slim

A slim customer: General Edmund Allenby, c. 1917.

12 March 2025

The most common use of slim is as an adjective meaning slender or thin, but that is not the only use of the word, and its earliest known appearance in English is as a noun meaning a tall person. It’s a sixteenth-century borrowing from Dutch. In English, slim, meaning slender, almost always has a positive connotation, although in Dutch it can be negative as well.

There is also a slang sense of slim meaning sly or clever, with a connotation of untrustworthiness. One famous use of the slang term is in the 1962 David Lean film Lawrence of Arabia in which American journalist Jackson Bentley (played by Arthur Kennedy) has this exchange with Prince Faisal (Alec Guinness). The conversation is supposed to represent speech from c. 1916:

Faisal: Do you know General Allenby?

Bentley: Watch out for Allenby. He's a slim customer.

Faisal: Excuse me?

Bentley: A clever man.

Faisal: Slim customer. It's very good . . . I'll certainly watch out for him.

But this and the other senses of slim are much older than this movie or the era it is set in.

The earliest use of slim in English, in the sense of a tall person, that I’m aware of is in a definition of the Latin longurio in Thomas Cooper’s 1548 Latin–English dictionary:

Longurio, longurionis, masc. gen. Homo prælongus. A long slimme. Varro apud Nonium.

The adjectival use of the word appears in the mid seventeenth century. In his 1630 poem An Epitome of the Worlds Woe, George Duchante uses slim to mean small, slight, or thin, but in reference fortune or luck, not to a person:

Vnto his mother Altine wrote a letter,
That she might beare his banishment the better.
(Mother said he) I n’ere gaue credit to,
Or trusted Fortunes slimme and subtle show
Although ’twixt me and her did often grow,
Great friendlinesse ’'twas fild with fraud I know.

Three years later, William Harvey’s medical text Anatomical Exercitations uses the adjective in reference to people:

And therefore amongst grown persons, the long slimme Fellows, (whose Thighs, but especially their Shanks, are longer then [sic] ordinary) can stand, walk, run, or vault longer, and at more ease, then square, and well trussed men.

But this sense was by no means confined to medical contexts. George Thornley’s 1657 translation of Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe uses the adjective:

How is it possible for one to catch him? he's small and slim, and so will slip and steal away. And how should one escape, and get away from by flight?

And the slang untrustworthy sense also appears in the mid seventeenth century. Here is an example from Elizabeth Fools Warning, a 1659 poem advising women to not marry older men:

His promises then did please me well,
I loved to go fine I must you tell,
Oh! I was fowly cheated by this old slim,
And on a Palmsunday was married to him
Unknown unto my kindred all
On slippery yce I then did fall.

Again, the noun precedes the adjective in the record, although not by much. We see slim used to mean sly and untrustworthy in a 1664 anti-Catholic polemic by Henry More:

Onely I cannot let go this seasonable opportunity of triumphing in her behalf, in that she is so throughly [sic] reformed from that notorious, though subtle and slim, piece of Antichristianism, I mean that Self-ended Policy in those Doctrines and Practices which are so many in the Church of Rome and so profitable, and yet Our Heaven-directed Reformation has perfectly refined us and cleansed us from them all.

All these senses seem to be in continuous use through to the present. But in the 1980s a grimmer sense of slim made its appearance, that is in slim disease, an African-English coinage for what would become known as AIDS. The term makes its published appearance in the medical journal The Lancet from 19 October 1985:

Most patients present with fever, an itchy maculopapular rash, general malaise, prolonged diarrhoea, occasional respiratory symptoms, and oral candidiasis, but the most dominant feature is extreme wasting and weight loss. Hence the syndrome is known locally as slim disease.

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Sources:

Cooper, Thomas. Thesaurus linguæ Romanæ and Britannicæ. London: Thomas Berthelet for Henry Wykes, 1565, s.v. longurio, sig. BBbb 6v. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO). [The OED cites a 1548 edition.]

Duchante, George. An Epitome of the Worlds Woe. London: Thomas Cotes and Richard Cotes, 1630, n.p. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., s.v. slim, adj.

