I was reading Nick Paumgarten’s fascinating New Yorker article “The Long Flight to Teach an Endangered Ibis Species to Migrate” (archived) when I had to pause to look up a word: “On the other side of the chapel was the swimming pool, surrounded by fig and plum trees and a wire fence vined with grapes, and a kind of galilee that looked out over the foothills of the Pyrenees.” (Emphasis added.) What was this “galilee”? Well, according to Wikipedia, it’s “a chapel or porch at the north end of some churches. Its historical purpose is unclear.” (The article is just a stub, but there’s a nice photo of the galilee porch at Lincoln Cathedral.) The OED (entry from 1898) begs to differ:
A porch or chapel at the entrance of a church.
According to some authorities, the Latin word was also applied to the western extremity of the nave, as being a part regarded as less sacred than the rest.
The etymology:
< Old French galilee, < medieval Latin galilæa (Du Cange), a use of the proper name (see Galilean adj.¹). Possibly the allusion is to Galilee as an outlying portion of the Holy Land, or to the phrase ‘Galilee of the Gentiles’ (Matthew iv. 15).
It’s certainly an obscure word, and it’s a bit cheeky to use it casually as though every New Yorker reader was familiar with the terminology of ecclesiastical architecture, but on the other hand it’s resonant and works well in the sentence, and I enjoy learning new words, so good for Paumgarten.
Later on he uses an excellent word from an entirely different register:
Schnapsi was the flock’s schlimazel. “In the beginning, you could always tell Schnapsi from the others, a white bird covered in shit,” Babsi said.
If you’re unfamiliar with schlimazel, here you go. (I learned it, along with so much else, from Leo Rosten.) The OED (entry revised 2019) has a good selection of citations:
1917 What was it that had frightened me? Why had I not kissed her? Why had I run away and left her alone, humiliated? What could she think of such a Schlemazzel?
Maccabæan March 183/11928 And look at me, all covered with flour—what don’t I look like—I’ve been such a shlemazzle.
B’nai B’rith Magazine February 130/31948 Sholom Aleichem drew endless amusement out of the misadventures of his irrepressible, daydreaming schlimazls.
N. Ausubel, Treasury of Jewish Folklore iii.i. 3441960 In the schlimazl of Jewish tradition, I found the ancestors of Bellow’s ‘Angie March’. If the schlimazl went into the hat business, babies would be born without heads.
Encounter May 84/11962 She shrugged. What could one make of such a shlimmazzel?
J. Ish-Kishor, Tales from Wise Men of Israel 1991972 Just bring me a cold drink, you old schlimazel.
J. Wambaugh, Blue Knight (1973) i. 151980 When a waiter spills soup on a customer, the waiter is a shlemiel and the customer is a shlemazl.
Times 12 June 16/82014 He’s a schlimazel who provides a running commentary on his own schlimazelhood.
Atlantic January 102/2
(They add: “In quot. 1917 perhaps: a foolish or bungling person.”) I note with horror the typo they’ve let slide in the 1960 citation; I confirmed via a Google Books scan of the issue of Encounter that it should have the correct spelling Augie. Have they, too, fired their proofreaders?
I’m relying on google translate here, but this piece from French wikipedia https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galil%C3%A9e_(architecture) suggests to me that perhaps the end-of-the-nave thing is what the word usually means in French whereas the porch thing is what it usually means in English, so what are we to assume when the author sets his scene in the foothills of the Pyrenees?
Excellent question!
One, two, three, four,
Five, six, seven, eight!
Schlemiel, schlimazel,
Hasenpfeffer Incorporated!
The Etymonline entry for “gallery” includes the suggestion that it may come from this “galilee”.
Wiktionary agrees “perhaps”. I had no idea.
When did the New Yorker start allowing shit to soil its pages?
The WP aticle suggests that it be augmented by translating the corresponding German article. The latter appears under Narthex, from νάρθηξ, ‘giant fennel (Ferula communis); firebrand’. The path from one to the other is “nicht ganz klar”. Other terms for the structure are Vorhalle, Atrium, Paradies and Galiläa.
