivious (before 1387)

• scrupulous or punctilious (c.1387–95)

• cowardly (before 1393)

• extravagant, ostentations (1395)

• strange, extraordinary (c.1395)

• lazy, slothful (before 1398)

• shy, reluctant (before 1400)

• well dressed, elegant (c.1400)

• fastidious, fussy (c.1400)

• tender, fragile (c.1450)

• arcane, intricate, demanding close attention (before 1500)

Most of these senses dropped out of the language in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, although the fastidious sense is still in use, and that sense has spawned some others:

• strict or careful about a particular point (1584)

• cultured, associated with polite society (1588)

• particular in regard to literary taste (1594)

• virtuous, decent (1799)

• in good taste, appropriate (1863)

And the arcane, intricate sense can still be seen occasionally, and it too spawned new senses that are in common use today:

• of minute difference, slight, small

• precise, requiring precision

• of the senses, acute

• skillful, dexterous

• finely discriminative

• requiring tact or care

• accurate

And by the beginning of the eighteenth century, nice was being used to refer to food that that was especially fine or delicious. By the middle of that century, this sense had generalized to refer to anything that was attractive or pleasant. And by the end of the century, nice was being used to refer to pleasant or agreeable people.

In many of these senses, nice can be used ironically to refer to the opposite. A nice job can be one that was not done well, and Nice one! is often uttered when someone else makes a mistake.

Nice is a rather extreme example of how words can change and acquire new meanings over time. Language is not fixed and is ever changing.

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Sources:

Anglo-Norman Dictionary, 2017, s.v. nice1, adj. and n.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. nice, adj., nice, n.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2003, s.v. nice, adj. and adv., nice n.1.

Reames, Sherry L. “Early South English Legendary Life of Mary Magdalen.” Middle English Legends of Women Saints. TEAMS Middle English Text Series. Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute Publications, 2003. lines 486–93. Bodleian Library MS Laud Misc. 108.

Image credit: Pamela Colman Smith, 1909. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

copper

Copper ore

17 June 2023

(This entry is for the chemical element. For the slang term for a policeman, see the entry for cop.)

Copper is a pinkish-orange metal that is soft, malleable, and ductile and that has high thermal and electrical conductivity. The metal has myriad uses from building construction to jewelry to electronic components. It has atomic number 29 and the symbol Cu.

Copper has been known since antiquity, and our present-day English word comes from the Old English copor. But that Old English word only appears three times in the extant corpus, although that fact probably tells us more about the types of texts that have been preserved than about the frequency of the word’s use during the pre-Conquest period. Two of the word’s appearances in the corpus are in glosses of Latin texts and the third is from a medical text:

To eahsealfe, nim aluwan & sidewaran, lawerberian & pipor, gescaf smale, & cubuteran fersce lege on wæter, nim þonne hwetstan bradne & gnid ða buteran on ðæm hwetstane mid copore þæt heo beo wel toh, do þonne sumne dæl þara wyrta þærto, clæm ðonne on arfæt, læt standan nygon niht.

(For an eye salve, take aloes and zedoary, laurel berries and pepper, shave them small, and lay fresh cow’s butter in water, then take a broad whetstone and rub the butter on the whetstone with copper so that it may be very sticky, then add some part of the worts to it, then enclose it in a brass vessel, let it stand for nine nights.)

The Old English word is from a common Germanic root that itself comes from the late Latin cuprum, short for Cyprian aes (Cyprian metal), so called because Cyprus was a major source for copper ore in the ancient Mediterranean region. We get the symbol Cu from the Latin word.

In antiquity and in the Middle Ages, seven of the elemental metals were each associated with a god and with a planet, with copper associated with Aphrodite/Venus. We see this association in a variety of alchemical writings, including Chaucer’s The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale:

I wol yow telle, as was me taught also,
The foure spirites and the bodies sevene,
By ordre, as ofte I herde my lord hem nevene.

The firste spirit quyksilver called is,
The seconde orpyment, the thridde, ywis,
Sal armonyak, and the ferthe brymstoon.
The bodyes sevene eek, lo, hem heere anoon:
Sol gold is, and Luna silver we threpe,
Mars iren, Mercurie quyksilver we clepe,
Saturnus leed, and Juppiter is tyn,
And Venus coper, by my fader kyn!

(I will tell you, as it was taught also to me,
The four spirits and the seven metals,
In the order as I often heard my lord name them.

