A Boy Named Humiliation.

Some of those virtue names became (and have remained) so mainstream that they don’t sound weird, such as Grace, Faith, and Hope, all of which were rare-to-unattested in pre-Reformation Anglophone culture. Constance (usually “Connie” in practice) was in the top 100 names for baby girls in the US circa 1950 but has subsequently suffered a sharp decline. The linked piece does mention “Prudence” which is probably sufficiently uncommon to have a bit of amusement value, plus it has a Beatles-song connection. The broader point is probably that both OT names and virtue names became part of more generically-Protestant cultural practice in the Anglophone world in a way that was not limited to the more hardcore members of the Puritan faction.

A different religiously-driven source of conceptually-odd-sounding names is Hispanophone Catholic culture, which produced e.g. Dolores from Our Lady of the Sorrows.

I don’t think Faith, Hope, or Charity are confined to the heritage of the Nonconformists, as they are common in other languages, too.

Martiros is one of the commonest Armenian names.

Humility Cooper, age one, was passenger on Mayflower.

I wonder why the name didn’t become popular.

There was a set of early Christian martyrs (claimed by certain modern spoilsports to be historicity-challenged …) named Faith Hope and Charity (or rather, the corresponding Latin or possibly Greek words), which would thus make those names part of the potential naming pool for pre-Protestant and non-Protestant cultures. I guess there never happened to be a St. Grace in the early Church, though? (Arguments about the nature of grace were a big deal at the time of the Reformation, so that may have given the name a sort of factional Protestant vibe, although I’m sure Catholics and indeed Orthodox would say that they certainly had a high opinion of grace, understood slightly differently.)

I had a friend in college who was (on his father’s side) from an old Connecticut family named Bissell, and he once showed me a family book that included some names from the late 17th Century; the ones that stuck in my head were Thoughtful, Thankful, and Mindwell.

I have a bunch of old Puritan branches of my family tree, but the given names I’m aware of don’t get any wackier than “Old Testament name that never became that popular as an American name and that comes from a fairly minor character in the original OT context,” with examples I can recall being Achsah and Mehitable. That said, I expect there’s a certain amount of contingency and randomness in which OT names did or did not become “mainstream” names — and of course there has been historical variation and cyclicality in which OT names are and aren’t in more common use.

[Praise-God Barebone] gave his name to the Barebones Parliament, which ruled Britain in 1653

…Now that was unexpected.

Ever since I’ve first heard of it, I thought that the Barebones Parliament was named so because it was unusually small for the time (note: I don’t know whether it actually was), but now that I’ve checked, apparently Wikipedia does call it “Barebone’s Parliament”.

like Purificación, Patrocinio de Jesús, and even Circoncisión. I don’t think I’ve ever met a Circoncisión, but I’ve certainly met the other two

Don’t these Spanish names refer to the ecclesiastical festival on whose date a person was born? If there is someone named Circoncisión, they were probably born on January 1, the feast of the Circumcision.

Of course, some of the women’s names like Luz, Carmen, Dolores, Monserrat, etc have spread, to prevent every woman from being called Maria.

If you know your Shakespeare, you’ll remember lines such as Lady Macbeth’s “Had he not resembled my father as he slept, I had done it.”

@SFReader: I have noticed some modern names with the opposite connotation from “Humility.” I have a friend named “Star” (and there is also the much-mocked Star Jones), whose name, I gather, is related to stardom, not anything celestial. My daughter also went to elementary school with a classmate with the even more explicit name “Celebrity.” I am not sure whether it is significant or not, but all of the mentioned individuals are African-American and female.

@David Eddyshaw: “Polycarp” seems to me as a normal, albeit uncommon, Greek name. My father has a story about meeting Polykarp Kusch, the German-American physicist who won a Nobel Prize for discovering the anomalous magnetic moment of the electron, at an event at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. If you drive all the way through Chicago on the Dan Ryan and Edens Expressways, you also pass a Greek Orthodox church dedicated to Saint Polycarp right next to the highway.

@Del Cotter: Romeo’s “wilt thou” seems very odd to me, but as I said, thou/thee is not native to my speech, so I have no confidence in my intuition about how to handle irregular verbs like the modal will.

Fair enough, you did ask for the modal; examples in Shakespeare and the Bible have it as “thou wouldst have”. Not counting non-modal examples like “thou wouldst have mercy”, of course.

Thou wouldst have poison’d good Camillo’s honour
The Winter’s Tale

thou wouldst have asked him, and he would have given thee living water
John 4:10

Polyfilla is the Anglican patron saint of plasterers. NoMerit Vynall works for Spotify.

Earl is another aspirational name, not quite as grandiose as Roy. Also spelt Erle and Errol.

And the film director King Vidor (b.1894).

According to Wikipedia, the name Regina referred to the Virgin Mary. It came back into fashion in the 19th century.

Queenie, (again according to Wikipedia) “is thought to be derived from the Old English word ‘cwen’, meaning ‘woman’ rather than a reference to the monarch or his wife”.

Although denied Puritanism, the German language was used as a vehicle for Pietism around the same time. That involved translating/explaining names. Erdmann for Adam is now thoroughly extinct – though it’s surprisingly common as a last name. Theophil(us) became Gottlieb, and that may have been the starting point for Fürchtegott “fear God” and Traugott “trust God”; all three were fairly common until WWI.

The Lord in question is actually Lord Rayleigh.

Kelvin Is Lord

Queenie, (again according to Wikipedia) “is thought to be derived from the Old English word ‘cwen’, meaning ‘woman’ rather than a reference to the monarch or his wife”.

Northern German Wi(e)bke* “little woman”, Frauke “little lady > woman”.

* Central vowels: [ˈʋʉpkɵ].

offensive, in order to ward off the evil eye.

Also in southern China. I think it was Singapore where a whole list of the most offensive names was outlawed.

Bardsley also lists Judas-not-Iscariot. Would that my name included a footnote!

opens lots of possibilities: Alexander-not-of-Macedon, Peter-not-the-Great, Thomas-not-unbelieving…

Their friend, Joseph-neither-Stalin-nor-McCarthy…

(Somebody stop me.)

Don’t forget Mary-not-Bloody and William-not-Bastard

Just went to genealogy site and discovered that Experience Paine is the daughter of Mercy Paine and granddaughter of Patience Paine.

And oh, she married and became Experience Studley…

Don’t these Spanish names refer to the ecclesiastical festival on whose date a person was born? If there is someone named Circoncisión, they were probably born on January 1, the feast of the Circumcision.

No. If your name is Circoncisión, then January 1 is your name day, not necessarily your birthday. Casual acquaintances of John may not know whether his name day is the feast of John of God, John the Baptist, John the Evangelist, etc. And I dunno what happens if you have a double name: Pierpaolo is June 29, but what about Anne-Marie? Since 2011, John Paul is 22 October, but what about before that?

No. If your name is Circoncisión, then January 1 is your name day, not necessarily your birthday.

Not necessarily, and probably not nowadays; but into the 20th century it was a very widespread Catholic practice to let birthday and name day coincide. All the way to boys named Toussaint.

I’m perpetually exasperated by the number of my students named Chasity (sic).

There’s a baroque composer by the name Jacob Clemens non Papa. I was told by a musician friend that the ‘non Papa’ bit means ‘not the Pope’ but Wikipedia casts doubt on that and suggests it was a private joke whose origin has been lost, although the name stuck.

@David L: He was actually pre-baroque, having worked in the sixteenth century. Apparently, he wrote a number of “parody masses,” but I was disappointed that apparently that term comes from a bit of linguistic confusion, and there are no actual parodies involved.

Mary-not-Bloody

William Cobbett, aka Peter Porcupine, pointed out that Elizabeth I had more people killed for Catholicism than Mary I ever did for Protestantism, and referred to the former as “Bloody Bess”.

I think, however, we can safely rule out Bozo-not-the-clown as a name.

unseemly names derived from the Saints’ Calendar

How Akaky Akakievich got his name, faute de mieux.

not on the same connotation row as Pain

Paine, by the way, is ultimately from Latin paganus, and first appeared as a personal name in Domesday Book as Pagen. Pain is ultimately from Greek poina ‘compensation, punishment’, a sense preserved in on pain of death.

@ J.W. Brewer: This is an example of where reference to the original can make a translation clearer.

And as long as I’m thinking about these two translations — maybe this comment fits more appropriately elsewhere — what was going on with the King James translators? Is it that having grown up reading texts with words in apposition lying at some distance from each other — Tityre, tu patulae recumbens sub tegmine fagi — something more intelligible in languages with declensions — they might not have felt the distance between “Judas” and “not Iscariot” to be as jarring as we feel today? They also seem to have been slavish in their own way in translating the verse: they couldn’t really say “Says unto him Judas,” keeping the first four words in English in the same order as the first three in the original, so they followed the natural English order, but then they left the parenthetical “not Iscariot” where it was in the Greek, rather than moving it up along with the “Judas” that its attached to. And by preserving the “unto him” — the dative pronoun seems obligatory in NT Greek after forms of “lego,” but could have been dispensed with in English — they muddy the waters by making it seem at first that Judas might be talking to him, not to Iscariot.

But what’s up with the modern translation? It’s being slavish in its own way. We don’t usually “say” questions in modern English, we “ask” them, and this translation also seems to feel the need to express the indirect object after the form of “to say.” — But then it bothered to change the Greek present tense “legei” to the more formal past tense in English. (Is describing this conversation with the English present tense — perfectly colloquial in informal speech — too informal here?) — But if your going to make that change, why not go ahead and express the rest of the verse in the same standard English register, and, as long as you’re at it, express the force of the Greek definite article with the name Iscariot? You’d end up with something like “Judas — not the one called Iscariot — asked: Lord, how is it you show yourself to us and not to the world?”

@ J.W. Brewer:

Thanks for checking the older versions — I hadn’t thought of doing that. I took a look at the Wessex Gospels, and the word order in English, surely from the Vulgate, goes all the way back to that:

Iudas cwaeth to hym (naes na se Scarioth): Dryhten, hwaes ys geworden, thaet thu wilt the sylfne geswutelian us, naes middan-earde?

Evan has got it, I reckon: the Vulgate reads Dicit ei Iudas, non ille Iscariotes.
As he says, the early English versions fix the word order by putting the subject in front of the verb, but thereby strand the “footnote.”

I suspect (having no expertise in this area at all) that although verbs can precede subjects in Old English without necessarily implying that the clause is a question, there would be a difficulty with the prepositional phrase intervening between the verb and the following subject.

(Cf in modern English: “Very well”, said I to him but not *“Very well”, said to him I.)

Randolph Quirk’s little OE grammar doesn’t help much on this, and I haven’t myself got anything more hifalutin.
From what he does say, it seems that in prose at any rate the order VS in non-dependent non-questions is common only if there’s some other element preceding the verb, like an adverb, and he doesn’t mention the order VXS (where X is some other constituent) in that connexion.

