bordello

Salon at the Rue des Moulins (1894), by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

14 August 2023

A bordello is, of course, a brothel, a house of prostitution. It is an example of a word that has been borrowed into English multiple times at different points in history.

Bordello is a sixteenth-century borrowing from Italian, but it has an earlier form bordel, dating to c. 1300, that is a borrowing from Anglo-Norman. The Anglo-Norman originally, c. 1185, meant a cottage or hut but came to mean a brothel by around 1300, about the time the word started to be used in English. The French and Italian words come from the post-classical Latin bordellum, meaning a cottage or small land holding. Bordellum appears in Anglo-Latin from c. 1100. (The Anglo-Latin word would later, in the late fourteenth century, also acquire the sense of a brothel, but this sense would be due to influence from the English and Anglo-Norman.)

Bordel appears in English writing c. 1300 in the Life of St. Lucy found in the collection of hagiographies known as the Early South English Legendary. Lucy was condemned to a brothel for refusing to marry a pagan man and for giving to the poor her wealth, which legally belonged to the man she was supposed to marry. One version of the life has this exchange between the judge and Lucy:

“I-wedded ich was to Ihesu crist,” : þis holie maide him tolde
“Þo ich was i-baptized : and þulke weddinge ichulle holde.
Ake to hore-dome þov wouldest me bringue : ȝwane þov me wouldest make
Mine spousede louerd Ihesu crist : for ani oþur man for-sake.”
“Þou schalt for-sake him,” quath þe Iustise : “haddest þou it i-swore :
For to þe commune bordel þov schalt beo :  i-lad oþur i-bore,
And þare schal mani a moder-child : go to þi foule licame
And ligge bi þe, alle þat wollez : in hore-dom and in schame.”

(“I was wed to Jesus Christ,” this holy maid told him. “At the time I was baptized, and it was ordained that I should have that marriage. Yet to whoredom you would bring me when you would make me forsake my spouse, the lord Jesus Christ, for any other man.”

“You shall forsake him,” said the judge, “whom you had promised. For to a common bordel you shall be taken or carried, and there shall many a mother’s child go to your foul body and lie with you, all that will, in whoredom and in shame.”)

Bordello, borrowed from the Italian, first appears in a 1581 anti-Catholic tract:

Wisdome is requisite in a Pope, whereby he may knowe golde from siluer, gemmes and precious stones, fro[m] common stones which bee in the streetes. Hee must haue wisedome to counte them, wisedome to locke them vp in his treasure house: hee cannot bee without wisedome to picke out the best golde from the badde, to giue to his waiting gentlewomen at bed and boorde. Hee must moreouer haue wisedome to prouide for his bastardely children, which hee begot whiles hee was a soule Priest to the Putanne in the Burdello or whilest hee saide Masse elswhere for money, to supplie the necessitie of any sober Curtezane, and defloured Virgin

Note that bordello, or burdello, appears in an Italian context and is italicized in the book, indicating that the word was not fully anglicized by this date. But it would quickly be picked up and replace bordel as the more common form.

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Sources:

Anglo-Norman Dictionary, 2007, s.v. bordel, n.

Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, 2013, s.v. bordellum, bordellus, n. Brepols: Database of Latin Dictionaries.

Horstmann, Carl, ed. “Vita sancta Lucie uirginis.” The Early South English Legendary. Early English Text Society. London: N. Trübner, 1887, 103, lines 91–98. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud 108. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. bordel, n.(1).

Nicholls, John. Pilgrimage, Whrein Is Diplaied the Liues of the Proude Popes, Ambitious Cardinals, Lecherous Bishops, Fat Bellied Monkes, and Hypocriticall Iesuites. London: Thomas Dawson, 1581, sig. C3. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2022, s.v. bordello, n.

Image credit: Painting by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, 1894. Public domain work. Wikimedia Commons. Photograph by Didier Descouens, 2021, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

europium

A 300g block of pure Europium

11 August 2023

Europium is a silvery-white metal that develops a dark oxide coating when exposed to air. Pure europium has relatively few uses, notably in the production of some types of optical glass. Its oxides are used as phosphors in television sets and computer screens and as an anti-counterfeiting measure in Euro bank notes. It has atomic number 63 and the symbol Eu

As early as 1896, chemist Eugène-Anatole Demarçay suspected that samples of samarium contained a novel element, and he was able to isolate it 1901 and proposed naming it after the continent of Europe, making it the first element to be discovered and named in the twentieth century.

