steward / stewardess

Nelly Diener, the first European air stewardess, 1934. She is standing in front of a Swissair Curtiss AT-32C Condor. She would be killed in a crash in this aircraft in July 1934, soon after this photo was taken.

28 August 2023

Steward has a variety of meanings. We perhaps most often encounter it today, along with its female counterpart stewardess, in the context of air travel, although those uses have largely been overtaken by flight attendant. One can also encounter it in church circles, where stewardship refers to fund raising. But it’s oldest meaning is that of a guardian, one who cares for a noble’s estate.

Steward is a compound of the Old English stig (hall) + weard (guardian). Perhaps the earliest attested use of the word is in a translation of Augustine’s Soliloquies. This text appears in the Southwick Codex, one of two codices that constitute London, British Library, MS Cotton Vitellius A.xv. (The other is the Nowell Codex, also known as the Beowulf Codex.) The Southwick Codex was copied during the twelfth century, but the text is widely thought to have been composed a few centuries earlier. The translation of the Soliloquies has traditionally been ascribed to King Alfred the Great, although recent scholarship disavows that attribution. The lines in question read:

Sam ic wylle, sam ic nelle, ic sceal secgan nide right, buton ic leogan willæ. Gyf ic ðonne leoga, þonne wot God það; forði ic ne dear nan oððer secgan butan soð þæs ðe ic gecnawan can. Me þincð betere þæt ic forlete þa gyfe and folgyge þam gyfan ðe me egðer ys stiward ge ðæs welan ge ac hys freonscypes, buton egðer habban mage. Ic wolde þeah egþer habben, gyf ic myhte ge ðone welan ge eac hys willan folgyan.

(Whether I want to or not, I must speak the truth, unless I am willing to lie. If I lie, then God will know it. Therefore, I dare not speak anything other than the truth, as far I as can know it. I think it is better that I forsake the gift and follow the giver, who to me is the steward both of riches and of his friendship, unless I might have both. I would like to have both, if I could have riches and also follow his will.)

We see steward in the title of a minor noble in the entry for the year 1093 in the Peterborough Chronicle. The entry describes the death of King Malcolm III of Scotland:

Ac hraðe þæs þe he ham com, he his fyrde gegaderode & into Englelande hergende mid maran unræde ferde þone him a behofode, & hine þa Rodbeard se eorl of Norðhymbran mid his mannan unwæres besyrede & ofsloh; hine sloh Moræl of Bæbbaburh se wæs þæs eorles stiward & Melcolmes cinges godsib.

(And soon after [Malcolm] returned home, he assembled his troops and raided into England with greater hostility than was wise of him, and Robert, the earl of Northumberland, with his men surprised and defeated him; Morel of Bamburgh, who was the earl’s steward and King Malcom’s godfather, killed him.)

From this sense of a someone who served as manager of an estate came comes the sense of servant who keeps stores and serves meals. We see this sense in the fifteenth century, first in naval parlance and then more generally. We see it applied to train travel at the turn of the twentieth century and to air travel by the 1930s.

Stewardess, referring to a woman who serves as a steward appears in the seventeenth century.

In Old English, stig can also refer to a pig sty, and therefore a myth has arisen that the original meaning of steward was that of someone who took care of pigs, but there is no reason to think that this is the case. The idea of “hall guardian” fits the known uses far better.

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Sources:

Carnicelli, Thomas A., ed. King Alfred’s Version of St. Augustine’s Soliloquies. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 1969, 62. London, British Library, MS Cotton Vitellius A.xv.

Irvine, Susan. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 7. MS E. Woodbridge: D.S. Brewer, 2004, 103. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Laud Misc. 636, fol. 69r. JSTOR.

Lockett, Leslie, ed. Augustine’s Soliloquies in Old English and Latin. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 76. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 2022, 220.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. steward, n., stewardess, n.

Photo credit: Swissair, 1934. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

mug / mugger / mug shot

“Toby jug,” made by Ralph Wood, c. 1782–95.