@David Eddyshaw: In my experience, some Old Testament translations that are supposed to be de novo, direct from the original Hebrew, nonetheless replicate some of the idiosyncrasies of the King James Version. Whether this is done intentionally, as a stylistic choice, or merely out of laziness is generally unclear. I would not expect the situation with New Testament translations from the original Greek to be terribly different in this regard. Indeed, the King James version itself is generally described as a completely new translation from the original Near Eastern scriptures; but this example shows that it continued to propagate errors found in earlier English editions.

In Russia, Peter might have killed more people than Ivan. Guess who was great and who was terrible.

I hope I won’t go to hell:

Mary-not-Virgin

The KJV translators operated under a set of fifteen rules written by Richard Bancroft and signed off on by King James. Here are the most relevant ones:

1. The ordinary Bible, read in the church, commonly called the Bishop’s Bible [1568], to be followed, and as little altered as the original will permit.

2. The names of the prophets and the holy writers, with the other names in the text, to be retained, as near as may be, according as they are vulgarly used.

3. The old ecclesiastical words to be kept; as the word church, not to be translated congregation, &c.

4. When any word hath divers significations, that to be kept which has been most commonly used by the most eminent fathers, being agreeable to the propriety of the place, and the analogy of the faith.

[…]

6. No marginal notes at all to be affixed, but only for the explanation of the Hebrew or Greek words, which cannot, without some circumlocution, so briefly and fitly be expressed in the text.

[…]

14. These translations to be used when they agree better with the text than the Bishop’s Bible, viz. Tyndale’s [1522-34], Coverdale’s [1535, completion of Tyndale’s], Matthew’s [1537, Tyndale + Coverdale], Whitchurch’s [the Great Bible, 1539], Geneva [1560].”

In the end, the KJV is essentially 80% Tyndale.

In Russia, Peter might have killed more people than Ivan. Guess who was great and who was terrible.

In fairness, Ivan isn’t called “terrible” in Russian, but “menacing”, more like a huge dark cloud on the horizon. As a more accurate English rendering, John the Dread has been proposed.

Genesis 1:3, some early versions:

Interesting indeed that they all resort to “make”.

Ivan the Awesome might have worked before the 80s or so. As it stands, I’d struggle to say it without imagining him doing the air guitar.

Some other suggestions I’ve seen are Ivan the Fearsome and Ivan the Formidable.

Weirdly, I’ve never seen the Awful, which would of course be similarly wrong in the opposite direction.

Awful, pompous, and artificial.

From Christian point of view, Ivan would have made a good saint.

Because after his reign of terror, Ivan the Terrorist repented his sins, returned survivors of the purge from exile, gave families their confiscated lands back and ordered monasteries to pray for his victims.

That’s exactly the career path which half of early Christian saints followed.

Unfortunately, Ivan ruined chances for salvation of his immortal soul (let alone sainthood) by falling back into old routine and beating his son and heir to death (and his pregnant wife to miscarriage)

He died shortly afterwards.

you said he wasn’t a bad ruler.

Not me.

I personally think he was a very good ruler in the beginning of his reign, suffered a decade-long episode of madness in the middle and spent the rest of his reign trying to fix the harm done, didn’t quite succeed, but managed to avoid an all-out disaster.

{thinking} sort of like Mao, really.

So applying the standard Chinese assessment, he would be “70% good, 30% bad” ruler.

In addition, a 16C tsar’s goodness or badness must be judged by what was possible in Russia in the 16C, not what we as 21C people would like or not like to live under.

WP suggests “Ivan the Formidable” and “Ivan the Fearsome”.

People make the same argument on Stalin’s behalf, and I’m not buying that either.

Let’s go to the ultimate argument:

Four million Jews survived the Holocaust, because Soviet Russia under Joseph Stalin’s rule won the war against Nazi Germany.

Wouldn’t these four million saved lives (forget about the rest of potential victims in Nazi-occupied Europe and USSR) contribute a little to that “70% good, 30% bad” assessment?

Molotov/von Ribbentrop Pact.
90% of three million Polish Jews killed as a consequence.

If you cause massive amounts of death and destruction, you’re a bad ruler, no excuses.

FDR and Churchill caused massive amounts of d. & d. because they thought they had no other choice. That doesn’t put them in the lineup with Hitler, Stalin, and Mao.

It’s hard to make objective assessment of historical leaders, if you make an honest effort.

For example, while I really hate Lenin for what he did to historic Russia, honestly I can’t give him less than something like “30% good, 70% bad” assessment, because, well, he did save Russia from the ultimate collapse and managed to reunite it in a different form.

Similar things can be said about many villains (even those who lost all in the end) in history.

For example, Russian futurologist Sergei Pereslegin once caused a scandal by noting that in the long run, the history will remember Adolf Hitler’s Germany as the country which opened for humanity the path to the stars.

I sure hope that it won’t the only thing which will be remembered about Nazi Germany in 26th century

Russian peasantry’s view of Ivan the Terrible is colored by memory of what happened under his successor Boris Godunov who is believed to have introduced serfdom which didn’t exist under Ivan the Terrible (according to other version, Ivan the Terrible prohibited changing of residence for peasants for duration of the war to ensure payment of taxes, but it was made permanent by Godunov and degenerated into outright serfdom under Romanovs).

So peasants remembered Ivan’s reign as the Golden Age when they were free from serfdom. (war and famine which characterized his late reign forgotten in folk memory)

And peasants couldn’t care less about boyars persecuted by Ivan.

Molotov – Ribbentrop Pact was very bad for Poland and Polish Jews, but…

No buts.

…it gave the Soviet Union two additional years of peace to prepare for the war.

Germany too. It’s why Germany signed.

No, Germany didn’t get peace – Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact ensured that Germany will get into world war immediately while Russia stayed neutral.

It was certainly selfish, but that’s the norm in international relations. The United States stayed neutral until directly attacked too.

There is an appropriate Clausewitz quote on selfishness of States and why it’s OK, but I can’t recall it now.

Well this conversation took a dark turn.

“That was very bad for Poland and Polish Jews” — there’s an understatement. With understatements like that you can get away with a lot.

Anyway, thanks to John Cowan for reminding us about the instructions given to the King James translators. They did clean up John 14:22 a bit:

KJV: Judas saith unto him, not Iscariot, Lord, how is it that thou wilt manifest thyself unto us, and not unto the world?

Tyndale : Iudas sayde vnto him (not Iudas Iscarioth) Lorde what is the cause that thou wilt shewe thy selfe vnto vs and not vnto the worlde?

So why didn’t they clean up the syntax of the first part of the verse? The New English Bible keeps it, trying to clarify it with a little padding — “Judas asked him — the other Judas, not Iscariot –” British translators can’t seem to shake it, even in Welsh.

It’s a shame the name Judas-not-Iscariot didn’t become popular. That would solve it:

Judas-not-Iscariot asked: Lord, why do you show yourself to us and not the world?

Re: Finland

Russia invaded Finland in 1939, Finland invaded Russia in 1941 (in alliance with Hitler).

Time to call it quits, guys.

Re: lost Polish territory

Most of it is in the Ukraine, the rest divided by Belarus and Lithuania (none held by Russia).

there’s an understatement. With understatements like that you can get away with a lot.

let’s not confuse the issue. Holocaust is Hitler’s crime, not Stalin’s.

Stalin is guilty of many crimes, but not of this one.

OK, let’s finish it. Haven’t done history flame wars for a good while, forgot how quickly one gets sucked in…

So how fluid v. stilted is the Church Slavonic version of John 14:22? Did the revision/cleanup work started under Peter I that culminated in a later reign in the so-called “Elizabeth” edition tweak that verse or leave it alone? If it was left alone, was that a missed opportunity?

Apparently the best current view is that it cannot be proven Lenin ever actually said “We will hang the capitalists with the rope that they sell us,” and even in the version commonly attributed to him there’s no specification about whether the capitalists were going to demand cash on the barrelhead for the rope versus offering E-Z credit terms.

Molotov – Ribbentrop Pact was very bad for Poland and Polish Jews
The genocide there didn’t go into high gear until 1942. Is there a consensus among the historians about the reasons of the 3 year delay? Was it because of the lack of the technical means (such as Soviet tank engines for the gas chambers and Soviet guards)? Or because the Nazis didn’t yet think that they could get away with it? Or it was merely a consequence of the (vastly smaller and very technically different) trial program for mass murder of the German mental patients?

They only started mass murder of the Jews in late summer 1941 in the captured Soviet territories. Clearly couldn’t replicate the same un-obscured mass executions by bullets in Poland, but became determined to expand the killing zone to Poland, and spent a long time preparing the ruse of “deportations to the East” and building hidden, secret death camps. Did the collapse of the Soviet defenses, or the surprising ease of killing hundreds thousand defenseless Soviet civilians, embolden them?

The point is, do we know to what extent the Holocaust was a consequence of Molotov-Ribbentrop, as oppose to the military collapse of the USSR in 1941?

To bring this back around to a linguistic matter, a lot of sources are quite conscientious about referring to Finland as Germany’s “co-belligerent” rather than “ally.” The Finns had one of the few surviving democracies in central and eastern Europe (the only other being in Czechoslovakia), and they got drawn into the war involuntary, only ending up on the German side because the Soviets attacked them first.

Finland (as opposed to some descendants of the exiles) doesn’t want their territory back: why would they want a big Russian minority in their country, especially somewhat involuntarily?

Somewhere hereabouts recently (but Dr. Google knows not where), David M said that nowadays honor is for Klingons, and a Good Thing Too. Khrushchev said about the Cuban missile crisis: “I am not some czarist officer officer who has to kill himself if he farts at a masked ball. It’s better to back down than to go to war.” Kennedy had been reading Tuchman’s The Guns of August (about the runup to WWI) and was thinking along similar lines: the reverberant doubt of ‘Can I trust him? Can he trust me to trust him?” ad infinitum leads directly to “backstab your buddy before he stabs you”. Instead, the Brothers K walked back the situation until the crisis was over.

The traditional solution to that problem is to expel the minority.
It’s an outdated tradition. The more recent tradition is to deny citizenship, reduce employment rights, education etc. To return closer to the topic of the conversation, it may also include mandatory changing names of the residents (and even, retroactively, of the past residents … so gradually, one starts looking for Chaims which once lived in Ukraine in the letter Ю sections of the lists, since they changed the initial twice, first upon Russification and then again upon de-Russification 🙂 )

The “little bit of former Polish lands” retained by Lithiania includes Lithuanian capital, BTW

The traditional solution to that problem is to expel the minority.

Certainly. However, I note that in 1845 the U.S. defeated Mexico repeatedly in battle, occupied its capital city, and annexed 54% of its territory (including the already annexed soi-disant Republic of Texas). But the war ended with the U.S. agreeing (reluctantly) to a treaty that:

1) agreed to pay almost half a billion 2017 dollars to Mexico in lieu of the lost territories.

2) guaranteed all Mexican residents of the territories all their property rights (not always respected by Anglos and local courts thereafter). The community-property provisions on divorce in a number of Western states are a survival of this provision.

3) provided all Mexican residents the choice of Mexican or American citizenship. About 90% took the second option (the default), a few remained in place as Mexican citizens, and the rest returned to Mexico where they received land grants.

4) assumed all debts owed by Mexico to U.S. citizens to the tune of another 150 million 2017 dollars.