The first spirit is called quicksilver,
The second orpiment, the third, indeed,
Sal ammoniac, and the fourth brimstone.
The seven metals also, lo, hear them now:
The Sun is gold, and the Moon we assert silver,
Mars iron, Mercury we call quicksilver,
Saturn lead, and Jupiter is tin,
And Venus copper, by my father’s kin!)

Our understanding of copper as an element, in the present-day definition of that word, dates to the late eighteenth century.

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Sources:

Chaucer, Geoffrey. “The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale.” The Canterbury Tales. In Larry D. Benson, ed. The Riverside Chaucer, 8.819–29, 273. Also, with minor variation in wording, at Harvard’s Geoffrey Chaucer Website.

Cockayne, Oswald. Leechdoms, Wortcunning, and Starcraft of Early England, vol. 3 of 3. London: Longmans, et al., 1866, 16–17. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

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

Miśkowiec, Pawel. “Name Game: The Naming History of the Chemcial Elements—Part 1—from Antiquity till the End of 18th Century.” Foundations of Chemistry, 1 November 2022.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. copper, n.1.

Image credit: US Geological Survey, 2009. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

speculative fiction

A Martian fighting machine from a 1906 Belgian edition of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds

14 June 2023

The term speculative fiction means different things to different people. Most often it is synonymous with science fiction, but it is also interpreted more broadly to include fantasy, horror, magical realism, fairy tales, and other imaginative works. In other words, it is fiction that includes imaginative elements, and is often, but not always, set in a future where the imaginative elements are based on scientific theories that are not yet realities.

Robert Heinlein is often credited with coining the term speculative fiction, but while his use undoubtedly popularized and helped usher in the term’s widespread use in the mid twentieth century, others had been using the term for nearly a century. In a 1947 essay, “On Writing of Speculative Fiction,” Heinlein wrote:

There are at least two principal ways to write speculative fiction—write about people, or write about gadgets. There are other ways; consider Stapleton’s “Last and First men,” recall S. Fowler Wright’s “The World Below.” But the gadget story and the human-interest story comprise most of the field. Most science fiction stories are a mixture of the two types, but we will speak as if they were distinct—at which point I will chuck the gadget story aside, dust off my hands, and confine myself to the human-interest story, that being the story I myself write. I have nothing against the gadget story—I read and enjoy it—it’s just not my pidgin.

Two years later, in a 4 March 1949 letter, Heinlein wrote:

[Alice Dalgliesh, editor at Scribner’s] has fixed firmly in her mind a conception of what a “science fiction” book should be, though she can’t define it and the notion is nebulous—she has neither the technical training nor the acquaintance with the body of literature in the field to have a clearly defined criterion. But it’s there, just the same, and it reads something like this: “Science has to do with machines and machinery and laboratories. Science fiction consists of stories about the wonderful machines of the future which will go striding around the universe, as in Jules Verne.”

Her definition is all right as far as it goes, but it fails to include most of the field and includes only that portion of the field which has been heavily overworked and now contains only low-grade ore. Speculative fiction (I prefer that term to science fiction) is also concerned with sociology, psychology, esoteric aspects of biology, impact of terrestrial culture on the other cultures we may encounter when we conquer space, etc., without end. However, speculative fiction is not fantasy fiction, as it rules out the use of anything as material which violates established scientific fact, laws of nature, call it what you will, i.e., it must [be] possible to the universe as we know it. Thus, Wind in the Willows is fantasy, but the much more incredible extravaganzas of Dr. Olaf Stapledon are speculative fiction—science fiction.

Another writer of speculative fiction, Margaret Atwood, defined the term thusly in 2011:

What I mean by “science fiction” is those books that descend from H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, which treats of an invasion by tentacled, blood-sucking Martians shot to Earth in metal canisters—things that could not possibly happen—whereas, for me, “speculative fiction” means plots that descend from Jules Verne's books about submarines and balloon travel and such-things that really could happen but just hadn't completely happened when the authors wrote the books. I would place my own books in this second category: no Martians. Not because I don't like Martians, I hasten to add: they just don't fall within my skill set. Any seriously intended Martian by me would be a very clumsy Martian indeed.

But the phrase is much older. Speculative fiction appears in the mid nineteenth century in the sense of a falsehood, a lie. Nathan Lord, president of Dartmouth College, wrote the following in a public letter dated 1 December 1859:

Any other view of man or of society, in the present state, can produce nothing but a spiritual inflation swelling us with self-sufficiency, and firing us with ambition, reducing us to mere competitors and strugglers for an ideal good, and at length exploding all our gaudy visions of a millennial Commonwealth. It is this speculative fiction, not of Puritan but our revolutionary fathers, whom we blame, however, not for revolutionizing society, but for re-constructing it on a false philosophical idea.

