Silent Conversations

Tags

courage, hero, intelligence, nostalgia, pride

Odyseus and Polyphemous, Arnold Bocklin, 1896

Students are writing essays considering the various decisions Odysseus makes throughout his journey. They analyze these decisions in order to consider Odysseus’s character.

We now have a rich bank of words from our previous work that reflects heroic qualities : determination, resilience, persistence, resistance, courage, selflessness, compassion. We have argued about what makes a hero a hero. We have listed flaws we see in Odysseus, Theseus, Perseus: impulsivity, curiosity, pride, arrogance. As these were words understood by many of the students we began by wrestling with the nuances of meaning. In order to tease out the meaning, to go beyond the surface, I discouraged students leaping to the dictionary as their first port of call.

I have to remind myself that these are the words that are the crux of our year. Students do not have to have bleed, dissect and beat out the meaning of every word, extort every relative in the first few sessions. Of course to know this deepens their understanding and I know would make their thinking about Odysseus even stronger. However, these words apply in many instances to the texts and issues we examine throughout the year so we will have countless opportunities to revisit our thinking.

For now, our focus is to ‘listen’ to one another and explore what we understand about the meaning of each word so far, to consider the morphemes and the related words . This is the thinking so often necessary before leaping to the dictionary and getting caught up in the ‘right answer hunt’. So initially we focus on our collective understanding. By giving time to hypothesize and question each other, when we come to the resources our understanding may then be deeper. We may understand the roots with greater clarity, truly see what lies behind each word, what common meaning is threaded through each of the related words. Too often in the last few years I have noticed students’ frantic rush to ‘google’ the answer, blindly accepting this rather than giving themselves the time and space for conjecture.

Building a Silent Conversation

Nevertheless, we are driven by time to examine all words at the same time!! Wretched time!! How, to explore all words without shallow superficiality, without me ‘giving students the answer’? How to allow enough time for all voices to be heard, for all to respond? We use the strategy of silent conversations.

In building a silent conversation (see explanation here from Facing History, Facing Ourselves), students talk with their ‘pen’.This activity slows down student thinking and allows them to focus and comment on the collective thoughts of others. Rather than one or two dominating the discussion, all students, shyer, less vocal, have a voice. Watch these ‘conversations’ in the video clips below.

Matching Root to Word

To complicate the task, although I like to think of as adding another rich layer(!),  students were able to select from roots that I had written out and place these to the word they believed had orginated from this etymon. You’ll notice that I have not indicated the language of origin, Latin, Greek, Old English. Nor did I give the meaning of the root. This time I want students to notice how letters from the root surface in the base element. Matching root to word will help students in a  later session work through the entry in the Online Etymology Dictionary. This helps them to go beyond the first layer in time, to dig deeper into the word’s past history. At the same time it helps students consider why there may be a vowel shift, to see that the Latin infinitive suffix <-ere>, <-ire>,<-are> is shed in its English adoption.

Modelling with ‘integrity’

I modelled the process with the word integrity – a quality we felt heroes possess but not necessarily present in mythical Greek heroes. We asked each other questions such as what is an act that shows integrity? What does it mean to act with integrity? We recognized that to do so could often be hard as one student recognized you do what’s right within but it may mean being at odds with your peers. Another student commented that you act with the truth within, you do what’s morally right. Another said the actions don’t chip away at your soul, or the inner you. Students picked ‘tangere’ from several possibilities as the most likely root to match to the present day English word integrity. They were several hypotheses as to the morphemes with everyone finally settling on <in+tegr+ity>.

Silent Conversations:

 

 

 

Finally students have consolidated their word inquiries and applied these understandings to develop their thoughts about Odysseus.

