grotesque

Michelangelo, 1530, studies of grotesques

28 April 2025

To present-day English speakers, grotesque is probably most familiar as an adjective meaning incongruous, absurd, or having distorted and ugly features. But it can also be a noun meaning a style of decorative art with distorted or caricatured human or animal forms and a piece of work in that style. The noun sense is the older one.

The English word is first recorded in the 1560s, a borrowing from the early modern French crotesque, which in turn is from the Italian grottesca. The Italian root, grotta, means grotto, so a grotesque is literally a style or piece of art appropriate to grottos. Exactly how grottos came be associated with such art is uncertain, but a plausible explanation is that it comes from excavations of buried ancient Roman architecture that had such works on their walls.

We first see the word appear in English in inventories of the valuables possessed by the Scottish royal court made during the reigns of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI. The first, from 1561, reads:

Item, twa paintit broddis the ane of the muses and the uther of crotescque or conceptis.

(Item: two painted boards, one of the muses and the other grotesque or ornamental.)

The second, from 1578, reads:

Ane litle pece of broderie werk grotesque

(A little piece of grotesque embroidery work)

The modern adjective, in the sense of something distorted or disfigured, appears several decades later. From John Hall’s 1650 Paradoxes:

And if wee looke somewhat more nicely into the thing it selfe, we shall finde that the sluggish Name of content never came from any other forge then the dull multitude (who though they be masters of words) are commonly enemies of reason, and therefore ought to bee accounted one of those Grotesco Maximes, and willy-with-wishes, that doe so disfigure and misguide the life of man.

And here is another early example from John Dryden’s 1687 poem The Hind and the Panther:

Such Doctrines in the Pigeon-house were taught,
You need not ask how wondrously they wrought;
But sure the common Cry was all for these
Whose Life, and Precept both encourag'd Ease.
Yet fearing those alluring Baits might fail,
And Holy Deeds o're all their Arts prevail:
(For Vice, tho' frontless, and of harden'd Face
Is daunted at the sight of awfull Grace)
An hideous Figure of their Foes they drew,
Nor Lines, nor Looks, nor Shades, nor Colours true;
And this Grotesque design, expos'd to Publick view.

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Sources:

Dryden, John. The Hind and the Panther. London: Jacob Tonson, 1687, 131. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Hall, John. Paradoxes. London: John Walker, 1650, 45. Gainesville, Florida: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1956. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

“Inventair of the Jowellis Plenissingis Artaillierie and Munitioun Being Within the Castell of Edinburgh Pertening to Our Soverane Lord and His Hienes Derrest Moder” (1578). In A Collection of Inventories and Other Records of the Royal Wardrobe and Jewelhouse. Edinburgh: 1815, 239. Google Books.

“Inventairis of the Movables Pertening to the Quenis Grace Dowriare and Regent and to Our Soverane Lady the Quene” (1561). In A Collection of Inventories and Other Records of the Royal Wardrobe and Jewelhouse. Edinburgh: 1815, 130. Google Books.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. grotesque, n. and adj.

Image credit: Michelangelo, 1530. British Museum. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

conclave

White smoke from the Sistine Chapel signaling the election of Pope Benedict XVI in 2005

25 April 2025

In present-day parlance, a conclave is a gathering of a group of people, especially one held in private, and particularly that of the cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church for the purpose of selecting a new pope. The English word comes from either, or both, the French conclave and the Latin conclave, a locked room or chamber, con- (together) + -clavis (key). By 1245, in Anglo-Latin, and perhaps in other Latin dialects, it could also refer to a papal conclave.

The earliest known use of conclave in English is to a papal conclave in John Gower’s 1393 Confessio Amantis. The relevant passage is about the selection of Celestine V in 1294 after a two-year deadlock among the cardinals following the death of Nicolas IV in 1292:

And thus whan that he passed was,
The cardinals, that wolden save
The forme of lawe, in the conclave
Gon for to chese a newe pope.

(And thus when he died, the cardinals who wanted to maintain the form of law, in the conclave proceeded to choose a new pope.)

Forme of lawe is a reference to the papal bull Ubi periculum, promulgated by Gregory X in 1274 that had established the papal conclave, including its rules of seclusion, for choosing the next pope. But the papal bull had not been enforced, with the popes between Gregory and Celestine being chosen in open election.

