unidentified aerial phenomenon / UAP

Frame from the “Gimbal” video of a UAP taken by a U.S. Navy aviator in 2015; while unidentified, the object’s movement is consistent with it being an ordinary jet aircraft

24 July 2024

Unidentified aerial phenomenon, or UAP, is another name for a UFO, that is an unexplained observation of some object in the sky. Sometimes UAP is interpreted as unidentified anomalous phenomenon. The term is also an illustration of two general principles that can be applied to language. One is the recency illusion; the other is Gresham’s law.

The recency illusion, a term coined by linguist Arnold Zwicky, is “the belief that things you have noticed only recently are in fact recent.” Many think that UAP is a recent coinage, when in fact it is decades old. It first appears in August 1963 in news reports about the U.S. Air Force investigating flying saucers. From Louisiana’s Alexandria Daily Town Talk of 2 August 1963:

Satellites, manned orbital flights and other earthling ventures into outer space seem to have evaporated general interest in the so-called “Unidentified Flying Objects” (UFO’s) or, as the Air Force prefers to label them, “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena” otherwise known as UAP.

According to Google Books Ngram Viewer, unidentified aerial phenomenon spiked in popularity during the 1960s, before falling into obscurity. It then spiked again in the 2000s and has remained popular since, particularly after the August 2020 announcement of a Pentagon task force to investigate UAPs. Such news reports brought the term back into the public consciousness and created the recency illusion.

The term is also an example of Gresham’s law applied to language. The original Gresham’s law applied to money, “bad money drives out good,” or the idea that if two types of coin with the same face value are in circulation and one type contains more precious metal than the other, then the coins with higher commodity value will disappear from circulation as people hoard them or melt them down. Gresham’s law is a nineteenth-century coinage named after Tudor financier Thomas Gresham, who had advocated for monetary reform in Elizabethan England.

As applied to language, the law describes a trend where a term with two senses or uses where one usage is considered offensive or carries negative connotations, the non-offensive usage will become less common. Once a term has acquired such a negative valence, there is a tendency to try and replace it with a more neutral one.

The U.S. Air Force, primarily concerned with earthly threats to national security, coined UAP because UFO had become irretrievably associated with little green men. (According to the unclassified executive summary of the Pentagon task force investigating UAPs, the group’s final report makes no mention of anything extraterrestrial.) Similarly, many believers in an extraterrestrial origin of UAPs prefer that term because disassociates them and their beliefs from the lunatic fringe of their movement.

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Sources:

Dunleavy, Jerry. “Pentagon Announces UFO Task Force.” Washington Examiner (Washington, DC), 14 August 2020. Proquest Newspapers.

“‘Flying Saucers’ Hard to Ground.” Alexandria Daily Town Talk (Louisiana), 2 August 1963, 7/3. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. The same article appears in multiple papers two days later with a United Press International (UPI) byline.

Google Books Ngram Viewer, “unidentified aerial phenomenon.” Accessed 22 June 2024.

Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, s.v. UAP, abbr. and n. Accessed 22 June 2024.

Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, 25 June 2021. Archive.org.

Zwicky, Arnold. “Just Between Dr. Language and I.”  Language Log, 7 August 2005.

Photo credit: U.S. Navy, 2015. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image. Analysis of the video demonstrates that the object, while still unidentified, is consistent with what one would expect an ordinary jet aircraft. See Mick West, “The Gimbal Video: Genuine UFO or Camera Artifact?” Skeptic.com, 2 August 2022.

frak

Montage of uses of frak in the TV series Battlestar Galactica

22 July 2024

"Obscene” words are funny things. Supposedly, a word is classified as obscene or not because of its meaning, what it represents. But very often the meaning seemingly has nothing to do with it. Frak is a case in point. Frak is a euphemism for that more familiar four-letter word that you can’t say on U. S. broadcast television without incurring hefty fines from the Federal Communications Commission. So screenwriters use words like freak, frap, frick, and frig as substitutes for the expletive. But frak goes a bit further and takes on all the valences of its more suspect progenitor. Despite meaning exactly the same thing as fuck, and despite being used in exactly the same manner and context as fuck, frak is okay, while fuck is not.

There are older uses of frack in English, but these are unrelated to the euphemistic expletive. Frec is an Old English adjective meaning greedy or eager; frecu is an Old English noun meaning greed or greediness; frecian means to be greedy; and the noun freca plays off the eager sense to produce a noun that means bold one, warrior. These words have survived into the modern period in the Scots dialect. The expletive is also unrelated to the jargon term from the oil and gas industry. Fracking is a process by which natural gas is extracted from shale through the use of high-pressure liquids. The liquid fractures the rock, releasing the gas, hence the jargon term.