Excerpts from essays

Gunnar’s conclusion: ‘ The word hero is overused in society nowadays. If a man helps a woman across a road he is not a hero. Someone who rescues a cat out of a tree is not a hero. These are people that are doing things that SHOULD be ordinary. An act of courtesy is not heroism. A hero is someone that is motivated by empathy for others. A hero’s fuel is generosity. They do not succumb to oppressive rules or laws; they fix them. They try to make things right so that the other members of the society can live up to a full potential. They sacrifice their time, energy, and in some cases their life to end unjust ruling. Odysseus’s homecoming troubled me. That image, him standing over the people he just murdered, blood, everywhere, is a massacre. Dreadful and disgusting. Is Odysseus really driven by an empathy for others? He is more likely driven by his own success and his desire for recognition, for fame. Therefore, Odysseus cannot be considered a hero. However, Odysseus is a mirror to society. He is a reminder to the community to adopt his best traits, resilience and intelligence and avoid his bloodlust; arrogance and hubris.’

A paragraph on Odysseus’s intelligence from Julian’s essay: ‘Odysseus’s intelligence is the sole factor that he survived everything on his journey home, without it he most likely wouldn’t have survived any of the battles he faced. The root of intelligence is Latin ‘legere’ which means to read and to gather. Odysseus “reads” the situation he is in and “gathers” information to get out of the situation. If you act with intelligence, you are able to get out of many situations that others would not. You can beat anyone with intelligence no matter the size or strength and this is a skill Odysseus excels at: deceiving people and then backstabbing them when they let their guard down.  Throughout the book Odysseus showed his intelligence over and over again, that is what makes him unique. Every other hero was a demigod or incredibly strong, Odysseus was just a man with a lot of intelligence. This makes him stand out as an individual. He used intelligence to defeat one of the biggest and strongest enemies in all of Greek mythology: The Cyclops: “I racked my brain for a plan… There was a massive staff of green wood lying in the cave, and I whittled it down to a sharp point and hid it in the back of the cave…Here, have some wine, monster. I brought it as a gift, though that means nothing to you. I’ll wager it’s finer than anything you have here…” (The Odyssey)  Even though the cyclops is killing men, eating them, that’s where normal men would have faltered and given up or just charged and fight until death came. Instead Odysseus puts his mind to work, he reads the situation, gathers information and plots his way out, coming up with the most effective strategy to escape the situation. He sharpens the wood, gives the cyclops wine so that his senses are dulled thus giving him a chance to stab the cyclops’s eye. Odysseus has been smart beforehand as well: He knows that that the cyclops would call for help, so he said his name was Nobody so that it wouldn’t be suspicious. Odysseus figured he’d have to move the big rock blocking the cave, the cyclops sat in the gap of the cave and only let his sheep through so Odysseus read the situation again and gathered more information and came up with a strategy: He and his men should hold onto the bottom of the sheep thus allowing them to escape. Intelligent.’

Gigi’s paragraph on pride: ‘Even Odysseus the hero has flaws, which prove him to be human and affect his life and the lives of the people he loves and cares about. He has too much pride in his accomplishments and he wants to be remembered for them. If he had not been so proud, he and his crew would not have suffered as they did. Still when his worn, salt crusted body returns home he understands that some things are more important than pride. Pride comes from the Old English root “prud” which means to be arrogant. Pride is to relish in your achievements, to want everyone to know that you have done something extraordinary. Odysseus wants people to recognize him as a great hero. When he taunts the cyclops, he shows that his desire for fame is so great that he would risk himself and his men for his own gain. In this instance, hubris blinds him from his common sense.When Odysseus says“Cyclops, if anyone asks who put out your eye, tell them it was Odysseus of Ithaca!” (p.109) he reveals his pride. His choice to tell Polyphemus his name is fatal for his crew and nearly fatal for him. Odysseus has many things he could be proud of, but when he lets pride control his decisions, pride becomes a dangerous weakness.’

Amanda’s paragraph courage: ‘The word comes from the Latin word cor, which means heart, to lead or fight with your heart. Courage is a peculiar trait. Courage, a rewarding trait and a death sentence. Needing to be fearful yet fearless at the same time. Too much courage could lead you to arrogance and maybe death. The lack of courage could also lead you to death. To be capable, to balance your courage is a gift. This is precisely what Odysseus displays in his journey. Men who are to be trapped in a cave is troublesome. Men to be trapped in a cave with a cyclops is deathly. Odysseus was one of those men who were trapped in a cave with a cyclops. When the cyclops goes out to tend his sheep, Odysseus observes his surroundings. He takes the staff from a corner and shapes it into a spear. When the cyclops returns, Odysseus offers Polyphemus wine until he passes out. Odysseus and his men take the spear and stabs Polyphemus in his eye. Odysseus takes that leap of faith, Polyphemus could have woken up at any moment and Odysseus was aware of that. Odysseus’s courage saves many, himself included.’