Use of conclave to refer to other private gatherings dates to the mid sixteenth century, at first to gatherings of an ecclesiastical nature and by the nineteenth century to secular gatherings as well.

But early English usage also had the sense of a locked room. While this sense is recorded in English after the papal sense, it is likely that both borrowed at the same time, with the gap accounted for by a lacuna in the extant manuscripts. The earliest surviving example of the locked room sense is from a pilgrim’s guide to Rome (sort of a medieval Fodor’s guide) from c. 1450:

A noþir litil chapel is by and on þe auter stand to elde pileris of ston whech pileres þei sey stood in þat conclaue at Nazareth wher gabriel told our lady þoo first heuenely tydyngis.

(Another little chapel is nearby and on the altar stands two old pillars of stone; they say those pillars had stood in that conclave at Nazareth where Gabriel told our lady the first heavenly tidings.)

The Oxford English Dictionary (in an entry written in 1891) has a citation of conclave in the sense of a locked room from the Coventry Mysteries from before 1400, but this is erroneous. When the entry was written, these mystery plays were thought to have originated in Coventry, but more recent scholarship puts them no earlier than 1425 (the extant manuscript dates to 1468) and with an origin in East Anglia. The collection of plays is now generally referred to as the N-Town Plays. The passage, which expresses the antisemitism typical of medieval England, reads:

Pylat ful redyly the body doth hem graunt,
Than thei with reverens do put it in grave.
The Jewyes more wyckyd than ony geawunt,
ffor Crystes ded body kepers do thei crave,
Pylat sendyth iiij. knytes that be ryth hardaunt,
To keep the blody in his dede conclave.

(Pilate did full readily grant him [Nicodemus] the body, so they could with reverence put it in the grave. Because the Jews, more wicked than any giant, asked the attendants for Christ’s dead body, Pilate sent four knights who were very courageous to keep the body in its dead conclave.)

So conclave exhibits several changes in meaning over the centuries, from the original sense of a locked room—a sense that eventually became archaic—to a private meeting of cardinals to elect a new pope, to any ecclesiastical meeting, to just any meeting.

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Sources:

Capgrave, John. Ye Solace of Pilgrimes: A Description of Rome (c. 1450). C. A. Mills, ed. London: Oxford UP, 1911, 71. Archive.org.

Gower, John. Confessio Amantis (1393), second edition, vol. 2 of 3. Russell A. Peck, ed. TEAMS Middle English Text Series. Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute Publications, 2013, Book 2, lines 2810–13.

Halliwell, James Orchard, ed. Ludus Coventriæ. London: Shakespeare Society, 1841, 15. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Latham, Ronald E., David R. Howletter, and Richard K. Ashdowne, eds. Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013. Brepols: Database of Latin Dictionaries.

Lewis, Charlton T. and Charles Short, eds. A Latin Dictionary. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1879, s.v. conclave, n. Brepols: Database of Latin Dictionaries.

Middle English Dictionary, 4 March 2025, s.v. conclave, n.

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

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

chauvinism

Nicolas Toussaint Charlet, c. 1825; lithograph of two veterans in Napoleon’s army breaking up a duel between two conscripts; the caption reads “Je suis Français, tu es Français, il est Français, nous sommes tous Français, Chauvin, l'affaire peut s'arranger” (I am French, you are French, he is French, we are all French, Chauvin, the matter can be resolved)

25 April 2025

Today we usually associate chauvinism with sexism, the belief that men are superior to women, but this is a relatively recent development in the word’s history. The original sense of the word was jingoism or superpatriotism, the blind, bellicose, and unswerving belief that one’s country is always in the right.

Chauvinism is an eponym, or a word formed from a person’s name, in this case Nicholas Chauvin. It is a near certainty that Chauvin never actually existed. He is a fictional character created to lampoon jingoistic patriots. The tales would have it that he was born in 1780 in Rochefort, France and served ably and well in Napoleon’s army, even being promoted to general, decorated, and granted a pension by the emperor himself.

That was fiction. What is factual is that after the Napoleon’s exile to St. Helena in 1815 the name Chauvin began to be applied to those soldiers who idolized the former emperor and expressed a desire to return to the good old days of the empire. Most famously, the name was given to a ridiculous character in the Cogniard brothers’ 1831 play La Cocarde Tricolore (The Tricolor Cockade), who uttered the line, “je suis français, je suis Chauvin” (“I am French, I am Chauvin”).