As to Galiläa itself, says that article, it comes from a procession which symbolized the apostles’ following Jesus to Galilee after the Resurrection (Mt 26:32), if I have it correctly. The Galilee is at one end of the church, which would be the destination of the procession.
Oh, goodness me, they’ve been allowing profanity for a long time now. See this 2012 LH celebration.
The putdown of Galilee in New Testament may be from intra-Jewish polemic, Galilee as putatively cruder than Judaea (though, later, the 24 mishmarot, priestly courses, moved here).
But why would medieval and later Christian architects think that and build on it?
On other late second-temple period intra-Jewish polemic, if interested:
“Others and Intra-Jewish Polemic as Reflected in Qumran Texts”
https://people.duke.edu/~goranson/Essenes_&_Others.pdf
The New Testament in multiple places treats Galilee contrastively with Jerusalem (or sometimes “Judaea”) and these medieval architects would have known that w/o necessarily thinking the contrast involved crudity rather than either peripherality or perhaps liminality (Galilee as halfway between Jerusalem and the wider Gentile world).
Maybe Galilee might could have represented to someone, somewhere, liminality, though my point was that medieval Christians would not necessarily have shared the late second temple period diss of Galilee as less educated and less ritually pure. Cathedral Galilee as less architecturally-sacred may or may not bolster that apologetic (in the sense of advocacy). I currently doubt it.
The NT reports such a stereotype of Galilee, without necessarily validating it.
‘Angie March’ … Have they, too, fired their proofreaders?
For whatever it’s worth, that error was made in the 1982 Supplement, when the entry was first created, then faithfully copied by the typists for the 1989 edition. Not that that excuses letting it pass in 2019.
If it cheers you up, here’s a typo the OED made in 1907, also faithfully copied in 1989, but corrected sometime after 2011: Demo-brained for Demi-brained.
@J.W. Brewer:
The author previously tells us that
This means the chapel in question is certainly the Ermita de Santa Maria de Pols. It has a little room to the south of the apse: you can see it from outside here, and you can see its door from the inside here. I might call it a sacristy, but even that seems a bit of an exaggeration. A Galilee it surely isn’t, if only because it’s inaccessible from the outside. Technically it also doesn’t overlook the foothills of the Pyrenees (which lie to its North beyond the chapel) but rather the Garrotxa volcanic field.
All in all, I’m wondering if the author is rather calling “galilee” some part of the house (masia) the swimming pool belongs to, which you can see here.
I haven’t visited enough English cathedrals to have immediate recognition of any architectural meaning of Galilee in English, but my experience as a tourist is that galilé is the ordinary (European) Portuguese word for what I’d call a narthex, or in Italian also a pronaos (but I suppose English doesn’t extend the applicability of the word to a Christian church).
gallery from galilee: All current dictionaries have this as at least a “perhaps”, and many without qualification, including French TLFI and Spanish RAE. Here’s TLFI’s etymology for galerie (which concurs with J.W. Brewer on Judaea vs. Galilee):
AHD’s etymology is oddly divergent: “from Old French, from Old North French galilee, galilee”. If galeria is attested in Medieval Latin, then I’d think it makes more sense to assume that the origin was there, especially considering it has descendants in several other Romance languages — no need for a detour in Old North French. This was a change in AHD3 from AHD1, which gave the standard route from French from Italian from Medieval Latin; I wonder if this was one of the production glitches that never got fixed.
enough English cathedrals to have immediate recognition of any architectural meaning of Galilee in English,
I recognized the term as applying for some Cathedrals (and Abbey churches, many of which are ruined), but was hard put to it to remember what feature. Durham Cathedral has one, and that description includes quite a bit of architectural detail plus a plan.
Fountains Abbey (ruins), North Yorkshire, has a “galilee or narthex” IIRC, the N.Yorks Abbeys were at first built with a galilee at West end to shelter the plebs, then that was built over as sponsorship allowed/the church got grander.
(Apologies for the lack of links, I’m travelling.)
medieval Christians would not necessarily have shared the late second temple period diss of Galilee as less educated and less ritually pure
JWB is quite right. Galilee is called “Galilee of the Heathens” in e.g. Matthew 4:15, picking up Isaiah, and Nathanael’s, “Can there any good thing come out of Nazareth?” at John 1:46 is obviously also dissing Galilee.
