Accepting Madame la ministre.

Sapristi!

I still haven’t got used to actresses being called actors. Been out of the country too long, I guess. Of course “actress” is discriminatory, because it tends to (although does not necessarily) suggest eye candy. But eliminating all distinctions between the sexes in language doesn’t, it seems to me, eliminate the problem… The masses (that’s us) glamourise their stars for whatever reason and pretending they like them only because they are technically very good ‘actors’ looks like another kind of reality slip.

Incidentally, one of the ‘actors’ I have always disliked most was Meryl Streep, not because she’s unattractive (which she is) but because she always looks like Meryl Streep trying, and failing, to be someone else.

@Y: The OED citations for poetess are rather interesting. There are some straight uses, but there are also a number of instances of women objecting to the term, from Henrietta Knight back in 1748 up through Maya Angelou in 1993. There are also a couple references to Sappho specifically (e.g. “Among the ancients Sappho enjoyed a unique renown. She was called ‘the poetess’, as Homer was called ‘the poet’”). Several other citations seem to be intentionally ironic. The most recent citation that does not seem to be using the term self consciously is from Benjamin Franklin in 1773.

The only place I have ever seen “poetess” in actual use was on the television sitcom Cheers, where it was Diane’s absurdly affected way of referring to herself, using a word that does not seem to have been “in good standing” since early Modern English.

I of course don’t have a French linguistic sensibility but I think [ekʁiven] is a rather nice-sounding word.

Gender-neutral “actor” is not recent. OED has … from 1980, … from 1966.

Eh? “not recent” I expect to be followed by an example from Shakespeare or at latest Jane Austen. Anything well within my lifetime like that clearly is — precisely — ‘recent’.

(I’m not objecting to it; I have to admit to needing a double-take for female actor; but I’m sure I’ll get over that.)

How does it go with acteur/actrice? To my BrE ears, the latter sounds awful. Are there still aviatrixes/-trices?

Not recent, as in not belonging to the present-day drive for gender-neutrality. Second-wave vs. fourth-wave feminism.

I think there’s a legible argument that within-language consistency on gender is desirable – e.g. disfavoring gendered professional nouns in English because they’re anomalies in our largely genderless nominal system, while also disfavoring masculine professional nouns for women because they’re anomalies in the “semi-biological” gender system of French.

On actor/actress, I don’t have really strong feelings, although actress is the one that I natively use. My impression has been that female actor seems largely confined to showbiz people themselves, giving it a similar “industry vibe” to something like the anarthrous agency names used by Beltway folk.

And I do wonder if a too-hard push to ax actress might imperil gendered acting award categories – which, on the one hand, do seem a bit unegalitarian (there’s no Oscar for best female editor), but which, on the other hand, I don’t think many people would really want to see abolished.

Anyway, Pepys (1666): “Doll Common doing Abigail most excellently, and Knipp the Widow very well (and will be an excellent actor I think).” But “Doll Common”, aka Katherine Corey, wrote of herself that she “was the first and is the last of all the actresses that were constituted by King Charles the Second at His Restauration.”

OED expounds: “Women did not appear on stage in public in England until after the Restoration of 1660, following which the terms actor and actress were both used to describe female performers. Later, actor was often restricted to men, with actress as the usual term for women. Although actress remains in general use, actor is increasingly preferred for performers of both sexes as a gender-neutral term.”