Chauvinism and chauvinist soon crossed the channel and began to be used in English by the mid nineteenth century. The following appeared in the 17 May 1851 issue of Littell’s Living Age, a Boston periodical that reprinted items from other American and British newspapers and magazines:

Between the saying of Anteroches and that of Cambronne there is a great gap; we find that the revolution has passed through it. The gentleman, refined even to exaggeration, has disappeared, and we have instead the rude language of democracy—“La garde meurt et ne se rend pas”—this is heroism, no doubt, but heroism of another sort. Never did the chauvinism of this present time light upon a more cornelian device, but do you not see in it the theatrical affectation, the melo-dramatic emphasis of another race?

The quotation “la garde meurt et ne se rend pas” (the guard dies and does not surrender) is attributed to Pierre Cambronne, a general in Napoleon’s Imperial Guard who allegedly uttered the line when the British demanded his surrender at Waterloo. The line was almost certainly invented after the fact—especially given that Cambronne did indeed surrender and lived for another twenty-seven years. An alternative, and more plausible, version of what he said is simply, “Merde!”

But quickly the term began to be applied to superpatriots from other countries, not just France. The following item about Romania appeared in London’s The Examiner on 6 June 1868:

It is this nucleus of a party of parliamentary self-government which the Bratiano Government now endeavours to destroy by rousing a kind of Rouman “Chauvinism.” The cry at Bucharest, among the adherents of the Cabinet, is for the enlargement of the frontiers of the new State—even if it has to be done with Russian aid!

The association with sexism would not appear until the twentieth century. The phrase “Male Chauvinism” appears as a section header in an article in New York’s Daily Worker of 5 March 1932. And both male chauvinism and female chauvinism appear in the Christian Science Monitor of 7 August 1935:

William H. Adler, we find, is apparently wrong for the first time … Of our suggestion that a Woman’s Who’s Who smacks of female chauvinism, he says: “This means the reviewer considers the female cause a lost one … or does it?” No, it doesn’t … Both Webster and Oxford define chauvinism as jingoism, and mention no connotation of hopelessness … Perhaps the change of scene has affected Mr. Adler’s etymological sensibility … He has lately removed, temporarily, from Shanghai to London … We hope he goes back by way of Boston.

Another correspondent objected to this same comment … She inquired pointedly if in reviewing “America’s Young Men” we had suggested that it smacked of male chauvinism … She had us there—we hadn’t … Still, we believe our main point stands—that men and women should receive recognition without discrimination.

But male chauvinist may be a decade or more older, just unrecorded. There is this story from the New Yorker of 13 April 1940 that refers to an event that had allegedly occurred some fifteen years earlier in McSorley’s Ale House:

One night in the winter of 1924 a feminist from Greenwich Village put on trousers, a man’s topcoat, and a cap, stuck a cigar into her mouth, and entered McSorley’s. She bought an ale, drank it, removed her cap, and shook her long hair down on her shoulders. Then she called Bill a male chauvinist, yelled something about the equality of the sexes, and ran out.

While there is no particular reason to doubt that the incident happened, whether or not the phrase male chauvinist was uttered is in question.

While there are these older uses, male chauvinism came to the fore with second-wave feminism of the 1960s and 70s, often with the added epithet of pig. Here is the earliest example of male chauvinist pig that I have found. From an article about political protests in Canada that appeared in the Kitchener-Waterloo Record of 9 August 1969:

The placards represented various views. One read “Keep the state out of the nations bedrooms—allow abortions.” Another was “OUR PET is a male chauvinist pig.”

This association with sexism became so strong that often the male is simply dropped.

But chauvinism is not exclusively applied to sexists. It is also used in other contexts, but almost always with a modifier. In April 1955 an article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists decried the attitudes of those who professed a belief that their nation was superior to others in the field of science:

Even though scientists did not go as far as to confuse scientific knowledge with national ideological doctrine, they did, nonetheless, often make it a point of patriotic honor to practice a certain kind of scientific nationalism and almost indeed a scientific chauvinism.

And in his 1973 book The Cosmic Connection, astronomer Carl Sagan referred to oxygen chauvinism in our perceptions of what extraterrestrial life might look like

Oxygen chauvinism is common. If a planet has no oxygen, it is alleged to be uninhabitable. This view ignores the fact that life arose on Earth in the absence of oxygen. In fact, oxygen chauvinism, if accepted, logically demonstrates that life anywhere is impossible.

