One is advised to unplug one's electric llama before dousing it with miracle water.

Back from the near-dead, it's LONG-LOST FRIENDS.

Today, three words meaning "indifferent," "driver," and "rub" - and all from the same root? Absolutely.

"Nonchalant" is very obviously French, since it's from a later period of adoption of French words: it's from chaloir, "to be warm," and originally meant "lacking in warmth of feeling." (Chaloir is semi-archaic in modern French, and when used, it means "to be of import.") "Nonchalance" is first cited in 1678, "nonchalant" in 1734.

But chaloir has cousins from the Latin. It's from caleo, "to be warm/hot," which has the derived verb calefacio, "to make (something) warm/hot." This made its way through French in parallel into the modern verb chauffer, with the same meaning, whose nominal form, chauffeur, which in 1898 or so started to be used as "driver of a car," and quickly morphing to "hired driver." This was a reference to the fact that steam engines were common in early cars, up until the 1920's (viz. Stanley Steamer), and took some time to stoke up to readiness. (It appears chauffeur previously also referred to the stoker of a steam train, but that this meaning was superseded by the car sense.)

Finally, "chauffeur" was not the first time chauffer crossed over into English: as early as 1382, back when it only had one 'f' in French, it fathered the word "chafe," originally also meaning "heat up" but moving to "heat by rubbing with the hands," and at last to simply "rubbing." (The old meaning is preserved in "chafing dish.")

The Latin cal- root has come through to English in several other forms, less interesting since the concept of "heat" is still resident in them: "cauldron," "calorie," "scald," "coddle," and "caldera."

For a quick glimpse at the timelessness of curmudgeonry, here's a letter to the New York Times, 1902, complaining about the gratuitous Frenchiness in "chauffeur." (He incorrectly predicted it would come to be pronounced "chawfer.")

Now it's 30 years, an airport, and a bridge to the mainland later, and he's still watching a TV made from a coconut.

"Very unique." The sight of these two words makes me, and most of my set, cringe.

Should it?

Let's think about why adding qualifiers to unique is so resisted a practice. It means one-of-a-kind, apparently, and naturally it is absurd to think of something being one-of-a-kind to a greater or lesser degree. It's binary, and you can't qualify something binary.

This is logical. But I think it might be more logic than language as a practice can reasonably accommodate. We almost never fully describe situations; sentences are like small boats of data that float on seas of context. Why does context apparently not matter for "unique"?

Take the word "everyone," for example. It doesn't mean "every human being alive or dead"; its scope implicitly scales up or down depending on the situation. It might mean "everyone in this conference room," "all my family and friends," "everyone in this university," "everyone in this country," or import more complicated meanings, like "everyone who I define to be reasonable enough to take part in this conversation."

In the same way, "one of a kind," implies a universe of entities out of which the predicate is the only one - and the possible variation in that universe of entities makes it no longer a binary proposition.  If you say a worker's skills are "unique," you probably mean "within this company" or "within this industry"; there are probably plenty of people out there with identical skills, but who are not available for the same job for any of a number of reasons. A historical artifact in a museum might be labeled "unique" even when it's known to be one of a series, because the others have all passed into obscure private collections, making it vanishingly unlikely that the museum-goer reading the display will ever see another like it.

In this way, "unique" is just as context-dependent as any other adjective. And all the above assumes that "unique" is completely equivalent to "one-of-a-kind," which should not be taken as given. Etymologically, Latin unicus is unus "one" plus an adjectivalizing suffix. Arguably, even back when it was coined, it didn't mean "one" - if so, why not just say "one"? - but something having the fuzzy quality of there being only one, which could be taken in many directions; and indeed, a glance through Latin dictionaries on Google Books finds it also had transferred meanings like "notable," "beloved," "singular," and even "uncommon." In this way, "unique" should be understood as a word with its own meaning, not the same as "one-of-a-kind," and there is nothing sacred about its original derivation.

Finally, some historical perspective on the word in English. According to the OED it was first used in 1609, in the sense of "sole," but (perhaps after becoming archaic) was "readopted" from French in the late 18th century in the more elaborate sense of "standing alone, unparalleled." The OED mentions "a tendency to take the wider meaning of 'uncommon, unusual, remarkable,' and that "[t]he usage in the comparative and superlative, and with advs. as absolutely, most, quite, thoroughly, totally, etc., has been objected to as tautological" - followed by a citation from 1809 qualified by "thoroughly"! It seems the "misuse" of the word is almost as venerable as the word itself, as is pedantic objection to that practice. (And that was the same generation of grammarians, I suspect, that instituted those meaningless, reactionary bans as on split infinitives, "they" as a gender-neutral singular pronoun, and prepositions at the end of sentences.)

I still find "very unique" clumsy due to my upbringing, and enough people feel the same way that I will keep editing it out when I see it. But "fairly unique," "relatively unique," and other such qualified phrases convey a real meaning, and I may be more lenient when I see them. Above all, we should strive to enjoy and participate in linguistic change, not look for opportunities to turn up our noses at it.

