cockatrice

“For, behold, I will send serpents, cockatrices, among you, which will not be charmed, and they shall bite you, saith the LORD.”

That is from the Book of Jeremiah, Chapter 8, verse 17. For several years now, I have been meeting with friends via Zoom to read the Bible together, and this is how far we have gotten. Each person is reading from the bible of their choice and this is what comes up in the King James version. The other versions have vipers and adders but it looks like only the KJV has cockatrices. 

We of course wondered what they were. I have run across it before but get the word mixed up with cicitrix, which means 'scar'. One of our group had heard it come up recently on the Game of Thrones sequel House of the Dragon and told us it was some kind of monster. And  I had a sneaking suspicion that it had come up in The Once and Future King and a sinking feeling that I might have already written it up for this blog and just forgotten it--it's happened before. (I didn't--it was corkindrill that I'd looked into, but to think of T. H. White in relation to this word is not to have gone too far afield, as he was the first and for a while the only person to translate a medieval bestiary into English).

But let's get to it, shall we?

A cockatrice transom at Belvedere Castle in Central Park

As you can see above, a cockatrice is a mythical beast, which Wikipedia tells us is a two-legged dragon with a rooster's head. I'll get a little deeper into this in a minute, but first let's look at the etymology.

According to the Online Etymology Dictionary,  the word means a fabulous monster. It comes to us by way of Old French cocatriz, which leads back to the Late Latin calcatrix, which in turn comes from the Latin calcare "to tread.". This is a translation of the Greek word ikhneumon, which means "tracker" or "tracer." The dictionary goes on to tell us that this fabulous beast was said to kill with a glance and that it could be killed only by tricking it into gazing at its own reflection. 

It then leads on to this wonderful paragraph, which I will quote in full:

In classical writings, an Egyptian animal of some sort, the mortal enemy of the crocodile, which it tracks down and kills. This vague sense became hopelessly confused in the Christian West, and in England the word ended up applied to the equivalent of the basilisk. Popularly associated with cock (n.1), hence the fable that it was a serpent hatched from a cock's egg. It also sometimes was confused with the crocodile. Belief in them persisted even among the educated because the word was used in the KJV several times to translate a Hebrew word for "serpent." In heraldry, a beast half cock, half serpent. Also, in old slang, "a loose woman" (1590s).

from the Biodiversity Heritage Library

To choose just a few favorite things from that paragraph, I am amused by the idea that the sense of this creature becomes hopelessly confused over time, so that it is associated with the basalisk; that simply because of its name it comes to be thought of as some mutant being from a cock's egg; and that  it is thought to be  the mortal enemy of the crocodile, but also, well, the crocodile itself. Oh, yes--and let's not forget the gratuitous insult to women thrown in at the end. (no blame to the etymologist intended.) Let me just say that if there is a way to turn a word into some kind of slam against women, it will eventually be done. But let's move on.

On reflection, I really must refer us back to the corkindrill post above, because I seem to have covered all this hazy crocodile reference before!

I have to confess that I have always thought that a basalisk was some kind of building, no doubt mixing it up with a basilica, except that if I'd been quizzed on it, I would have pictured it as a kind of tower. But no. Here is a drawing, which may or may not be representative of basalisks as a whole:

Ulisse Aldrovandi

If you've become intrigued with the cockatrice, I will refer you to a marvelous essay which I stumbled on through the Wikipedia post: "The Career of the Cockatrice" by Laurence A. Breiner. You can read it here, at JSTOR. Don't be put off by the whole members only vibe, because if you look closely you'll see that there is an independent researcher's button, where you can access 100 articles a month or free, which is probably about 98 more than I will often need. Let me entice you with the opening sentence.

The cockatrice, which no one ever saw, was born by accident toward the end of the twelfth century and died in the middle of the seventeenth, a victim of the new science.

