fantastic

17 June 2024

Fantastic comes via Old French from the Latin fantasticus or phantasticus, which in turn is from the Greek φανταστικός (phantastikos). The Greek verb φαντάζειν (phantazein) means to make visible and φαντάζεσθαι (phantazesthai) means to imagine, to have visions. Words like fantasy, phantom, and fancy come from the same root. [Cf. trip the light fantastic]

The adjective fantastic was brought to England by the Normans and has been recorded in English use since the late fourteenth century, when it could mean either “something false or supernatural” or “something produced by the mental faculty of imagination.” Fourteenth-century physicians believed the brain to be divided into three parts or cells. The fore-brain controlled imagination, the middle-brain judgment, and the rear-brain memory. In his Knight’s Tale, written c.1385, Chaucer alludes to this neurological understanding in a passage which is also one of the earliest recorded uses of fantastic in English:

And in his geere for al the world he ferde
Nat oonly lik the loveris maladye
Of Hereos, but rather lyk manye,
Engendred of humour malencolik
Biforen, his celle fantastik.

(And in his behavior for all the world he acted
Not only like the lover’s malady
Of heroes, but rather like mania,
Engendered of humor melancholic
In the fore-brain, his cell fantastic.)

By the end of the next century, fantastic had come to mean “imaginative, fanciful, or capricious,” and the older senses began fading away, although uses in these early senses can be found as late as the eighteenth century. And by the sixteenth century the word had also adopted the meaning of “extravagant or grotesque.”

But it wasn’t until the middle of the twentieth century that fantastic came to be used in the modern sense of “excellent, really good.” The transition is easy to understand, going from unbelievably good to simply good.

Both the Oxford English Dictionary and Green’s Dictionary of Slang have English crime novelist Margery Allingham use of fantastic in her 1938 novel The Fashion in Shrouds as their first citation for this “excellent” sense. But I believe this is in error, a misinterpretation caused by looking at snippet of text, with a significant portion elided, without context. Allingham uses the word five times in her novel. Four of those uses are clearly in the older sense of something that is beyond belief, something conjured by fantasy, and they are also used in negative contexts, to describe something horrible or unfortunate.

The fifth use of fantastic is the one included in the two dictionaries. Both give the citation as:

Oh, Val, isn’t it fantastic? […] It’s amazing, isn’t it?

The pairing with amazing makes it seem as if the word is being used in the positive sense, but what is omitted by the ellipsis and the lack of surrounding context is essential to understanding how Allingham is using the word. The immediate context of the quotation is a conversation about the sudden taking seriously ill by one of the characters in the novel, the speaker’s husband. The fuller passage reads:

 “They’ve been preparing me for it [i.e., his death]. Oh, Val, isn’t it fantastic? I mean, it’s frightful, terrible, the most ghastly thing that could have happened! But—it’s amazing, isn’t it.”

On the next page there is this exchange:

Oh, Val, don’t look at me like that! I’m broken-hearted, really I am. I’m holding myself together with tremendous difficulty, darling. I am sorry. I am. I am sorry. When you’re married to a man, whatever you do, however you behave to one another, there is an affinity. There is. It’s a frightful shock. It’s a frightful shock.

This use of fantastic is clearly not in the sense of “excellent, really good.” We see that sense in a 1 January 1955 article in the Cincinnati Post about RCA-Victor reducing the price of its phonographs:

Roland Davis of Ohio Appliances, in charge of Victor Records distribution in this area is optimistic. “We had a fantastic Christmas sale. Dealers’ shelves ought to be pretty well cleaned out.

But while Davis clearly meant fantastic to mean good, the article makes clear that perspective was not shared by the record store owners, who faced a loss in revenue from the price cuts.

Fantastic has come a long way, from hallucinations and medieval neurology to simply being something really neat.

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Sources:

Allingham, Margery. The Fashion in Shrouds (1938). London: Penguin, 1950, 118, 119. Archive.org.

Bell, Eleanor. “RCA-Victor Announces Price Cuts.” Cincinnati Post (Ohio), 1 January 1955, 5/1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. “The Knight’s Tale” (c. 1385), The Canterbury Tales, lines 1:1372–76. Harvard’s Geoffrey Chaucer Website.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., s.v. fantastic, adj. https://greensdictofslang.com/entry/ib5agny

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. fantastik, adj.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. fantastic, adj. & n.

Image credit: Unknown artist, 1949. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

polonium

Pierre and Marie Curie, c. 1904

14 June 2024

Polonium is a chemical element with atomic number 84 and the symbol Po. It is a highly radioactive metal. Once used widely in various commercial applications, such uses have largely been abandoned out of safety concerns. Its use today is primarily as a source for alpha radiation in laboratories and as a heat source for thermoelectric generators, such as those used for satellites and deep-space probes. The name comes from polon[ia] (Poland) + -ium.