Ulysses deriding Polyphemous, 1829 Joseph Mallord Turner.

I love Turner’s watery, light filled painting. Look carefully and you will see Ulysses (Odysseus) crying out his name to Polyphemus, the cyclops- pride, hubris, gloating? This is the moment of bringing down Poseidon’s vengeance. The horses of the sun rise above the horizon. All are enveloped in the fiery light.

We groaned as Odysseus invoked this curse and have travelled with him through every obstacle this trimester. We have finally reached the shores of Ithaca alongside that ‘man of many troubles’, witnessed Odysseus’s homecoming, seen the welcoming by his loyal dog and been aghast at the slaughter of the suitors and handmaidens. On this odyssey many of these internationally diverse students have empathized with Odysseus’s nostalgia.

We understand that the word nostalgia is of modern coinage, the 18th century in fact,  drawing on Greek roots  νόστος:nostos:home and  ἄλγος:algos pain, grief after German heimweh itself a compound of  ‘home’ and ‘woe’. Ayto mentions Joseph Banks, botanist,  who in 1770 on Cook’s voyage noted this condition, then regarded as a mental illness:’The greatest part of them [sc. the ship’s company] were now pretty far gone with the longing for home which the Physicians have gone so far as to esteem a disease under the name of Nostalgia.’ Nostalgia has weakened over the years so that today it is regarded as sentimental, more of a wistful yearning.We use homesickness which entered English in1756 as a translation of Swiss heimweh for this intense longing for your country of birth. Homesick is a backformation of homesickness and was not attested in English until 1798 as an adjective. Read a detailed account of nostalgia in the Online Etymology Dictionary and discover how this condition was regarded as a serious medical issue by the North in the American Civil War.

We, for now, leave Odysseus and leave this post with the final lines from Ulysses by Lord Alfred Tennyson another inspired by the The Odyssey:

‘Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.’

 

Heroes are Not Ordinary!

Tags

adorn, coordination, extraordinary, order, orderly, ordinary, ordination, ornament, primordial, subordinate, suborn

 

Thomas Rowlandson’s  1811 painting Two O’clock Ordinary. An ordinary is a public eating house where meals were served at a fixed time and set price – all in order!!! The house inspiring Rowladson’s painting is Hornsey Wood House which offered ‘Hot roast and boiled from two to five/ Dinners drest on the shortest notice’.

What is a hero? What are the qualities that make a hero, a hero? Lengthy debates. I challenged the classes over the fatuous statement echoing in the classroom, ‘We’re all heroes’. Really? Why the word ‘heroism’ if it’s that common, if we are all heroes? Today it seems as if the word is being drained of substance, is becoming bleached and bland, a flabby, empty word through overuse.

In order to go beyond the banal, we explored the words ordinary and extraordinary and then actions that go beyond the mundane. Eventually our thoughts shifted from the realm of anyone helping, inevitably the hapless elderly, across a road or standing to give the elderly (again) a seat on a train or a bus. Do acts of heroism only involve the elderly? In the scenarios painted by my classes, the elderly figured prominently as recipients of heroic action, as well as unfortunate cats apparently stuck in trees!

Below Jack Smith captures the actions of the everyday, the ordinary, at least ordinary in London 1953. Smith was one of a small group of British painters known as kitchen sink painters so called because they painted the ordinary, everything, including the kitchen sink.

Jack Smith’s 1954 painting of Mother Bathing Child provides a glimpse into an ordinary life in London .