6) guaranted not only a “firm and perpetual peace” (which has remained unbroken, despite two U.S. incursions and one Mexican one, for 171 years) but undertook to guarantee Mexico against raids by Indians from the U.S. side (though this proved to be impossible).

Compare and contrast with the Treaty of Versailles.

Update:

The more recent tradition is to deny citizenship, reduce employment rights, education etc.

Indeed, and a lot of that happened to Mexican Americans — but essentially none of it by law. “Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.”

@David Eddyshaw, Yeah, I was thinking the first generation after a rapid secularization. There were a bunch of parody Haggadahs and such in that era, the product of secularizing Jews who still had the religious canon in their blood.

Damn, my comment seems to have gotten lost at my end. It boiled down to comparing the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) with all the ethnic cleansing and reparations that have gone on before and since. In the treaty, the U.S. guaranteed full American citizenship to all residents of the annexed territories who wanted it (about 90% did), along with paying Mexico half a billion in 2017 dollars and guaranteeing the property rights of all Mexicans in the annexed territories (much of which was not respected by Anglos and local courts later).

Feklusha …They say there are such countries, dear girl, where there are no Orthodox kings, and Saltans rule the earth. In one land sits on the throne Saltan Mahnut the Turk, and in the other sits Saltan Mahnut the Pers; and they judge, my dear girl, all the people, and whatever is their judgement, it’s always wrong. And they can not, dear, judge righteously a single case, that is their curse. We have a righteous law, but they have, my dear, unrighteous; what comes one way in our law, in their’s goes always the opposite. And all the judges in their countries are also all unrighteous; even in submitting requests, my dear girl, they write: “Judge me, an unrighteous judge!”. And then there is a land, where all the people have dog’s heads.
   
Glasha How’s that with dog’s heads?
   
Feklusha For infidelity.

@mollymooly—I am very intrigued, but I don’t get it. And, of course I want to know the whole shaggy dog story, but I can’t ask you to type it all down.

@Brett—Of course! I should have remembered Punk Prayer (though it does not parody the Mass).
Interesting about the Purim play. Usually Purim is exactly the time for mockery and other transgressive behavior. Do you think your grandparents were upset because it was making fun of a traditional occasion, or because the people staging it were secular-leaning, or because of the political orientation of the parody?

The worst tyrant/bloodiest ruler lists usually consist of Hitler, Mao plus a few Russian rulers. I wonder if anyone has bothered including the rulers of the colonial powers too, especially in the 19th century. Surely the good old queen Vic would top a few such lists, if only because if her longevity, and the huge number of colonial “wars” over which she presided. These wars were nothing more than slaughters of the spear wielding natives. Add to this the slaughter against the working classes, the Irish famine etc., and you might have a few million souls on her hands.

These wars were nothing more than slaughters of the spear wielding natives.

I hold absolutely no brief at all for European aggression in Africa (or anywhere else), a shameful episode in all our histories, but this is just not true. Look up the Ashanti Wars, for a start. The Ashanti had guns and knew how to use them, to considerable effect. (Though in one conflict at least, dysentery killed more on both sides than enemy action did.) In a praiseworthy effort to call out British aggression, you shouldn’t go calling all their adversaries “spear wielding natives.” How about “well trained ground troops, eventually worn down by superior industrial might after decades of giving as good as they got”?

What British “slaughter against the working classes” during Victoria’s reign do you have in mind? I can’t think of anything in the Mao/Hitler/Stalin league, not by some orders of magnitude. Again, I am by no means an apologist for oppressors of my own forebears, but this seems a bit hyperbolic. It detracts from your perfectly arguable general point.

if someone other than Stalin had been in charge of the Kremlin, would things have been any different?

Certainly, we just don’t know how. Both USSR and PRC figured out at the end how to keep highly centralized authoritarian state without a paranoid sociopath at the top. That said, they should have just renamed czar “secretary general” and be done with it.

Would the U.S. have extended credit to someone else, preventing the spiral?

No. The “spiral” was necessary to squeeze out the peasantry and mass move people to the cities for industrialization. If by “spiral” you mean purges, they are necessary to establish a one man rule. I mean, was it necessary for William the Conqueror to chase down all Anglo-Saxon nobility? Of course, it was.

Would Russia even have needed to sign pacts with Germany?

What do you mean “needed”? As you see even in this thread, the great Russian ruler is the one who enlarges the territory and wins wars on many fronts. Stalin was a direct follower of countless czars and emperors who did exactly the same.

I’ve seen people make claims that all the starvation, bloodshed, and suffering was necessary if Russia was to be made into a ‘modern country’. Was Stalin’s way the only way?

Of course, not. Russia was and remains somewhat backward, but ordinary European country. Could Poland have been modernized without famine, mass incarceration, and wholesale replacement of the educated classes? Czechia? Hungary? Spain? Finland?

To get back to where we started, could Russia instead have been successfully modernized by a ruthless-yet-competent Puritan akin to Oliver Cromwell but with a wackier name?

Not to say that European colonial powers didn’t engage in deliberate genocide. Von Trotha set out to do precisely that to the Herero, for example; and Leopold’s evil regime in the Congo, if not genocidal stricto sensu, was just as depraved.

Just to confine examples to the twentieth century …

could Russia instead have been successfully modernized by a ruthless-yet-competent Puritan akin to Oliver Cromwell but with a wackier name?

Of course. The question practically answers itself.
Any country could be successfully modernized by a ruthless-yet-competent Puritan akin to Oliver Cromwell, especially with the advantage of a wackier name. No contest.

It’s hard to imagine any time in history where actual parodies of the Mass could be performed and have enough of an audience to appreciate them, and at the same time be allowed to exist

Well, there’s the medieval Greek classic Spanos, aka The Mass of the Beardless Man, but I’m not sure whether it was actually “allowed to exist”, as opposed to just persisting regardless, and the Orthodox perception of the whole thing might be different anyway…

(Disclaimer: most of what I know about it is taken directly from the excellent blogs of Nick Nicholas.)

could Russia instead have been successfully modernized by a ruthless-yet-competent Puritan akin to Oliver Cromwell but with a wackier name?

Now I wonder which of the rulers of the Time of Troubles was the closest to that description. Boris Godunov, probably, or maybe Vasily Shuisky? False Dmitry wasn’t much of a Puritan…

I’m perfectly aware that Ashanti had guns. So did the Boers, the Metis, Afghans, Indians and lots of others. The point is that all those colonial wars were unequal, one sided affairs, with no rules and laws of war applying as they might have done against a European opponent. They were acts of massacre, and should be included in the body count.

The comment about working class was about mainly about the Chartist movement, and about the transportation of convicts to distant inhospitable locations a la the gulag system. Add to that the disregard for human life during the industrial revolution.

And arguably queen Vic was at the head of the largest drug cartel in history – remember the Opium Wars?

Let’s not forget her ?uncle King Leopold of Belgium and the Congo.

When you have a war of highly unequal powers it is hard to devise civilized rules of engagement. If Taliban had drones that hunted down US top brass in their homes and killed them with families and neighbors, I guess somehow such action would be outlawed on both sides. As the things stand, it is awfully hard for American politicians to give up methods of killing that preserves lives of Americans because of the abstract notion of “fair play”. And clearly the same was applicable in the colonial wars. I am pretty sure that the non-European sides in these wars were as much happy to commit atrocities, they just had less opportunity.

And that is why you include them in the body count.

Isandlwana and Adwa were battles. It was the wars that were one sided affairs, not individual battles. After all, it wasn’t the Zulus or the Ashanti marching up and down Trafalgar Square killing English – and there was never any prospect of that happening in a colonial war. However, if you have the body count for the Zulu ruler Cetshwayo – great, include him on the list of the bloodiest rulers.

The descendants of convict transportees may be doing well, but we’re talking about body count, ie. the ones that didn’t make it.

Battle of Isandlwana: You can’t have these natives getting too uppity, can you? How dare they defy the might of enlightened Western civilisation and technology?

But I think the point is that even if it really was in some sense necessary that Stalin commit his atrocities in order for yet worse atrocities to be averted, this doesn’t detract one iota from his own guilt.

I think you are confusing moral judgements with the question of effectiveness of their rule.

Hitler was a horrible person and bad ruler, because he started and lost WWII causing greatest harm to the German people he led.

Stalin was a horrible person and good ruler, because he won the WWII and saved the country and the people he led.

And Tsar Nicholas was a decent person, but very bad ruler.

Re: queen Victoria the mass murderer

It’s very easy to get the necessary bodycount if you count all victims of famines on lands she ruled and blame them on her directly.

Millions dead in the Great Irish Famine?

That’s Bloody Vicky.

Tens of millions of Indians dead in a series of famines throughout her rule?

Artificial famines engineered by Victoria’s government. Point out facts like exporting rice from India to Britain at the time when millions were starving as a decisive proof.

{thinking} with some flexibility of mind, you could argue that the Taiping rebellion was organized by the British government (it started very conveniently for Britain and there were secret dealings with Taiping leadership throughout).

And that’s 100 million dead, easily.

She might actually top the list

Roughly on topic: Aren’t there some “unusual” French names around as well, courtesy of the French naming law. Eg. Hippolyte, Tryphon and that ilk. I recall that there is some official name list, which includes Christian saints and famous historical figures.
marie-lucie are you able to shed any light on this?

@SFReader:

Little flexibility of mind is necessary for identifying Stalin’s crimes. They cry to heaven. I am not proud of these episodes in my own country’s history. But what’s with all this whataboutism? Do you really believe that Queen Victoria was morally comparable to Stalin? I have no emotional investment in Victoria at all, but this just seems bizarre.

Victoria had vastly less personal control over Britain than Stalin over Russia. So do you just mean that Victorian Britain was responsible for more suffering in aggregate than Stalin’s Russia?
Conceivable; calculemus.

A good ruler won’t have blundered into WWII at all.

That is partly what I was asking, although more holistically. Did Stalin end up saving his country through superhuman efforts only after he put it into that mess in the first place? (Of course you can’t blame Stalin for Nazi Germany, but a different trajectory might have led to a different situation in 1941.) I’m asking this out of curiosity since I’m not familiar with the debates that SFReader is referring to. Is there some kind of consensus on this?

Whoa David! sorry if queen Vic had touched a raw nerve. I only picked her, well because she was around for a long time. But you can choose any head of state and apply the same methodology in calculating the body count. No one is saying that Victoria herself pulled the trigger personally when someone died. However, are you disputing that she was aware of the famines, the genocides, invasions, attrocities, drug running, deportations etc. committed on her watch. If she was aware of them and didn’t stop them or punish the perpetrators, it’s on her hands.

If you’re saying, however, that the queen couldn’t have stopped these attrocities, committed in her name, by her government & military, then who does the responsibility fall on?

Same goes for any other ruler.

Did Stalin end up saving his country through superhuman efforts only after he put it into that mess in the first place?

That’s a very good question.

In terms of international relations, I would argue that, no, he did everything he could.

He tried for six years to get an anti-German alliance with France and Britain – they were just not interested in the type of equal alliance he wanted (by equality I mean an alliance which doesn’t end in Russia doing all the fighting while the Western allies do nothing).