These are very familiar passages to Christians (especially as Christians traditionally interpret the Isaiah passages as prophecies of Jesus), and mediaeval Christians were surely able to see the point. Far from being an obscure point to Christians, this is practically a standard trope: “Hah! Didn’t see that coming, did you? Galilee (of all places!) Humble and riding on a donkey!”
gallery from galilee
Ah, the joy of LanguageHat. Made my day. Even if it’s not true.
@David Eddyshaw: I have bad news for you about popular understanding of the donkey element.
In addition to what AntC mentioned, some other English churches have galilees attached to the west front: Ely Cathedral, York Minster, Tintern Abbey, and more.
The Galilee porch of Lincoln Cathedral is on the west side of the south transept, as seen in this plan.
I think the author of the Wikipedia article was confused, maybe misled by the location of Galilee in Israel.
@Brett:
Yeah, I know. I only bunged that in to illustrate my point. Don’t get me started on the failures of my co-religionists to interpret their own canonical texts properly.
It occurs to me that the fact that the New Testament makes a big deal about the Galilean not actually having been born there, but in impeccably Judaean Bethlehem, may say something about even early Christian attitudes to Galilee, if you interpret it as a pious fiction. Admittedly, that is not an interpretation that would have commended itself to mediaeval Christians, however, so it has no bearing on the current question.
I think the author of the Wikipedia article was confused, maybe misled by the location of Galilee in Israel.
Who knows. My first reaction was: churches don’t even have a “north end”! And the text cited in the Wikipedia footnote says west, not north.
I just went in myself now and corrected the page to “west”, which was in fact there originally. Someone changed it to north last year.
The NT response to “Can there any good thing come out of Nazareth?” is not far to seek.
“And he came and dwelt in a city called Nazareth: that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophets, He shall be called a Nazarene.” The etymology is discussed in my Anchor Bible Dictionary article, “Nazarenes.”
The use of Galilee as an architectural term has been debated, in Notes & Queries and elsewhere, including proposals involving a Lady chapel, a place of procession beginnings or endings, and a stab at etymology, “circuit.” Me. I don’t know the architectural origin.
If you go with the convention that the “east end” of a medieval church is where the altar is, whether or not that matches up with the literal compass directions, a church of cruciform layout will have a “north end” of sorts at the end of the transept that’s to your left as you face the altar. Although that may not be what the wiki-editor meant, of course.
North-ender is (or was) Anglican slang for a Low Church/Evangelical person (not to be confused with the US heretics called “Evangelicals.”)
https://theoldhighchurchman.blogspot.com/2016/02/the-view-from-north-end.html
I have actually encountered this in the wild, but I don’t hang around with High Church Episcopalians enough to know if it’s still current.
It appears that public access to Lincoln Cathedral’s Galilee has been regrettably restricted after too many of the local down-and-out treated it as if it were a public park in San Francisco. https://lincolncathedral.com/latest-news/galilee-porch/
Coming from SF, it took me a second to realize that you’re referring to the stereotype, not necessarily the actual city. Yes, there are people sleeping in some parks there, as in many other expensive cities. Last I saw, it was maybe 10th among American cities in the homelessness rate, with many others not far behind.
Fun is fun, but SF has been taking the brunt of these kind of comments for very much the wrong reasons, for a long time.
(And now, back to our regularly scheduled program.)
in Spain in religious processions those dressed in the costumes nowadays we associate with the KuKluxKlan are called nazerenos. Aren’t they penitents?
what I’d call a narthex, or in Italian also a pronaos (but I suppose English doesn’t extend the applicability of the word to a Christian church).
Of which word? “Narthex” is certainly used by Anglicans. “Pronaos” I’ve never heard.
Narthex is common enough that it sees a certain amount of extended usage, denoting similar areas in buildings other than cruciform churches. Pronaos is so much rarer that if I encountered it without a great deal of context, I would probably have to look it up to remember what it meant.
I was never quite sure how the extended
meaning “vice president of the Harvard Lampoon” worked
The vice president of the Havard Lampoon is a narthex?