Harvey, William. Anatomical Exercitations. London: James Young for Octavian Pulleyn, 1653, 330. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Liberman, Anatoly. Word Origins . . . and How We Know Them. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005, 199–200.

Longus. Daphnis and Chloe. George Thornley, trans. London: John Garfield, 1657, 61–62. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

More, Henry. A Modest Enquiry into the Mystery of Iniquity. London: J. Flesher for W. Morden, 1664, 475. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. slim, adj.; Additions Series, 1993, s.v. slim, n.

Serwadda, D., et al. “Slim Disease: A New Disease in Uganda and Its Association with HTLV-III Infection.” Lancet, 19 October 1985, 849–52 at 849. Elsevier: Science Direct.

With, Elizabeth. Elizabeth Fools Warning. London: Francis Coles, 1659, 4. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Image credit: Unknown artist, c. 1917. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

polite

“Politeness,” James Gillray, hand-colored etching, c. 1779

10 March 2025

[Edit, 11 March: cleaned up translation of the Trevisa quote and fixed some typos and poorly worded passages]

It is quite common for a word with a specific and literal meaning to develop figurative or metaphorical meanings that are related to the literal one. And sometimes we can see this same change across multiple languages. Such is the case with polite. The Latin verb polire means to smooth, to polish, and its past participle, politus, and adverbial form, polite, came in that language to mean cultured or refined, a metaphorical polish.

The word first is first recorded in English as a surname—a Robertus Polyte is listed in the records of the reign of Henry III for the year 1263.  The adjective polite appears in English in the late-fourteenth century. The original meaning in English was a literal one of “smooth, polished.” John Trevisa’s 1397 translation of Bartholommaeus Anglicus’s De Proprietatibus Rerum (On the Properties of Things), sort of an early encyclopedia, says this about the stone beryl:

Berill is a stoon of Ynde yliche in grene colour to Smaragde but it is wiþ palenesse, and polit and schape among þe Yndes in sixe-cornerd schap þat dymnesse of colour may be excited by þe reboundyng of þe corners. And oþerwise yschape it haþ no bright schynyng.

(Beryl is a stone from India alike in its green color to emerald, but is marked by its paleness; polited [polished], and shaped in the Indies into a six-cornered shape such that the dimness of color may be excited by the reflections of the corners. And otherwise shaped it has no brilliance.)

Both the Oxford English Dictionary and the Middle English Dictionary classify Trevisa’s use of polit here as an adjective, but it is clearly fulfilling a playing role in the sentence, in apposition to paleness; we would use politeness here if writing this today. Trevisa is translating from Bartholomæus’s Latin, which may account for the OED saying the word is a direct borrowing from Latin, rather than via French, which is correct in this particular case but may not be true generally. Certainly, literate folks of the period would have been familiar with both the Latin and Old French.

Over time, polite began to be used in reference to language. Robert Henryson writes in the prologue to his translation of Aesop’s Fables, c. 1480:

Thocht fenyeit Faabillis of auld Poetrie,
Be nocht all groundit upon treuth, yt than
Thair polite termes of sweit Rethorie,
Ar richt plesand unto the eir of man.

(I think the fictitious fables of old poetry are not all grounded upon truth, but their polite terms of sweet rhetoric are right pleasant to the ear of man.)

And as with Latin, polite in English developed into a general sense of refined, cultured, elegant. Ben Jonson’s 1601 play The Fountaine of Selfe-Love has these lines:

Amor[phus]. Succinctly spoken: I doe vale to both your thanks, and kisse them; but primarily to yours, Most ingenious, acute, and polite Lady.

Phi[lautia]. Gods my life, how he do's all to be qualifie her! Ingenious, Acute, and Polite? as if there were not others in place, as Ingenious, Acute, and Polite, as she.

Hed[on]. Yes, but you must know Lady, he cannot speake out of a Dictionary method.

This sense survives today chiefly in the phrase polite society. Finally, the sense of courteous or well-mannered developed in the mid-eighteenth century.