And similarly he wasn’t interested in alliance with Hitler (the feeling was mutual). So the non-aggression pact and temporary truce with Hitler which gave Russia two years of peace was the only sensible alternative.

In terms of military preparedness, well, yes, he failed strongly, because he refused to believe Hitler would strike in 1941, he thought he had more time.

However, let’s not overestimate this factor. He made a mistake which put Russia on the brink of defeat, but if he was better prepared that still wouldn’t have stopped Hitler’s aggression.

If the Red Army was fully deployed on June 22, 1941, the war wouldn’t have been any less bloody, just a bit better matched for Russia. And still no guarantee of victory.

Remember that the Wehrmacht crashed fully mobilized and deployed French and British armies in May-June 1940.

I fear even prepared Red Army of 1941 wouldn’t have fared significantly better than it did in our history.

SFReader, I lack your power to imagine the alternatives on such a grand scale, but when is all said and done, it boils down to the same old thing, who won the most wars (and sorry, who got the most territory). If Nazi Germany won the war and established a 50 year Reich or something, would a modern German declare Hitler a good though unscrupulous politician?

Bathrobe, as you can imagine just reading this thread, there is absolutely no agreement on 20c Russian history (the country still has an unpredictable past) and it remains a lively and often over the top debate. Just to give you an example, Of course you can’t blame Stalin for Nazi Germany, but some people do blame him and they are not in an “obvious crackpot” category. The theory goes like this. Comintern made Wiemar Communists fight street wars with Nazis and parliamentary wars with Social-Democrats alienating conservative parties and frightening industrialists. Hence, Brexit. I mean, the other thing. Seems unlikely, but who really knows.

If Nazi Germany won the war and established a 50 year Reich or something, would a modern German declare Hitler a good though unscrupulous politician?

That modern German would likely to be a some sort of moderate Nazi, so, yes, he would.

when is all said and done, it boils down to the same old thing, who won the most wars

appropriate Sun Tzu quote:

The art of war is of vital importance to the State. It is a matter of life and death, a road either to safety or to ruin.

War is the ultimate test for a ruler.

Hitler, Hirohito and Tsar Nicholas failed, Stalin passed.

But the type of regime that Stalin created (secretive, unpredictable, destructive, ruthless) possibly put the country on a worse overall footing than the imaginable alternatives.

I would argue that Stalin inherited from Lenin a regime which was already secretive, unpredictable, destructive and ruthless.

Can’t see any decent alternatives.

I mean would you really believe that the Soviet Union led by Leon Trotsky would have been any better?

And that’s one of the most realistic alternatives to Stalin

Re: colonial wars in Africa

What is striking is how pointless they were. Well, in South Africa at least the British got gold and diamonds on vast scale, but the rest of Africa didn’t have enough riches to warrant conquest.

Even Congo might have enriched king Leopold personally, but proved to be unprofitable for the Belgian state.

The entire affair looks childish – they came, broke the existing states and societies, found the broken toy uninteresting and left.

a ruthless-yet-competent Puritan akin to Oliver Cromwell but with a wackier name?
That would be Oliver Cromulent.

Relatives of mine were transported to Australia. Their descendants seem OK now. It doesn’t seem comparable to being exterminated, but Australian Hatters may have their own perspective.
I may have mentioned repeatedly that in 1818 my great-great-grandfather was transported to Botany Bay because he’d walked off with someone’s chickens. So I read Tom Keneally’s (he wrote Schindler’s Ark (or List)) The Commonwealth of Thieves: The Story of the Founding of Australia and I got the impression that far from being a gulag, rehabilitation rather than punishment was the intention of at least some of the early administrators. If you survived the trip and weren’t Roman Catholic you were in a beer-drinker’s demi-paradise. My relative opened an inn by a beach on the NSW seashore. His children became landowners and his grandsons became (literally) doctors & lawyers.

could Russia instead have been successfully modernized by a ruthless-yet-competent Puritan akin to Oliver Cromwell but with a wackier name?

The most competent and successful modernizer in Russian history was Catherine the Great, but she was also the most un-Puritanical woman imaginable…

Will they bother to make any moral distinctions between FDR, Churchill, Hitler or Stalin in 26th century?

I do think so.

No, Germany didn’t get peace – Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact ensured that Germany will get into world war immediately while Russia stayed neutral.

“Germany”, i.e. Hitler, wanted to get into a war on the western front. He didn’t want to get into a two-front war, and that’s what he got for the two years until his ideology took over.

The 1945-1984 interval was the longest time in which no army crossed the Rhine in anger since the -2C

…What happened in 1984?

If war fever were cyclical, “one would expect the Swiss, Danes, Swedes, Dutch, and Spaniards to be positively roaring for a fight by now.”

And indeed, if they still had the militaristic education that was so widespread in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they totally would be. “Cleansing steel thunderstorms” and all that.

Huh, were there any “great rulers” of Russia who weren’t exceptionally callous bad rulers?

That reminds me of when Trump, during his campaign, said Putin was a stronger leader than Obama and so many Democrats went into patriotic apoplexy. To me the facts are clear: of course Putin has been a stronger leader than Obama ever was, and that’s a bad thing for Russia. 😐

the claim that whereas once war casualties were 90% soldiers, now they are 90% civilians. A moment’s consideration of the Mongol conquests should eliminate that idea.

There was a quite noticeable trend, in Europe at least, toward 100% military casualties in wars; WWI was much like that. But by the 1930s, that trend had been completely undone.

Presumably the 1918 flu epidemic did not depend in any way on WWI.

I’ve often seen the claim that it did: returning soldiers may have contributed to spreading it, and everyone’s general weakened condition may have made people more susceptible to infection.

(Not to actually dying of it, though. The ones who died were the ones healthy enough to produce enough phlegm to drown in it.)

And I can’t emphasize enough how close the country came to defeat in 1941-42 and what superhuman effort was needed.

Even so, it may not have been the superhuman effort itself that saved the Soviet Union, but Hitler’s insistence on conquering Moscow and Stalingrad for their symbolic value as soon as the front reached them. The army could have gone around them, conquered much larger territories, and besieged those two places later – but Hitler just wouldn’t have it.

However, we are talking about counterfactual starting in 1941 – what Soviet leader could have replaced Stalin in summer of 1941 and win the war?

The honest answer would be no one.

Quite possibly because, as already pointed out above, Stalin had just finished eliminating all possible competition.

That’s the Hirohito argument, with much dispute about how much he really knew. Some Chinese like to extend it to Mao.

It was extended to Hitler during his rule! Lots of people complained Wenn das der Führer wüßte! “If the Leader knew that!” about states of affairs he had, in many cases, personally ordered.

The entire affair looks childish – they came, broke the existing states and societies, found the broken toy uninteresting and left.

Well, yes. It was driven by ideology and fashion. (The latter most obviously in the German case, where the slogan was “we, too, must have ‘our place in the sun'”.)

Shifting the discussion (heh! I can try!) of Great Bad Rulers to a time and place none of us (probably) has much emotional investment in:

I’ve always recommended the Empress Wu (the one who so rudely interrupted the Tang) to my daughter as a Positive Female Role Model (though perhaps not in absolutely all respects.)

Even the uniformly hostile traditional Confucian scholars who regard her as a monster (one-woman Monstrous Regiment, in fact) seem to admit that she was a pretty competent Emperor.

The Wikipedia article says “Wu Zetian also had an active family life.” You might say so …
No horses, though.

Northern German Wi(e)bke* “little woman”, Frauke “little lady > woman”

One of the tallest women I know is called Frauke (she is German).

@JC, Presumably the 1918 flu epidemic did not depend in any way on WWI
Uff, the alternative-history fest seems to be abating, and we are so far away from the original topics that we may discuss the current status of the Spanish flu of 1918 in a few more details?

The main argument against war-related intercontinental population movements is the 2016 paper documenting considerably lower disease mortality in the Chinese laborers transported by the British government to France, compared to the European and Canadian troops. “So it wasn’t the Chinese laborers”, goes the explanation. This reasoning is rather weak, actually, because in mainland China, the death rate of the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic has ALSO been considerably lower. And the likely reason is that the Chinese has had higher prior exposure to the earlier, related virus strains, and retained some of the helpful immunity. A very similar effect has been demonstrated in the Western countries as well, where Spanish flu mortality has been substantially lower among the middle-age population, presumably because they have been exposed to an immunologically related strain during the previous flu pandemic of 1898-1892.

The flu epidemic has been already observed in 1917 in Northern China, but also later in 1917 in New York City. So spread from China is a foregone conclusion, but the laborers transported across Canada to France in 1918 may or may not have been the only conduit.

One yet unexplored data source just came into the public domain last year. Russian Ministry of Defense digitized millions WWI records, including military hospital admission cards. I mostly study them for genealogy purposes, but I can’t help noticing that in 1917, a wave of enteritis admissions crops up. Especially on the South-Western front. Now people may not know it but the 1918 pandemic was a stomach flu; and diarrhea along with cyanosis are the two main symptoms allowing differential diagnosis of the otherwise not yet specifically diagnosed disease.

My hunch is that we may be seeing one of the earlier waves of the great flu pandemic of 1918, and it could have spread from Northern China along the trans-Siberian railroad, likely owing to the fact that the Transbaikalian Border Guard regiments were transferred from Manchuria to the Russian Empire’s South-Western Front.

If you are happy to use the term “great” without any implication of moral judgment at all

Lord Acton was. The line after “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” (very relevant to this thread) is “Great men are almost always bad men.” This is quite different from Bulwer-Lytton’s sense (in his play Richelieu): “Under the rule of men entirely great, the pen is mightier than the sword.”

What happened in 1984?

Nothing. That’s just when the previous record was broken. The years since then haven’t broken any further records, because we don’t know anything about the Rhine in pre-Roman times.

And yes, colonial and imperial wars are inherently one-sided: the colonized have no opportunity to bring the war home to the colonizers. But they remain war and not democide, “the intentional killing of an unarmed or disarmed person by government agents acting in their authoritative capacity and pursuant to government policy or high command” (R.J. Rummel). This includes things like the creation of deliberate famines and working people to death. The great democidal regimes of history in absolute numbers remain the People’s Republic of China (including the Great Leap Forward famine), the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and the Republic of China before 1949. If you exclude that famine, the PRC is then second to the Soviet Union.

vir iniustus, fortis ad arma tamen

So European expansion into California was caused by the Russians!

So was the moon landing…

Surely you’ve heard of Ft Ross in California? — A cause for anxiety for the British, Americans, and Mexicans, and a disaster for Native Americans in the area, introducing them to smallpox.

— Linguistic angle: the name Ross may be a corruption of Rus.

Two small datapoints about Stalin’s continuing prominence in the online world of 2019.

1. I was looking up the wikipedia entry for the recently-deceased jazz musician Joseph Jarman and as soon as finished typing “Joseph” the autocomplete-suggestion software asked if it could save me time on the assumption that “Stalin” was what I was going to type next.