The element was discovered by Pierre and Marie Curie in 1898 and named for Marie’s native land. From the published announcement of their discovery:

Nous croyons donc que la substance que nous avons retirée de la pechblende contient un métal non encore signalé, voisin du bismuth par ses propriétés analytiques. Si l'existence de ce nouveau métal se confirme, nous proposons de l'appeler polonium, du nom du pays d'origine de l'un de nous.

(We therefore believe that the substance that we removed from the pitchblende contains a metal not yet reported, close to bismuth in its analytical properties. If the existence of this new metal is confirmed, we propose to call it polonium, after the country of origin of one of us.)

At the time, Poland did not exist as an independent state, partitioned into three parts ruled by Russia, Germany, and Austria-Hungary. Curie hoped that naming the element for her native land would raise awareness of Poland’s political situation.

Polonia is a post-classical Latin name for the land, appearing in the eleventh century and widely used in Latin texts since.

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Sources:

Curie, Pierre and Marie Curie. “Sur une substance nouvelle radio-active, contenue dans la pechblende.” Comptes Rendus Hebdomadaires des Séances de l'Académie des Sciences, 127, July–December 1898, 175–178 at 177. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

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, September 2006, s.v. polonium, n., polony, adj. & n.2.

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

literally

12 June 2024

Literally is often the target of grammar scolds and pedants. What the scolds are carping on is the figurative use of the word, as in, I was literally glued to my seat. The word literally comes to us, via French, from the Latin literalis, meaning pertaining to letters. It literally means word for word, actually, exactly. But when someone says they were literally glued to their seat, it is a pretty good bet that they are not actually attached to a chair with some sort of mucilage, and it is this non-literal use of literally that the pedants and scolds object to.

What the pedants and scolds fail to realize is that words can have multiple meanings. Furthermore, it’s hardly unknown to have words that have two contradictory meanings, such as the noun sanction (meaning both permit and punish) and the verb to cleave (to separate and to join together). Usually which meaning is intended is obvious from the context, as in someone being literally glued to their seat. Such multiple meanings are rarely the source of confusion.

The pedants and scolds also fail to realize that this figurative sense of literally has been around for a lot longer than they think—over two centuries. And it has been employed by writers who are a lot better at using the English language than they are.

Literally dates back to Middle English, appearing around 1429 in a work titled The Mirour of Mans Saluacion:

Litteraly haf ȝe herde this dreme and what it ment,
Now lyes moreovre to knawe þerof the mistik intent.

(Literally have you heard this dream and what it meant,
Now lies moreover to know thereof the mystic intent.)

This early use is, of course, is not figurative. But by the late seventeenth century, writers were beginning to use literally as an intensifier, but only for true statements. In 1670, Edward Hyde, the First Earl of Clarendon wrote of the interpretation of vow of poverty taken by Capuchin monks compared to that of the Benedictines and Jesuits:

The other poor men literally affect Poverty in the highest Degree that Life can be preserved, with what uneasiness soever, insomuch as it is not lawful for them to provide or retain what may be necessary for to Morrow, nor to have two Habits nor two Pair of Shoes.

Within a hundred years, however, literally was being put to use to intensify things that weren’t true. In 1769 Frances Brooke wrote in her novel The History of Emily Montague:

He is a fortunate man to be introduced to such a party of fine women at his arrival; it is literally to feed among the lilies.

Brooke is quoting the Song of Solomon 4:5:

Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins, which feed among the lilies.

Brooke may be using the word to mean “I quote word for word” or “I am making a literary reference,” but she is also employing metaphor, so her use occupies something of a middle ground between the actual and the figurative. And by 1801 the figurative use was being employed without reservation. Joseph Dennie’s satiric The Spirit of the Farmer’s Museum and Lay Preacher’s Gazette had this to say about beaus, what we might call “metrosexuals” today:

BEAU.

A being, who would puzzle Linnæus to ascertain the class to which he belonged. Beaus have generally been arranged among the monkey tribe. This was extremely hard upon the monkeys; for they are tolerably agreeable and sprightly animals, but a beau is as stupid in conversation, as he is frivolous in dress. His is like Miss Fanny Williams’s preserver of beauty, “a curious compound.” He is, literally, made up of marechal powder, cravat and bootees. The tailor and the shoemaker, the perfumer, and the laundress, must all fit in council, before a beau can take any public steps.

And by 1838–39, actress Fanny Kemble could, upon visiting her husband’s Georgia plantations for the first time, muse about the effects of her giving up a successful career on the stage to marry a Southern slave owner:

And then the great power and privilege I had foregone of earning money by my own labor occurred to me, and I think, for the first time in my life, my past profession assumed an aspect that arrested my thoughts most seriously. For the last four years of my life that preceded my marriage I literally coined money, and never until this moment, I think, did I reflect on the great means of good, to myself and others, that I so gladly agreed to give up forever for a maintenance by the unpaid labor of slaves—people toiling not only unpaid, but under the bitter conditions the bare contemplation of which was then wringing my heart.