(The Oxford English Dictionary has a citation of Sagan using the phrase human chauvinism in this book, but I cannot find that phrase, or even the page number on which it allegedly appears, in any edition of the book I have access to.)

All in all, chauvinism is a pretty successful eponym, considering it’s named after someone who never lived.

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Sources:

Carney, Tom. “Pelted with Paper and Banana Peel.” Kitchener-Waterloo Record (Ontario), 9 August 1969, 2/2. ProQuest Newspapers.

Dubarle, Daniel. “Observations in the Relations between Science and the State.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 11.4, April 1955, 141–44 at 142/3. Google Books.

Hutchins, Grace. “11 Million Women Are a Big Factor in the Struggle of Toilers Against Bosses.” Daily Worker (New York), 5 March 1932, 4/7. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Mitchell, Joseph. “Profiles: The Old House at Home.” New Yorker, 13 April 1940, 23/3. New Yorker Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2000, s.v. male chauvinism, n.; second edition, 1989, s.v. chauvinism, n.

“The Political Examiner.” The Examiner (London), 6 June 1868, 1/2. Gale Primary Sources: British Library Newspapers.

Sagan Carl. The Cosmic Connection: An Extraterrestrial Perspective. New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1973, 44. Archive.org.

Sloper, L.A. “Bookman’s Holiday.” Christian Science Monitor (Boston, Massachusetts), 7 August 1935, Magazine Section 11/1. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

“A Wreck of the Old French Aristocracy.” Littell’s Living Age (Boston, Massachusetts), 17 May 1851, 308–11 at 310. Gale Primary Sources: American Historical Periodicals from the American Antiquarian Society

Image credit: Nicolas Toussaint Charlet, c. 1825. British Museum. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

callow

A callow northern mockingbird (Mimus polyglottos)

23 April 2025

Callow is a word that dates back to the beginnings of the English language, but it has shifted in meaning significantly over the past eleven-hundred years. Today it means inexperienced or naive, and it often appears in the phrase callow youth. But way back when it was associated with aging, for in Old English the word calu meant bald.

Calu appears nineteen times in the extant Old English corpus, referring either to a bald person or a place devoid of vegetation. One example is in Riddle 40 found in the late tenth-century manuscript known as the Exeter Book, lines 98–104:

Ne hafu ic in heafde    hwite loccas
wræste gewundne,    ac ic eom wide calu;
ne ic breaga ne bruna    brucan moste,
ac mec bescyrede    scyppend eallum;
nu me wrætlice     weaxað on heafde
þæt me on gescyldrum    scinan motan
ful wrætlice    wundne loccas.

(I do not have on my head elegantly curled blond locks, but I am very bald; I have no use for eyelids or brows, but the creator deprived me of all; now wondrously there grows on my head tight locks that may shine on my shoulders most marvelously.)

Although it is not apparent from these extracted lines, the answer to the riddle is “creation.” And like many of the riddles in the Exeter Book, this one is based on a Latin enigma, in this case Aldhelm’s Enigma 100, Creatura, from the late seventh century. The corresponding lines 44–48 from that enigma read:

Cincinnos capitis nam gesto cacumine nullos.
Ornent qui frontem pompis et tempora setis;
Cum mini caesaries volitent de vertice crispae,
Plus calamistratis se comunt quae calamistro

(For I wear no curls at the top of my head, which would adorn my brow with pomp and my temples with hair; when my curly hairs fly from the crown of my head, they are more arranged than hair curled with a curling iron.)

The meaning of callow remained stable through the Middle English period, but in the late sixteenth century the word began to be applied to young birds, who were unfledged, that is without feathers. Arthur Golding’s 1567 translation of Ovid’s Metamorphosis contains these lines in which the sons of Boreas, the north wind, are compared to young birds:

They were not borne with wings vpon their bodies in this sort.
While Calais and Zetes had no beard vpon their chin,
They both were callow. But assoone as haire did once begin
In likenesse of a yellow Downe vpon their cheekes to sprout,
Then (euen as comes to passe in Birdes) the feathers budded out
Togither on their pinyons too, and spreaded round about
On both their sides.

In 1580, Gabriel Harvey wrote of some of the students he encountered at university, comparing them to young birds:

I blush to thinke of some, that weene themselves as fledge as the reste, being God wot, as kallowe as the rest.