26 August 2023

Mug is a word that has undergone a number of semantic shifts, or changes in meaning, over the centuries. So much so that today one wonders what connection, if any, there is between the drinking vessel and getting robbed or a person’s face or the photograph taken upon a person’s arrest.

The first known use of mug in English dates to 1400 and it is used in the sense of a dry measure, in this particular case a measure of salt. The etymology of mug is not known; there are cognates in other Germanic languages, but relationship these different words have to one another is uncertain.

By the early sixteenth century mug was being used to refer to large pieces of crockery, and by the middle of the seventeenth century we see the sense that we know today of a large drinking vessel with a handle. From Charles Cotton 1664 mock epic Scarronides, based on Virgil’s Aeneid, where Dido raises a mug in a toast to Aeneas:

Up from her Chayre Queen Dido starts,
And takes a Mug, that held Two Quarts
Of Drink, that she with much forbearing
Had sav'd long since for her Sheep-shearing:
And thus begins, Here Sirs, here's to you,
And from my heart much good may do you

In the eighteenth century, mug was being used as a slang word for a person’s face. How this sense arose is not certain, but it may be from the grotesque faces that often appeared on earthenware drinking vessels of the era. Alternatively, etymologist Anatoly Liberman suggests that the Scots murgeon, meaning grimace, may be the source of this sense of mug. But both of these suggestions must be labeled with “perhaps.”

The sense of mug meaning face appears as early as 1708 in the humorous newspaper the British Apollo. This passage appears in a supposed letter from a woman asking advice about which of her suitors to marry:

Three persons making their addresses to me, a captain, a lawyer, and a merchant; I have enquir’d after their personal estates, for they despise real ones: my captain has his commission in his pocket, which scorns to keep company with any gold there. My Lawyer has a desk, nine law-books without covers, two with covers, a temple mug, and the hopes of being a Judge. My merchant has a vast estate, tho’ at that distance that I have never heard of besides, who have ever travell’d to those parts.

The editors of the British Apollo demur in giving an answer, but instead consult the “Oracle of Apollo,” which responds with some lines of verse that describe the risks of each choice but do not offer any actionable advice. The temple here refers to the Inns of Court near Temple Church in London which contain barristers’ chambers and solicitors’ offices. A man with a temple-mug would have the countenance expected of a lawyer.

And from this sense of mug meaning face we get mug shot, the photograph of a person who has been arrested. Mug shot arose in American police jargon in the first half of the twentieth century. We see its development in this Indiana newspaper article from 20 December 1911. The noun phrase isn’t yet in place, but we can see that it is coming:

Sergeant Weifenbach characterizes them as the toughest mugs that he has ever had to deal with. They spend their time in cursing and annoying the other prisoners. Captain Evans of the Chicago department[t,] head of the bureau of identification, has asked the local authorities to have their “mugs shot,” and accordingly a photographer has been engaged to get pictures of the criminals.

The verb phrase have one’s mug shot, meaning to have one’s portrait photographed, appears in various contexts after this, not all having to do with police procedures. But we don’t see the noun phrase mug shot for a couple of decades. From Iowa’s Des Moines Register of 5 July 1936:

Of course there are many other wanted men in the thousands of files of the bureau. There are “mug” shots, or pictures, and identifications and criminal records of hundreds who are sought for poultry theft, car stealing, larceny, forgery, farm implement and produce theft, rape, arson and so on down the long list of crimes.

Along another path of the word’s development, by the early nineteenth-century mug had become a slang verb in the boxing community that meant to strike an opponent in the face. And by 1864 J. C. Hotten’s Slang Dictionary recorded the verb as meaning to rob someone:

MUG, to strike in the face, or fight. Also to rob by the garrote.

So the sense transferred from the face, to striking someone in the face, to robbing someone by striking or threatening to strike them. At about the same time the noun mugger, meaning a robber, also appears.