2. Whether this one is more amusing or appalling is left as an exercise for the reader: https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/zmaedw/i-pretended-to-be-a-young-joseph-stalin-on-tinder-and-it-went-weirdly-well

A parody Mass is not a parody in the modern sense of the term. It refers to a polyphonic Mass in which one voice (usually the bass) is a pre-existing song, usually a secular one. The rhythm of the song is typically stretched way out so it’s not obvious to recognize, but the use of the same ground all the way through the mass gives a sense of musical unity. It was a popular device around the 16th century. The song L’Homme Armé was the most commonly used for this purpose.

Eventually the Pope forbade the use of secular tunes in the Mass and the technique fell out of use, although a few composers kept on trying to sneak some in for a while.

The use of secular tunes in a Mass is permitted these days. And the Protestants have been appropriating secular tunes for centuries.

There is no requirement that the government officials doing the killing belong to the government that claims jurisdiction.
Usually when there are two governments at war, then one gets away with sending a class of its citizens to death in battle in the hands of the other.
Argentina decimated its Afro population by sending them to fight in Paraguay, and got away with it. Stalin and Zhukov ordered the hundreds thousand of “black jackets” to be sent to fight the Nazis, without weapons, training, or indeed uniforms (hence the name of this group, чернопиджачники) (the authorities briefly discussed a possibility of issuing obsolete rifles to the black jackets and decided that it wasn’t worth it. But some were issued bricks broken in half). And it doesn’t even get a footnote in the history books.

I think your database is not very accurate if it counts the Philippines before July 4, 1946 as foreign.

It was about as foreign as Alaska back then.

Who is blaming Stalin for Hitler’s crimes?

AJP Crown: A contemporary account, “Recollections of life in Van Diemens Land” by an American prisoner William Gates would suggest that it wasnt all beer and skittles.

In any event, is your point that Australian convicts had it good because they didnt all die, and some finished their term of imprisonment and became “reformed”?

Not too sure how that would apply to Siberia, because both Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn served their time, got out, and continued writing. Doesnt make it some sort of a writers camp.

Both were brutal places for transportation of prisoners, whether on trumped up or real charges, whether political or criminal, with little or no prospect of return to their homes and families. In both cases it’s about doing the calculation for the bloodiest ruler league table.

There is, apparently, an identifiable watershed moment when the number of Soviet citizens killed by Hitler finally exceeds the number of Soviet citizens killed by Stalin. It’s somewhere in 1943, if I remember rightly.

A contemporary account, “Recollections of life in Van Diemens Land” by an American prisoner William Gates would suggest that it wasnt all beer and skittles.

No, indeed. But Van Diemen’s Land was primarily used for “twice-convicted men”, those who had been transported for committing crimes in Britain, and then committed further crimes in Australia. This changed only with the closure of all other colonies to transportation, by which point the tradition of extreme harshness had been set. Indeed, when transportation ended altogether its name was changed to Tasmania because Van Diemen’s Land had such evil connotations that free settlers wanted no part of it. (Tasmanians are still considered weird by mainlanders.)

In any event, is your point that Australian convicts had it good because they didnt all die, and some finished their term of imprisonment and became “reformed”?

Compared to being hanged, they certainly did have it good. What is more, essentially all transportees were sent for ordinary crimes, though typically of a lesser kind (those convicted of more serious crimes were still hanged). “Politicals” were only a few percent, very unlike the situation in the Great Terror, and all but a literal handful of those were either armed rebels, Navy mutineers, or violent rioters. The twice-conviction rate was very very low, enough so that when Van Diemen’s Land became the sole target of transportation, the twice-convicted could be housed on tiny Norfolk Island (34 square km). Overall, transportees greatly improved their living standards by coming to Australia because they had many more opportunities other than criminal ones.

@Bathrobe, Well, they’re on Wikipedia (Чорнопіджачники). (to a surprise observation that throwing unarmed and untrained ethnic civilians under enemy fire would have constituted an act of genocide, but the alleged genocide of Ukrainian civilians in 1943 doesn’t get even a footnote in history books).

The Wikipedia article mostly deals with literature about the war horrors, but it does cite one history treatise (Sokolov’s biography of Marshal Zhukov). Sokolov paints an ugly but decidedly less cannibalistic picture. A Stalin’s order directed, in 1943, the frontline units to draft males aged 17 to 45 from the liberated territories, bypassing the regular draft board system. They new recruits were to be “properly trained” before deployment, whatever it means. Sokolov maintains that one of the unstated goals of this procedure was indeed to have as many “liberated” fighting-age men (and presumed Nazi collaborators) killed as possible.
But the alleged frank exchange of opinions between Zhukov and Stalin is nowhere to be seen; and the new recruits do seem to have been trained and armed in most of the documents cited by Sokolov, with two exceptions drawn from WWII memoirs. One Russian commander tells about a group of ethnic Russian recruits sent to battle without weapons. Another is a German account of a group of civilians drafted by the Red Army for forced labor, rather than for fighting.
In my own research, as in Sokolov’s, I saw evidence of malnourished victims of the Nazi occupation in Western Ukraine drafted in 1944, and killed in action only months later. But it wasn’t the draft-and-immediately-march-to-battle plot alleged by the best-publicized “black jacket” tales. What happened has implied some level of training and preparedness, coupled with the Soviet’s notorious high loss rate of lower ranks in battle.
So there is gap between Stalin’s general callous disregard for human life of all sorts, vs. specific allegations of no-training-no-weapons, which doesn’t seem to be addressed in actual historic research.

zyxt [is that an English name?]: In any event, is your point that Australian convicts had it good because they didnt all die, and some finished their term of imprisonment and became “reformed”? Not too sure how that would apply to Siberia…

No, no, not at all! I was responding to David Eddyshaw’s “Relatives of mine were transported to Australia. Their descendants seem OK now. It doesn’t seem comparable to being exterminated, but Australian Hatters may have their own perspective.” Siberia doesn’t come into it. I’m unsure what you mean by “became ‘reformed'”. Transportation to the colonies was the result of poverty not immorality. And if you’re unconvinced that convicts prospered in Australia, don’t forget that until 1776 they were dispatched to the American colonies. The ancestors of most waspy white Americans with English surnames were impoverished convicts like my own and yet nowadays these people own Ford dealerships and God knows what else. Bookshops.

No one has super-reliable numbers but most estimates seem to have the number of pre-1776 involuntarily-transported convicts delivered to what became the U.S. at approximately 10% of the total pre-1776 white arrivals, a bit higher if you limit it to British arrivals. They are I believe skewed somewhat toward the later years thus reducing their significance from a gene-pool perspective (i.e. a random English guy who came over in 1630 generally had a lot more descendants in the post-independence U.S. population than one who came over in 1760, ceteris paribus). If you assume pretty even mixing into the broader WASP population over the following centuries (which may or may not be a good assumption – don’t know if it’s been investigated or modeled), you would conclude that most now-living WASP’s have a little bit of convict ancestry but only a little bit. Little enough it can be plausibly airbrushed out of the family-history narrative rather than foregrounded the way it might be in Australian family-history narratives. I don’t know of any in my own ancestry, but certainly not all of my pre-1776 lines of ancestry have been traced all the way back to the original Atlantic-crosser and perhaps the convicts left fewer traces in the early primary sources and/or have not been investigated as closely by the respectability-minded amateur researchers from which we know most of what we know about what the primary sources contain.

Nikolai Rezanov, who obtained an Imperial Charter for the Russian-American Company in 1799, visited San Francisco in 1806 to seek supplies for the starving colonies in Alaska. Seeing the weakness of the Spanish authorities, he hatched a plan for Russia to annex the entire west coast of America and populate the land through large-scale Russian emigration. However, he died in Krasnoyarsk on the way to St Petersburg to get approval. The plan was revived in the 1820s but was dropped after the Decembrist revolt.

Rezanov was quite a character. The first Russian to circumnavigate the globe, he tried to annex Hawaii and later attacked Japan. In San Francisco he fell in love with the 15-year old daughter of the governor of Alto California, Concepción Argüello (Conchita), writing to the Pope and the Tsar for permission to marry. Conchita was never told of his death and refused to marry believing that he would return, eventually becoming a nun. The story of Rezanov and Conchita was the subject of the first Russian rock-opera in 1979 (‘Юнона и Авось’ is truly dreadful but remains inexplicably popular and is still playing to packed houses forty years later.)

That’s interesting, JW. I think the difference is that while Australians explain that they aren’t, in fact, descended from any convicts at all, no siree, I’m not sure that wasp Americans have even considered the possibility. I can’t tell you how many New York architects (lawyers, bankers) I know who are relatives of the Mayflower lot, early governors of Massachusetts etc. Yes, I can. Not counting siblings, it’s somewhere around ten, I think. And yet even though we all have 16 gt gt grandparents, none of them nor anyone else has ever volunteered a convict ancestor. There should be no shame in it. Quite the opposite.

@Lazar: Georgia was founded as a place for debtors, not felons, to start over. They did have debtors’ prisons in England at the time (1730s) though. Interestingly, Georgia was the first colony to ban slavery, since the slaves were felt to provide undesired competition for the white debtor laborers the colony was meant to support.

Five points for a witch, JW, and a bonus for Salam. I read that you only got death-slash-transportation for having taken more than 40/- (i.e. £2) which may have been a large sum in 1720.

(i.e. £2) which may have been a large sum in 1720.

Well, at some point it was two pounds of sterling silver, and inflation has been markedly slow in the UK.

Almost £4000 today, relative to the income of the average worker, per Measuring Worth, the go-to site for this sort of thing. In terms of the price of silver it’s only about £275, but there’s a lot more silver above ground today.

Gotthilf Fischer.

Almost £4000 today, relative to the income of the average worker

inflation has been markedly slow in the UK

True, thanks to Keynes, but in the early ’60s £5000 was the price of a new Rolls Royce and was the annual income of an army general (my planned career path at the time) so it still exists, but what makes these scales so out-of-whack now is the value of land & property compared to other goods & services.

To be honest, I don’t know anyone who has convict ancestry

What am I, Bathmat, chopped liver?

Undoubtedly, Y. Just my little reality check.

I think it was around $2.50 to the pound through the 1960s. I’ve read all this stuff about the pound and inflation but it’s gone. First they abandoned the gold standard and then… I do remember from the late Ben Pimlott’s excellent biography of Harold Wilson a good recounting of Wislon’s inexplicable 1967 reluctance to devalue the pound against the dollar. Pimlott also explained what a Eurodollar was (is?), namely… … I don’t know, something about buying oil.

The Brits are good at finance (upmarket betting) but compared esp. to the Americans they and their government negotiators are surprisingly crap at business. This makes their brexit flight slightly poignant.

The other suicidal thing the British gov. has done is to shrink the size of the money every couple of years. In the 50s, a £5 note was as big as a restaurant tablecloth. Nowadays it’s the size and thickness of half a sheet of bog-roll. And the £1 note has disappeared altogether; there isn’t one. Whereas the dollar bill never changes, or only a tiny bit. The same with the coins; when I was a lad, it took two of us to carry a threepenny bit down to the corner shop [p.94]

Re: Catherine the Great and the horse

This is nothing, but politically biased slander!

She was into men, not horses.

Perhaps into even younger men as she aged, but that’s her only vice.

Except for quantity, of course.