The article delves into the cockatrice in heraldry and alchemy and has much more to say about it than I have either the acumen or the space to consider. But I can leave you with an image of its use in heraldry which I've come across. Ladies and gents, I give you the Arms of Bogan of Totnes, Devon:

Talos

 This one came to me in the form a crossword puzzle clue: "ancient Greek robot." It was recent, so maybe some of you have come across it too. Although no expert, I have read or at least read about a fair number of the ancient Greek classics,  so I was pleasantly surprised to discover a new character. And for some reason, the idea that the ancient Greeks were as fascinated by robots as we are charmed me. Although I suppose I should have gathered that from the Trojan horse. Which, of course, was Greek.

Talos, armed with a stone

Here's what Wikipedia has to say about Talos:

In Greek mythology, Talos, also spelled Talus or Talon was a giant automaton made of bronze to protect Europa in Crete from pirates and invaders. He circled the island's shores three times daily.

But apparently there was more than one theory about who or what Talos was. The one above has Zeus asking the god Hephaestus, who was the god of fire and metalwork among other things, to make this metal man. But in other versions he is a descendent from the race of brass people. I found this relevant passage in Hesiod's Works and Days. Hesiod tells us that the gods made different races of men in rapidly declining order of excellence, starting with gold, silver and then bronze (humans coming decidedly further down the scale).

Hesiod--or someone's idea of him anyway

Then Zeus the father made yet a third race of men, the bronze, not like the silver in anything. Out of ash-trees he made them, a terrible and fierce race, occupied with the woeful works of Ares and with acts of violence, no eaters of corn, their stern hearts being of adamant; unshapen hulks, with great strength and indescribable arms growing from their shoulders above their stalwart bodies. They had bronze armour, bronze houses, and with bronze they laboured, as dark iron was not available. They were laid low by their own hands, and they went to chill Hades house of decay leaving no names: mighty though they were, dark death got them, and they left the bright sunlight.

                                                                                --translated by M. L. West

Or he may have been a brass bull. Which I have just learned was a well documented instrument of ancient Greek torture. But we're not going there today.

There are a couple of things that fascinated me about the story of Talos. One is that even this early version of a robot was described as having human emotions, and as you will see below, his desires proved his undoing, a very human failing. 

The other thing that seems to persist through many versions of his story is that he was fueled by one vein, which ran up and down his body and was full of ichor. What is ichor, you ask? It is the celestial blood of the gods. I have always pronounced it as ICK-or when I've come across it, which made it sound disgusting, but apparently it's more like EYE-core (American English) or EYE-cur (British English), either of which is much more palatable. 

As I sought out usable images I came across a strange one. It is of a statue found on Guildhall Street behind the Lion Yard Centre in Cambridge, England. . It was sculpted by Michael Ayrton and it was posted on a blog called "Art in Cambridge" by a woman named Nina Lübben. Her post contains more photos of this statue and others by the sculptor. Here's a link. And here's a little quote I found from the sculptor himself within it:

A certain tranquillity lies in his stupid presence, a certain comfort.  He has no brains and no arms, but looks very powerful.

Talos, by Michael Ayrton

The article asks if this is the ugliest statue in Cambridge, but I find it rather poignant.

It turns out that Talos, or at least someone called Talos has made his way into modern culture even if I've personally been ignorant of this. (What else is new? It's the name of the blog, people.) There is a very impressive Talos (for its time) in the 1963 movie Jason and the Argonauts.

And the gaming world is familiar with at least the name Talos, as he is a god in the game The Elder Scrolls/Skyrim, though not a bronze automaton. But there is a newer entry in the gaming universe, The Talos Principal, which seems quite germane. According to Wikipedia:

The game features a philosophical storyline. The name of the game refers to a philosophical principle formulated by a fictional Greek philosopher known as Straton of Stageira. In texts found in the game, Straton argues that the consciousness of Talos of Greek mythology (a mechanical yet conscious man) implies that humans are also merely machines (albeit biological ones). 