Nor has the figurative use of literally been employed only by hacks, humorists, and actresses. For example:

“Lift him out,” said Squeers, after he had literally feasted his eyes in silence upon the culprit.
—Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby, 1839

Tom was literally rolling in wealth.
—Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, 1876

Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet.
—James Joyce, “The Dead,” Dubliners, 1914

And with his eyes he literally scoured the corners of the cell.
—Vladimir Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading, 1960

Of course, just because the usage isn’t wrong doesn’t mean that all the uses of it are good ones. Like any form of hyperbole, the figurative literally can be overused. And care should be taken that it doesn’t cause confusion. Its use is not appropriate for all genres. For instance, it is probably a bad idea to employ it in expository prose, such as an academic paper. But in fiction, in informal prose, and in speech there is nothing wrong its judicious use. So, unless you’re a better writer than Dickens, Twain, Joyce, and Nabokov, don’t go around saying that the figurative and intensifying use of literally is wrong altogether.

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Sources:

Baron, Dennis. “Literally Has Always Been Figurative.” The Web of Language (blog), 23 August 2013.

Brooke, Frances. The History of Emily Montague, vol. 4 of 4. London: J. Dodsley, 1769, 175. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Dennie, Joseph. The Spirit of the Farmer’s Museum and Lay Preacher’s Gazette. Walpole, New Hampshire: D. & T. Carlisle for Thomas & Thomas, 1801, 261–62. Gale Primary Sources: Sabin Americana.

Henry, Avril, ed. The Mirour of Mans Saluacion. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987, 51, lines 553–54. Archive.org.

Hyde, Edward, First Earl of Clarendon. “On an Active and on a Contemplative Life” (1670). In A Collection of Several Tracts. London: T. Woodward and J. Peele, 1727, 170. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Kemble, Frances Anne. Journal of Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838–39. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1863, 104–05. Gale Primary Sources: Nineteenth Century Collections Online.

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 1994, s.v. literally.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. literalli, adv.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2011, s.v. literally, adv.

Image credit: Lee Lorenz, 1977. Fair use of a low-resolution version of a copyrighted image to illustrate the topic under discussion.

dickens

Woodcut from the Compendium Maleficarum, a manual for witch-hunters, 1608

10 June 2024

No, not the famous nineteenth-century writer. This is the slang term, as in the exclamation what the dickens? Dickens is a euphemism for devil. The earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is from the 1599 play King Edward IV, Part 1, commonly attributed to Thomas Heywood. The passage is from a comic scene in which the duchess is talking about hunting a deer, and the character Hobs is talking about snogging one who is dear to him:

Du[chesse]. Well met good fellow; sawst thou not the hart?

Ho[bs]. My heart? God blesse me from seeing my heart.

Du. Thy heart? the deere, man, we demaund the deere?

Hobs. Do you demaund whats deere? marie corne & cowhides, Masse a good smug Lass, well like my daughter Nell; I had rather then a bend of leather shee and I might smutch togither.

Dutchesse. Cam'st thou not downe the wood?

Hobs. Yes mistris that I did.

Dutch. And sawst thou not the Deer imbost.

Hobs. By my hood ye make mee laugh, what the dickens is it loue that makes ye prate to mee so fondly? by my fathers soule I would I had iobd faces with you.

(masse = uncertain, perhaps mercy; smug = trim, neat, smart; smutch = smooch; imbost = to drive prey on a hunt; iobd faces/jobbed faces = kissed)

While that play is the first published use of the word, Shakespeare may have beaten Heywood to the punch. He uses the word in his The Merry Wives of Windsor, where Margaret Page is trying to recall Falstaff’s name:

M.Pa. I cannot tell what (the dickens) his name is my husband had him of, what do you cal your Knights name sirrah?

Rob. Sir Iohn Falstaffe.

Ford. Sir Iohn Falstaffe.

M. Pa. He, he, I can neuer hit on’s name; there is such a league betweene my goodman, and he.

We don’t know exactly when Shakespeare wrote this play. It may have been performed as early as April 1597, but it wasn’t entered into the Stationer’s Register until 1602. But this line does not appear in either the 1602 or 1619 quarto editions. It isn’t until the 1623 First Folio that we see the dickens in the play. As usual, the quarto editions of this play are unreliable—in this case the first quarto appears to have been reconstructed from memory by an actor or someone who had seen the play—so maybe the line was used in its early performances, or maybe not. There is no way to tell for sure.