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Sources:

Demarçay, Eugène-Anatole. “Sur Un Nouvel Élément, l’Europium.” Comptes Rendus Hebdomadaires des Séances de l'Académie des Sciences, 132, Jan–Jun 1901, 1484–86 at 1485. HathiTrust Digital Archive. 

Miśkowiec, Paweł. “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. DOI: 10.1007/s10698-022-09452-9.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2008, s.v. europium, n.

Photo credit: Heinrich Pniok, 2006. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NonDerivative 3.0 (US) License.

precovery

Example of precovery images showing Jupiter’s moon Valetudo. The moon was discovered in 2017 but later found in this archived shot from 2003. Each of three images in the gif were taken 21 minutes apart.

9 August 2023

Precovery is a term originating in the astronomy community that refers to the finding of evidence of an astronomical object’s existence in archival images and data after the object has been discovered. Precover is also a verb. The term is a blend, or portmanteau, either of pre- + [dis]covery or of pre[-discovery re]covery. The word has been in use by astronomers for over thirty years, but has yet to make it into any of the major general dictionaries, probably because the term rarely appears outside of astronomical papers and such jargon rarely makes it into general dictionaries.

The earliest use of precovery, in the plural form precoveries, that I’m aware of is in a 1991 paper in the Australian Journal of Astronomy:

Another classification of observation we term “precoveries.” These are newly discovered NEAs for which we have identified observations on UKST [U.K. Schmidt Telescope] plates taken in the past. Accurate measurements of these plates thus allow the orbits to be immediately determined, and thus the objects secured.

The use of “we term” hints that this may be the actual coinage of the word, but all we can say for certain is that it indicates the word was quite new in astronomical circles in 1991.

The verb is in place by 1995, when it is used in a paper given at the International Astronomical Union Colloquium of that year:

The asteroids of most interest to us are those which approach the Earth, and whenever such an object is found (by anyone) we perform back-integrations in order to determine whether the object may have been recorded on any UKST plate taken since 1973. In many cases the object is found (“precovered”) and measured, allowing an accurate orbit to be determined soon after its discovery.

That same paper also uses the noun:

Recently a similar object, (5145) Pholus = 1992 AD, was found by the University of Arizona Spacewatch team. The earliest images of Pholus were measured from UKST plates taken in 1977 and 1982. These images were identified following the “precovery” (or pre-discovery recovery) of the object by E.M. and C.S. Shoemaker on films taken with the 0.46 m Palomar Schmidt, and by J.Mueller on plates taken with the 1.2m Palomar Schmidt.

The term continues to appear in the ensuing decades, but in most instances it remains within quotation marks or is otherwise explained, indicating the authors or journal editors did not think it would be familiar to a large portion of their readership. There is this from Astronomy & Astrophysics in 2001:

The Arcetri Near Earth Object Precovery Program (ANEOPP) is a project dedicated to the identification of Near Earth Objects (NEOs) on past archival materials, an activity usually referred to as precovery.

And this from the 2001 book Collisional Processes in the Solar System:

It involves a specific agreement with the MPC [Minor Planet Center] on the share of specific responsibilities, the set-up of new observatories in locations where there are none or only a few, an inquiry on the content and location of image archives that may reveal a "gold mine" for past, undetected observations of newly discovered objects (usually called prediscoveries, or "precoveries"). This last possibility is of great interest, as has been recently demonstrated by the precovery of the NEO [Near-Earth Object]1997 XF11 in films taken at Palomar in 1990 by the teams of E.F. Helin and of E.M. and C.S. Shoemaker: these precoveries have transformed a few-months arc into an 8-years arc, allowing a far better determination of the orbit of this rather intriguing PHO [potentially hazardous object].

There is an example of the word used without marking or comment in a 2010 PhD dissertation:

These observations were used to calculate an orbital ephemeris, and to precover additional data from 10 nights in 2005, as well as 7 subsequent nights in 2007.

But that may show the difference between more informal of the term by astronomers and how the term is presented in journals—unlike dissertations—that have copyeditors who look out for such terms. Here is an example of the term placed within quotation marks in a 2021 article in the Astronomical Journal:

We developed simulations that demonstrated the ability to use archival photometric data in combination with TESS to “precover” the orbital period for these candidates with a precision of several minutes, assuming circular orbits

Occasionally, precovery makes its way out of the confines of astronomy circles and into general publications. The earliest that I have found is in a 9 April 2005 article in the Washington Post about an asteroid that passed close to earth. The article was reprinted in a number of other papers in the following days:

By Dec. 26, the impact probability had risen to one chance in 38. What the plotters needed was a “precovery,” an overlooked observation from before Tholen’s initial June fixes to yield a more precise orbital solution.