Ordinary

‘Ordinary’ as an adjective is of Latin roots from ordo, ordinus arriving in English in the 15th century via France. Did you know that as a noun, its use was common up until the 19th century? Rowlandson’s image of the chaotic ordinary, the initial painting in this post, shows it to be synonymous with tavern. The only surviving use of ordinary as a noun today is in the expression ‘out of the ordinary’. We saw the related word order as a noun was older, attested in English from the 13th century .We discovered from the Online Etymology Dictionary that its root, Latin ordinem, accusative of ordo ‘order’ had a sense of ‘rank, a series or an arrangement’ which originally referred to the threads lined up in a loom! So from ordo we have ordain, order, subordinate, ordination,primordial.With the discovery of primordial and ordain ,we hypothesized that the morphemes: <ord+in(e)+ary>.

There was even more to discover. In 1200 the verb order meant ‘to give order to, to arrange’ and it was only in the 1540’s that it took on the sense to command, give orders to. The noun orderly 1781 meant someone who carries orders, broadening later to hospital attendant, so someone assigned to keep things in order. We discovered too the clipped form ordnance from ordinance referred to military equipment, artillery then to the branch of the army concerned with stores of materials. The ordnance survey of Britain was conducted in 1833 under the direction of the Master of Ordnance.

We wondered about primordial– a compound surely, therefore two base elements. So why no <e> in the final position of the first base <prime>?  <prim(e)+ord++i+al>? Perhaps we wondered because it was already primordialis in Latin, already a compound with no final <e> in its base.

Further surprises were the order of the day when we discovered the Latin past participle ornare from ordo had led to words such as ornate, ornament, adorn meaning to ornament, to fit out with. Suborn, anew word for both the students and me, meaning to bribe to bring about a wicked purpose, to lure someone to commit a crime. In constructing the word sum for ornament we wondered if <a> was a connecting vowel letter in the word: <orn+a+ment> and thought of predicament, testament, ligament and fundamental as support for the connecting vowel letter<a> hypothesis. Ornament as a noun is attested from the 13th century, but in the verbal sense not until 1720.

Some of our thinking captured here on the matrices built on Neil Ramsden’s Mini Matrix Maker:

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Helpfulness and assistance is certainly an element of heroism, but the deeds of heroes go beyond the everyday- they are extraordinary. In order to extend the thinking in the classes, my EAL teaching partner and I had students place the choices made by characters, real and fictional, on a spectrum from ordinary to extraordinary. There was no right or wrong placement but we had an expectation that students would offer convincing support for a claim. We hoped students would reconsider the concept of heroism as they placed the following on the spectrum:

• Odysseus ‘s choice to proceed past the monstrous  Scylla.
• Telemachus’s choice to go in search of his father.
• The rescue of a cat from a tree.
• The nine African American students known as The Little Rock Nine who chose to attend the previously all white Little Rock High school, Arkansas in 1957. Watch below.
• The young man who attempted to stop the artillery tanks of China’s People’s Liberation Army in the aftermath of the violent gunning down of protesters in Tianamen Square on June 4, 1989.His fate remains unknown but he remains a symbol of peaceful resistance as he stands defiantly before tanks clutching a shopping bag. Watch the extraordinary footage below.

Considering the choices by all these characters, has certainly helped sharpen the discussion as to what constitutes heroism.

 

Watch a clip from the documentary Eyes on the Prize concerning the Little Rock Nine.

Watch more about the Tianamen Square tankman here and at about 6.50 watch the actions of the ‘tankman’:

Occasionally we witness the extraordinary as seen in the non-fiction excerpts above. Nicholas Clairmont at Big Think reflects on heroism:“Heroism matters because symbolism matters. Let’s stop the hyperbole so that we can truly honor a great and rare human trait when we do see it. Let’s strive to bring ourselves up to heroic levels, not to bring the definition of “hero” down to us.” Read the full article here at Big Think’s, The Proverbial Skeptic blog : You are Not a Hero and follow the links to some real heroes.