But the expletive frak has its origins in the television show Battlestar Galactica, which ran from 1978-79 and was reimagined and remade from 2003-09. In the original series, the word, spelled frack in the scripts, was just a simple expletive. The character Starbuck, a hotshot pilot, was particularly fond of exclaiming “Frack!” when he got into bad situations.

In the reimagined Battlestar Galactica, the screenwriters dropped a letter and made the word frak, presumably to make it literally a four-letter word. Not only was the spelling changed, but the word was used in a much wider variety of situations. In the new series, frak could be used as a substitute for its infamous cousin in any and all situations. So Starbuck (still the hotshot pilot, but now a woman) could use it literally to mean carnal intercourse, as in, “you’re not still frakkin’ Dualla are ya?” She was also heard to use “motherfrakker,” and to use the word as in infix, as in, “I guaran-frakkin-tee you.” Other characters uttered “frak you!” and “frak me!” in rage and despair, respectively. On various occasions in the new series we also heard “frakkin’ A,” “clusterfrak,” “frak-all,” and “for frak’s sake.”

Unlike the original series which ran on broadcast television, the reimagined series ran on cable and therefore was not subject to FCC regulation. Presumably the producers continued to use the euphemism in order to make the series easier to run in syndication on broadcast channels. Another modified profane word in the reimagined series was goddamn, which was altered to godsdamn in the series, but this change was presumably because the culture depicted in the series is polytheistic and not just to avoid government censorship.

Euphemisms like frak have a long history. They’ve been around for as long as people have been getting upset by particular words. But seldom has a euphemism been used as a perfect synonym in 100% of original word’s uses. There is no semantic difference between frak and its forbidden cousin; the only difference is a couple of phonemes. It is not the meaning or the sentiment that is considered offensive and therefore censored, it is the sound of the word. It is not the idea that is banned, but the particular form that idea takes. It makes no frakking sense, but there it is.

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Sources:

Battlestar Wiki, s.v. frak (21 February 2024), frack (29 April 2008).

Dictionary of Old English, A–I Online, 2018, s.v. frec, adj., frecu, n.

Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction, s.v. frak, v. (28 January 2021).

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2023, s.v., frack, adj. & adv.

Video credit: Battlestar Galactica YouTube channel, 2017.

broligarchy

Elon Musk (2015) and Peter Thiel (2022)

21 July 2024

Slang terms often exist for years before the general public takes notice of them. Broligarchy and broligarch are examples of this. The words are a play on bro + oligarchy. And a broligarchy is small group of men who control a situation or political power structure. It differs from an ordinary oligarchy in that a broligarchy carries with it a connotation of toxic masculinity.

Neither broligarchy nor broligarch appear in any traditionally published media outlets until July 2024, but the word existed in social media and the alternative press, especially Twitter/X for many years before that. The first example of the word that I can find is on Twitter from 7 December 2009, when a user posted:

the broligarchy has spoken. you are cool.

The context of this tweet is unclear

The word makes into the Urbandictionary on 22 May 2011:

Broligarchy

A small cadre of Bros who snatch control of any scenario.

I tried to play beer-pong at that party last night, but that table was such a fuckin' broligarchy.

And the blog The Belle Jar includes the term in a glossary of bro-terms on 19 December 2014:

Broligarchy—A form of power structure in which power effectively rests with a small number of bros, most often distinguished by the power of their bro-ness.

On 3 March 2023, the Arkansas Times, an alternative newspaper, has this in an article on the state legislature:

The Arkansas Legislature, aka the broligarchy, does not believe in the people’s right to the ballot process. This is as disappointing as is it unconstitutional, though the unconstitutionality isn’t stopping the bill’s sponsors.

In the article, the word broligarchy is hyperlinked to an article from two days earlier about how Arkansas has relatively few female legislators, so the implication of toxic masculinity is clear.

