gospel

The Soweto Gospel Choir performing in Graz, Austria, 2014

28 June 2023

The word gospel has a rather straightforward etymology. It’s an alteration of the Old English godspell, a compound of god (good) + spell (news, account). In Old English, the meaning was not restricted to the four books of the Christian Bible that detail the life of Christ—although it was used in that particular sense too—but the word could also be used to refer to the entire body of texts that professed Christian doctrine. While the word is formed from two Germanic roots, it is actually a calque of one of several Latin phrases evangelium, bona adnuntiatio, or bonus nuntius. These in turn are based on the Greek εὐαγγέλιον, meaning good news. (A calque is a loan translation, a term borrowed from another language but translated in the process.)

The sense of spell meaning news or account continued on into the early modern era, falling out of use in the seventeenth century. The sense of spell meaning a magical incantation or charm arose in the sixteenth century, a set of words that one could speak and have a magical effect, and that’s the definition that prevails today.

The d was dropped from godspell, at the end of the thirteenth century. The change was unusually sudden. While some later texts, notably the C text of Langland’s poem Piers Plowman, continued to use the older spelling, most texts written after 1300 drop the d.

One of the appearances of godspell is in Ælfric of Eynsham’s homily for the fifth Sunday after Easter, which opens:

Sume menn nyton gewiss, for heora nytennysse, hwi godspell is gecweden, oþþe hwæt godspell gemæne. Godspell is witodlice Godes sylfes lar, and ða word þe he spræc on þissere worulde, mancynne to lare and to rihtum geleafan; and þæt is swyðe god spell.

(Some men do not know for certain, because of their ignorance, what godspell is called, or what godspell means. Godspell is indeed God's own teaching, and the words that he spoke in this world, for the instruction of mankind and for true faith; and that is a very good message.)

The more general sense of gospel meaning something that is true, particularly in phrases like their word is gospel, appears in the thirteenth century. The Middle English poem The Owl and the Nightingale, written c.1250, has these lines, ascribing an adage to King Alfred the Great:

Forþi seide alfred swiþe wel—
And his worde was goddspel—
Þat “euereuch man þe bet him beo
Eauer þe bet he hine beseo.”

(About this, Alfred spoke very well—
And his word was gospel—
That “the better off any man might be
The better he should look after himself.”)

Gospel music is a genre of Christian music that originally arose out of eighteenth-century Scottish religious music but in the twentieth century was transformed by African-American folk and religious music traditions into the genre we know today. The phrase gospel music appears as early as 1846 in this announcement of a change of editorial staff in the Star of Bethlehem newspaper, published in Lowell Massachusetts:

Star of Bethlehem. The Editorship and Proprietorship of this paper has passed into the hands of Br. W. Bell, for which all Universalists will be very thankful. Br. Bell used to chime good excellent Gospel music amongst the Green Mountains years ago; and we dare say he has not forgotten how to ring the notes of Gospel truth as of yore.

It’s not clear if this use of gospel music is referring literally to music, or if it is simply a play on the name Bell and the phrase refers to his preaching. But even if the latter is the case, this use shows the phrase on the path to becoming the name for the genre.

By 1875, we see uses of gospel music that clearly refer to a musical genre. Here is one from the 25 October 1875 Louisville, Kentucky Courier-Journal that refers to children in the local “House of Refuge” singing:

And yet there isn’t a Sunday-school class of boys and girls in any of the schools in the city that can sing like these bad little boys. They know they have to sing or suffer the consequences, and they seem to forget that they sing because they have to, and they throw open their great big mouths and convert all the yelling and howling that belongs to their boyish nature into sweet gospel music. And it is music, too, that some of our great men, who go to the house every Sunday to see the boys and hear them sing, weep over and enjoy more than all the music they are accustomed to hear in higher places.

The music may have been Christian, but in all likelihood the “consequences” were anything but good news for the children.

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Sources:

Ælfric. “Dominica Quinta Post [Pascha].” The Homilies of Ælfric: A Supplementary Collection, vol. 1 of 2. John C. Pope, ed. Early English Text Society 259. London: Oxford UP, 1967, 357.

Cartlidge, Neil, ed. The Owl and the Nightingale. Exeter: U of Exeter Press, 2003, 31, lines 1269–72.

Dictionary of Old English: A to I, 2018, s.v. god-spell, n.

“Editorial Etiquette.” Star of Bethlehem (Lowell, Massachusetts), 7 March 1846, 2/5. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“Little By Little.” Courier-Journal (Louisville, Kentucky), 25 October 1875, 4/2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

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

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

Photo credit: Christine Kipper, Info Graz, 2014. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

mook / moke

Screen shot from Martin Scorsese’s 1973 film Mean Streets in which Johnny Boy (played by Robert De Niro) asks, “What’s a mook?”