Last week I had the pleasure of hearing a member of the Accademia della Crusca speak to a group of Italian literary translators about changes underway in the language, and one of the first things he did was to present everyone with a series of recommended female forms of traditionally male professions (l’avvocata, la presidente, la sindaca, etc.). It’s amazing how quickly they start sounding normal once they’re used in the press; just ten years ago everyone made fun of “sindaca” and now it’s pretty much standard, because of the mayors of Rome and Turin. I do wish they’d do something about “medico,” though: “medica” remains unusable except in the privacy of one’s own home (which he admitted to doing, but he’s a member of the Crusca and can get away with more than the average person, let alone the average foreigner). Even after twenty years of using Italian as my everyday language, I continue to find the workaround with “dottoressa” uncomfortable, and I hear native speakers fumble with it sometimes, too.
Weirdly, to my mind, he saw no reason to use “la poeta” as opposed to “la poetessa,” even though he recommended “la pilota”; he saw “poetessa” as being like “studentessa,” a form so well established in the language that it isn’t marked anymore. About half the women poets I know find “poetessa” condescending (it’s not as marked as “poetess” in English, but still has a nuance of that) and the other half find “la poeta” too ideological, so I’m never sure what to do.

But there are 63 genders out there – someone certainly will be left out!

I don’t think I’ve heard “coed” for at least forty years. Even in my grad school days it was a geezer-professor word.

My somewhat curmudgeonly view is that for both actor and gods gender is what is technically called in the U.S. a “bona fide occupational qualification” (more usually BFOQ), notwithstanding Shakespearean boys, Sarah Bernhardt’s Hamlet, and Robin Williams’s Mrs. Doubtfire. So I will stick with actress and goddess. Hell, the Greco-Roman god of love is not even the same person as the goddess of love, though he is said to be her son or something.

(Y’know, looking at “Robin Williams’s Mrs. Doubtfire”, it occurs to me that if you didn’t know who Robin Williams was, you’d certainly assume from that phrase in isolation that an actress is meant.)

Gallic names ending with *rix are female.

Fortunately or unfortunately, the word for ‘queen’ in Gaulish is attested: it’s rigani. It’s unclear whether this is an Italo-Celtic innovation (Latin regina), or whether just possibly it’s the IE word and rex, rix are back-formations.

I remember finding “actor” odd for women, but now I’m completely used to it

Actor is a word which can be used to describe anything and everything – even mathematical abstractions.

ideological stubbornness

Stubbornness in my case, certainly, but not ideological. I don’t peeve when others use it, but I just prefer my old mumpsimus, as you yourself have said about various half a dozen times on this blog. Particularly since actress is not actually an error, unlike mumpsimus.

I suppose this makes me like one of those old farts who still say colored people because that was the polite expression in their youth.

“I still haven’t got used to actresses being called actors.”

Because what they are doing is called acting. Or do you propose we need “actressing”?

What should we call a male “seamstress”? A sewman…a sewer….or worse

What should we call a male “seamstress”?

A seamster. Actually this one seems like a very good candidate for de-gendering, so I think I’d prefer to call them both that.

Also, one case that’s always puzzled me is fisherman: if German makes do just fine with Fischer, and English as well with weaver, baker and the like, then why is the -man there at all?

“And Jesus, walking by the sea of Galilee, saw two brethren, Simon called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea: for they were fishers. And he saith unto them, Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.”

The OED says fisher is now archaic; the last non-poetic citation it has is 1758. It is still current as the name of Pekania pennanti, a kind of weasel native to North America. By contrast, the Big Dict first finds fisherman in the Tyndale Bible.

Both terms are sometimes used for fishing boats rather than their occupants, and Henry David Thoreau uses fisher for a boat in 1862. The only citation for this sense the OED has.

This discussion forces you to consider why you feel compelled to mention somebody’s sex, even when there’s no real reason to. Without the pressure of a deadline, and with 20 more years experience in dealing with issues like this, one wonders why one would use the headline in the MIT Tech story to focus it on the sex or affiliation of the student at all. They’re both mentioned in the lede anyway. The fraternity was in trouble for allowing underage drinking, not for allowing a BU woman into the dorm. From the headline, I’m set up to think that the problem that night in the frat house stemmed from the facts that the person drinking was (1) a BU student, (2) a young women, and, therefore — what? ditzy? — I might have written the same headline then as well, but “Minor Hospitalized After Drinking at Frat” would have been stronger. (What would the headline have said if the BU student had been male? “Terrier Hospitalized”? — That would have gotten my attention.)