We see the same development of meanings in French, where the word poli appears around the year 1160 with the meaning of smooth, shiny. By the late-twelfth century the word was being applied to words and diction, meaning careful, well-chosen, and it acquired the meaning of cultured in the late-sixteenth century and well-mannered in the late-seventeenth. And a similar pattern occurs at about the same time in Spanish and Italian. Interestingly in Occitan, a Romance language spoken in southern France and parts of Spain and Italy, the pattern is reversed, at least in the record. In Old Occitan the word polit was first applied metaphorically to well-chosen words in the mid-twelfth century, and the literal meaning of smooth, polished did not develop until the fourteenth century.

So we have a semantic change that occurs in Latin, then centuries later the same pattern repeats itself in a number of languages that borrowed or inherited the word with its original meaning.

Discuss this post

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Sources:

Bartholomæus Anglicus. On the Properties of Things (De proprietatibus rerum), vol 2 of 3. John Trevisa, trans, M. C Seymour, ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975, 16.20, 837.

Close Rolls of the Reign of Henry III, vol. 12 (1261–64). London: Stationary Office, 1936, 260. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Henryson, Robert. “Prologue” to The Moral Fables of Æsop in Scottish Metre. In The Poems and Fables of Robert Henryson. David Laing, ed. Edinburgh, 1865, lines 1–4, 101. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Jonson, Ben. The Fountaine of Selfe-Loue. Or Cynthia’s Reuels. London, R. Read for Walter Burre, 1601, 4.3, sig G4r. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Middle English Dictionary, 8 February 2025, s.v. polit(e, adj.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2006, s.v. polite, adj. & n.

Image credit: James Gillray, c. 1779. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

tariff

Still from the 1986 film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off of Ben Stein lecturing extremely bored students about the 1930 Hawley-Smoot Tariff

8 March 2025

A tariff is a tax on imported or exported goods, or more precisely, it is a schedule of such tax rates for various types of goods. The word is also used more generally to mean a fee or charge. It was borrowed into English from the Italian tariffa in the late sixteenth century. The Italian word, in turn, comes from the Arabic تَعْرِفَة (ta’rif), meaning notification. As such, it clearly comes out of the lingua franca of cross-Mediterranean trade of the period.

But tariff first appears in an English context in the sense of a table or schedule more generally. That is in Garrard and Hitchcock’s 1591 Arte of Warre, where the authors use it to mean a table of the soldiers in a unit (in present-day U.S. Army jargon a Table of Organization and Equipment or TO&E). In this book it is clear that the word had not yet been fully anglicized as it is in italics and a synonym, table, also provided. Many English military terms were borrowed from Continental languages in the Early Modern period, so the Italian source isn’t surprising:

So that helping your memorie with certain Tablei or Tariffas made of purpose to know the numbers of the souldiers that are to enter into ranke, and what number of rankes will performe the iust square, you can neuer erre, but vpon any sodaine, set in battell any number of souldiers whatsoeuer.

The following year we see the word used in the context of taxation, but here it seems to refer to general taxes, not those on imports or exports. It is in a 3 October 1592 letter from English diplomat Henry Wooton to Edward la Zouche, 11th Baron Zouche. (Digression: Zouche was one of the commissioners at the trial of Mary, Queen of Scots and was the lone vote against her death sentence.) Again, tariff is not fully anglicized; it is highlighted and is in the context of taxes on Italian cities:

The book that I put to be copied for your Honour is not yet ended, nor the tariffa of all the towns in the Grand Duke’s territories, in my hands; for which I have tarried eight days in Florence longer than my determination.

And the word appears in John Florio’s 1598 Italian-English dictionary, A Worlde of Wordes:

Tariffa, arithmetike or casting of accounts.

All these early examples are of an Italian word being used in an English-language text. But by the end of the seventeenth century the word had been fully anglicized and the specific sense of a schedule of taxes on imports and exports was in place. We seen this with the word’s appearance in the 1699 slang dictionary, A New Dictionary of the Canting Crew:

Tariff, a Book of Rates or Customs; also another of the Current Coin.

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Sources:

B.E. A New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew, London: For W. Hawes, P. Gilbourne, and W. Davis, 1699, sig. L8r. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Florio, John. A Worlde of Wordes. London: Arnold Hatfield for Edward Blount, 1598, 413/1. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Garrard, William and R. Hitchcock. The Arte of Warre. London: John Charlewood and William Howe for Roger Warde, 1591, 224. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

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

Wotton, Henry. Letter to Edward la Zouche, 11th Baron Zouche, 3 October 1592.  In Logan Pearsall Smith, ed. The Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton, vol. 1 of 2. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907, 288–89. Archive.org.