PS. One of the most delightful episodes in her correspondence with Potemkin was their fight over the quantity issue:

Potemkin snapped and called her a slut who slept with fifty men.

And she actually took the occasion to count her previous lovers and arrived at much lower figure. And she literally wrote something along the lines of “I counted everyone and it was only fifteen, not fifty. That’s not really that high, is it?”

That was in mid-1770s. She may have added more over the next two decades.

He was appointed Chancellor as the head of the party which got the largest number of votes in election of 1932.

Isn’t that what happens in every election in Europe?

Apportioning blame and figuring out who have and have not made a mistake are two different things. To a degree that leaders of one country can influence events in another country they can do it competently or not. Leninist “the worse the better” really is not a very good policy.

No, it’s not. Here‘s a nice summary:

Still don’t get what was wrong with Hitler becoming Chancellor after winning most votes in the election.

What was actually supposed to happen then?

New election until Hitler gets 51% of vote?

Grand coalition between Hitler and SPD?

From my understanding of the topic, appointment of Hitler was pretty ordinary thing which happens all the time in European parliamentary elections.

It’s what happened after (Reichstag fire and Dimitrov show trial and Hitler getting extraordinary powers) which wasn’t ordinary.

I note that in the only Democratic elections run in Russia in 1917, the Bolshevik Party won only 24% of the vote (compared to 37% won by Hitler).

So they usurped power.

Hitler didn’t even need that – he came to power through entirely legitimate means.

Well, according to recent innuendo, it was the Russians who got Trump into power and the UK out of the EU 😉

The thing is, if this happened to be true, would you still use your legalistic argument that “they voted for him/it, so it was their responsibility”?

Coming after a thread full of references to chicanery on both sides, it’s a bit rich to suddenly say “It was the voters’ fault”.

And just when we were making some progress in getting the thread away from Hitler/Stalin and back toward more Puritan-adjacent topics!

For a moment I read that as “Putin-adjacent topics”!

I think we’re making great progress when SFReader resorts to blaming ‘the people’! I think the argument is nearing its last gasp.

Throughout the longish run of the pre-WW1 gold standard a pound sterling was worth $4.85 or $4.86, which is exactly the ratio you would get if you compared the amount of gold in a sovereign to that in a trivially-heavier American five-dollar coin. If that’s not exactly the same ratio you’d get comparing the first U.S. silver dollars in the 1790’s to the slightly smaller U.K. silver coin that was most comparable (the five-shilling crown), it’s close.

we knew someone whose three sisters were called Faith, Hope and Charity

The question then arises, was their mother called Sophia?

The question then arises, was their mother called Sophia?

Another question that arises is how the names came about. When they named their first daughter Faith, were they committing to continue having children until they had two more daughters to complete the set? Not having any more daughters would be OK, but having only Faith and Hope would be a little awkward. Or were they triplets?

Wikipedia has a ridiculously good article about von Papen, which everyone should read as a cautionary tale. He was especially enamored with a plan in the works since 1926 to subvert democracy and substitute it with dictatorial presidential rule by having Hindenburg declare a state of emergency, and, if the Reichstag objected, which they could do by a simple majority vote, then cowing the Reichstag by threatening to dissolve it. There was nothing unconstitutional about Hitler’s appointment, besides its goal of overthrowing the constitution, and the plan succeeded beyond everyone’s wildest dreams. Gives an American pause for thought at this moment of our political history.

But to the point:

1. Von Papen held the title of Erbsälzer, one of most obscure titles I have ever run across. Half the fun of running across words like this is tracking their meaning down, but if people don’t want to do this on their own, here’s the first couple sentences from the relevant article in German WP:

Die Erbsälzer stellten das Patriziat der Stadt Werl dar, das im ausgehenden 14. Jahrhundert aus 48 Familien bestand. Die erste urkundliche Erwähnung der Erbsälzer stammt aus dem Jahr 1246, als Erzbischof Conrad von Köln die besonderen Privilegien der Werler Sälzer bestätigte.

2. There is (or was) an anti-Puritan train-wreck naming convention he exemplifies: his full name is Franz Joseph Hermann Michael Maria von Papen. Compare René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke. Do people still get names like this in Germany? Or anywhere, outside decaying aristocratic circles?

Presumably the idealized regime von Papen wanted to replace the Weimar regime with would have looked something like the Estado Novo in Portugal or the Ständestaat in neighboring Austria or (as Brett’s comment suggests) any number of other vaguely similar authoritarian models floating around Europe in that era. He did not, to put it mildly, achieve what he set out to achieve. The failure of many Germans to feel any particular emotional loyalty to the norms of the Weimar constitution, plausibly viewed as externally imposed in the wake of military defeat, is perfectly understandable as a matter of human nature, and I’m not sure what the easy hindsight fix for that should have been. The BRD regime got much more widespread emotional buy-in from the people of West Germany a few decades later and remains reasonably stable even unto this present day, but the even more catastrophic circumstances of 1945 implied an extremely high price (for all concerned) to pay to get them there.

The UK royal family seems pretty understated in the multiple-given-names category these days. The now-rather-elderly heir to the throne is Charles Philip Arthur George and the next two after him in their respective generations are William Arthur Philip Louis and the even terser George Alexander Louis. George’s even-younger brother is Louis Arthur Charles. My sense is that giving kids two middle names rather than one is certainly not majority practice in the UK but is not that uncommon in non-royal circles (much more so than in the US) and the latest generation thus doesn’t stand out all that much. I find using one of Price George’s middle names as his younger brother’s first name weird (much more so than recycling a father’s middle name for a son), but I may not be sufficiently in tune with the relevant cultural conventions. And come to think of it the first name of one of my great-grandfather’s younger brothers was the middle name of his oldest brother.

Do people still get names like this in Germany?

Only the nobility: Dr. Googleberg is Karl-Theodor Maria Nikolaus Johann Jacob Philipp Franz Joseph Sylvester Buhl, Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg. The Buhl part is the only case I know outside of English-speaking countries where a last name was repurposed as a given one.

Austria limits the number of given names to three by law. (That would be Karl-Theodor Maria Nikolaus in this case, because given names can have hyphens in them.)

The politically-known-in-his-day grandfather of the fellow David M. mentioned was Karl Theodor Maria Georg Achaz Eberhardt Josef Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg (1921-1972). Fewer total names, but “Achaz” has sort of a Puritan-compatible vibe to it at first glance. Is this sort of lotsa-given-names practice in Germany exclusive to the Catholic nobility, or do the equally posh Protestants do it as well?

It is by me, at any rate. It has never actually occurred to me that it might not be in the US. How about L. Armstrong?

Louis Armstrong v. Louie Armstrong would be the relevant minimal pair in AmEng, contrasting in both spelling and pronunciation. There’s an exception for kings of France or other overtly French bearers of Louis. (Note FWIW that the names of Donald Duck’s nephews, viz. Huey, Dewey, and Louie, all rhyme but illustrate three different orthographic conventions for the same sound.)

But not Louis CK, I see from Wikipedia.

Being generally hip and happening, I had never actually heard of LCK before his recent difficulties. My extensive research on Wikipedia has also revealed to me why his stage name is “CK”, which I had vaguely wondered about on occasion for stretches of some seconds before losing interest.

Bathrobe, there certainly are significant numbers of Australians (outside South Australia) who are quite proud of convict ancestry.

But I was surprised that when the conversation moved from whether relatively one-sided violent conflicts should be called ‘wars’ to Australia, that transportation of convicts was the focus. My thoughts went to the fact that there are groups pushing for recognition of the conflicts between colonial people and Aboriginal groups as ‘Frontier Wars’. Most of these were even more one-sided than the ones discussed in Africa, but the idea is that acknowledging them as part of an invasive war is an improvement the existing general narrative of settlement with a few isolated massacres.

The first book to deal seriously with the concept that there was a war between the Europeans and the indigenes (The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance to the European invasion of Australia by historian Harry Reynolds) was only published in 1981. Before that I guess it was assumed that, with isolated exceptions, the Aborigines just ‘melted away’. They weren’t even given the dignity of recognition that their land was taken in acts of war, unlike the indigenes of North America.

But the big change in Australia took place in 1992, when the High Court held that the legal doctrine of terra nullius did not apply in circumstances where there were already inhabitants present. Whether terra nullius was an ancient legal concept or a product of 19th century law appears to be controversial (see Wikipedia). Whatever the case, the 1992 decision resulted in legal recognition of indigenous rights to the land, which were previously in the power of the State or Commonwealth governments to “grant”.

Showa seemed easy to me as a boy living in Tokyo, and I imagine Heisei would be easy if I lived there now. As long as you only need to remember the conversion algorithm between A.D. and the current era, whatever it is, you’re fine, given the simplifying and pro-Westernizing choice to change the number of the era year from n to n+1 on Gregorian Jan 1. It’s when you have to keep track of Japanese dates given in multiple eras that it might get confusing quickly.

I think there was a time when the pound was five dollars

Yes, which was why a slang name for the crown (a coin worth 5s) was “dollar”.

a slang name for the crown (a coin worth 5s) was “dollar”. — the crown was rarer than a two dollar bill, but the very common half-crown was likewise a half-dollar.

I think Mary is a fairly common middle name for big hairy men in Ireland — Mary is my father’s third name. He goes by AJ, not AJM. Also he is bald. I guess his mother was not sufficiently devoted to the BVM to inflict it as a second name. The only professed Mary I can think of is Joseph Mary Plunkett, and even for him the middle name is less commonly included nowadays when his combination of Catholic piety and republican martyrdom is less fashionable. Gay Byrne’s middle name is also Mary, providing him with a self-deprecatory joke.

In my idiolect it would have to be “big ol’ hairy.” I’d interpret “big hairy” literally. That’s just me, though.

big hairy

As far as I can tell, hairy works as intensifier (as John Cowan said). But if pressed to interpret it literally, I would imagine lots of body hair (signifying an adult male), not head hair.

So Henry Cuttner’s Mammothslayer, Son of the Big Hairy, tricked all the Russians into believing that she was mighty hairy for real???

The end of the Heisei era will require some fancy footwork because of date localization, basically all computers in the world will need to be updated in the 9-week period following February 24 so you can set your locale to ja_JP_JP* and see the new name on the morning of May 1. (Never mind that the Unicode standard itself has to be updated with a combined character for the expected two-kanji name, even if you just want the Roman letter style of H31-02-05 it should change to ?1-05-01 on the day).

https://mjtsai.com/blog/2018/07/20/unicode-waiting-for-new-japanese-era-name/
______________
(*) Or in theory even en_JP_JP — but I can’t find a machine that even has an en_JP locale, much less one that accepts the variant part of a locale string. If you have a recent Linux with Perl installed, you can try this:

TZ=Asia/Tokyo LANG=ja_JP.utf8 perl -MPOSIX=strftime -E "say strftime q(In Japan it's %H:%M on %EY %m月 %d日), localtime"

Right now it tells me “In Japan it’s 19:09 on 平成31年 02月 06日”. Note it doesn’t even try to use the single-space composed character, I guess the two-kanji form has better coverage in fonts. This also means that the new era can be implemented with a simple addition to a string value in the locale files, no font or code updates needed.