This post was composed in the spirit of Stephen Fry's manifesto, which I recommend to everyone, and which is embedded below.



(Final note: Truly binary adjectives do exist, like "pregnant" - but that has a clearly defined referent, an individual.)

All biomedical and archive personnel are to report to my harangue pit immediately.

This post is finally putting down in a public form some observations I made some time ago, back when I read Japanese manga.

It relates to the multiple writing systems that interlock to form Japanese.  Japanese does use Chinese characters (kanji), but mostly to represent core words with clear meanings - nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc. Many grammatical elements, on the other hand - verb suffixes, postpositions, etc. - are spelled out in syllabic script or kana.  Kana is also used in texts for children who haven't learned kanji, and for writing regular words or names whose kanji is considered too obscure (depending on how highbrow the text is), writing borrowed words, etc.  Kana has two types, hiragana, which is to some extent the "default", and katakana, which is mostly used for borrowed words; they both represent the same body of sounds, but with different symbols.

Youth-oriented books, including manga, often include furigana, or tiny kana printed next to the kanji, to show pronunciation.  (These can also be called rubi, after a dated English term for 5.5-point type.)  But there are odd wrinkles in how furigana is used.

• Furigana is sometimes used for explication.  You might see, say, "the laboratory" in regular text and "here" on the side as furigana.  This corresponds nicely to the fact that the speakers know that perfectly well that they are in the laboratory, but the readers need reminders to keep track. But is "here" the pronunciation (by analogy with the main use of furigana), or is "laboratory" the pronunciation and "here" just a reminder? It's rather ambiguous.
• Furigana can also be used for translation: foreign phrases can be translated into Japanese along the side.  The oddest example I've seen was when a character who was Chinese said 我爱你 (wo ai ni, "I love you," in Chinese), with the furigana アイラブユー airabuyuu, or English "I love you" transliterated into Japanese kana.  Despite using broadly the same character system, that Chinese sentence is not necessarily legible to Japanese readers, particularly children, since the pronouns for "I" and "you" are both different in Chinese and Japanese. My guess is that they chose to put it into transliterated English so that it would be understood but still retain an air of foreignness.

Noticing these furigana practices made me notice something else: as I mentioned above, kana are often substituted to write words with obscure or difficult kanji.  In real life, this practice sometimes covers up that someone has forgotten the right kanji (a common cause of embarrassment in these days of word processors).  In manga, that seems to have been transferred to speech: one character uses an obscure technical term unknown to the listener; the other repeats the word quizzically, implicitly asking for a definition, and in that second speaker's word balloon only, the word is in kana rather than kanji, clearly showing that they don't know what it means. (In English the same thing is often accomplished by having it misspelled in the second speech; this wouldn't work as well in Japanese as spelling in kana is much simpler and there's a smaller range of sound combinations to choose from.)

Does this mean that if kanji appears in a word balloon, the character knows that kanji? Not necessarily, but sometimes this notion seems to be carried further. When there are foreigners talking to or about a Japanese person (applying the Translation Convention), and they speak the Japanese person's name, it's commonly written phonetically in kana, apparently to show that they only know the name as a string of sounds, not as something with another identity through its kanji.

The most compelling example of this: in one otherwise forgettable early 90's comic, a boy and girl get "sucked into cyberspace" (yeah, I know) to a sword-and-sorcery world. The girl loses her memory and is captured.  When the boy, Tōru, finally rescues her, she calls him トール, his name spelled phonetically in kana - just like everybody else in the (non-Japanese) fantasy world has been doing. When she regains her memory later, she delightedly calls him 通, his name in kanji, demonstrating to the reader in an instant that she now remembers and thinks in the writing system she and he share.

It's time to kick ass and repent of the murders I have committed to become king... and I'm all out of repentance.

Something bugs me about Haley Barbour as a potential GOP nominee. Besides the obvious, I think part of it is that old Southern men really don't fit the image anyone has of Presidents.

Obviously, I checked Wikipedia to see if this could be borne out.  And indeed, Haley Barbour would be 65 in 2012, and this is older than any serious Southern presidential candidate since 1844 - the only two older in American history are Henry Clay, who was 67 when he ran against Polk that year, and Andrew Jackson, who was 67 when he ran for reelection in 1832. LBJ always looked old, but he was 56 in 1964; and the shriveled Ross Perot was 62 in 1992.

Even knowing how the South's national political power was greatly restricted after the Civil War, it's striking, looking over the records, how thoroughly and how long Southerners were kept out of consideration for the presidency since then. It's hard to say who the first post-Civil War Southern president was, because so many technicalities come up. Woodrow Wilson was born in Georgia, but he made his academic career in the North and entered politics in New Jersey. Harry Truman was from Missouri, which is sort of half-Southern, and I'm not sure about his identity, but that certainly wasn't his image. LBJ and Carter were the first completely unambiguous Southerners, and if we can give George W. Bush that label (he might have been a transplant or fraud, but he had the accent and the identity), then he was the first conservative Southern president since the Civil War, despite the consistent conservatism of the South. One gets the impression that until recently, being Southern was an inherent minus, needing to be countered by other political assets.