(The vice president of the US is a scolex, so I can see how that might work.)
@Y I was referring more specifically to San Francisco’s worldwide fame for public defecation. https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/poop-sf-city-street-19964427.php
That’s what I meant exactly. Every city with people living on the streets will have public poop. The reputation of San Francisco in that regard has been created and amplified to show What Happens When the Liberals Get Their Way, by conservatives without and within (including the SF Chronicle and commentators on SF in the New York Times). Despite the stereotype, SF has not had a progressive mayor since 1992, and every mayor since has won by running on a platform of fixing homelessness through extra cruelty (which it never did), plus laissez-faire economic policy which has made matters worse.
Yeah, it’s a sore point. Always, and a bit extra now.
A useful corrective, and I thank you for providing it. Even when one is well aware of the deficiencies of the official/conservative media, it’s difficult to look beyond the veil without knowledgeable reporting/correction.
I will note for further reference Y’s perspective and try not to bring such topics up gratuitously. The problem in Lincoln may require some different analysis since AFAIK Lincolnshire is not a place where economic inequality has recently been exacerbated by bajillionaire techbros glomming onto scarce housing stock.
The problem in Lincoln may require some different analysis
Happy to help:
It is conceivable that the situation with homelessness in Lincoln is in some way related to the kneecapping of local government funding by the Conservative Party in the years after 2015. The UK system of taxation is almost uniquely centralised:
https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/explainer/local-government-funding-england
The situation is exacerbated by the fact that most local government spending is legally mandated (for example, on social care, schools and children’s services.) This greatly limits the ability of local councils to respond to even serious additional problems: the pot left over for so-called “discretionary” spending is small to non-existent. The Tory government acted to make this aspect of the matter worse (POSIWIG.)
The absence of local state-provided rentable housing and inability of local governmrnts to provide decent accommodation at sufficient scale even if they wish to is directly due to Margaret Thatcher’s inspired “right to buy” policy, which was a political masterstroke on her part. In fairness, it did involve selling off state assets at unrealistically low prices to private individuals, rather than the preferred technique of selling off undervalued state assets to large corporate monopolies.
@Rodger C:
That’s indeed what I meant. As far as I can tell, in English a church has a narthex while only a classical temple has a pronaos.
In Italian, I don’t know what terminology architects and art historians would use, but the Treccani dictionary bears out my impression that for the non-specialist early churches have a nartece, but a similar (and typically quite neoclassical) structure in a more modern church is a pronao.
It seems telling that the Firefox spell-checker knows neither narthex nor pronaos as English words, but conversely knows both nartece and pronao as Italian ones.
POSIWID, not POSIWiG. I may need to give my Boy Scout Badge in Cybernetics back. (I recently encountered the slogan in Welsh – took me an embarrassingly long time to recognise it …)
I was on “Pattern one sees is what I get”, but the approach didn’t look promising.
GP: “narthex” strikes me as a perfectly usual American English word but I suspect it may well be ecclesiastically factional in usage, with the label being used for churches w/ particular denominational affiliations but not for architecturally-identical churches with other affiliations. I am not familiar with the purported Harvard Lampoon usage, but there’s no accounting for those zany Cantabrigians.
@David Eddyshaw, J.W. Brewer: Down Mass Ave, the officers of the MIT Science Fiction Society are the Skinner, Lord High Embezzler, and Onseck. However, the reasons for those names are (if not well known) fully documented.
@Brett: Reasons for names? That’s the Etymological Fallacy! Names are names because conventionally treated as such (i.e. carrying a particular signifer/signified association), and only total weirdos would get hung up on the contingent causal pathways leading to that conventional treatment. Whether total weirdos are overweighted in the membership of the student society to which Brett refers is not something I have personal knowledge of and it might be ungentlemanly to speculate.
@JF:
“The purpose of the system is what it does.” It’s meant as an analytical heuristic rather than a timeless truth (counterexamples are easy to find in this sad sublunar sphere of people who have no bloody idea what they’re doing.)
The idea is that if an established and actively maintained system consistently produces outcomes at variance with its ostensible purpose, it’s worth looking further into the mismatch.