26 June 2023

Mook is a slang term for a person of low social status, especially a contemptible one, a fool or stupid person. Mook is often confused with moke, a racial slur, and therefore should used with care, if at all. The word’s history, however, takes us on a journey that includes Tennyson’s opinion of his critics, the clientele of nineteenth-century American prostitutes, and a classic Martin Scorsese film.

For many people the introduction to mook came with that film, Martin Scorsese’s 1973 film Mean Streets, in which it appears in the following exchange:

JOEY (George Memmoli):     Alright, alright, we’re not gonna pay. We’re not paying.

JIMMY (Lenny Scaletta): But why?  We just said we’re gonna have a drink.

JOEY: We’re not paying (pointing at JIMMY) because, because this guy is a fuckin’ mook.

JIMMY: But I didn't say nothin’.

JOEY: And we don't pay mooks!

JIMMY: A mook. I'm a mook?

JOEY: Yeah.

JIMMY: What's a mook?

JOHNNY BOY (Robert De Niro): Mook? What’s a mook?

TONY (David Proval): I don’t know.

JOHNNY BOY: What’s a mook?

JIMMY: You can't call me a mook.

JOEY: I can’t?

JIMMY: No.

(A fight breaks out.)

Because the term was unfamiliar to both the audience and the characters in the scene, many assumed that mook was coined for the film. But that’s not the case. It’s much older, but how much older and where it comes from is a question, but one for which we think we know the answer.

Both the Oxford English Dictionary and Green’s Dictionary of Slang have as a first citation for the slang term a piece by humorist S.J. Perelman that appeared in the 1 February 1930 issue of the magazine Judge:

Ever since Harvey Hoover’s autograph and scratch-pad sketches went under the hammer for $123,000 recently, smarties here and there have been burning to muscle in on the big dough. Autograph collectors and others of the same ilk (and a fine big ilk it is, to be sure, with simply HUGE antlers four feet from tip to tip) have been lurking through their Congressman’s waste-basket, waiting hungrily for his “John Hancock,” and even ordinary mooks like you and me have been stuffing their blotters and backs of envelopes in safe deposits for their posterity.

While we can’t be certain where mook comes from, it most likely comes from an older, originally British, dialectal term moke. That term appears as moak in a slang glossary appended to an 1839 report to the British House of Lords on Poverty, Mendicity and Crime. In that glossary moak is defined as a donkey and marked as a Romani term.

The application of the term for a donkey to a person appears in an 8 January 1856 letter Dante Gabriel Rossetti wrote to William Allingford. In a comment about Alfred Lord Tennyson’s reaction to criticism of his work, Rossetti writes:

One of his neverended stories was about an anonymous letter running thus (received since Maud came out)—“Sir, I used to worship you, but now I hate you. I loathe and detest you. You beast! So you've taken to imitating Longfellow. Yours in aversion, –––” and no name, says Alfred, scoring the table with an indignant thumb, and glaring round with suspended pipe, while his auditors look as sympathising as their view of the matter permits. He has an irreconcilable grudge against a poor moke of a fellow called Archer Gurney, who he swears must be the author of the letter, having treated him before to titbits something in the same taste.

Moke crosses the ocean by 1872, when it is recorded in Maximillian Schele De Vere’s Americanisms: The English of the New World. While it’s a good attestation of the term having arrived in America, we can discount the etymology he proposes:

Moke, possibly a remnant of the obsolete moky, which is related to “murky,” is used in New York to designate an old fogy or any old person, disrespectfully spoken to.

This and other American uses of moke to mean a contemptible person make it likely that the British term for a donkey is the source for Perelman’s and Scorsese’s later use of mook in the same sense.

But the use of mook is further complicated by conflation with the use of moke as a racial slur. This sense has a different origin than moke meaning fool or contemptible person. The racial slur appears in mid nineteenth century America and is apparently from mocha, a reference to brown skin. An item in the 7 September 1850 issue of the flash newspaper Life in Boston and New England Police Gazette reads:

Morals in this respectable region are looking up, decidedly. “Dusty Bob” informs us that on the corners of Ferry and Ann [s]treets there are two subterranean dens kept by white “gentlemen,” one of whom has just graduated from State Prison. These pits of pollution are of small size, yet they are every night densely crowded  with “mokes,” (negroes) who hold unlimited intercourse with the wretched white prostitutes, four of whom inhabit one cellar, and five the other, all sleeping in one bed! It is also said that the “landladies” of these dens do not object to bestow their favors upon the dusky sons of Ethiopia. What a beautiful feature in the moral and physical aspect of the Athens of America!