While I love the evolution and meaning shifts of words, I worry too about overuse which drains the life and history leaving only brittle word husks. Overuse inevitably walks hand in hand with sloppy sentimentality and flaccid thinking. The Dimwit’s Dictionary by Robert Hartwell Fiske, urges us to write with clarity, to ‘keep the language free from the pollution of empty jargon, idiotic euphemism, self-serving imprecision, comic redundancy, nonsense generally’,(from the foreword by Epstein). Definite, perhaps prescriptivist but provocative and entertaining. Read Fiske’s comments here on hero:

‘Hero’ from Robert Hartwell Fiske’s, The Dimwit’s Dictionary, a top twenty dimwitticism

 

 

Monsters and Money in Temples! Sheer Lunacy!

Tags

crescent, Juno, Luna, measure, money, month, moon, Selene, sultry, swelter, waist, wane, wax

The Moon and Sleep, 1894, Simeon Solomon

Here is the question from Jeremy in Grade 2 at our school on the Melawati campus:

Is money related to ‘Moon’? If who is seeing this is not who I seek, send this post to Ms. Whiteley of one of the classes in the high school section in ISKL Ampang Campus in Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia’s western island, Malaysia, Asia, Earth, the Solar System, The Milky Way, past black holes, The universe.

An intriguing request. Almost Jeremey  ..I am Ann Whiting and in Middle School on the Ampang campus and this is the research one of my students tackled to address your question and the question from the rest of the class as expressed by your teacher:

I have a question to ask one of your English classes. My students were recently studying the days of the week and the meaning behind each day. When we were talking about Monday and making the connection with the base word ‘mon ‘ with month and Monday to the moon, a student asked what about money? Are they connected?

We were thrilled by the  Grade 2’s  inquiry. We were thrilled they were asking us word  questions. However, school was out for two days due to parent teacher conferences. Nevertheless, one student volunteered to tackle this inquiry.

Here are three emails I received from my student over her break.

Month and Monday have a connection to the moon.Month has the proto- Germanic root menoth- (month). And Monday is literally “day of the moon”  which has the root mona (moon). They don’t quite have the same root here, but I think they are related to the moon.The Latin root ‘luna’ means moon, and that’s gets me thinking about Monday in other languages, like French, where monday is lundi, in Italian it’s lunedi  and in Spanish is it lunes. I am doing more research on the relation with money, but that’s what I have found right now. I’ll reply with information on that! :)’

Here is her next email!!

I don’t think that money has any connection, because both Monday and month, they “technically” have a connection. Like, I’m not sure about this, but many cultures (including mine) follow a lunar calendar.(I found some information about why Monday would be the “day of the moon”. It’s after mythical gods and goddesses–Monday coming from Diana or Artemis!)Money comes from the old French monoie, which means coinage or metal currency. I think the reason why the Grade 2 kids thought of it that way was because of the “mon”.

While Jahnavi discovered that  money came into English via  French, I urged her to dig deeper.

‘This sparked a further email: ‘I found out that money comes from Latin moneta or perhaps monere!! However, I’m not sure how that is related to ‘moon’ or ‘month’. I don’t think it is.’

 Watch her explain below:

 

Apologies for any confusion while pointing to the PIE root( Proto Indo Erupean root) and calling it Proto-Germanic!

Here’s our written reply to our 2nd grade inquirers:

Month and moon are related. Both come from really old roots. Languages have a history- just like you do. You have parents and they had parents and those grandparents had parents and …you get the idea I’m sure..those people are our roots. So it is for words.Words have roots – they come from different places and different times. Some words are old and their roots even older.

Monday came from two Old English roots one is mona : moon which has given us the present day English word <moon>. The other root is also Old English: dæg and this has given us day. So Monday is literally moon’s day. As it has two base elements <mon +day> we have a compound word. A compound word is a word with two or more base elements. In Monday we have a bound base element <mon> .Bound bases mean that that the word, in this case <mon> , can’t stand alone and make sense. It needs another element – in other words another affix or another base. Well Monday of course has <day> a free base element.