EDIT: I see it actually has a WP page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does
I came across it first in reading economics blogs, which I do because I’m a sad boring person.
I should separately ask Brett whether, as yet, a young lady has been selected to hold the Lxxx High Embezzler office and if so whether the title of the office was modified vel non.
@David E.: Your embarrassing self-disclosure is admirable yet socially awkward. Surely everyone knows that the Socially Superior sort of people confine themselves to reading linguistics blogs?
Separately, the POSIWID perspective can be used in two different ways. First, to say-without-saying that “purpose” (in the sense of conscious and allegedly benevolent subjective intent) is not actually all that relevant a thing in evaluating whether a system is good or bad. Second, to magically reveal the hidden True Motives of various Shadowy Figures which turn out (spoiler!) to be inconsistent with their benevolent professed motives. The second usage is obviously the more tendentious one, and the one most likely to encounter contrary evidence in the aforementioned sublunar world.
Although maybe true wisdom requires a higher level of analysis. It may often be the case that a system is pretty obviously trying to achieve arguably plausible goal X but without taking any meaningful care to avoid causing negative side effect Y. Saying that “Y is the purpose” of the system is dubious and tendentious, whereas saying “X without any concern about the risk of Y is the purpose” may be fair and an actually useful perspective, albeit one perhaps too nuanced to achieve virality on social media.
I gather that POSIWID actually is quite useful in the systems-theory domain that it originated in; I entirely agree that when it is unmoored from this and hijacked as a political concept, certain severe limitations rapidly become apparent.
@David Eddyshaw: You yourself pointed out that Saint Ludwig said something quite similar (although he got that idea, in turn, from Husserl).
@J.W. Brewer: MITSFS has had female treasurers, but I don’t recall how their other title was construed. Next door, the head of layout and production at The Tech was the man[aging editor]. When the future mother of my children was elected to that position, it had been sufficiently long since another woman had held it that no one was quite sure of the proper term of address for her.
Perhaps I’m too close to the subject, but Paumgarten’s piece left me completely unmoved. It read like he strung together all the quotes in his notebook and his editor let him leave it that way.
“Babsi studied at the Lorenz Center hand-rearing greylag geese. ‘I came across the bald ibis when they visited me there in the woods with my goose family,’ she said. It was her second year as a foster mother.”
What? Did his tape recorder run out of batteries just then? Why are foster mothers needed? What is their role? Why do the foster moms “chatter” and “sing” to the birds, rather than playing ibis calls over a speaker (as is done in other successful projects)? Why doesn’t Fritz just wear yellow himself? It’s like Paumgarten just sat in the film camp eating sausage for three weeks, inadvertently gleaned eleven facts about the project and then filed his story.
Is the project really as whimsical as Paumgarten’s article? Or is that just Paumgarten’s best genre?
Oh, and the project with whooping cranes that Paumgartner writes off with three words, it “didn’t really take”? Operation Migration lasted more than a decade and established the core of today’s eastern migrating flock.
OM’s idea wasn’t “that humans could imprint behaviors on animals that they would pass down to subsequent generations” (and I wonder about the implication that that is Fritz’s goal.) Instead, OM tried to mimic as much as it could of crane parental behavior so that it could impart one single thing – not a behavior, but the map of the route along which that instinctive behavior would play out.
Eventually, the biologists in charge realized they could as easily leave first-year whoopers to learn from sandhill crane migrants without risk of misimprinting and at lower cost, and arguably with greater likelihood of learning a host of other life-skills. The flock is now bolstered by new sandhill-led migrants but it wouldn’t exist without Operation Migration’s herculean effort.
Before Operation Migration got involved, there were decades of conservation biologists trying to teach whooping cranes other behaviors, most notably their famous leaping mating dance. Besides this being a behavior that human-reared chicks would need in the wild, there was some belief that artificially inseminated females would be more likely to lay fertile eggs if they participated in mating dances beforehand.