And of course I can't forget to mention that Talos has even made his way into the world of TED Talks in the form of this very charming very short animated film by Adrienne Mayor, The Greek Myth of Talos, the First Robot.

 

And now that you've watched the film and know the end of the story, what better way to finish this off but with the death of Talos on an ancient Grecian vase?

The Death of Talos

hackneyed

 I put the word "hackneyed" on my long backlist of words to look into in April 2021, so it seems high time to bring it out of the dusty corner where it's been lingering. I don't remember why it sprang out to me at the time, and I don't know why I've picked it as the one with which to renew investigations here now.

I know what "hackneyed" means, or at least think I do. It means worn-out, trite, commonplace. Unoriginal.Passé. But where does it come from? Does it have any relationship to hackney cabs, and if so, what could that possibly be?

Well, we must start off with a controversy.  According to the website World Wide Words, the editors of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary were quite sure that the word "hackney" derived from the French  haquenée, which meant and still means "an ambling horse." However, modern writers are just as certain that the French actually derives from an English placename, namely Hackney, England. 

Hackney Downs

A hakeney (Middle English) was a horse raised for riding --or ambling-- as opposed to being raised as  a warhorse or those used for hunting and racing. (You can see why these perfectly fine animals might seem a little, well, commonplace by comparison.) The countryside around Hackney was apparently ideal for raising horses (see the remnant of the landscape above) and it seems that the town of Hackney developed a nice little trade hiring out of these beasts. The 'to hire' aspect began that kind of drift that language is wont to do, so that the word expanded its meaning to include other beings who could be hired--like servants. And prostitutes. I think we can all see that any of these hired out beings might become tired out and overused. Which I'm guessing is the real link to our modern term "hackneyed."

Hackney carriage, Gibraltar Museum

With this mystery (perhaps) solved, let's move on. For the word "hackney" also kept its associations with horses. According to Wikipedia, the first private coaches were used by the aristocracy in the 1580s. It didn't take long for the general public to emulate the upper classes and the first horse powered hackney cabs and carriages came along in the 1600s.

But even as horse drawn carriages began to be replaced by motorized cabs, the term "hackney" stayed with them, even though the horses didn't. 

a modern hackney carriage

The excellent Grammarphobia blog lays out the evolution of the subsequently shortened term "hack" quite succinctly:

As for the short form “hack,” it evolved similarly. Here are the earliest OED dates for some of its senses: horse for hire (1571), driver of a hackney carriage (1661), hireling (1699), trite writing (1710), trite or dull (1759), journalistic drudge (1798), ride a horse (1800), writer of unoriginal work (1927).

Perhaps inevitably these days, the word "hack" leads us eventually to think of "hacker", and in an interesting piece at Deepgram,  essayist Morris Gevirtz shows us how the term "hack" has had two meanings since its emergence in English, one having to do with horses and one with the physical and often violent act of hacking. He argues that in our contemporary sense of hacking, the two meanings have been reunited again. 

But let's not forget the horses! For the Hackney is also a recognized breed. You can see their distinctive high stepping trot in the photo below. They are often used in harness events. Read all about them in this Wikipedia article.

a Hackney in a driving competion

Well, we've come a long way from Hackney, and even Hackney itself has come a long way from the quiet village where horses once roamed the fields outside it. It was gradually swallowed up by London, and here is an image of it in the present day:

Hackney from the Air--Thomas Nugent

But if you're feeling a little nostalgic for the old Hackney, here's a delightful rendition of "If it Wasn't for the 'Ouses in Between" on YouTube. Wait for it--you'll find a mention of "Ackney Marshes" part way through. 

. 

slogan

 When I started this post, I wasn't thinking of a word for "a short and striking phrase used in advertising." I was thinking of those words or sometimes phrases that suddenly burst on the scene and which everyone else seems to already understand and I always start off hopelessly behind on. Words like "snowflake" and "woke" and "cancel culture" and "Karen", to name just a few from the current batch. Or probably the not so current batch, since  I know of them.