But this usage, which continued through the rest of the nineteenth century, has little to do with the literary genre beyond sharing the collocation of words.

A few years earlier than Lord’s letter, in 1856, we see speculative fiction being used in the sense of a literary genre. Here it is used not in the sense of futuristic possibilities, but in the sense of a broader imaginative literature. From the North British Review of August 1856:

In still more recent times, there has been a new literary avatar in the serial novels of Dickens, Thackeray, Lever, and their imitators, and even, competing with that, there has appeared what may be called the literature of philosophical and speculative fiction.

And in 1887, we see the following in the December issue of the Atlantic Monthly:

If we compare a finely chiseled piece of work like this with the flat, faintly colored sketches which are at present passing muster for novels, we feel that beauty of form is something not compounded of earthly materials only, and that neither the savage strength of French and Russian realism, nor the dreary monotony of German speculative fiction, can lift us any nearer the tranquil realms of art.

Exactly what is meant by “German speculative fiction” is not clear, but it probably refers to the work of, among others, Kurd Lasswitz (a.k.a Velatus) and his wissenschaftliche Märchen (scientific tales).

And by 1889 we see speculative fiction clearly being used to refer to what we today would classify as science fiction. From a book review in the October 1889 issue of Lippencott’s Monthly Magazine:

Mr. Besant has, since the success of his utopian “All Sorts and Conditions of Men,” been very much in the air. In fact, he has become both a prophet and a reformer. Edward Bellamy, in “Looking Backward," and George Parsons Lathrop, in a short story, "The New Poverty," have followed the example of Anthony Trollope and Bulwer in speculative fiction put in the future tense. Mr. Besant’s “Inner House” is as clever as any of these efforts. His German professor discovers the art of prolonging life, and the Royal Institution at once monopolize and use it for the good of the minority. A massacre of the old is ordered, and at the opening of the story everybody has been young for five hundred years.

Speculative fiction is yet another example of the recency illusion in relation to words and phrases. They are often much older than one thinks.

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Sources:

Atwood, Margaret. “If It Is Realistic or Plausible, Then It Is Not Science Fiction.” Gizmodo, 6 October 2011.

Egan, Maurice F. “Book-Talk.” Lippencott’s Monthly Magazine, October 1889, 597. ProQuest Magazines.

Robert A. Heinlein. Letter to Lurton Blassingame, 4 March 1949. In Grumbles from the Grave. New York: Ballantine, 1989, 49. Archive.org.

———. “On the Writing of Speculative Fiction” (1947). In Lloyd Arthur Eshbach, ed. Of Worlds Beyond: The Science of Science Fiction Writing, second edition. Chicago: Ardent Publishing, 1964, 13–19 at 13.

Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction, 16 December 2020, s.v. speculative fiction, n.1, n.2, n.3.

Lord, Nathan. “President Lord’s Letter” (1 December 1859). Congregational Journal (Concord, New Hampshire), 16 February 1860, 1/5. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

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

“Recollections of the Table-Talk of Samuel Rogers.” North British Review (Edinburgh), August 1856, 426. ProQuest Historical Periodicals.

Repplier, Agnes. “Some Aspects of Pessimism.” Atlantic Monthly, December 1887, 765. ProQuest Magazines.

Weaver, Toze. “What Is Speculative Fiction?” Medium.com, 2 August 2021.

Image credit: Henrique Alvim Corrêa, 1906. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

science fiction

August 1959 cover of Super-Science Fiction

12 June 2023

The Oxford English Dictionary defines science fiction, as it is most commonly used today, as:

Fiction in which the setting and story feature hypothetical scientific or technological advances, the existence of alien life, space or time travel, etc., esp. such fiction set in the future, or an imagined alternative universe.

Jesse Sheidlower’s Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction defines it as:

a genre (of fiction, film, etc.) in which the plot or setting features speculative scientific or technological advances or differences.

One can, and many do, argue over whether or not a particular work is science fiction or speculative fiction, or science fantasy, or whatever, but such hair splitting is not needed to determine the origin of the phrase, which first appears in the late nineteenth century.

In those early appearances, the term was occasionally used to refer to a scientific hypothesis or claim that is false. This is clearly not what we mean by the current use of science fiction, no matter what hairs you split.