Perhaps I’m too close to the subject
I’m afraid so. This is the inevitable result of knowing too much about a subject — you get disgusted with journalistic coverage. (See the entire history of LH with regard to language stories in the press.) The thing is that it’s impossible for a reporter to get everything right about some specialized field they’re covering; they’re bound to make lots of little mistakes and probably a howler or two. It’s not their fault and there’s not much point blaming them (though of course we do); they parachute in and do the best they can. But if they write well, like Paumgarten and so many New Yorker writers, they get the reader interested enough in the subject to investigate further and learn more. The alternative is not that the readers would get better information from specialists to begin with, it’s that they wouldn’t know anything about it. I hope this is some consolation!
I concede your general point, but I’m going to push back a little. I’m too close not merely for being interested in the subject, but as someone who has written nature for a popular audience. I’m certainly not the writer that Paumgarten is. And, it’s possible my editor simply didn’t understand her audience. But I don’t think so. I think there was a way to get more substance into this story.
So I maybe I should say it wasn’t a good article. It was a pretty good article about some quixotic people. I’d have liked a McPhee piece where the personalities pulled people into a genuine understanding of the topic.
And I stand by the idea that some of the quotes are dropped without enough context or buildup even to make the quote come alive, and that I think it results from spending too much time with the film crew and not enough with the people running the project. As a result, he didn’t have enough color nor enough understanding. It reads like he was brought in by the PR people of one of the film houses.
Oy, that was supposed to read “maybe I shouldn’t say it wasn’t a good article”. I’m the one who needs a good editor.
This fame seems universal in the US now, but doesn’t seem to have spread elsewhere at all. I’d have no idea of it if I weren’t reading altogether too much about US politics.
reading altogether too much about US politics
“My desire to be well informed is currently conflicting with my desire to remain sane.”
@David Marjanović: Rumors of feces smeared across the streets of San Francisco are hardly universally known, even in America. The news and media ecosphere are more fractured than you could ever have imagined even fifteen years ago.
Conspiracies abound, but many of them are utterly unknown outside small (sometimes absolutely tiny) sub-populations. I texted this to my best friend earlier this afternoon:
I live in San Francisco too. I fully agree with Y that there’s a lot of nonsense on this subject in the media, both local and national. Particularly galling is that pattern of blaming “ultra-liberal San Francisco”, then electing yet another mayor promising to punish the homeless into not being homeless, then blaming “progressives” when cruelty yet again fails to solve the problem.
But I regularly step over human poop on the sidewalks when getting around in this city. That’s not something I saw in other cities I’ve lived in, or that I see in other cities I visit. (Sometimes dog poop, yes; the human stuff is bigger, and it smells different.) I think the problem here really isn’t just the norm for all expensive cities.
Here’s a report with a handy table of homelessness rates by city, in the US, from the annual count made in 2022:
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/homelessness-in-us-cities-and-downtowns/
It shows San Francisco at the top, with around 30% more people homeless per capita than NYC in second place.
More to the point for poop on the sidewalk: SF is also at the top in *unsheltered* homelessness. That rate is far lower in NYC, Boston, and DC. The top 6 are all in California, several of them close neighbors of SF; the next two are Portland and Seattle.
So SF really does have more people living (and pooping) on the streets than other US cities, even expensive ones. The diagnosis in the media may be terrible, and the flogged solutions the same ones that have failed for decades, but the problem is real and really is worse than elsewhere.
Thanks for another insider perspective. It’s a difficult problem. (It shouldn’t be — just house people! — but in our political climate…)
Thanks, Greg. The numbers you have are more recent than ones I had looked at. I think that perhaps the neighborhoods I spend time in are more peripheral and have a smaller population of people living on the street, so I notice it less. I honestly don’t think I encounter a poopy sidewalk more than once a month or so at most.
Sheltering works, especially if the shelters are in fact better than living in a tent on the sidewalk. I wonder if east coast cities finally built shelters because they have hard winters, and frozen bodies are extra unappealing to visitors.
Yes, sorry, it was too late in the evening. Now it’s even later, so I can say what’s widespread in the US is the idea that SF is overrun with homeless people…
Etymological note: The Onseck’s title is a borrowing from (Old North) Australian. In the Ancient British orthography it was “Hon. Sec.”
(The only distantly related Baker Street Irregulars have just two officers, the Gasogene and the Tantalus.)
It’s funny (although not really coincidental) that I had two occasions to mention the Onseck here in a single week.