But slightly earlier a different, a more specific type of bro with a slightly different connotation appeared. The element of toxic masculinity was still there, but broligarch became linked to Silicon Valley, where the power structure revolves around tech-bros. There is this tweet from 27 May 2018:

Elon Musk is a real life Tony Stark but if Tony Stark just stayed a cunt instead of becoming Iron Man. Give me 1000 journalists @ the top of their game over 1 “fun” Broligarch who shits out a flame thrower, launches his car into space & spends money on efforts to impugn reporters

On 25 February 2024, the politically activist, alternative dance/industrial musical group Consolidated, posted a song to the Bandcamp website titled Serfin’ U.S.A./The Broligarchy. The word appears only in the song’s title, but the lyrics show that the tech-bro sense is clearly intended:

Hey baby baby check it do u wanna free music with me?
Hey baby baby we can kick it and hasten the end of the industry
Hey baby baby hold up ur still clinging to ur fantasy
Where u say ur an artist and ur makin the do re mi
But we all know it's $.03
He's an AssEt, she's a commodity
He's volatile, she's his security
He's a crypto, she's a NFT
He's a merger, she's an acquisition
Together they're a contradiction.. neuz guitar.

And there is this exchange posted to Threads.net on 19 July 2024:

dncndenise: What is TRULY frightening is the Silicon Valley dudes who want Twitler because they want the dollar to DROP in value so they can get CRYPTO to be the "world currency". That screws ALL of us and makes them RICH! Apparently realizing that they were losing their @$$3$ because Crypto is a Ponzi scheme, doesn't matter. They want their money back and they'll be OK destroying the US to get it. Read Mark Cuban's Xitter post on it. I'm SO disgusted.

Pcrritesgood: Tech Broligarchy.

Dncndenise: Yup!

Broligarch would finally hit the mainstream press on 20 July 2024 with Donald Trump’s selection of J. D. Vance as his running mate in the 2024 U.S. presidential election. Vance had long been linked to Silicon Valley entrepreneur and icon of toxic masculinity Peter Thiel. The Guardian newspaper printed an article by Carole Cadwalladr with the headline “Tech Broligarchs Are Lining Up to Court Trump,” and which contained this line:

Thiel is betting—again—on the same phenomenon in America. Betting that he will be first among a new breed of tech bro oligarchs—a new super-class of broligarchs.

The article generated a spike in the use of the term across social media.

It’s too early to tell what will happen with the word. It may be a flash in the pan, as often happens when the mainstream press gets hold of a slang term. Or it may become a staple of political commentary for years to come. In the latter case, the tech-bro sense will probably dominate the more general plain-bro sense. But for now, both the more general and the specific senses are coexisting.

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Sources:

Andre (The Wet Gamer) Cole, @coolsl4w. X.com, 7 December 2009.

“The Bronomicon.” The Belle Jar (blog), 19 December 2014.

Cadwalladr, Carole. “Tech Broligarchs Are Lining Up to Court Trump. And Vance Is One More Link in the Chain.” Guardian, 20 July 2024.

Consolidated. “Serfin’ U.S.A./The Broligarchy.” Bandcamp.com, 25 February 2024.

“Legislators Try New Tricks to Tank Citizen’s Right to Put Issues on the Ballot.” Arkansas Times (Little Rock), 3 March 2023.

pcrritesgood. Threads.net, 19 July 2024.

Thischarminham, @Thischarminham. X.com, 27 May 2018.

Urbandictionary.com, 22 May 2011, s.v. Broligarchy.

Photo credits: Elon Musk: Steve Jurvetson, 2015; Wikimedia Commons; Flickr.com; licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license. Peter Thiel: Gage Skidmore, 2022; Wikimedia Commons; licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

radium

1918 advertisement for toiletries containing radium

19 July 2024

The element radium is a radioactive, silvery-white, alkaline-earth metal with atomic number 88 and the symbol Ra. Its most stable isotope, radium-226 has a half-life of 1,600 years. Radium is particularly toxic in that it is chemically similar to calcium and can deposit in bones, causing long-term exposure to its ionizing radiation. Once commonly used for its radioluminescent properties, because of its toxicity its only applications today are in nuclear medicine.

Radium was formed in French from rad- (from the Latin radius [ray]) +-ium (suffix used for metallic elements).

It was discovered in 1898 by the husband and wife team of Marie Sklodowska Curie and Pierre Curie, who wrote of the name:

M. Demarçay a trouvé dans le spectre une raie qui ne semble due à aucun élément connu. Cette raie, à peine visible avec le chlorure 60 fois plus actif que l'uranium, est devenue notable avec le chlorure enrichi par fractionnement jusqu'à l'activité de 900 fois l'uranium. L'intensité de cetle raie augmente donc en même temps que la radio-activité, et c'est là , pensons-nous, une raison très sérieuse pour l'attribuer à la partie radio-active de notre substance.