This Old English word mona, moon, goes way back, 5,500 years in fact to a root *menes– which meant both moon and month and that goes back to another really old root *me- which has led to the word measure!!!!!So think about measure and month and moon!!! All have a really old root in common. If we think about month it’s the measurement of the moon’s cycle. And if you are thinking moon and month… see what you can find out about lunar. There’s a big hint below. What is the base element here?

Also you might be interested to think about the word crescent which describes the appearance of the moon in part of its cycle. How are crescent and croissant related? Find out about the story behind those words?

 

As for money: We think it’s a free base element with absolutely no connection to month and moon. We want to remind you that just because there is the same string of letters in a word does not mean that they share the same morpheme ( that is prefix, suffix or base element). To be related a word has to have the same root and the word money comes from a Latin root monere to warn, to advise!!!

What has warning and advising got to do with money you are wondering? Well, here’s what Jahnavi found out. Money is a fairly old word. It came into English in mid 13th century (a long time ago but moon and month are older!!) Money came via France and before that from a Latin word moneta (Latin is the language spoken by the Romans). The Latin root moneta meant place where money was made or a mint. This Latin word moneta was also the title or surname for the Roman goddess Juno so Moneta (note the capital letter). Etymologists (people who study the history of words) still argue about where the word moneta came from and many think from a Latin word monere to warn. This makes sense to us as the goddess could be warning people when they came to the temple for advice!

Now from Latin monere, lots of other words have come into English. The Latin suffix <-ere> drops off from the word and we have eventually money in English, a free base element. We do not think there is a suffix <ey> – we see it in words but so far can not prove it to be a suffix. Think about <key>, <they>.. no suffix there. Also from this Latin root monere we get words like admonish which means to tell someone off, in other words warn them against doing something. Monsters were once thought to be a sign of evil approaching, doom, of something bad about to happen so in other words, a warning. So no link between month, moon and money but a link instead between money and monsters!!! What a surprise!! There is a lot to talk about with monster but that’s a story for another time!

Read the work on moon conducted by Canadian teacher Skot Caldwell ‘s and his 4th grade class on the blog Who in the World Am I? You might find their work inspiring.

Further research: Endymion and Selene

And that was it I thought. Interesting but no moon and money connection. Our class continued to get lost in Greek myths, along with Odysseus lost at sea. Then as we read one of our texts D’ Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths, I remembered  the myth of Endymion and Selene.

Endymion was a handsome shepherd and the mortal lover of the moon goddess Selene. Selene despaired at the thought of Endymion dying and begged Zeus to grant him eternal life. Zeus granted her wish and put Endymion into eternal sleep so that each night Selene could visit him. Some accounts say Selene and Endymion had fifty daughters!  The Greek poet Nonnus of Panopolis says that they were the parents of the beautiful and vain Narcissus. Selene, one of the Titans, is often depicted riding a chariot pulled by horses or bulls across the sky when her  brother Helios, the sun god has completed his journey. She wears a crescent moon on her head.

The Etymology of Selene

Selene’s Latin equivalent is Luna. The Greek name Selene is from the root σελήνη meaning moon which comes from Greek σέλας meaning ‘light’ or ‘brightness’. This goes even further back to the PIE root *swel- : to shine, to beam and could you dear reader, as you look at that root be making the leap to Old English swelter? And what happens when the weather is hot and humid? Well you become sweltery and the weather is sultry!! Read on at the Etymology Online Dictionary  and gasp with amazement at the connections!!

Continue to gasp as you read about the etymology of the name Endymion!

Juno

Even more surprising was the discovery that there is a moon~money link after all. Juno is the Roman equivalent of Hera. As mentioned earlier in this post, coins were minted at her temple. As I failed to recognize earlier, she is goddess of the new moon! Her name means “the young one”  from an Italic root similar to Latin iunior “younger,” iuvenis “young”‘. Juno’s name is linked with with juvare (iuvāre) “to aid, benefit”, which led to the Latin compound  iuvenescendo, “rejuvenate”. This then is a link to the concept of renewal of the waxing moon. Read about this here and on Online Etymology Dictionary: Juno.

So where from here with the grade 2’s?