But having started out thinking these were "slogans," I thought I would pursue the term anyway, and an agreeable journey it has proven to be. Since I visited Scotland recently and delved a bit into my Scottish roots I was pleased to learn that the word derives from Gaelic originally. 

The original term sluagh-ghairm, meaning "battle cry" in both Irish and Scottish Highland clans, is a combination of two Scottish Gaelic words, sluagh, which means  "army", "host" or "slew", and gairm, a cry, which is related to the word 'garrulous', according to the Online Etymology Dictionary. (At first I didn't understand this, because garrulous derives from Latin, but it turns out that they are linked even further back by the Proto-Indo-European root gar--"to call or cry".)

An Incident in the Rebellion of 1745, David Morier

We may think of images from Braveheart or the like when we think of a Scottish battle cry, but I have stumbled upon a quote from Elias Canetti's Crowds and Power (Masse und Macht) which reminds me that our tour guide Graham often pointed out the mythological stories of Scotland as being on at least an equal footing with the geographical or historical ones:

"The Celts of the Scottish Highlands have a special word for the host of the dead : sluagh, meaning 'spirit-multitude'. 'The spirits fly about in great clouds like starlings, up and down the face of the world, and come back to the scenes of their earthly transgressions. With their venomous unerring darts they kill cats and dogs, sheep and cattle. They fight battles in the air as men do on the earth. They may be heard and seen on clear, frosty nights, advancing and retreating, retreating and advancing against one another. After a battle their crimson blood may be seen staining rocks and stones.' The word gairm means shout or cry, and sluagh-ghairm was the battle-cry of the dead. This word later became 'slogan'. The expression we use for the battlecries of our modern crowds derives from the Highland hosts of the dead."

Which brings us back to our present day usage. Sluagh-ghairm entered into English as slogorne in the 1510s. Its metaphorical sense of "distinctive word or phrase used by a political or other group" is attested from 1704, says the Online Etymology Dictionary, when it was spelled slughon. They mention a "fully folk-etymologized slughorn" as another variant spelling. (Folk-etymology is when people make mistakes about the origin of a word because it coincidentally sounds like another word that it bears no relation to.)

Slogans were not just war cries, however. They are also used on Scottish family crests, as either the motto or a kind of secondary motto. They might be war cries, but they don't have to be. The Graham family motto, for instance, is "Ne oublie"--do not forget. This is not exactly a war cry--but it's hardly a peace cry either. 

It is this kind of family advertising that seems to be the transition point to our current understanding of "slogan," which means, according to Wikipedia, a motto or memorable phrase in a political, commercial, religious or other context, designed to persuade a targeted audience about something, whether a cause, a conviction or an object. 

Which brings me right back around to the beginning. Because it turns out that those single word I mentioned are slogans. They're just in special subcategory called "catchwords."

The Oxford English dictionary: "a briefly popular or fashionable word or phrase used to encapsulate a particular concept.

"“motivation” is a great catchword."

What I find all slogans have in common (and what drew me to this topic in the first place), whether catchwords or mottos, virtuous or villainous, is that they are designed to make you stop thinking critically and fall into line as a member of the "target audience." It doesn't hurt to eye a slogan with a certain amount of suspicion. What is it not letting you think?

For the surprising origin of one of most famous advertising slogans ever, click here.

No, really. Just do it.

Connie Nielsen

Infrastructure

Photo by Howard Arlander

 

So what is it, exactly? With Congress in tension over two bills on infrastructure, one being on the traditional kinds of infrastructure, such as roads and bridges, and Progressives in the House pushing for a more expansive bill that would include things like working to abate climate change and  poverty, and expand things like Medicare and childcare, I'm curious about where the  word came from and what it meant in the beginning. 

