Book Review: Dancing on Mara Dust

13 October 2006

Usually I restrict my reviews and notices to books about language and linguistics, but in this case it’s a book by a regular contributor to the Wordorigins discussion forum, Vivien Smith, a.k.a. ElizaD. The book is Dancing on Mara Dust: The True Story of a South African Farm.

Written with her mother, Nancy Mathews, the book is the story of Ms. Mathews and her parents and their life in the Transvaal in the early part of the 20th century. Written in a straightforward, matter-of-fact style, the book tells a tale of the travails and the joys of a hardscrabble family life. It evokes a time and place that is no more and is populated with a string of interesting characters who duck in and out of the family’s life (including a cameo appearance by Prince Edward, later King Edward VIII, who does not come off too well in the family’s estimation).

The book is not completely without linguistic interest. It is peppered with good South African words like mielies (maize), koppie (hill), and kraal (corral), as well as place names like Soutpansberg (salt-pan mountain).

Unfortunately, I’m not sure the book is readily available (at least not yet) in the United States. It can be found at amazon.co.uk and other sources in the UK.

Paperback, 208 pages, Vivien Clear Publishing (Oct 2006), ISBN 0955267102, £10.99.

Treason

13 October 2006

Treason has been much in the news of late.

This past Wednesday the United States charged Adam Yehiye Gadahn with treason, the first time since 1952 that such a charge has been brought against an American citizen. Gadahn has allegedly appeared in al-Qaeda training videos and is suspected of working in the terrorist group’s training camps. The Californian is believed to be in Pakistan.

In other treason news, Iva Toguri, one of several female radio broadcasters known as "Tokyo Rose," died last month at her home in Chicago . She was convicted of treason in 1948, the only one of the Japanese-American broadcasters so convicted, and pardoned by President Ford in 1977.

Treason is a very rare crime. In the history of the United States, there have been less than 40 prosecutions for treason, and even fewer convictions. The most famous treason case, that of Vice President Aaron Burr in 1807, resulted in an acquittal. The last person charged with treason by the United States was Tomoya Kawakita, a Southern Californian who was found guilty in 1952 of torturing American prisoners or war during WWII. Kawakita was sentenced to death, although the sentence was commuted and he was eventually deported. None of the famous Cold War spy cases involved charges of treason.

When I heard the news of Gadahn’s indictment on television, I was struck by the word treason. While hardly an unfamilar term, it sounded odd to my ears and I immediately wondered what its etymology was.

The word treason makes its appearance in the manuscript The Ancren Riwle (The Nun’s (Anchoress’s) Rule), a manual of monastic rules published sometime before 1225, in a reference to King David’s killing of Uriah, Bathsheba’s husband:

Dauid�dude�treison and monsleiht on his treowe kniht Vrie, hire louerd. (David�did�treason and manslaughter on his true servant Uriah, her husband.)

This early sense of treason means simply betrayal and does not have the specific meaning of betrayal of the state. The word comes from the Anglo-French treysoun and ultimately from the Latin verb tradere, meaning to betray. So treason has the same root as betray.

The word had acquired its modern legal meaning of an offense against the state by 1303, when it appears in Robert Manning of Brunne’s Handlyng Synne:

Yn no thyng wote y more tresun, than brynge thy lorde to hys felun.

English law originally divided the crime into high treason, or crimes against the sovereign or the state, and petit treason, crimes against a subject (e.g., murder). The phrase high treason is still used today, although it no longer has a counterpart in petty treason.

The Treason Act of 1351, which although amended many times in the intervening centuries is still in force in England, defines treason as:

when a man does compass or imagine the death of our lord the King, or of our lady his Queen or of their eldest son and heir; or if a man violates the King’s companion, or the King’s eldest daughter unmarried, or the wife of the King’s eldest son and heir; or if a man does levy war against our lord the King in his realm, or be adherent to the King’s enemies in his realm, giving them aid and comfort in the realm, or elsewhere, and thereof be properly attainted of open deed by people of their condition�and if a man slays the chancellor, treasurer, or the King’s justices�being in their places, doing their offices: and it is to be understood, that in the cases above rehearsed, that ought to be judged treason.