In Tucson, astronomers at the Spacewatch Project, at the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, started searching their archive. Spacewatch has been surveying the solar system for 20 years, and precovery is a specialty.

Precovery is a nice example of how a technical term can circulate within a particular discourse community for decades before anyone outside that community notices it.

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Sources:

Boattini, A., et al. “The Arcetri NEO Precovery Program.” Astronomy & Astrophysics, 375.1 (15 August 2001), 293–307 at 293. DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361:20010825.

Burkhardt, G., et al. Astronomy and Astrophysics Abstracts: Literature 1991, Part 2. Berlin: Springer, 1992, 631. SpringerLink.

Carusi, A. “NEO, The Spaceguard System and the Spaceguard Foundation.” In Collisional Processes in the Solar System. Mikhail Yakovlevich Marov and Hans Rickman, eds. Astrophysics and Space Science Library 261. Dordrecht: Springer 2001, 341. SpringerLink: Springer eBooks.

Gugliotta, Guy. “Earth Dodges Big One, For Now.” Washington Post, 9 April 2005, A6-1. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Kaib, Nathan A. “Numerical Models of Oort Cloud Formation and Delivery.” PhD Dissertation, University of Washington, 2010, 134. ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global.

McNaught, R. H., et al. “Near-Earth Asteroids on Archival Schmidt Plates.” International Astronomical Union Colloquium, 148, 1995, 170–173 at 170 and 171. CambridgeCore: Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union.

Steel, D. and R. H. McNaught. “The Anglo-American Near-Earth Asteroid Survey.” Australian Journal of Astronomy, 4.2, October 1991, 42–48 at 47.

Yao, Xinyu, et al. “Following Up TESS Single Transits with Archival Photometry and Radial Velocities." The Astronomical Journal, 161.3, 16 February 2021, 1–14 at 1. DOI: 10.3847/1538-3881/abdb30.

Photo credit: Brett J. Gladman/Canadian Astronomy Data Centre, 2003. Taken with the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope's MegaPrime CCD camera. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

blue / blues

Blues musician John Lee Hooker at the Long Beach Blues Festival, 1997

7 August 2023

Blue can refer to the color or it can also refer to a state of sadness. That latter sense is probably a reference to the medieval theory of medical humors, in particular to melancholy, which has a black or dark blue color. While we have a good idea of the general outline of the word’s etymology, there are a number of uncertainties and gaps in our knowledge of blue’s history and development.

Blue comes from a proto-Germanic root (there are cognates in most of the Germanic languages). The Germanic root was also borrowed into post-classical/medieval Latin as blavus, and that Latin word, along with its descendent in Anglo-Norman (the dialect of French spoken by the Norman conquerors of England) and Continental Old French, would influence and reinforce later English usage. But the meaning of this proto-Germanic root was probably quite different from that of our present-day word.

We can see this difference in Old English, which like proto-Germanic, did not have a separate word, at least not one in common use, for the color blue, having only six basic color terms (for white, black, red, yellow, green, and gray). We have two words in Old English that come from this root. One, blæwen, referred to the color blue as we know it, but it was an uncommon word, only a few instances appear in the extant corpus. The second, bleo, is much more common, but it is used only twice in the corpus to mean blue or purple (glossing the Latin blavus and fucus). Its usual meaning was the more general color/hue or form/shape (and these two senses often cannot be disambiguated, giving bleo an even more general sense of aspect/appearance).

It is the Normans who really introduced blue into the English language. We see the Anglo-Norman and Continental Old French bleu, meaning the color we know today as blue, starting in the thirteenth century. But both Anglo-Norman and the Old French words have an older sense, recorded in the early twelfth century, meaning tawny/golden/fair. This sense may represent a different, perhaps Celtic, root.