Surprisingly, to me anyway, the word actually comes to us from French. It was made of two Latin components, but was never actually used in ancient times. It was coined by the French in 1875 and was first used in English not long after, in 1887. Infra means "under or below" in Latin, and "structure" comes from the Latin structura, which the Online Etymology Dictionary tells us meant, "a fitting together, adjustment; a building, mode of building". Fairly broad, in other words. The French, according to Merriam Webster's site, used it originally to mean what in English we already called "substructure," as in the foundation of a building, road or railroad bed. 

Photo by Niilo Isotalo

But the word took on new meaning and vitality after World War II, as NATO came into existence and started building airfields, railroads and military bases in response to the Cold War. The word migrated from French to English as these military groups worked together.  An interesting Merriam Webster article on this word talks about how war can lead to a parallel invasion of new words as well, as happened during the 11th century Norman Conquest of Britain, which brought many Latinate words from French into the English vocabulary.

So the word "infrastructure" entered the English language with many military associations which were not part of the original French coinage. But as is the way with language, it began to be applied to other spheres. The Merriam Webster article says that  "infrastructure" quickly had an added definition "the system of public works of a country, state or region." Which is not so much a departure from military usage as a sidestep to a larger governmental one. 

Avenue de l'Opera by Camille Pissarro

(Haussmann's renovation of Paris in the mid 1800s may not have been termed infrastructure by the French at the time, but it was definitely a public works project.)

But "public works" is itself a vast and sometimes abstract concept, and now includes things that are not large physical building projects like bridge building and road making, but communication systems and electrical systems. And also the human beings who will be needed to organize and run all these things. Yes, you could say that there is a bit of mission creep going on with this word, but you could just as easily say that the definition of the word expanded as people came to understand the many facets of life to which it was applicable. 

So it's no coincidence that the bigger bill that Biden and many of the House Democrats are pushing has come to include caregivers and teachers and healthcare. It turns out that it takes an awful lot to keep a human system running. 

 Hush Naidoo Jade  Photography

racketeering

We were hearing the word 'racketeering' coming up quite a bit, what with the Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis adding an expert on the subject to her criminal investigation of former President Trump's phone calls asking Georgia's Secretary of State Raffensperger  to 'find him more votes.' Although this has faded from the headlines a bit in the wake of other events (for now), I did find myself wondering about the word, especially as it was surprising to hear it come up in a context other than mob crime.  

It turns out that 'racketeer' is one of those unusual words that has quite a specific date of coinage that can actually be traced. The Employer's Association of Greater Chicago, which was formed in 1905 with the purpose of breaking up unions according to Wikipedia, came up with it in 1927 in a statement about organized crime in the Teamsters Union. (The Online Etymology Dictionary says the word was first published in 1928.) In an ironic twist, the president of the association, James Breen, was soon rumored to be linked to the rackets himself and had to resign, although he was never indicted. However, Wikipedia also says that crime organizations blew up his house the next year to scare him into not talking, so I guess he didn't get off scot-free. 

"The Racketeer" 1929-Hedda Hopper , Carole Lombard

I have looked at a few pages now to get a sense of what racketeering is, and the definition that I find most helpful is one that D.A.Willis gave herself, saying that racketeering is "doing overt acts using a legal entity for an illegal purpose." 

In the same Business Insider article, Notre Dame law professor G. Robert Blakey is quoted as saying that racketeering "is not a crime--it's a way of thinking about and prosecuting a variety of crimes."