(The date command doesn’t implement the E modifier, and neither does Python (2 or 3); the implementers probably thought they were more clever than Stallman (GNU C library). Perl on OS X is also unable to do it, probably because the system locale doesn’t have the necessary info).

a slang name for the crown (a coin worth 5s) was “dollar”

Not just a slang name – the 1804 Bank of England dollar did, in fact, have a value of 5 shillings.

(Granted, in 1804, this referred not to the American dollar, but to the so-called Spanish dollar [a type perhaps better known to us as “piece of eight”]; in fact, the Bank of England dollars were directly struck over the very coins known as “Spanish dollars”.)

Oops, I was about to edit my previous comment, but there’s a link in it. So, another link: Achaz is short for Achatius, but has a Protestant distribution.

The Nazis may not even have been uniquely bad; some scholars consider the Croatian Ustase to be have been just as bloodthirsty

It may be an invention, or at least an exaggeration, but I have read that even Heinrich Himmler was shocked at the excesses of the Ustase. It took a lot to shock Heinrich Himmler.

If aristocratic families had about 6 children…

Only six? Not doing their duty at all. I have an ancestor who had 17 children, of whom the seventh and youngest son was called Henry Septimus and the 17th child, the tenth and youngest daughter, was called Louisa Decima. The names suggest that they knew that there wouldn’t be any more sons after the seventh (though Henry did have some younger sisters), or any more daughters after the tenth.

David Marjanović says: The Buhl part is the only case I know outside of English-speaking countries where a last name was repurposed as a given one.

Well then, meet Ivić Pašalić, a Croatian politician, and Ivan Ivan a TV producer. Though, the last one is more likely to be the a case where the surname is based on the first name.

Evelyn Waugh is known as Ивлин Во in Russian, which, as far as I could tell from this discussion, is actually fairly close to the name’s original pronunciation.

Ивлин is pretty good (from a British point of view). Во is maybe the best possible, but it’s not very good. Would Уо look pronounceable to a Russian reader?

OTOH, until this discussion, I was fairly sure that Evelyn Waugh (whoever they are) was female.

“Evelyn” is nearly always a woman’s name, so you’re not wrong, but this one was a man.

I am a fan of E O Ashton’s Swahili textbooks. which have lots of pretty awesomely “period” example sentences — it was, post-WW2, the end of the era for the prototypical Anglophone learning Swahili being some wet-behind-the-ears Oxbridge-graduate toff about to assume the White Man’s Burden administering the Empire in East Africa, but that’s clearly the intended reader. I am unaware of her work on Luganda but will have to look into it.

George Herbert Walker Bush
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien
George Raymond Richard Martin

I was going to mention Johann Gambolputty de von Ausfern-schplenden-schlitter-crasscrenbon-fried-digger-dingle-dangle-dongle-dungle-burstein-von-knacker-thrasher-apple-banger-horowitz-ticolensic-grander-knotty-spelltinkle-grandlich-grumble-meyer-spelterwasser-kurstlich-himbleeisen-bahnwagen-gutenabend-bitte-ein-nürnburger-bratwustle-gerspurten-mitzweimache-luber-hundsfut-gumberaber-shönendanker-kalbsfleisch-mittler-aucher von Hautkopft of Ulm, but I guess he has only one given name.

I assume “Mark Hanna Watkins” is a he?

“Evelyn” is nearly always a woman’s name

The same applies to Marion, IIRC. (Also in Estonian, at least, if memory serves.)

And Beverly and Lindsay and Vivian and Ashley. But maybe not Dana yet.

I don’t think it it did: a minority usage simply eroded further. WP says that Evelyn is from Aveline, a feminine diminutive of Avila, a locational surname.

I violently object to the use of “Alexis” as a girl’s name, a perversion for which I suspect “Dynasty” is entirely responsible. O tempora, o mores ..

In re the Mollymooly Conjecture, my mother and her sister both bear (Scots) family surnames as middle names; my family is distinctly plebeian, and I don’t think the flattering of any influential relatives was entailed (if there was, the strategy seems to have been ineffectual, at any rate.) My father’s family didn’t run to effete middle-class fripperies like middle names. Couldn’t afford them. We felt we were lucky to have any names at all.

Alexis Smith

Hah! It’s all Hollywood Babylon, anyhow. Depravity, I tell you!

I wonder if she was named after her father Alexander? One of the more regrettable Scots naming practices is naming girls after male relatives, resulting in a great many Davinas and even the occasional unlucky Kennethina.

(If any Hatter is in fact called Kennethina, I apologise prophylactically for the implied onymatism.)

Some of the most militaristic Prussians named their daughters after Prussian generals. Two examples that have escaped the total damnatio memoriae are Blücherine and Gneisenauette.

Blücherine and Gneisenauette

That would be a consolation for Kennethina.

Ostap Suleyman Berta Maria Bender Bey sounds like a perfectly ordinary name

I’ve always felt that “Glubb Pasha” takes some beating. His middle name was Bagot. Life can be unfair.

Kim

Kipling’s one is short for Kimball; I think the girls are (or originally were) short for KImberley, as in South Africa.

What’s the story behind Kim (male in Kipling, female in Hollywood)?

In Kipling’s case it was short for the given name Kimball (again, a repurposed surname). I suspect that most Kims nowadays are Kimberl(e)ys, yet another repurposed surname that like Evelyn has become mostly female. In addition, apparently some Kimikos (a firmly female name) become Kims outside Japan (maybe inside, for all I know).

There are also Russian Kims – their name was coined from Russian abbveviation of Young Communist International.

“Winifred” is an odd one. I had always assumed that it was from the male name corresponding to German “Winfried”, with one of those mysterious gender-flips for no reason that we’ve been talking about, but I was wrong: the virgin and martyr is evidently Gwenffrewi

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Winifred

Presumably the unfortunate girl suffered the further indignity of having her name confused with that of the manly Anglo-Saxon St Boniface.

@David Eddyshaw: Marilyn Novak had to use the stage name “Kim,” because she was supposed to be Columbia Pictures’ answer to Marilyn Monroe. Having the same name as Monroe was (probably rightly) considered to be too on the nose.

…Mandaean?

Yes.

So, Kimberley is the form diamond takes as a personal name?

Another allotrope appears in “Coal Porter.”

The Box of Delights, probably the best known fantasy novel by John Masefield, features a character using the pseudonym “Cole Hawlings,” who is really the polymath Raymond Lully in disguise. In the BBC television adaptation, he was memorably played by Patrick Troughton. I don’t know whether any of the children in the story ever commented on the oddity of the character’s assumed name. When I read the book, I could only get ahold of an inept abridgement, in which the conversation where Cole Hawlings introduced himself had been cut.

There are also Russian Kims – their name was coined from Russian abbreviation of Young Communist International.

Unless they were so named in homage to Kim Philby.

Oh, yes. Pretty much everything you would have been taught in school is a myth or a highly sanitised version. There was really nothing at all noble about the American revolt. It was solely about other people’s land and money. Guff about democracy is very much a later addition.

Many historians argue that the revolution was ultimately a disaster for the USA. Without it the abolition of slavery would have been enforced decades earlier, no civil war, better treatment of the Indians, and the US would have shared in the early flourishing of the industrial revolution from which it was cut off. Inevitably it would have been granted full self-government in the 19th century.

Plus, your Head of State would now be HM Queen, so I think that’s a win-win.

The British government was never keen on colonial expansion. It tended to be very expensive and risky and almost never made a profit. Non-sanctioned acquisitions of territory were most strongly discouraged. Territory could only be acquired by government treaty (of course many treaties might not be considered fair but at least they were official). The Treasury in particular fought tooth and nail against filibusters annexing territory unilaterally. There was no way HM government could condone Washington seizing Indian or French territory without permission but Americans, especially Virginians, seemed to consider any restraint on their behaviour as “tyranny”.

the American revolt … was solely about other people’s land and money. Guff about democracy is very much a later addition

I don’t think this is a valid antithesis, more’s the pity, and it would be all too comforting (especially for a Brit) to see the matter simply as hypocrisy. Freedom for one is all too often the freedom to oppress another. It’s something that needs to be borne strongly in mind when people are getting all frothy about freedom as some abstract automatic good. Freedom for whom? To do what?

Don’t get me wrong: freedom is good – by default. It’s just that, as the Proverbs of Heaven and Hell put it:

One law for the lion and the ox is Oppression.

solely about other people’s land and money

Not so. Before 1766 Parliament had basically left America in a state of more or less benign neglect, and Americans had gotten used to mostly ruling themselves. But in that year the Declaratory Act told Americans that Parliament “had, hath, and of right ought to have, full power and authority to make laws and statutes of sufficient force and validity to bind the colonies and people of America, subjects of the crown of Great Britain, in all cases whatsoever”. While Americans were willing to tolerate Parliamentary legislation in matters of defense and external trade, the Declaratory Act looked a lot more like incipient tyranny when seen from the left side of the Pond.

To make things worse, its wording almost exactly tracked another Declaratory Act of 1719 which said just about the same thing, giving Parliament “full power and authority to make laws and statutes of sufficient validity to bind the Kingdom and people of Ireland”, which made the Parliament of Ireland (which did not represent the native Irish) subordinate to the English Parliament. This power was not used to tax Ireland, but it was used to grant a monopoly to an Englishman named Wood to issue copper hapence, which the Irish were convinced would undermine the currency. Swift wrote the “Drapier’s Letters” exercising his considerable powers agains the hapence, and against the whole idea of a “dependent kingdom”. Both Declaratory Acts were repealed after the American War.

Without it the abolition of slavery would have been enforced decades earlier, no civil war

Perhaps 800,000 slaves in the Caribbean and South Africa (and a handful in Canada) were freed by the 1833 Act. An analogous Act in a world in which all of British America remained part of the Empire would have had almost three million slaves, and the chances are good that Southern lobbying would ensure that no such Act was passed. If it had been, the South would simply have had its own Revolutionary War instead of the Civil War.

This also ignores the knock-on effects in France and in Spanish America, which would have remained under monarchical control considerably nastier than the British royals.

valid antithesis

It’s true that democracy wasn’t much of a thing in the U.S. until 1824 with the election of Andrew Jackson, who was the closest thing the U.S. has ever had to a standard-issue populist dictator, so far at least.

It sounds to me a good deal more like an aphorism concocted by a Webb and then foisted on VIL.

“It is true that liberty is precious — so precious that it must be rationed” is along the same lines as “I love Germany so much I’m glad there are two of them”, supposedly by François Mauriac.

“Freiheit ist nur ein weiteres Wort für nichts zu verlieren.” attr. Herr Doktor Professor Kristofferson.

A better rendition of the Engels blurb is: “freedom is the acknowledgement of necessity”. Einsicht in die Notwendigkeit is a way to say “recognition [that] necessity [is a fact of life]”.

So I imagine that if the war ended with British victory, slavery would have been de-facto abolished by 1783.

Hmm, I don’t think so. De jure, slavery wasn’t abolished in the British Empire until 1833 (actually three days before Wm Wilberforce, the famous campaigner, died). Trading in slaves was outlawed earlier (1807). More here.

so far at least.