There are various other senses of mugger. The use of the word to mean a dealer or tinker in crockery dates to 1743. Mugger is nineteenth century British schoolboy slang for a diligent student, what we might now term a nerd or grind. The name for the mugger crocodile, native to India, appears by 1844. This name is unrelated to the other mugs and muggers, coming from the Hindi magar, meaning crocodile.

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Sources:

British Apollo, third edition, vol. 1 of 3. London: Theodore Sanders and Arthur Bettesworth, 1726, 8. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Cotton, Charles. Scarronides. London: E. Cotes for Henry Brome, 1664, 107. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

A Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue, 1971, s.v. murgeo(u)n, n. Dictionaries of the Scots Language.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2023, s.v. mug, n.1, mug, v.1, mug shot, n. Note: Green’s has a quotation for the noun phrase mug shot from 1912, but this is actually an instance of the verb phrase, to have one’s mug shot.

Hotten, John Camden. The Slang Dictionary. London: 1864, 183, s.v. mug, v. Archive.org.

Liberman, Anatoly. An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 2008, s.v. mooch,164.

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

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2003, s.v. mug, n.1, mug, n.3., mugger, n.2., mugger, n.1., mugger, n.5., mugger, n.3., mug shot, n.

“Police Capture Hamilton and Pal Without a Shot” (photo caption). Dallas Morning News (Texas), 22 August 1938, 1/3–4. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Scottish National Dictionary, 1965, s.v. murgeon, n., v. Dictionaries of the Scots Language (DSL).

Spry, Dick. “Seven Iowa Public Enemies Still Evade Dragnet of Law Agencies.” Des Moines Register (Iowa), 5 July 1936, Iowa News 4/1. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

“Toughs Finally Landed,” Lake County Times (Hammond, Indiana), 20 December 1911, 4/1. Newspapers.com.

Photo credit: Andreas Praefcke, 2011. Wikimedia Commons. Victoria and Albert Museum, London, C.42-1955. Public domain image.

fluorine

Liquid fluorine in a cryogenic bath

26 August 2023

Fluorine is an element with the atomic number 9 and the symbol F. At room temperature and pressure, it is a highly toxic, yellow gas. In pure form, it is extremely reactive, interacting and corroding most substances it comes in contact with.

The name is a combination of fluor + -ine. The noun fluor is from Latin, where it means a discharge, flow, or stream. In English it can refer to any of a variety of minerals, resembling gems, that are used in smelting remove impurities and to facilitate the fusing of metals, a welding or soldering agent. The suffix -ine is used, among other things, in the names of classes or genera of natural objects; compare fluorine to the names of the elements in the same column of the periodic table: chlorine, bromine, iodine, astatine, and tennessine.

In 1546, Georgius Agricola, the “father of mineralogy,” used the Latin fluores to translate the German Flusse (fluxes) used in smelting. And by 1610, fluor was being used in English, in particular in Philmon Holland’s 1610 translation of William Camden’s Britannia. The word appears in a description of the mining industry in Darbyshire:

Milstones likewise are here hewed out, as also grinde-stones and whetstones, to giue an edge unto iron tooles: and sometimes in these mines and quarries is found a certaine white Fluor (for such stones coming of Mines, that bee like unto precious stones, learned minerall men call Fluores) which for all the world resembleth Christall.

The adjective fluoric, in the phrase fluoric acid, is in use by 1783, and by the late eighteenth century chemists began to suspect such compounds contained a novel element. Starting in 1809, chemists Humphry Davy and André Marie Ampère exchanged a series of letters on the topic, culminating in 1813 with Davy publishing a paper that named the element, crediting Ampere with the coinage:

From the general tenor of the results that I have stated, it appears reasonable to conclude that there exists in the fluoric compounds a peculiar substance, possessed of strong attractions for metallic bodies and hydrogen, and which combined with certain inflammable bodies forms peculiar acids, and which, in consequence of its strong affinities and high decomposing agencies, it will be very difficult to examine in a pure form, and, for the sake of avoiding circumlocution, it may be denominated fluorine, a name suggested to me by M. Ampere.