Image credit: Paramount Pictures, 1986. Fair use of a single, low-resolution still from a motion picture to illustrate the topic under discussion.

Mandela Effect

Nelson Mandela, 1994

7 March 2025

The Mandela Effect is the phenomenon of many people sharing the same false memory. The classic examples, which are cited in nearly every description of the phenomenon, are memories of watching news reports of the death of Nelson Mandela in the 1980s, long before the South African leader’s actual death in 2013, and that the children’s book and television characters were originally spelled Berenstein Bears rather than the actual name, Berenstain Bears.

The fact that many people share such false memories has led some to believe that the phenomenon is evidence for the existence of a parallel universe (or universes) that we only get glimpses of. False memories are extremely common, and while shared false memories may raise eyebrows, prosaic explanations for them are available with no need to resort to the paranormal. For instance, many of those who remember Mandela dying in the 1980s may be conflating Mandela with anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko, who died in 1977 while in the custody of South African police. And because the spelling -stein is more common that -stain, people naturally read -stein when they see -stain. (The 2010 US Census lists 128 instances of Berenstein and 17,916 for Bernstein, while Berenstain and Bernstain appear less than 100 times. The Census does not call out names that appear less than 100 times.)

The earliest example of the phrase Mandela Effect that I have been able find is in the blog The Wood Between Worlds on 23 June 2012, written by Reece:

Plenty of people have brought up the Mandela Effect. Depending on your take on things, this is when huge groups of people all have similar false memories. Alternately, this is when some people shift to a different timeline and notice that their transplanted memories no longer accord with official history. The name comes from an apparently widespread belief that Nelson Mandela died in the 80’s, which resulted in massive riots throughout Africa.

The Berenstein/Berenstain confusion is included on their list of common memories. Also included are things like a portrait of Henry VIII eating a turkey leg, or New Zealand once being located north of Australia.

Reece also claims to have originated the parallel universe explanation (they were taking a class on quantum field theory when they discovered that the name was actually Berenstain), although their parallel universe explanation was just idle musing not an actual belief.

Various online blogs and websites picked up on Reece’s use, and Mandela Effect appears with some frequency on the internet in subsequent years.

The earliest example of the name that I have found in legacy media is a 17 August 2015 article in Toronto’s Globe and Mail newspaper:

Most of the articles claimed that there are several such widely held historical false memories. They refer to something supposedly called the Mandela Effect: This theory has it that many people believe that Nelson Mandela died in prison in the 1980s. There are conspiracy-theory websites claiming that if so many people have such a false memory, then this un-fact could also have existed in a parallel universe that we somehow got a glimpse of.

Some news articles credit a Fiona Broome, a “paranormal researcher,” with coining the phrase and inventing the parallel universe theory, but there is no evidence that she originated either one.

Discuss this post

Sources:

Reece. “On the Berenstein Bears Switcheroo.” The Wood Between Worlds (blog), 23 June 2014.

Smith, Russell. “A Case of Schrodinger’s Nostalgia.” Globe and Mail (Toronto), 17 August 2015, L3/1–2. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

US Census Bureau. “Frequently Occurring Surnames from the 2010 Census—File B: Surnames Occurring 100 or More Times.” Census.gov. Page last revised on 8 October 2021.

Photo credit: John Mathew Smith, 1994. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

robot / android

5 March 2025

Robots are a staple of science fiction and increasingly an important part of life in our present-day world. The word comes from the Czech robota, a word literally meaning forced labor (the root rob means slave) but which is also used figuratively to mean drudgery, hard work. Robota has cognates in several Slavic languages, and the use of robot in English to refer to the system of serfdom in Eastern Europe dates to the early nineteenth century. Here is an example from John Paget’s 1839 Hungary and Transylvania that criticizes the system of robota, not because forced labor is inherently immoral, but because the system encourages sloth among the working class and doesn’t benefit the capitalists:

I believe that many of these laws have an injurious effect on the character of the peasantry. The system of rent by robot or forced labour,—that is, so many days ’ labour without any specification of the quantity of work to be performed,—is a direct premium on idleness.