This 1351 statute, in modified form, is also the source for American law on the subject of treason. Article III of the US Constitution says:

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.

In the American version gone are the crimes against the person of the head of state or his ministers. And having abandoned the monarchy, the crime of sleeping with the Queen, a crime because it could place one’s offspring illegitimately on the throne, is also gone. But what remains contains two interesting terms, adhere and aid and comfort.

Adhere is definitely an odd word here to the modern ear. It is used here in the old sense of to be a follower, a partisan of a person or group. In the original Anglo-French version of the 1351 statute the term appears as adherdant. In modern slang, an adherent might be rendered as fellow traveler. But we no longer use this sense of adhere in non-treasonous contexts and the only reason that it is still used in the legal documents is because of the specific wording in the Constitution requires it.

Like adhere, aid and comfort, is familiar; in fact, giving aid and comfort to the enemy is something of a cliché. In the original Anglo French of the 1351 statute, it is eid ou confort. What is odd, though, is the use of comfort. Again, this is an old, obsolete sense of the word meaning encouragement, strength, or incitement. This sense also first appears in Ancren Riwle:

Of fleschliche vondunges and of gostliche both and kunfort ageines ham. (Of fleshly, and also of spiritual temptations, and of comfort against them.)

Ponder for a moment that the specific wording of indictment of treason against an alleged 21st century terrorist is rooted in the legal language of the mid-14th century and that some of the words used to define it are first found in an even older manuscript about monastic life. A marvelous thing this English language of ours.

Futuristic Swearing

6 October 2006

There was a mention above of the show Battlestar Galactica, which has competed with The Wire for the honorific of the best show currently on television. For those who remember the cheesy 1970s television series of that name starring Lorne Greene, this current incarnation of the show is very different from the original. While it retains the basic premise of the original (a fleet of ships, led by the battlestar Galactica, carries the remnants of the human race in search of the mythical planet known as Earth) and many of the characters have the same names as in the original, the show is a superbly written and acted drama.

But of linguistic interest is the word frak. It is an expletive with the same meanings and emphasis as the morphologically similar English expletive. It is one of group of fictional expletives that is used in science fiction tales to simulate linguistic change (and get past the real-world censors). The crew of the Galactica use frak in exactly the same ways that the English word is used, including in combinations like motherfraker and as verb meaning to copulate.

Joss Whedon’s short-lived science fiction show Firefly and the subsequent feature film Serenity brought us gorram, a future dialectical version of god damn. Whedon also has his characters lapse into Chinese when they go into a fit of cursing, a hint of the demographics of the future.

Veteran writer Robert Heinlein used many such invented curses in his science fiction books. Frimp, meaning the sex act, and kark, meaning excrement, in I Will Fear No Evil; the word kink is a swear word of ambiguous meaning in The Door Into Summer; and slitch, a blend of slut and bitch, appears in Friday.

The Star Trek series used their share of invented swear words. There is the Klingon epithet p’tahk, meaning lowly being, jerk. Andorians refer to humans as pinkskins. And in one particularly absurd episode of the original series, space hippies refer to Captain Kirk as Herbert, meaning square or nerd.

In Richard Adams’s Watership Down, which is not science fiction but an enchanting tale of the secret lives of rabbits set in 20th century England, the lapines use hraka, their word for excrement, as an expletive.

It’s common for science fiction writers to take such liberties with swearing to both make their material more acceptable to a wider audience while adding a bit of linguistic flavor to their future worlds.

Finally, in Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy the ultimate swear word was Belgium, described as “the concept it embodies is so revolting that the publication or broadcast of the word is utterly forbidden in all parts of the galaxy except one, where they don’t know what it means.”