The early use of the Middle English blo reflects a lighter shade. It is recorded in the early thirteenth century in the sense of gray or ashen. But this sense is rare and early. The more common use blo was to refer to a hue that was a dark blue, almost black, or a purplish blue, like a bruise. This sense survives today in the northern English dialectal and the Scots blae. We can see this dark blue/purple sense the Scottish legal text Leges quatuor burgorum. This macaronic, Latin-English text was penned sometime before 1200; the Scottish text shown here is a nineteenth-century recension of a number of unspecified older manuscripts:

De querela de blaa et blodi

Si quis verberando fecerit aliquem blaa et blodi ipse quie fuerit blaa et blodi prius debet exaudiri sive prius venerit aut non ad querimoniam faciendam Et si uterque fuerit blaa et blodi qui prius accusaverit prius exaudietur.

Of playnte of hym þat is mayd blaa and blody

If ony man strykis anoþir quhar thruch he is mayd blaa and blody he þat is mayd blaa and blody sal first be herde quheþir he cumys fyrst to plenge or nocht And gif þat bathe be blaa and blody he þat first plengeis hym sal first be herde

(Regarding a complaint of one who is made blue and bloody

If any man strikes another whereby he is made blue and bloody, he that is made blue and bloody shall first be heard whether he comes first to complain or not. And if they both be blue and bloody, he that first complains shall first be heard.)

Use of blue to refer to the lighter shades appears by the early fourteenth century. We see it in the Middle English romance of Sir Tristrem. The poem is found in the Auchinleck manuscript, which was copied c. 1330, but the poem may have been composed as early as the late thirteenth century:

Þe king, a welp he brouȝt
Bifor Tristrem þe trewe;
What colour he was wrouȝt
Now ichil ȝou schewe.
Silke nas non so soft,
He was rede, grene & blewe.
Þai þat him seiȝen oft
Of him hadde gamen & glewe,
Ywis.
His name was Peticrewe,
Of him was michel priis.

(The king brought a whelp before Tristrem the true. What color he was made of I will now tell you. Silk was never so soft, he was red, green, and blue. In fact, they that saw him often had joy and glee. His name was Peticrewe, of him there was great distinction.)

The sense of blue referring to sadness or depression seems to be a development from this sense of a dark, almost black, shade of blue and is a metaphor for melancholy, or black bile, the humor that was thought to be the cause of sadness and teres blewe. This sense was in place by the late fourteenth century. Geoffrey Chaucer uses it in the opening of his poem The Complaint of Mars, about the love between the planets Mars and Venus. The speaker is repeating words they heard spoken by a bird on St. Valentine’s Day that warn illicit lovers to run before daybreak exposes them to jealous eyes, but the bird says not to worry, because the sadness of their parting will soon be assuaged:

Gladeth, ye foules, of the morowe gray.
Lo, Venus, riysen among yon rowes rede,
And floures fressh, honoureth ye this day;
For when the sunne uprist then wol ye sprede,
But ye lovers, that lye in any drede,
Fleeth, lest wikked tonges you espye.
Lo, yond the sunne, the candel of jelosye!

Wyth teres blewe and with a wounded herte
Taketh your leve, and with Seint John to borowe
Apeseth sumwhat of your sorowes smerte.
Tyme cometh eft that cese shal your sorowe;
The glade nyght ys worth an hevy morowe—
Seynt Valentyne, a foul thus herde I synge
Upon this day er sonne gan up-sprynge.

(Be glad, you fowls of the gray morning.
Lo, Venus rises among yon red rays,
And fresh flowers honor you this day;
For when the sun rises, then you will spread out.
But you lovers that lie in any danger,
Flee, lest you espy any wicked tongues.
Lo, yonder the sun, the candle of jealousy.

With tears blue and with a wounded heart
Take your leave, and with Saint John your guarantor,
Sooth somewhat your sorrow’s pain.
Time comes again that will cease your sorrow;
The glad night is worth a sad morning—
Saint Valentine’s Day—thus a fowl I heard sing
Upon this day before the sun springs up.)

Use of the phrase the blues to refer to a state of unhappiness dates to the mid eighteenth century. We see this phrase in an 11 July 1741 letter by actor and playwright David Garrick:

The Town is exceeding hot & Sultry & I am far from being quite well, tho not troubled wth ye Blews as I have been, I design taking a Country Jaunt or two for a few Days when Our Engines are finish’d, for I found great Benefits from ye last I took.