The Austrian Empire abolished the system of robota following the 1848 revolutions that swept over Europe.

But the sense meaning an artificial being that can, in some fashion, take the place of a human is more recent. Czech writer Karel Čapek (1890–1938) created this new sense by modifying the word robota and coining robot in his 1920 play R. U. R. Rossum’s Universal Robots—the play was originally written and performed in Czech, but the name of the company was in English, which tells us something about the state of capitalism in Eastern Europe in the period. One of the play’s stage directions reads:

Ústřední kancelář továrny Rossum's Universal Robots. V pravo vchod. Okny v průčelní stěně pohled na nekonečné řady továrních budov. Vlevodalšířiditelské místnosti.

(The central office of Rossum's Universal Robots. On the right is the entrance. Windows in the front wall look out onto the endless rows of factory buildings. On the left are the other management offices.)

Čapek credited his brother Josef for helping him come up with the word.

The dystopian play, set in a robot factory, is about a world where humans rely on automated labor. The outline of the play’s plot, a robot rebellion against their human masters, is now a staple of science fiction (Terminator; Battlestar Galactica; I, Robot; 2001: A Space Odyssey; etc.), and this March 1922 summary of the play by Edward Moore has one of the first uses of this sense of robot in English:  

Rossum’s Universal Robots (which one may translate as Knowall’s Universal Hands) is a firm for the production of mechanical men who have the advantage, from the commercial point of view, of working more efficiently than real men, and at a fraction of the cost. Being without desires, incapable of feeling pain or pleasure, or of laughing or crying, they are tremendously efficient, and after the lapse of ten years they not only do the world's work, but fight the nation's wars. At the same time, children cease to be born; nature, it appears, has no longer any need of man, and declines to give herself the trouble of producing him. The Robots, logical in everything, exterminate the human race until only one man is left, Alquist, an architect at the factory, who for his own salvation has always worked with his hands, and whom they spare on the equivocal ground that he is a Robot. The new masters of the world are left with the problem of reproducing themselves; a difficult question, for they do not know the trade secret and they are all due to die in twenty years, even the more recently-made among them who are superior in brain and in sensibility to the earlier Robots. Alquist is unable to do anything for them, but he happens to overhear two of them laughing together, and making love: and he realizes that life will go on again, and a new world will begin with a new Adam and Eve.

R. U. R. was a popular play and quickly translated into English, opening on Broadway in 1922. In a time where industrialization and factory labor was combining with rising totalitarianism (e.g., the 1917 Bolshevik revolution in Russia and the 1922 fascist rise to power in Italy), robot struck a chord that resonated with the times. The play was a hit on Broadway, and by December 1922 robot was being used in contexts divorced from Čapek’s play. Here is a syndicated film review that appeared in newspapers on 15 December 1922:

The only time acting was ever required of Edna Purviance, Chaplin’s leading woman, was in “The Kid.” She showed in that that she was wasting her talent by remaining in comics. Mildred Davis was an essential character in “Doctor Jack” and “Grandma’s Boy,” but in his other comedies Harold Lloyd could well have had a robot in her place.

A good sign that a word has entered the language to stay is when it is modified to form new words or used as a different part of speech, and indeed by 1924 the adverb robotically, meaning to act mechanically, without emotion, had been coined. In 1927 the adjective robotic was in use; Isaac Asimov was using robotics by 1941, and the combining form robo- was in place by 1945.

Čapek’s robots were human-like androids, but the word, especially in its actual application to real-world automatons, is often used for machines that do not resemble humans at all. This shift is not recent and goes back at least to 1927, almost as long as the word has been in use in English. In 1930, for example, automated traffic signals in London were dubbed robots. This particular use of the word has fallen out of use in British English, but survives in South Africa.