American Dialect: Baltimore & The Wire

6 October 2006

It’s rare for a television show to accurately portray regional or social dialects, but one show that has done so consistently over the past few years is HBO’s The Wire. Set in inner-city Baltimore, the show details the exploits of a police department wiretap unit and the drug dealers it pursues. Throughout the show, which has just started its fourth season on the pay-TV channel, the characters speak in authentic Baltimore dialects.

In addition to its linguistic accuracy, it’s probably the best show on television right now–at least, that is, until tonight’s season premiere of Battlestar Galactica. The drama is gripping, the dialogue well-written, and the characters multi-layered and intricate. It’s also a very adult program, not at all suitable for children, with horrifying portrayals of the violence that surrounds illegal drug trafficking.

But here we’re primarily concerned with dialects and there are two major ones that appear on the show. The most striking, at least to most viewers, is the speech of the drug dealers, a local variation on the inner-city African-American dialect. The second is almost Southern dialect of Baltimore’s white working class, heard on the show most often from the mouth’s of police officers.

The opening scene of this season’s first episode demonstrates the difference between these two dialects, both linguistically and socially. Snoop, a cold-blooded assassin, is buying a nail-gun in a hardware store. The store clerk shows her one that is the "Cadillac of nail guns." Later on, Snoop tells a fellow assassin "He mean Lexus, but he ain’t know it." A deft bit of writing that is both authentic and demonstrative of the social distinctions contained within automobile brands.

Last season, when a police commander permitted drugs in a particular section of west Baltimore in order to control crime everywhere else in his district, the police officers took to calling the area Amsterdam, because drugs were "legal" there. The dealers, not understanding the reference to Dutch drug laws, took this to mean Hamsterdam, because it was like a cage where the police could watch them like pet rodents. Another bit of clever writing that combines a pun with social commentary.

Among the dealers, what up and yo are the common greetings. One boy tells a friend after spotting an undercover cop, "yo, he police." The most common epithets are bitch, used to refer to both men and women (or perhaps more accurately boys and girls as most of the dealers are, sadly, still in their teens), and nigger.

Working-class black dialect is also captured. An African-American political campaign manager assures his white candidate that it is possible for him to win the black vote, "Black folk been voting white for a long time. It’s y’all that don’t never vote black."

Distinct from the African-American dialects portrayed on the show, but just as authentic, is the speech of the white police officers. Bawlmer accents abound, particularly among the minor characters–it’s clear that the producers have done a lot of local casting. Police slang is also common. The word police is used to mean police officer, as in "being a police isn’t just about carrying a gun." Innocent bystanders are taxpayers, ghetto youths are hoppers, and quick arrests without a lengthy investigation are rips. And of course, the famous Baltimore honorific hon is often heard.

If you subscribe to HBO, I highly recommend tuning in to The Wire and listening closely to the dialects portrayed there.

Planetary Update: Xena Is Cancelled

15 September 2006

The dwarf planet 2003 UB313 has been given an official name by the International Astronomical Union (IAU). Unofficially named Xena, after the television heroine, by its discoverer Mike Brown of Caltech, the object will now officially be known as Eris, the Greek goddess of discord. And the dwarf planet’s moon, previously dubbed Gabrielle after Xena’s companion on the TV show, will now be known as Dysnomia, Eris’s daughter and demon of lawlessness.

The discovery of Eris/Xena was what prompted the recent definition of the term planet by the IAU.

The use of the Greek name falls into line with that of the other planets, which also have the names of Greek or Roman gods and not the naming convention used for other non-planets, that of deities from other mythological traditions like Sedna and Quaoar.

It should also be noted that the name Dysnomia shares its first syllable with Brown’s wife Diane. Similarly, Pluto’s moon Charon shares an initial syllable with Charlene, the wife of Clyde Tombaugh, its discoverer.

(Dysnomia’s association with lawlessness and the fact that the part of Xena was played by actress Lucy Lawless is assumed to be entirely coincidental.)