And by the end of the seventeenth century, callow was being used to refer to young and naïve people without allusion to fledgling birds. From an argument about the type of men that women prefer found at the end of Aphra Behn’s play Widdow Ranter. The play was written sometime before Behn’s death in 1689:

Chri[sante]. I confess Sir we Women do not Love these rough Fighting Fellows, they're always scaring us with one Broil or other.

Dar[eing]. Much good may do you with your tame Coxcomb.

Ran[ter]. Well Sir, then you yield the Prize?

Dar. Ay Gad, were she an Angel, that can prefer such a callow Fop as thou before a man—take her and domineer.

This inexperienced sense would quickly overtake the bald sense, driving the latter out of the language.

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Sources:

Aldhem. “Enigma 100: Creatura.” In Ehwald, Rudolph, ed. Aldhelmi Opera. Berlin: Weidmann, 1919, lines 44–48, 147. Monumenta Germanicae Historica (MGH), Auct. Ant. 15.

Behn, Aphra. Widdow Ranter. London: James Knapton, 1690, 44. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Dictionary of Old English: A to Le, 2024, s.v. calu, n.

Harvey, Gabriel. “A Pleasant and Pitthy Familiar Discourse, of the Earthquake in Aprill Last.” In Edmund Spenser, Three Proper, and Wittie, Familiar Letters. London: H. Bynneman, 1580 29. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Middle English Dictionary, 4 March 2025, s.v. calwe, adj. (& n.).

Ovid. The .xv. Bookes of P. Ouidius Naso, Entytuled Metamorphosis. Arthur Golding, trans. London: Willyam Seres, 1567, Book 6, 79v. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2016, s.v. callow, adj.1 & n.1.

“Riddle 40.” In Muir, Bernard J., ed. The Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry, revised second edition, vol. 1 of 2. Exeter Medieval Texts and Studies. Exeter, UK: Short Run Press, 2000, lines 98–104, 316.

Photo credit: Epachamo, 2020. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain photo.

Great Depression

Unemployed men queued in front of a Chicago soup kitchen opened by Al Capone, February 1931

21 April 2025

I am always interested in the question of when various historical events acquire their names. For instance, when did people realize the global economic downturn that started with the Wall Street crash of October 1929 was great. And when did it become The Great Depression, an event with no peer?

The phrase great depression was applied to any number of earlier economic downturns, a simple collocation of terms, not a fixed label or proper noun. And at its start the 1929 downturn was no different. We see the phrase great depression being applied to it a little more than a month after the crash. For instance, there is upbeat (and unfortunately very wrong) analysis in the New York Times of 24 November 1929:

Reports of business heads to the President’s conference, Mr. Barnes said, should dispel the fears that existed that the country was running into a period of great depression. Retail stores reported, he said, the usual employment for this period of the year, mail-order houses were going along in a normal way and the “distribution of automobiles is normal for this period of the year.”

By the middle of 1930, though, it had become obvious that this particular depression was worse than the previous ones had been, and people had started to use the definite article with it, calling it the great depression. From Massachusetts Springfield Union/Springfield Republican of 13 July 1930 (the two papers published a joint edition on Sundays):

The taxes paid in March and June 1930, quarterly payments, were on the business done by American firms and individuals during the calendar year 1929, which takes in the autumn of the great depression.

Full recognition that it was a singular event came by 1931, when capital letters started to be used in the label. What had been simply a period of great depression had become the Great Depression. We can see it in an article in the 15 April 1931 edition of Windsor, Ontario’s Border Cities Star about Pasquale Venuta, who had taught music to bandleander Guy Lombardo and his brothers in London, Ontario:

While signal success attended his efforts in London, that was before the period of the Great Depression.

“There is not much money now,” he said, “to spend for music and this part of the young people’s education is being neglected.”

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Sources:

“Barnes Assures Business Advance.” New York Times, 24 November 1929, 1/3. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

“Heavier Federal Taxes Paid Here Past Fiscal Year.” Springfield Union/Springfield Republican (Massachusetts), 13 July 1930, 1/4. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“Lombardo’s Maestro Here.” Border Cities Star (Windsor, Ontario), 15 April 1931, 11/5. ProQuest Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, 2013, s.v. Great Depression, n.

Photo credit: US government photographer, February 1931. US National Archives NAID 541927. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.