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Sources:

Camden, William. Britain, or a Chorographicall Description of the most Flourishing Kingdomes, England, Scotland, and Ireland, and the Ilands Adioyning. Philemon Holland, trans. London: George Bishop and John Norton, 1610, 556–557. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Davy, Humphry. “Some Experiments and Observations on the Substances Produced in Different Chemical Processes on Fluor Spar” (8 July 1813). Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 103, December 1813, 263–79 at 278. DOI: 10.1098/rstl.1813.0034.

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.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2012, s.v. fluorine, n., fluor, n.1, fluoric, adj., fluoric acid, n.; second edition, 1989, s.v. -ine, suffix1.

Image credit: B.G. Mueller, 2011. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

quark

James Joyce, 1915 (left) and Murray Gell-Mann, 2012 (right)

23 August 2023

A quark is a subatomic particle that combine in pairs to form hadrons, the basic constituents of matter. The name is an arbitrary coinage inspired by a passage in James Joyce’s 1939 novel Finnegans Wake.

The word was coined by physicist Murray Gell-Man in a 1964 paper:

A simpler and more elegant scheme can be constructed if we allow non-integral values for the charges. We can dispense entirely with the basic baryon b if we assign to the triplet t the following properties: spin ½, z = ˗⅓, and baryon number ⅓. We then refer to the members u⅔, d ˗⅓, and s ˗⅓ of the triplet as “quarks”⁶ q and the members of the anti-triplet as anti-quarks ˗q. Baryons can now be constructed from quarks by using the combinations (q q q), (q q q ˗q), etc., while mesons are made out of (q ˗q), (q q ˗q ˗q), etc.

The note (#6) is to James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, in particular to a line in a poem that appears at the opening of the novel’s book 2, episode 4:

—THREE QUARKS for Muster Mark!
Sure he hasn’t got much of a bark
And sure any he has it’s all beside the mark.
But O, Wreneagle Almighty, wouldn’t un be a sky of a lark
To see that old buzzard whooping about for uns shirt in the dark
And he hunting round for uns speckled trousers around by Palmerstown Park?
Hohohoho, moulty Mark!
You’re the rummest old rooster ever flopped out of a Noah’s ark
And you think you’re cock of the wark.
Fowls, up! Tristy’s the spry young spark
That’ll tread her and wed her and bed her and red her
Without ever winking the tail of a feather
And that’s how that chap’s going to make his money and mark!
 
Overhoved, shrillgleescreaming. That song sang seaswans. The winging ones. Seahawk, seagull, curlew and plover, kestrel and capercallzie. All the birds of the sea they trolled out rightbold when they smacked the big kuss of Trustan with Usolde.

The poem is, among other things, a reference to Arthurian legend. The Mark in question is King Mark of Cornwall, the “Cuckold King,” uncle to Tristan, who had an affair with Mark’s wife, Iseult. Joyce’s quark is probably an imitation of sea-bird’s call. Quark can also be a type of cheese similar to cottage cheese, but this makes little sense in Joyce’s context.

On its face, the passage has no relation to particle physics, but Gell-Mann explained his reasoning in a 27 June 1978 letter to the editors of the OED:

I employed the sound “quork” for several weeks in 1963 before noticing “quark” in “Finnegans Wake,” which I had perused from time to time since it appeared in 1939 [...] The allusion to three quarks seemed perfect [...] I needed an excuse for retaining the pronunciation quork despite the occurrence of “Mark,” “bark,” “mark,” and so forth in Finnegans Wake. I found that excuse by supposing that one ingredient of the line “Three quarks for Muster Mark” was a cry of “Three quarts for Mister…” heard in H. C. Earwicker's pub.

Quarks come in six types, arranged in three pair (up/down, charm/strange, top/bottom), and that struck Gell-Mann as sufficient justification for using the word as the name of the subatomic particle. The word stuck, but Gell-Mann’s preferred pronunciation did not.