Tragedy and farce.

In later years of the war, it became standard practice for British forces to give freedom to all slaves who escaped from American mutineers.

Or, as it was described: “he has excited domestic insurrections against us…”

Nicht in der geträumten Unabhängigkeit von den Naturgesetzen liegt die Freiheit, sondern in der Erkenntnis dieser Gesetze, und in der damit gegeben Möglichkeit, sie planmäßig zu bestimmten Zwecken wirken zu lassen. […] Freiheit des Willens heißt daher nichts andres als die Fähigkeit, mit Sachkenntnis entscheiden zu können. […] Die ersten, sich vom Tierreich sondern den Menschen waren in allem Wesentlichen so unfrei wie die Tiere selbst; aber jeder Fortschritt in der Kultur war ein Schritt zur Freiheit.

– Friedrich Engels, Antidühring

Freedom lies not in the dreamed independence from the laws of nature, but in the knowledge of these laws, and in the possibility of having them work according to plan for specific purposes. […] Freedom of the will therefore means nothing more than the ability to decide with expertise. […] The first humans who were separated from the animal kingdom were essentially as unfree as the animals themselves; but every advance in culture was a step towards freedom.

Ahh, those were the days. You didn’t have to define “advance in culture”.

But that was only theoretical, and only philosophical types care about theory. What caused people to take action, and violent action at that, was the frustration of their land hunger.

Come, come. The Declaratory Act was directly followed by, and authorized, the legalized oppression that followed. The Townshend Acts of 1767-68 imposed indirect taxes rather than the direct taxes of the Stamp Act — which turned out to be just as obnoxious. One of them, the New York Restraining Act, literally shut down the New York colonial legislature until they paid for the food, housing and supplies of British soldiers quartered in the colony. (It never happened, because they did pay.) Most of the Townshend taxes were also repealed, but not the one on tea, and all Americans know what came of that.

The response to the Boston Tea Party consisted of the Intolerable Acts (Coercive Acts in Britain) of 1774 which shut down the port of Boston, canceled the Massachusetts charter unilaterally, removed all civil and criminal trials of royal officials to Britain, and permitted soldiers to be quartered in unoccupied buildings (not private houses) without compensation to the landlords (hence the Third Amendment). There was nothing merely philosophical about any of this.

None of these things had word one to do with land hunger, either. Richard Henry Lee of Virginia (later the mover of the independence resolution in the Continental Congress, president of Congress after independence, and U.S. senator) described the Intolerable Acts as “a most wicked System for destroying the liberty of America”, and the leak wasn’t even at his end of the boat (nor did he suffer from a lack of land).

Another Virginian had this to say: “But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a design to reduce them [the Americans] under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

I agree that nicknames as given names are very common, but I’ve never heard of anyone nicknamed Ivić before. Prompted by your comment I checked in Šimundić’s dictionary of personal names, and sure enough, Ivić is given as one of the many nicknames for “Ivan”.

I believe it’s most common in Istria and Kvarner. No idea about whether it gets any use in Hercegovina, where Pašalić comes from. I just always assumed it was a nickname as given name thing, the repurposed surname explanation never even occurred to me. I was about to say it’s something I’d never encountered anywhere in ex-Yu, but thinking about it I remember Bogić Bogićević (Serb from NE Bosnia), Milić Stanković (Serbia) and Milić Vukašinović (who I thought was from Bosnia, but Wikipedia says was born in Belgrade). Are those names seen as repurposed surnames or just as hypocoristic nicknames as given names? Not sure if names like these are or were used where Pašalić is from.

Has he ever talked about his name in the media? It’s such an unusual one, I can’t imagine he’s never been asked.

gwenllian says: Are those names seen as repurposed surnames or just as hypocoristic nicknames as given names?

These names certainly stand out.

I am not aware of any studies about first names ending in -ić. But here is another thought: In medieval times, names ending in -ič were common. So it could be a continuation of medieval naming practice, with the -ič changing to -ić.

Checking in Šimundić’s dictionary again, I found Bogić and Milić, as well as other first names ending in -ić such as Vukić and Vučić. There are also doublets like Radić & Radič and Dobrić & Dobrič, which might support the idea that names ending in -ič are somehow linked to those ending in -ić.

the Bezos, a South American river people

Is that why Jeff chose to call his company Amazon? (Apparently not; it just named a very large object and would tend to appear at the head of lists.)

Nikolai Rezanov, lexicographer, who left his heart in San Francisco.

I’m afraid that the South American river Bezos are a figment of my imagination, although the South American river Bezos is real. At least, that’s what they want us to think.

Googling [river Bezos] instantly tells me that Jeff B. (whose name is Hispanic, though he is not: he was adopted by his stepfather at age four) attended River Oak Elementary School. Aha!

Belatedly on Kims: in the Nordics they’re usually male and short for Joakim. (Perhaps this clipping can be found elsewhere too; the conditions ought to exist also in Central Europe, outside of the Benrath Line at least.)

Didn’t realize Achim also belongs in the cluster, but why not.

Jochem on the other hand may be rare but happens to be well known to me as the given name of noted Dutch techno wiz “Speedy J”. As Dutch has held on to native /x/, maintaining this in biblical names also seems not at all surprizing actually.

Just found out that Gravity is an actual baby girl name.

She probably has a sister named Density and they both should be moderately heavy (and have mad scientist for a father)

Note that the old-fashioned term for mass density is “specific gravity.” In this instance, “gravity” means “amount of gravitational force,” while “specific” means “per unit volume.” This sense of specific can also mean “per unit mass”; sometimes, such as in “specific heat [capacity],” in could be either in units of mass other volume.

It’s the usual word for the first year of an era:

がんねん【元年】 ﾛｰﾏ(gannen)
the first year 《of an era》.
▲今年はデジタル放送元年である. This is the first year of digital broadcasting. | Digital broadcasting is starting this year.
･来年を県政改革元年としてまず議員を減らすところから始めたい. With prefectural reform starting next year, the first thing I want to do is to cut down the number of councillors.
__平成元年 the first year of Heisei.

The need to print dates in 1 Heisei isn’t very common, after all. But Linux developers are detail oriented, to put it nicely, so my surprise was only mild.

It does sound like the kind of geekery they’re known for. I forgot – was it Linux or Unix that had a calendar function with several days missing in September 1752, to account for the Julian/Gregorian switch?

That said, Heisei 1 (and in some rare edge cases, Showa 1) is probably going to show up every so often when people’s birth dates need to be printed, so I doubt it’s that rare of an occurrence.

The Unix epoch is a signed number on Posix (which means almost all) systems. On 64-bit machines, therefore, it stretches back some 292 billion years, much older than the universe itself.

@JC, strftime uses the unpacked time format (struct tm) so it really doesn’t care about the epoch anyway. My point is more that a lot of applications out there still hold their UNIX times in an unsigned 32-bit integer, POSIX be damned.

And the glibc format didn’t cover quite as many eras as I thought, because it has the 元年 years as separate items and some intervals that aren’t eras.

1 BCE: 紀元前1年 aso.
1 CE: 西暦1年 aso.
1873: 明治6年 (!) aso.
1912: 大正元年 (from July 30) aso.
1926: 昭和元年 (from December 25) aso.
1989: 平成元年 (from August 1) aso.
2019: 令和元年 (from May 1) aso.

The theory seems that Japan adopted the Gregorian calendar on January 1, 1873, so we have “CE 1872” followed by “Meiji 6” — since “Meiji 5” and earlier were defined under the lunisolar Chinese calendar and it’s not the task of the locale system to convert between calendar systems, but to localize the printing of proleptic Gregorian dates.

(According to Japanese Chronological Tables: Showing the Date, According to the Julian Or Gregorian Calendar, of the First Day of Each Japanese Month, from Tai-kwa 1st Year to Mei-ji 6th Year (645 A. D. to 1873 A. D.) With an Introductory Essay on Japanese Chronology and Calendars, the 12th month of 明治五年 (師走 of Meiji 5) had all of two days — since the 12th new moon of that lunisolar year was on December 30 of 1872. In many other years, Shiwasu started in Gregorian January and would have been lost completely in a change).

It has been bruited about that Bezos thought Amazon had second syllable stress (Say “the amazing river” fast). Or someone at his trade name consultancy did.

Sadly, Mazon Creek – a Late Carboniferous site with amazing preservation of soft anatomy, including lots of Tully Monsters – is pronounced with its o unreduced (LOT/THOUGHT).

Aubrey is becoming a girl’s name, I guess as a variation of Audrey.

Probably so, but Audrey itself is what happens to Alberic(h) when you push it through French. The native English form was and is Ælfric; as far as I know there is no modernized version of this.

but Audrey itself is what happens to Alberic(h) when you push it through French

Really? I thought it originated from Æthelthryth. But maybe that’s just the saint.

In any case, the French version looks more like it would have resulted in Aubrey rather than Audrey – where would the d come from?

I once worked for a man who had a manservant called Aubrey. So I called him Aubrey. Then I found out that he was really Mr Aubrey; he had a quite different first name, Felix or something. After that I felt rather guilty for following the convention, but not guilty enough to revolt.

On the topic of names from religion, I was vaguely surprised at the names of the authors of Logicomix: Apostolos (Doxiadis) and Christos (Papadimitriou). I thought at first that the names implied great, perhaps even Puritan-level, parental piety, but they seem to be common enough Greek names that I am not sure the inference is warranted.

The WP page for Christos mentions a difference in accent; Χρίστος (the name) vs. χριστός (the actual epithet for Jesus), and similarly, Σταύρος (the name Stávros) vs σταυρός (the cross).

Another Biblical name, almost certainly given out of extreme piety: Mahershalalhashbaz Gilmore, later Mahershalalhashbaz Ali, currently going by Mahershala Ali as a shortening.

I spotted the name in the credits to a film (probably The Curious Case of Benjamin Button), sputtered What?! Is that Hebrew? to myself, and looked up the credits after getting home from the film to confirm that he did indeed bear that name. It’s from Isaiah 8:3.

I wouldn’t mind the odd pic now and then. Even depictions of printing, as here, break up the somewhat relentless sans-serif blog text.

Yes, you see? I’ve found angoras hopeless for milking, and not only the males. But who wants to get up at 5 in the morning, anyway. For a sec, I thought that was When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary…

Devil’s Dictionary. I like “There is nothing new under the sun but there are lots of old things we don’t know.”

It is generally contraindicated to hotlink a remote image directly, rather than storing a local copy. There is no guarantee that the remote site will keep the system working in exactly the same way into the future indefinitely, meaning that future viewers of this site may see a box with a red x, or some similar depiction of “image not found”.

You might think that Google Books will still be around in however many years, but Google itself makes no guarantee that future results will be the same as past performance. I know I followed a Google books link from an older post on this site, and found the book had changed, for whatever reason, to “No preview available”, making the linked page unavailable. This despite the fact that the text was old enough to be in the public domain.

On top of that, which parts of a book you can see in any given week depends, in part, on the top-level domain: change .com to .ru, and you’ll be shown an overlapping but different part of the book. Alas, there generally are parts that are unavailable in any TLD.