“Dusty Bob” also intimates that Moll McQuade, alias “Bald Head Moll,” now lives in the brick house corner of Ann and Richmond streets, with Hen Dean, a darkey, and Angenette Piper, a white gal. “Togey M—n is her present accept lovyer[?], and they pile together in a small room, Moll deriving a small income from her intercourse with mokes, while Togey practices stone cutting. Well, this is a great country, sure!

Use of this racial slur continues through to today, and it is easily conflated with the other sense of moke and with mook, neither of which have racist origins. Still, the confusion among the terms makes the use of mook problematic, at best. And, while it is probably not what Scorsese intended when he wrote that scene for Mean Streets, the violent reaction to a white man being called a mook can be seen as him objecting to being equated with a Black man.

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Sources:

Note: Both the OED and Green’s Dictionary of Slang misdate Rossetti’s letter, giving it a date of 25 November 1855. But the mistake is understandable. Rossetti began the letter in 1855 but was evidently interrupted and picked up the pen again in January 1856. The portion containing moke is not only dated later, but it also makes reference to publications appearing in the interval. Green’s, however, goes on to make several other errors. First it says that the citation of moke from the 1856 Letters by an Old Boy is from an American publication, but it is a British source. And it places the 1867 use by G.E. Clark in his Seven Years of a Sailor’s Life in the “fool” sense, while Clark clearly uses it as a racial slur.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2023, s.v. mook, n.1, moke, n.1, moke, n.2, mooch, n.1.

Letters by an Odd Boy. London: S.O. Beeton, 1866, 25. Google Books.

Miles, W.A. Poverty, Mendicity and Crime. London: Shaw and Sons, 1839, 164. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

“Morality in Ann Street.” Life in Boston and New England Police Gazette (Life in Boston and New York), 7 September 1850, 3/1. Readex: American Underworld: The Flash Press.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2002, s.v. mook, n., moke, n.2.

Schele De Vere, Maximillian. Americanisms: The English of the New World. New York: Charles Scribner, 1872, 617. Google Books.

Scorsese, Martin and Martin Mardik. Mean Streets (film). Martin Scorsese, dir. Warner Bros., 1973. YouTube.

Perelman, S.J. “Rare Bit of Coolidgeana Bobs Up; Quickly Bobs Down Again” (1930). Judge, 1 February 1930, 8. Archive.org.

Rossetti, Dante Gabriel. The Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, vol. 1 of 4. Oswald Doughty and John Robert Wahl, eds. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1965, 282. Oxford Scholarly Editions Online.

Wright, Joseph. The English Dialect Dictionary, vol. 4 of 6. Oxford: Henry Frowde, 1905, s.v. moke, sb., 145.

Photo credit: Martin Scorsese, 1973. Fair use of a single frame from the 1973 film Mean Streets to illustrate the topic under discussion.

curium

Pierre and Marie Curie, c. 1904

23 June 2023

Curium is transuranic, highly radioactive, hard, dense metal with atomic number 96 and the symbol Cm. It is a synthetic element, first produced in 1944 by Glenn T. Seaborg, Ralph A. James, and Albert Ghiorso. Wartime secrecy, however, delayed the announcement of the discovery until 1945, and the name was not proposed until the following year. It is named for chemists Marie and Pierre Curie.

Because it is so highly radioactive, curium has limited uses. It is used in the synthesis of other transuranic elements; in thermoelectric generators, primarily in spacecraft; and in alpha-particle X-ray spectrometers, again, primarily in spacecraft designed to land on Mars and other celestial bodies.

Seaborg proposed the name in a paper given at an American Chemical Society conference on 10 April 1946. The paper was published in Chemical and Engineering News a month later:

For element 96, containing seven 5f electrons, we suggest “curium”, symbol Cm after Pierre and Marie Curie, historical leading investigators in the field of radioactivity; this is by analogy with gadolinium, containing seven 4f electrons, which recalls Gadolin, the great investigator of rare earths.

The Associated Press reported on the naming on 10 April, and the journal Science followed on 19 April 1946.

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Sources:

Associated Press. “World A-Energy Controls Declared Necessary: Scientist Says Alternative is Non-Commercial Use of Power.” Columbus Evening Dispatch (Ohio), 10 April 1946, 2-A. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Miśkowiec, Pawel. “Name Game: The Naming History of the Chemical Elements—Part 3—Rivalry of Scientists in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries.” Foundations of Chemistry, 12 November 2022.

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

Seaborg, Glenn T. “The Impact of Nuclear Chemistry” (10 April 1946). Chemical and Engineering News, 24.9, 10 May 1946, 1192–98 at 1197. DOI: 10.1021/cen-v024n009.p1192.

“U.S. News and Notes.” Science, 103.2677, 19 April 1946, 480–82 at 481. DOI: 10.1126/science.103.2677.480.

Image credit: Unknown photographer, c. 1904. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

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.