— I think “coed dorm” is still used now and then, with a completely altered meaning from what would have been understood fifty or sixty years ago — “a dorm for both sexes” rather than “a dorm for women.” — Sort of like the evolution of the word “kern,” from a time when, because of the technology involved, adjusting the size of the kern could only mean to increase it, to the present, when it can be adjusted either way. —

There are several women who are professional actors living in my building. They call themselves actors, emphasizing their profession and their craft, not their sex. It goes without saying that their sex is a factor in what roles they get, but they get accepted or turned down for roles because of their physical attributes all the time — height or weight or hair color or tone of voice. Those other physical attributes do not define their craft, and neither does their sex. We don’t feel the need to have a single word meaning “tall-actor” or “fat-actor” or “brunette-actor” — why do we need the word actress? What are we implying when we think we need it? — I grew up using the word actress without a second thought, and it sounded funny the first time I used the word actor referring to a woman, but again, just as once one thought one needed to call people “coeds,” and it turned out one does not — what’s important is that they’re students, not women-students — it turns out you don’t need the word “actress” either.

I’ve not had a conversation with any goddesses, and can’t report on their opinions on the issue.

Latinx is another interesting phenomenon, but that’s enough for now.

I know co-ed only in the meaning of “having students of both genders”, so I’m quite confused what “a coed” is supposed to refer to. A student with two genders? Any student?

In Sweden most occupations use the male form, and it’s considered gender neutral. For example, the speaker of the parliament is “talmannen”, even if the speaker is a woman. (Similar to how actor is considered suitable for actors/actresses of any gender, while actress is only used for women.) In a few instances the male form and the female form refers to different occupations: en sjuksköterska is a licensed nurse with a bachelor’s degree, while en sjukskötare is a nurse without license and degree. In Finland, on the other hand, “sjukskötare” is a licensed nurse with a bachelor’s degree. That’s confusing! Another example is “kassörska” and “kassör”. Kassörska is a cashier, for example in a supermarket, but kassör is a treasurer, usually in a non-profit organization. For male cashiers people prefer to use another word, such as kassapersonal, but kassör is used for men and women alike.

As mentioned above, in Germany the opposite method is prefered. An author writes for the male readers and the female readers (Leser und Leserinnen), and the university welcomes the male students and the female students (Studenten und Studentinnen). If only the male version is used, the female half of the population feel ignored.

I’m not sure what to think. From an ideological standpoint, it’s quite sexist to consider the male forms (actor, talman) to be gender neutral, on the other hand it feels quite cumbersome to come up with new words for every occupation that has a male or female ending. If we follow the German example we then exclude gender neutral people.

@Lazar
Thanks for explaining!

“Nurse” is another curly one. Nursing used to be a completely feminine profession (thanks, Florence), so that “nurse” came to be understood as referring exclusively to women. When men started doing it people felt the need to differentiate them as “male nurses”. And I don’t think this one has gone away. And yes, it’s sexist.

One other oddity in English is that some terms like mayoress and ambassadress used to refer to the wife of the (always male) office holder.

True – on reflection I’d guess that they probably did that in a lot of languages.

That was standard in 19th century Russian as well – generalsha (general’s wife), gubernatorsha (governor’s wife).

Female generals and governors in modern Russian are referred to in male form – gubernator Valentina Matvienko, general armii Tatiana Shevtsova.

During War of Austrian Succession, Maria Theresa appealed to the Hungarian nobility for help and twenty thousand Hungarian knights shouted “Moriamur pro rege nostro Maria Theresia” (We shall die for our king Maria Theresa).

Apparently Hungarian Constitution lacked provisions for a reigning queen, so head of state in the kingdom always had to be king – regardless of actual gender.

I know co-ed only in the meaning of “having students of both genders”, so I’m quite confused what “a coed” is supposed to refer to. A student with two genders? Any student?