Before science fiction began to be commonly used, the term used to describe the genre was slightly different, scientific fiction. We find this phrase used in an 1876 obituary for the writer William Henry Rhodes, who commonly wrote under the pseudonym of Caxton. In his early years, Rhodes wrote in the genre before moving on to other types of stories:

His fondness for weaving the problems of science with fiction, which became afterwards so marked a characteristic of his literary efforts, attracted the especial attention of his professors; and had Mr. Rhodes devoted himself to this then novel department of letters, he would have become, no doubt, greatly distinguished as a writer; and the great master of scientific fiction, Jules Verne, would have found the field of his efforts already sown and reaped by the young Southern student.

By the end of that century, however, science fiction would start to displace scientific fiction as the name for the genre. But before we get to that, let’s take a look at one example of an early use of science fiction in a slightly different sense. William Wilson, in his 1851 A Little Earnest Book upon a Great Old Subject, uses the phrase to refer to stories and poetry that make use of present-day science, rather than speculative advances in the future:

Campbell says that “Fiction in Poetry is not the reverse of truth, but her soft and enchanting resemblance.” Now this applies especially to Science-Fiction, in which the revealed truths of Science may be given, interwoven with a pleasing story which may itself be poetical and true—thus circulating a knowledge of the Poetry of Science, clothed in a garb of the Poetry of life.

A more recent example of this genre would be Michael Crichton’s 1969 novel, and the 1971 film directed by Robert Wise, The Andromeda Strain, which purports to be a history of scientists battling the arrival of a deadly extraterrestrial microorganism in the recent past (1967 or 1968). Because it does not speculate about future technologies, one might classify the book and movies as a techno-thriller rather than science fiction. (I was wrong, a little of the hair splitting is necessary to discuss the phrase’s origin.)

But this particular use of science fiction was rare, perhaps even a one-off usage.

Use of science fiction to refer to a literary work that speculates about the future dates to a least 1897. In that year, Harry B. Mason published a story in which the narrator goes to sleep in 1897 and wakes in 1917. The story appears in the 20 May issue of The Pharmaceutical Era. That seems like an odd venue for such a story, but in the story the narrator is a clerk in a drug store. Anyway, the first paragraph of the story contains these lines:

No Svengali had ushered me into the peace of oblivion. My last remembrance had been of reading Mr. Lloyd’s Etidorhpa. (And now that I thought of it, this was at the store, too. I must have been carted to the house, and allowed to sleep my sleep out, which quite broke my former records.) The complete arrest of bodily function and tissue waste which the central figure of that remarkable science-fiction achieved at the point where gravitation ceases, somewhere between here and China, impressed me deeply. Long and intense in-dwelling upon it had evidently brought about its achievement in me. Mind had exerted great power over matter and matter had knuckled.

But this use of the term refers to an individual work, not the genre as a whole, and it can be constructed in the plural; one may, for instance, write several science fictions.

Use of the term to denote the genre appears a year later, and possibly may have been written by the same Harry B. Mason. It is in a book review of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds that appears in another pharmaceutical journal, the October 1898 issue of the Bulletin of Pharmacy. (What is with pharmacists and science fiction?) The review immediately preceding this one, about a tome on rheumatoid arthritis, was authored by an “H.B.M.” The only questions are whether H.B.M. is the same Harry B. Mason and whether he also penned the book review of Wells’s novel. The review reads, in part:

Mr. H. G. Wells, the imaginative writer of science-fiction, has recently brought out a thrilling romance whose basis in the intended conquest of the earth by the inhabitants of Mars.

Perhaps Mason was the coiner of both senses of the term. In any case, the use of science fiction to denote the genre was in place before the start of the twentieth century, the century in which the genre would fully establish itself on the literary landscape.

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Sources:

Barnes, W.H.L. “In Memoriam.” In Rhodes, W.H. Caxton’s Book. Daniel O’Connell, ed. San Francisco: A.L. Bancroft, 1876, 6–7. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

“The Beneficent Microbe.” Bulletin of Pharmacy, 12.10, October 1898, 466/1. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Goranson, Stephen. “science-fiction, 1898 antedating (?),” ADS-L, 3 February 2021.

Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction, 12 May 2023, s.v. science fiction, n.2; 17 May 2022, s.v. science fiction, n.1.; 16 December 2020, s.v. scientific fiction, n.

Mason, Harry B. “A Rip Van Winkle Episode.” The Pharmaceutical Era, 7.20, 20 May 1897, 592/1. Google Books.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2014, s.v. science fiction, n. and adj., scientific, adj. and n.

Wilson, William. A Little Earnest Book upon a Great Old Subject. London: J. Wertheimer, 1851, 137, 138–40. Archive.org.

Image credit: Headline Publications, 1959. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image as a work published in the United States prior to 1963 whose copyright was not renewed.