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Sources:

Gell-Mann, M. “A Schematic Model of Baryons and Mesons.” Physics Letters, 8.3, 1 February 1964, 214/2. Elsevier Science Direct.

Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake. New York: Viking Press, 1939. 2.4, 383.

Merriam-Webster. “What Does ‘Quark’ Have to Do with Finnegans Wake?” Words at Play.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2007, s.v. quark, n.2., quawk, n.

Image credits: James Joyce: Alex Ehrenzweig, 1915, Wikimedia Commons, public domain image; Murray Gell-Mann: Melirius, 2012, Wikimedia Commons, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

big endian / little endian / middle endian

A chicken egg

21 August 2023

Big-, little-, and middle endian are adjectives denoting ways to sequence data. A big-endian system places the most significant bit or digit at the beginning, a little-endian one places it at the end, and a middle-endian system puts it in the middle. Knowing the distinction has important implications for computer and information system design. The distinction is perhaps most easily explained using dates. A big-endian date places the year first, followed by the month then day: 20230821. A little-endian scheme reverses that order, putting the day first: 21082023 or 21 August 2023. And a middle-endian system mixes it up: 08212023 or August 21, 2023.

Big endian and little endian were coined by computer scientist Danny Cohen in a 1 April 1980 paper:

This is an attempt to stop a war. I hope it is not too late and that somehow, magically perhaps, peace will prevail again.

The latecomers into the arena believe that the issue is: “What is the proper byte order in messages?”. [sic]

The root of the conflict lies much deeper than that. It is the question of which bit should travel first, the bit from the little end of the word, or the bit from the big end of the word? The followers of the former approach are called the Little-Endians, and the followers of the latter are called the Big-Endians. The details of the holy war between the Little-Endians and the Big-Endians are documented in [Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver’s Travel (sic). Unknown publisher, 1726.] and described, in brief, in the Appendix. I recommend that you read it at this point.

As Cohen notes, his names were inspired by Jonathan Swift’s 1726 novel Gulliver’s Travels. In the novel, Swift describes a religious war between the people of the islands of Lilliput and Blefuscu over which end of an egg to break before eating it, the big end or the little end:

During the Course of these Troubles, the Emperors of Blefuscu did frequently expostulate by their Embassadors, accusing us of making a Schism in Religion, by offending against a fundamental Doctrine of our great Prophet Lustrog, in the fifty-fourth Chapter of the Blundecral, (which is their Alcoran.) This, however, is thought to be a meer Strain upon the Text: For the Words are these; That all true Believers shall break their Eggs at the convenient End: and which is the convenient End, seems, in my humble Opinion, to be left to every Man’s Conscience, or at least in the power of the Chief Magistrate to determine. Now, the Big-Endian Exiles have found so much Credit in the Emperor of Blefuscu’s Court, and so much private assistance and Encouragement from their Party here at home, that a bloody War hath been carried on between the two Empires for six and thirty Moons with various Success.

Note that Swift only used the term Big-Endian in his novel.

Nor did Cohen use the term middle endian. That term was coined later. The earliest use I have found is in a Usenet post from 27 December 1998, but I’m sure antedatings can be found:

It seemed resonable [sic] to me to to have MSB at the left and LSB at the right. Obviously this wasn't so for others so, which was natural for you and what influences were operating on h/w designers to influence the final result as big/middle/little endian?

MSB/LSB = most/least significant bit.

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Sources:

Cohen, Danny. “On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace.” Internet Engineering Notes 137, 1 April 1980.

Lamb, C. “Big, Little and Middle Endian-ness.” Usenet: alt.folklore.computers, 27 December 1998.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2008, s.v. big-endian, n. and adj.; September 2014, s.v. little-endian, n. and adj.; December 2012, s.v. small-endian, n. and adj.

Swift, Jonathan [Lemuel Gulliver, pseud.]. Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, vol. 1 of 4. London: Benjamin Motte, 1726, 74–75. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Image credit: Sun Ladder, 2009. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.