Historically in the U.S., co-education referred mostly to the admission of women to formerly all-male tertiary institutions, and only rarely to the reverse, which historically came much later. A coed therefore was a term for such a woman student. The AHD says it “carries a connotation of frivolity” and is therefore discouraged nowadays. The few dozen surviving all-female colleges are now beginning to admit men on economic grounds — they can’t survive on just half the population, and fewer and fewer women are interested in attending male-free institutions. Others have broadened their mission from the education of women to the education of other gender-disadvantaged minorities, including transwomen, non-binaries, and even transmen.

A New York magazine called The Independent (1848-1928) printed a telling remark about the word as long ago as 1903 that is quoted by the OED: “Any college where the girls are commonly called ‘co-eds’ is not a truly co-educational institution.”

Zahnarztin

Zahnärztin

la dentista

There’s a dental practice in Berlin with that name, see la-dentista de. The RAE says

# 1. m. y f. Especialista en odontología. #

‘That’s not an oddity – it happened a lot in German well into the 20th century.’

And in French too.

Very sexist — wives judged on the status of their husbands. But perhaps a social reality.

Exactly.

duke of Lancaster and anywhere else

Also Lord of Mann.

David M.: That’s not an oddity – it happened a lot in German well into the 20th century.

Kate Bunting: And in French too.

When my wife’s paternal grandmother (b. around 1910) sent Christmas cards and other post to her son’s family, she adressed it formally to her daughter-in-law:

Fru arkitekt [Husband’s full name]
[Address]
[Postal code] [City]

If she had lived only a few years longer, she would have continued that tradition into the 21st century. And as the use of postal code shows, it’s not like she wasn’t able to adapt to new ways.

By the way, it’s really strange to see a few actual Algonquian place names next to the rest of Massachusetts place names coming straight from Old England.

That is exactly what Australian place names are like. Lots of good old English names right next to names derived from indigenous languages. It does vary from area to area, though.

a few actual Algonquian place names

Including of course the name of the state. But in Wikipedia’s list of the 351 municipalities, I see only Acushnet, Agawam, Aquinnah, Chicopee, Cohasset, Mashpee, Mattapoisett, Merrimac, Saugus, Scituate, Seekonk jumping out at me as native (I might have missed some). There are some others of non-English origin, like Carlisle, Florida, Lenox, Methuen, Orleans, Salem, Peru, Rehoboth. The name Dracut looked distinctly odd, but it turns out to be a misspelling of Dreycott (as Lenox is a misspelling of Scottish Lennox).

Carlisle being Gælic, if that’s what you mean, but it’s in England and so English. Draycott Avenue is a well-known (to me) street in Chelsea.

The OED lists only two examples of -istess words: artistess (1770, 1924, 1980), and the ever-popular casuistess (1865).

1924, W. R. Smith, In Southern Seas, xiv. 167: “We do not see why a woman should be called an authoress, or a poetess, or an artistess (unless it is that the grammars were all written by men).”

I don’t think I have ever heard anyone use “co-ed” in a serious sense in my lifetime, but one example is in the song “The Sweetheart of Sigma Chi”:
Each sweet coed, like a rainbow trail
Fades in the afterglow.

Composed in 1911, Top Ten hit in 1927.

I think it peaked in the 1970s. That’s where I remember it from — yeah, 40 years ago. The uptick after 2000 could be caused by the use of “co-ed” in the sense of “co-educational institution” rather than “female student”.

A few supplements to John Cowan’s list, above, of Native American town names in Massachusetts: Nahant, Natick, and Swampscott.

I suspect several commenters here of being bags of worms.

Finally, a note on coed colleges (in America, “universities” is a subset of colleges). Until the late 1960s, many if the best American colleges admitted only men to their undergraduate programs. One if my father’s friends (and eventually, one of my own academic siblings, meaning we had the same Ph.D. advisor; and although our advisor, Roman Jackiw, was in physics, we were both applied mathematics students), a man named “Andrea,” initially had his application rejected by Princeton, since they thought he was a woman. Many of the men’s colleges had female equivalents, like Harvard and Radcliffe*.