• While thinking of month , we’re wondering can you find any other words where <-th> is a suffix? Some of the grade 7’s have been thinking about this and gathering evidence. Here’s a clue for one word where the <-th> is a suffix:When you are cold you look for ……? How do you know the <-th> is a suffix?
• The relationship of <o> and <u> could be interesting to follow on from this investigation . Month when pronounced is  IPA /mʌnθ/ and money as / mʌni/. If sound was the dominant force in the orthographic representation of a word then you might expect  ‘munth’ and ‘muney’. However, because the prime purpose of spelling or orthography is about representing meaning (text made visible) then as we can see month and money need to be written with the single grapheme <o> in order to reflect the meaning link between the moon and Monday and Latin monere warning for money.. As the root was Old English  OE monaþ, OE monað, or OE monoð,it is the grapheme <o> that surfaces in the present day spelling. The phoneme /ʌ/ can then be represented by both <o> and <u>. The choice of the grapheme will be reflected by the etymology. What about investigating the word love as part of an <o> /<u> inquiry? See Kit 1 K Learning from Love and Kit 4C ‘Letters <o> and <u>: Conventions that concern them’ from Real Spelling.
• Investigate the story behind the verbs wax and wane? How is the word waist connected?

Finally treat yourself to Gina Cooke’s Lex post A Measured Response to Crazy Rumours here and become moonstruck by the connections and interconnections.

For more lunacy journey to 1959 and la bella Mina:

 

 

And how can anyone think of the moon without Van Morrison? Listen to Moondance with Van Morrison, Carlos Santana and others recorded in 1977:

 

 

It is appropriate to close with Pink Floyd’s Money, from their brilliant 1973 album Dark Side of the Moon, that explored lunacy and the things that drive people to this state. Listen here. Read more about the album here and Rolling Stone’s article ‘Forty years of the Dark Side’

 

 

 

How Long is A Piece of String?

Tags

aftermath, dead, death, die, mow, strength, string, strong

The string of athletes above is led by Roger Bannister followed by Chris Chataway and Chris Brasher at the White City Stadium, London, during an attempt at the British two miles record. It was this same trio that had earlier that year combined to break the four minute mile barrier. All strong runners! Photographer E.D.Lacey, June 4 1954.

 Follow the inquiry string of one student.There is more research to do on each word but this student has organized her thinking after gathering words from Neil Ramsden’s tool, Word Searcher. Her question, ‘Is <th> in the final position of a word, a clue that the word is a noun? This sprang from the class work on nouns and in particular the related free bases elements strength and strong. See below the etymological connections of strong, strength and string. However, before I become tangled in these etymologies and potential connections listen to the explanation and discoveries.

Aftermath, mow and meadow:

Who would have thought that a word that has come to mean the result of a catastrophe, or unpleasant circumstance has its origins in harvesting and in particular, mowing? It refers to the second crop of the season, the crop occurring after the earlier one has been harvested or ‘mown’. The free base element <math> is from Old English noun mæð : mowing. The verbal form is Old English mawan: to mow – remove that Old English suffix<-an> and you see the resemblance to present day mow. This shares the same Proto Indo European root: *me– as Old English:mæd “meadow”.The word aftermath is a compound comprised of two Old English base elements <after+math>. In her haste to describe the surprising back-story of aftermath, the student above had assumed that after referred to grass. Not so! For more etymological diversion, read Douglas Harper’s etymological summation of the preposition after and his wry comments about the obsolete afterwit. Perhaps ‘recycycle’ and ‘reuse’ should apply to this word as well material items!!

<-th>: How far do we analyze?

Our question as to whether <-th> is always a suffix, if in the final position, is still there. We know that just because it may have been a suffix in Old English  does not mean it’s necessarily a suffix in the present day. It becomes a question of how far do you go when analyzing a word. We see< warm> as a free base element so warmth is formed from <warm+th>. We read the Online Etymology Dictionary entry concerning <-th> and see that indeed it is an element that forms ‘nouns of actions, states or quality’. We see that Old English  <-ðu>, <-ð> has a long history back to Proto Indo European root *-ita. But just because it appears in words in present day English and was once a suffix, does that necessarily mean that it can be regarded as a separate morpheme in present day English? Consider death. Yes inevitable, not always desired but what are the morphemes? We see the Old English deað is an etymon meaning “death, dying, cause of death which gives us the present day noun death.  But is it analyzed<dea+th> because the <-th>, once a suffix, can be replaced by the <-d> in dead? Is dead in fact <dea+d>? Both death and dead have originated from the same ancient Proto Indo European root *dheu: to die. Read about the noun death  dead and verbal die here and consider how far do we go?