Don't lend money to unreliable narrators.

I couldn't shoehorn this into another installment of Long-Lost Friends, so this is an, um, Etymological Interlude.

I was thinking about the differentiation of similar words and realized that I perceive a "cane" as needing to be slender and professionally made, whereas a "walking-stick," is more generic and can include a stick you find along the trail.

As it turns out, this has a good reason: the word "cane" originally meant a reed, from Latin canna / Greek κάννα, both words apparently Semitic in origin, cognate with Biblical Hebrew qanah.  It came to be applied to sugar cane and to more and more plants with solid or hollow stems as Europeans spread across the world and "discovered" them, in particular bamboo and rattan.

Rattan, being sturdy but flexible, was quickly taken up as a rod for beating people with, and apparently became the standard rod used in English and Welsh schools despite being a tropical product (hark, the globalization of past ages!). Stronger stems, also imported, were used as walking-sticks, such as "Malacca cane" and "Tobago cane," though as I can't find these outside the OED, they may no longer be current names, and may in fact now all be considered varieties of rattan. Such stems are still used in Singapore and other countries that practice judicial caning.

As I reconstruct it, wood was also used, but canes were common enough that for a wooden stick to be called a "cane," it had to be similarly slender - but the OED entry for "cane" doesn't mention wood at all, and Wikipedia describes canes made of wood as a distinctly North American practice. Something I wouldn't have guessed was a regionalism!  I wonder if this was because wood was so much more plentiful in North America than in Britain.

Other traditional walking-stick materials, derived from Wikipedia's list, include ash, Aralia spinosa, bamboo (in which case it's called a whangee), American rattan vine, and medlar wood,

Wikipedia mentions, presumably because it could otherwise confuse UK speakers, that when we speak of the caning of Senator Sumner, it was not a true "cane" and in fact, the stick in question broke into pieces, suggesting the practical superiority of rattan. Some sources say Brooks's cane was of gutta-percha, others gutta-percha wood, so I'm not sure whether it was entirely made of that early natural rubber, or wood from the plant that gives it, or regular wood enhanced with gutta-percha; however, the presence of gutta-percha in that incident was a novelty widely picked up on at the time, with lots of metaphors about electricity and telegraphs.

Truth! Understanding! The end of entropy! And babes!

I was pretty puzzled when David Cameron's plan came out to reform the NHS by making general practitioners responsible for all contracting for services.  It was vaguely in the spirit of primary-care-centeredness that led to the current Primary Care Trust system, and possibly GPs are better respected in the UK than bureaucrats and hospital administrators, but the glaring issue was, "Why would GPs be particularly good at managing this huge administrative burden?  Why would they even want to take it on?"  I thought it most likely that, if it was passed as advertised, GPs would collectively delegate their new responsibilities to some body that would become yet another bureaucratic overlay on the same system as before - much like the Primary Care Trusts.

Well, the picture is becoming more clear.  Polly Toynbee writing in the Guardian to interpret a new article by Cameron in the Telegraph:

Every single public service will be put out to tender. Everything. ...Forget the camouflage of localism and choice: however much local people like local services that work well, they will have no choice in the matter. .... 

Democracy will scarcely get a look in. People can't choose if services are contracted out. Once contracts are signed, nothing can change. You can throw out rascally councillors or governments, but the contracts will go on regardless. Like PFIs, they will be traded as financial instruments, sliced and diced according to risk and sold on. This sets a nuclear bomb under all public services, because there can never be any going back. If you don't like the sound of this, Cameron's government can be voted out but it will be virtually impossible to return services to a public realm that no longer exists. Ownership of the contracts and companies moves on, and the public sector loses any capacity to take them back. 

Apparently this is very similar to what's happened with public-private partnerships over the years.  It seems all too likely that this is how it could work out in practice, and that the conscious goals are the accumulation of private profits and the sapping of public capacity.

This is one of the most creative policy innovations I've heard about in some time, and not in a good way.

I hate wasting food, so I poured what I couldn't eat through your mail slot.

More Livy!  Obviously, where rape and murder of women as motif is concerned, Lucretia is another canonical example.  Interestingly, in this part of Livy victim-blaming isn't precisely what goes on, but it's still overwhelmingly the context - in the below passage it's clearly the cultural norm they're trying to avoid just once.

One after another they tried to comfort her. They told her she was helpless, and therefore innocent; that he alone was guilty. It was the mind, they said, that sinned, not the body: without intention there could never be guilt. 

"What is due to him," Lucretia said, "is for you to decide. As for me I am innocent of fault, but I will take my punishment. Never shall Lucretia provide a precedent for unchaste women to escape what they deserve." With these words she drew a knife from under her robe, drove it into her heart, and fell forward, dead.

So Lucretia is a paragon of virtue partly because she enthusiastically participates in the oppression of women.