While Čapek coined this sense of robot, he did not invent the concept. The idea of human-like automatons, or androids, has been around for centuries. And the Czech origin of robot recalls the Jewish tradition of the golem, a robot-like servant made from mud. Golem is Hebrew for shapeless mass. And reinforcing the Czech origins of the concept of robots, the most famous tale of a golem takes place in sixteenth-century Prague, where rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel creates one to defend Prague’s Jewish ghetto from a pogrom.

The English word android is borrowed from the French androïde, which is formed from andro- (Greek ἀνδρο-, man) + -oid (Greek -οειδής, form or likeness). Albertus Magnus (c. 1200–80) allegedly created a magical android, and accounts of this fictional accomplishment using the French word appear in English by 1657. From John Davies’s translation of Gabriel Naudé’s The History of Magick from that year:

And that is Original is true and well deduc’d, where is a manifest indicium, in that Henry d’Assia and Bartholomæus Siillus affirm, that the Androides of Albertus, and the Head made by Virgil, were compos’d of flesh and bone, yet not by Nature but by Art.

This definition of androides appears in Pantologia, an 1819 encyclopedia:

ANDROIDES. (ανηρ, ἀνδρο, man, and ειδος, form) A human figure, which, by certain springs or other movements, is capable of performing some of the natural motions of a living animal. The motions of the human body are more complicated, and consequently more difficult to be imitated, than those of any other creature; whence the construction of androides, in such a manner as to imitate any of these actions with tolerble exactness, is justly supposed to indicate greater skill in mechanics than any other piece of workmanship whatever.

This definition is followed by a description of a flute-playing android, on display in Paris in 1738.

But the use of android in science fiction postdates Čapek’s play. The following appears in Jack Williamson’s 1936 Cometeers:

“The illegal experiments of Eldo Arrynu,” Jay Kalam continued, still unhurried, “had been in the synthesis of life—repeated horrors long ago forced the council to outlaw such efforts.

“And upon the asteroid, he carried out his forbidden work to a triumphant completion. The traffic that brought him such enormous wealth was the production and sale of androids.”

For a moment the nearere shining thing seemed frozen. Red star and violet star ceased their regular beat. And the misty spindle between them was congealed into a pillar of green-white crystal. Then it broke into quivering motion, and a startled word cam out of it: “Androids!”

“Eldo Arrynu,” amplified Jay Kalam, “had come upon the secret of synthetic life. He generated artificial cells, and propagated them in nutrient media, controlling development by radiological and biochemical means.

He was an artist, as well as a scientist. The genius of creation was a supernal flame in him. He worked in living, synthetic flesh. He achieved miracles—diabolical miracles——"

The history of robots, both literary and industrial, reflects our ambivalence to the concept and the fear of humans assuming god-like powers of creation without god-like wisdom, whether it be fears of rebellion and genocide or simply those of unemployment.

Discuss this post

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Sources:

Čapek, Karel. R. U. R. Rossum’s Universal Robots. Prague: Aventinum, 1922, 7. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Dean, James. W. “Fraternity Foolishness is Basis for Very Funny Film.” Port Huron Times-Herald (Michigan), 15 December 1922, 8/3. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Good, John Mason, Olinthus Gregory, and Newton Bosworth. Pantologia, vol. 1 of 12. London: J. Walter, et al., 1819, s.v. androides. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction, s.v. robot, n. (18 March 2021); robotic, adj. (26 January 2025); robo-, prefix (18 March 2021); robotically, adv.1 (17 November 2024); robotically, adv.2 (20 December 2020); robotics, n. (16 December 2020); android, n. (5 December 2024).

Languagehat. “The Android of Albertus Magnus.” Languagehat.com (blog), 19 January 2013.

Moore, Edward. “Prague Letter” (March 1922). The Dial, April 1922, 407. ProQuest Magazine.

Naudé, Gabriel. The History of Magick. John Davies, trans. London: Joh Streater, 1657, 250. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2010, s.v. robot, n.2, robot, n.1, robotic, adj. & n.; September 2022, s.v. android, n. & adj.

Paget, John. Hungary and Transylvania, vol. 1 of 2. London: John Murray, 1839, 305–06. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Williamson, Jack. “The Cometeers” (conclusion). Astounding Stories, 17.6, August 1936, 121–52 at 146. Archive.org.

Photo credit: Chris 73, 2005. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.