But the expression is probably not original to either Heywood or Shakespeare. It seems to have been a slang term circulating at the time.

As a diabolical euphemism, dickens shares the initial d with devil, as does the similar euphemism deuce. The name Dickin or Dickon, a diminutive of Dick, are well attested and older, so the euphemism probably assigns that name to Satan, and so it is akin to Old Nick, which dates to before 1643. Some have suggested that it is an alteration of devilkin, but there is no evidence for this.

The dickens, along with deuce, which appears by 1651, are also of note because they mark a shift in what was considered profanity, probably a result of the Protestant Reformation and nascent Puritanism. In the Elizabethan era and earlier, references to the devil are common. Shakespeare, for example, was not shy about calling the devil by his name. But by the end of the sixteenth century such euphemisms were beginning to appear, and by the mid seventeenth century such euphemisms were the norm. Shakespeare’s use of what the dickens is another example of his being attuned to the latest slang and linguistic trends, but Heywood’s use shows that Shakespeare was not unique in this regard. Other playwrights of the era were just as likely to use trendy slang and neologisms.

This shift in what is considered impolite speech also demonstrates that what we consider to be profanity is really a question of fashion. What is considered highly offensive in one era may not be so in another. Think of today’s speech where sexual terms are becoming increasingly acceptable, while the taboos are racial and misogynistic epithets; a century ago the opposite would have been the case. What the dickens is up with that?

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Sources:

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., s.v. dickens, the, phr., what the dickens...? phr.  

Heywood, Thomas. The First Part of King Edward the Fourth. In The First and Second Partes of King Edward the Fourth. London: I.W. for John Oxenbridge, 1599, sig. E3r. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Hughes, Geoffrey, “Devil, The,” The Encyclopedia of Swearing, Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2006, 118–20.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2019, s.v. dickens, n.; June 2017, devil, n., devilkin, n.; March 2004, s.v. Old Nick, n.; second edition, 1989, s.v., deuce, n.2.

Shakespeare, William. The Merry Wives of Windsor, 3.2. In Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (First Folio). London: Isaac Jaggard and Edward Blount, 1623, 49. Folger Shakespeare Library.

meitnerium

Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn, c.1910

7 June 2024

Meitnerium is a synthetic chemical element with atomic number 109 and the symbol Mt. It is extremely radioactive, with a half-life measured in seconds. It was first created in 1982 at the Center for Heavy Ion Research in Darmstadt, Germany. It is named for physicist Lise Meitner, the physicist who in 1938, along with her nephew and fellow physicist Otto Robert Frisch, and chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman, discovered nuclear fission. Hahn, alone, received the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery. Placing Meitner in the long line of women who have been denied a Nobel Prize because of their sex.

While it was first synthesized in 1982, it took a decade for the element to be named and another five years for the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) to officially bless the name meitnerium. The naming was delayed not for anything having to do with meitnerium itself, but because of a dispute over who had first synthesized other transuranic elements. The name was first revealed in an article in the 18 September 1992 issue of Science that detailed the naming controversy:

Call it a late christening ceremony. Researchers from the German Heavy Ion Research Society's laboratory in Darmstadt last week announced names for three chemical elements (107, 108, and 109 in the periodic table)—the heaviest elements yet discovered—that were found at Darmstadt way back in the early 1980s

[…]

Why did the German researchers wait so long to name their elements? The answer lies in an unseemly row that has been raging since the 1960s. Both the Dubna researchers and their main competitors—a team from the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory led by Glenn Seaborg—claim to have discovered elements 104 and 105. The Americans wanted to name them rutherfordium and hahnium; the Russians, kurchatovium and nielsbohrium. Until this squabble was sorted out, the naming of the heavier elements was also held up.

[…]

Elements 104 and 105 are therefore still embroiled in controversy. But 107 to 109 are finally cleared for christening by the Darmstadt researchers. Assuming the names are approved, as expected, by IUPAC's Commission on the Nomenclature of Inorganic Chemistry, element 107 will be called nielsbohrium (as a gesture to the Dubna group); 108 will be named hassium, after the Latin name for Hesse, where the Darmstadt lab is based; and 109 is to be meitnerium, after the German nuclear physicist Lise Meitner.

IUPAC approved the name in September 1997.

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Sources:

Holden, Constance. “Random Samples.” Science, 257.5077, 18 September 1992, 1626–27 at 1626. JSTOR.

Miśkowiec, Pawel. “Name Game: The Naming History of the Chemical Elements—Part 3—Rivalry of Scientists in the Twentieth Century.” Foundations of Chemistry, 12 November 2022. DOI: 10.1007/s10698-022-09452-9.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2001, s.v. meitnerium, n.

Stone, Richard. “Transuranic Element Names Finally Final.” Science, 277.5332, 12 September 1997, 1601. JSTOR.