Strength, strong and string:

Strength is an attested word from Old English: strengþu, strengð  a strong feminine noun in Old English (OED). It had a sense of bodily power, vigour and fortitude but also a sense moral endurance.  Both strength and strong have evolved from a Proto Indo European root *strenk which indicated stiffness and tautness.The <-th> is from an hypothosized Proto Germanic noun suffix *itho indicating abstract nouns. It was much later, the 14th century in fact, when this noun was used verbally as strengthen. O strengthen my heart! Could there be a strong connection to string?!!

Strong and string share the prehistoric Germanic base *strang which the Online Etymology Dictionary states :strang- “taut, stiff,” from PIE root *strenk– “tight, narrow.However, the OED claims the string- strong link is doubtful.‘The pre-Germanic root *streŋk- appears not to be known in this form, but a parallel form *streŋg- is represented by Irish (and Scottish Gaelic) sreang cord, string, Middle Irish srincne navel-string, Greek στραγγάλη halter, Latin stringĕre to bind, draw tight. Connection with strong adj. is doubtful.’

Chambers Dictionary of Etymology( Barnhart) swings us back in support of the string strong connection. This dictionary claims that string is attested from 1175 developing from Old English streng meaning line or cord and links this to Proto Germanic *straŋgi-z which was from Indo European*strongh. There are several Germanic cognates such as Danish and Norwegian streng. This dictionary states that strong is ‘related to Old English streng :cord, rope, sinew’.

We saw that Skeat’s Concise Dictionary of Etymology also gave support for the string strong connection.

The phonestheme ‘str’

We also discussed phonesthemes, another highly entertaining path of lingusitic diversion. Phonestheme is the term for the meaning association lurking behind certain sounds or sound sequences. These are not morphemes merely symbolic sound suggestions. We see phonesthemes occur in in initial letter strings in a word and or in rhymes . For example ‘ odge’ has a heavy, well, stodgy sound.  <str> is a phonestheme that has an underlying suggestion of ‘tightness’, of ‘stretchiness’. As Benjamin Shisler notes in his Dictionary of English Phonesthemes: the initial consonant cluster ‘str’ strives to struggle against stress, strain, and stricture with strength. ‘str’ straddles, straggles, strands, streams, stretches, strews, and strings out.

So much more in this list of <-th> to investigate. Our work continues!

Did you know that:

• heartstrings, a compound word, was originally literal and part of anatomical theory in the late 15t century?
• string can mean to deceive, attested since 1812 and that to string someone alomng has been in use since 1902?
• to pull the strings is in reference to control alludes to puppetry and is from 1860s?
• to hold the pursestrings as in the figurative expression to control money is attested from the 1530’s?
• a stringer, not only referred to a maker of bow strings, attested from the 15th century but a newspaper journalist paid by ‘length of the copy’,attested from 1950’s?
• a stringybark in Australia can refer to a particular species of eucalyptus (1801) and an uncouth person, an inhabitant of the outback, according to the OED, attested 1833: New S. Wales Mag. I. 173 The workmanship of which I beg you will not scrutinize, as I am but, to use a colonial expression, ‘a stringy-bark carpenter’

Links

If intrigued by phonesthemes go to Benjamin K Shishler’s Dictionary of Phonesthemes. Earlier posts on phonesthemes can be found here: Enwrought by Phonesthemes and  What’s in a Name?

The last words of this post go to Marcus Aurelius: “Remember that what pulls the strings is the force hidden within; there lies the power to persuade, there the life — there, if one must speak out, the real man.”