Les diverses raisons que nous venons d'énumérer nous portent à croire que la nouvelle substance radio-active renferme un élément nouveau , auquel nous proposons de donner le nom de radium.

(Mr. Demarçay found a line in the spectrum which does not seem to be due to any known element. This line, barely visible with chloride 60 times more active than uranium, became notable with chloride enriched by fractionation to the activity of 900 times uranium. The intensity of this line therefore increases at the same time as the radio-activity, and this is, we think, a very serious reason for attributing it to the radio-active part of our substance.

The various reasons that we have just listed lead us to believe that the new radioactive substance contains a new element, to which we propose to give the name radium.)

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Sources:

Curie, Pierre and Marie Curie. “Sur une nouvelle substance radio-active, contenue dans la pechblende.” Comptes Rendus Hebdomadaires des Séances de l'Académie des Sciences, 127, December 1898, 1215–1217 at 1216–17. 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, June 2008, s.v. radium, n.

Image credit: Radior Cosmetics, 1918. New York Tribune Magazine, 10 November 1918. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

libel

Thomas Rowlandson, 1810, “Libel Hunters on the Lookout, or Daily Examiners of the Liberty Press”

17 July 2024

In present day legal parlance, according to Black’s Law Dictionary, a libel is “a defamatory statement expressed in a fixed medium, esp. writing but also a picture, sign, or electronic broadcast.” It is also a verb meaning “to defame (someone) in a permanent medium, esp. in writing.”

The word comes from the Anglo-Norman libel, meaning a legal writ or complaint, which is from the Latin libellus, or little book. It makes it’s English appearance by the end of the thirteenth century, when it appears in The Metrical Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester describing events of a century earlier, during the reign of King John:

& after sein Micheles day · þe þridde day he com ·
To douere & þe bissop · of londone wiþ him nom ·
& þe bissop of eli · & þe king sone wende ·
To a maner þer biside · & to hom anon sende ·
Is heye Iustice of is lond · sir · G · le fiȝ peris ·
Þat ȝuf þe erchebissop · oþer eni of his ·
Wolde eni þing · toward him · þat hii sende him libel ·
& esste ek articles · þat nere noȝt to graunti wel ·
Ac vor it nas bote al þe mase · þe erchebissop sone ·
Wende aȝen ouer se · as best was to done ·

[And on the third day after Saint Michael’s day, he (i.e., the archbishop) came to Dover and brought with him the Bishop of London and the Bishop of Ely, and the king soon went to a nearby manor and soon sent for them. Sir Geoffrey le Fitz Piers is the Chief Justiciar of this land, and that if the archbishop or any of his would have anything with respect to him, that they send him a libel and asked also for items that were not to be granted.]

By the late fourteenth century and probably under the influence of the Latin, libel was being used to mean a small book or short treatise. And by the early sixteenth century, the word was being used to denote a printed and publicly distributed leaflet or pamphlet. Such leaflets were often defamatory and dubbed libellus famosus or famous libels, the famous referring to the fact that they were published and distributed. Here is an early example from a 26 June 1521 letter written by John Longland, the bishop of London, to Cardinal Wolsey about a pair of heretic priests in his diocese:

And noo doubte ther arre moo in Oxenford as apperith by suche famous lybells and bills as be sett uppe in night tymes upon Chirche doores. I have twoo of them, and delyvered the third to my Lord of London. I truste your Grace hath seen itt, whereby ye may perceyve the corrupt mynds.

And by the early seventeenth century libel had acquired its present-day legal definition of a written defamatory statement, as opposed to a slander, which is a spoken defamatory statement. At around the same time, the verb to libel, meaning to make such a defamatory statement, also made its appearance.

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Sources:

Garner, Bryan A., ed. Black’s Law Dictionary, 11th edition, 2019, s.v. libel, n., libel, v. Thomson Reuters Westlaw.

Longland, John, Bishop of Lincoln. Letter to Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, 26 June 1521. In Henry Ellis, ed. Original Letters Illustrative of English History, third series, vol. 1 of 4. London: Richard Bentley, 1846, 253. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. libel(le, n.

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

Wright, William Aldis, ed. The Metrical Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester, vol. 2 of 2. London: Stationary Office, 1887, lines 10,227–237, 703. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Image credit: Thomas Rowlandson, 1810. Wikimedia Commons. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Public domain image.