And several centuries later, the blues would become the name of the musical genre. The musical style, usually reflecting melancholic themes, arose out of African-American folk music. The earliest tunes bearing the title blues appear in 1912, Memphis Blues and Dallas Blues, and the name of the genre appears in newspapers by 1915, although undoubtedly the name was in use on Black oral use well before these dates. From the Chicago Tribune of 11 July 1915, an article on the musical genre that refers to a husband, the “Worm,” who at the insistence of his wife reluctantly dances to a blues melody only to discover that he loves it:

The Worm had turned—turned to fox trotting. And the “blues” had done it. The “jazz” had put pep into the legs that had scrambled too long for the 5:15.

What mattered to him now the sly smiles of contempt that his friends had uncorked when he essayed the foxy trot a month before: what mattered it whose shins he kicked?

That was what “blue” music had done for him.

That is what “blue” music is doing for everybody—taking away what its name implies, the blues. In a few months it has become the predominant motif in cabaret offerings; its wailing syncopation is heard in every gin mill where dancing holds sway.

That’s it, from medieval colors and medical theory to Black music on the far side of the ocean.

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Sources:

Anglo-Norman Dictionary, 2007, s.v. bleu, adj. and n.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. “The Complaint of Mars.” The Riverside Chaucer, third edition, Larry D. Benson, ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987, lines 1–14, 643–44.

Dictionary of Old English: A to I, 2018, s.v. blæwen, adj., blæ-hæwen, adj., bleo, n., blae, adj.

Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue, 1937, Dictionaries of the Scots Language (DSL), s.v. bla, adj., bla, n., blae, n.

Garrick, David. Letter to Peter Garrick (11 July 1741). The Letters of David Garrick, vol.1, David M. Little, George M. Karhrl, and Phoebe deK. Wilson, eds. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press, 1963, 26.

“Leges Quatuor Burgorum” (before 1200). The Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, vol. 1 of 11. Edinburgh, 1844, 349. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Latin text is from before 1200. The Scottish text is an nineteenth-century recension of a number Middle English Dictionary, 2019. s.v. bleu, adj., blo, adj.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2013, s.v. blue, adj. and n., blues, n.; second edition, 1989, blae, n.

Sir Tristrem (MS c. 1330, composed before 1300?), lines 2400–2404. Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, Adv MS 19.2.1 (Auchinleck manuscript), fol. 294va. https://auchinleck.nls.uk/mss/tristrem.html

Photo credit: Mashiro Sumori, 1997. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

erbium / terbium

Ytterby Mine on the island of Resarö, in Vaxholm Municipality in Stockholm archipelago

4 August 2023

Erbium (atomic number 68, symbol Er) and terbium (atomic number 65, symbol Tb) are two of the four elements named after the Swedish mining village of Ytterby, the others being yttrium and ytterbium. But the history of the names is more convoluted than the simple etymology suggests.

In 1843 chemist Carl Gustaf Mosander discovered that a sample of the oxide of yttrium in his possession also contained two other oxides which he dubbed erbium and terbium. He identified the erbium oxide as having a yellowish color and terbium oxide a reddish one:

If the name of yttria be reserved for the strongest of these bases, and the next in order receives the name of oxide of terbium, while the weakest be called oxide of erbium, we find the following characteristic differences distinguishing the three substances. […] Oxide of terbium, the salts of which are of a reddish colour, appears, when pure, to be devoid of colour, like yttria. Oxide of erbium differs from the two former in its property of becoming of a dark orange yellow colour when heated in contact with air.

But in 1860, chemist and physician Nils Johan Berlin conducted a spectroscopic analysis of the ore and only found the red- or rose-colored oxide. Based on his analysis, Berlin disputed the existence of the other oxide, and he confusingly dubbed the red oxide (Mosander’s terbium) erbium. In 1877, Chemist Marc Delafontaine conclusively showed that the yellow oxide did indeed exist, but he followed Berlin’s switch in naming and dubbed the yellow oxide terbium. Delafontaine had previously suggested the yellow oxide be named mosandrium, but that name did not stick. As a result, the present-day nomenclature of the two elements is the reverse of Mosander’s original.  

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Sources:

Miśkowiec, Pawel. “Name Game: The Naming History of the Chemical Elements: Part 2—Turbulent Nineteenth Century.” Foundations of Chemistry, 8 December 2022. DOI: 10.1007/s10698-022-09451-w.

Mosander, C.G. “On the New Metals, Lanthanium and Didymium, Which Are Associated with Cerium; and on Erbium and Terbium, New Metals Associated with Yttria.” London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science, third series. 23.152, October 1843,  241–254 at 252.

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

Photo credit: Sinikka Halme, 2019. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.