The etymology of 'racket' in this sense is fairly unclear. Whether it's connected to the word's sense of "loud noise", or to games via the word 'raquet,' or to the word 'rack-rent', which meant extortionate rent back in the 1590s, seems to be anybody's guess. But I liked this idea which came up in on the English Language and Usage group on Slack Exchange:

racket; racketeer. English pickpockets, once the best of the breed, invented the ploy of creating disturbances in the street to distract their victims while they emptied their pockets. This practice was so common that a law was passed in 1697 forbidding the throwing of firecrackers and other devices causing a racket on the city streets. From the common pickpocket ploy the old onomatopoeic English word racket, imitative like crack or bang and meaning a disturbance or loud noise, took on its additional meaning of a scheme, a dodge, illicit criminal activity. Before 1810, when it first appeared in print, the word had acquired this slang meaning in England, though it was later forgotten and the word racket for a criminal activity wasn't used again there until it was reintroduced from America along with the American Prohibition invention from it, racketeer. The only other, improbable, explanation given for the word is that it was originally the name of an ancient, crooked dice game.

That is from  The Facts on File Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins (1997) by Robert Hendrickson.

Many of us have heard of the RICO Act, but we may not know or remember that that's an acronym for the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, which was enacted in 1970. 

So that guy, John Floyd, who Willis brought on board to look into the racketeering aspects of the investigation? Turns out he wrote the book on the subject. Literally.

filibuster

I imagine that, reading the subject line of this post, you're expecting some kind of discussion of the filibuster process, which we are all hearing so much about at the moment. And probably I should at least find a good definition of the filibuster as it is currently used. But in fact I was merely attracted by the word itself. It's really a rather jolly sounding word, but I couldn't even make a guess as to where it came from. It doesn't sound exactly Latinate, though if the original was something like "filibustrum'" or "filibustrate" that would make a bit of sense. When I delved into its etymology, though, I found something quite a bit more interesting. 

But first, a brief, basic definition of its current usage. According to the U.S. Senate itself (and they have a pretty cool glossary that anyone can look up at their website), "filibuster" is not a formal term. It simply means any attempt to block or delay a piece of legislation by debating it at length, or putting forth a lot of motions or obstructing its progress in any way one can think up. Wikipedia tells how the filibuster became theoretically possible in 1806 when an earlier rule for ending debate had been abandoned, but it wasn't actually exploited until 1837. So it didn't start out as a deliberately thought out strategy, but  as an accidental consequence of another Senate ruling. 

Senator Huey Long, famous filibusterer

The Online Etymology Dictionary tells us that "filibuster" is derived from a word first written down in English in the 1580s. A flibutor was a pirate, particularly the kind of pirate that was raiding the Spanish colonies of the West Indies at the time. These weren't people from just one country--there were Dutch, English, French and maybe other nationalities preying on these islands. It's thought that the original word was the Dutch vrijbueter, which  became filibustero in Spanish and fribustier and later flibustier in French. It also came into the English language by another path as "freebooter," which is one of those weird connections that I love. 

A Buccaneer of the Caribbean by Howard Pyle

The British adopted the term flibutor in 1684, but American English didn't really find a use for the term until later, when it was used to refer to lawless military adventurers from the U.S. aiming to overthrow Central American governments. The event in which William Walker, who tried to overthrow both Mexican Sonora and Nicaragua and briefly became president of the latter is actually called the Filibuster War (or, alternatively, the Walker Affair). 

William Walker, filibuster and brief president of Nicaragua

 I feel fine about swiping the following directly from the Online Etymology Dictionary, since they swiped it from Harper's before me:

FILIBUSTERING is a term lately imported from the Spanish, yet destined, it would seem, to occupy an important place in our vocabulary. In its etymological import it is nearly synonymous with piracy. It is commonly employed, however, to denote an idea peculiar to the modern progress, and which may be defined as the right and practice of private war, or the claim of individuals to engage in foreign hostilities aside from, and even in opposition to the government with which they are in political membership. [Harper's New Monthly Magazine, January 1853]

Interestingly, the term "filibuster" was originally used to describe the person who was taking the action and only later became the name of the action itself. William Walker was described as a filibuster, for example. It came into the Senate that way too (1865). It was the person who was "pirating" the debate that was the filibuster, not the maneuver itself. That usage didn't come until 1893.

And of course no post on the term could be complete without posting the most famous filibuster of all, even if that filibuster never really took place.