MIT, in contrast, had always admitted women. However, while the Ivy League schools had been inundated with female applicants as soon as they were allowed, MIT remainef male dominated much longer. My own graduating class (1999) was the first that was over 40% female. At that time, all if the historically male dorms also housed women, although there were a few floors/entries/sections that we’re still all male. My own floor (second east) was the last in the East Campus dorms to house women, starting my freshman year.

In contrast, McCormick, the all-female dorm, which originally housed all the female undergtads (after the previous Back Bay brownstone had become too small), will probably remain all women forever. There was also an all-female graduate student dorm when I was there, but it was so small as to be meaningless, since it was just the former campus infirmary. Graduate student dorms are weird anyway. The largest one at MIT was for first-year grad students only; after that, they were expected to find housing off campus.**

* When I was working at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, I had to walk back and forth from Harvard Square on the way to and from work, since I was commuting by bus from Sullivan Square in Charlestown, when I lived. This meant walking past the Radcliffe Institute (the only surviving form of Radcliffe, which had finally been eliminated as a fictitiously independent college a few years earlier), which was situated in a quad along the way. One day, I saw a group of three women, including future Harvard president Drew Faust, come out of the gate of the Institute. One of the women was a very elderly visiting scholar, and as they turned onto the sidewalk, the wind caught a handkerchief she had been carrying and blew out of her purse without her noticing. I rushed to pick it up and then caught up with her and returned it. What followed was a brief but hillarious discussion of how we had just replayed a scene from a chivilric romance.

** Continuing to tell my weird personal stories, that grad dorm has a strange emotional valance for me. I only set foot inside it once, at the end of the going-away party for the closest friend I made I my first year of graduate school. As things were winding down, she asked me up to her room, knowing full well that I would almost certainly decline, since I was already engaged to my wife. And I did, of course, say no. Still, I feel bad that she dropped out of graduate school, which she probably would not have done if I had been available. Her other closest friend (female) dropped out if the program after another year, which was also sad.

bags of worms

Bags of water, rather.

Parramatta and Toongabbie are actually local names, while Girraween (place of flowers) is from somewhere in northern New South Wales, one of those words that featured in a popular publication and was then used as a generic “Aboriginal name” in quite a few places.

If I’m not it Parramatta or Girraween, I’m probably in between in Pendle Hill, a name whose interesting story belongs in cotton-milling Lancashire. Nearby Wentworthville and Seven Hills give a feel for names of more recent origin.

UGLY BAGS OF MOSTLY WATER!

Looking that up led from the crystalline life form to the amorphous-silicon life form, the Horta (one of whose children features in Diane Duane’s excellent Rihannsu Treknovels as a Starfleet officer, with a communicator/translator strapped to his back and his rank-stripes painted on him), to HORTA, a Real World inertial navigation system used in mines (where GPS is useless) to provide location information for vehicles and devices such as drills.

Checked Smith College. Not very impressed frankly, don’t see what’s so special about them to still keep the boys out.

However, I am very glad to discover neighboring Northhampton High School – it’s Technology Department is simply unbelievable.

How can a bunch of high school students produce so much professional quality television?

I suddenly noticed that America has both a Smith college and a Brown college. It turns out that each of the ten most common surnames in America*:
1. Smith
2. Johnson
3. Williams
4. Jones
5. Brown
6. Davis
7. Miller
8. Wilson
9. Moore
10. Taylor
has a college-slash and or-university named for it. A couple are fake-sounding (to me) theological colleges. Even so, I’m sure there are all sorts of conclusions waiting to be drawn.

*OK, even if they aren’t the commonist (not too many languages besides English & Spanish in this list) they’re probably fairly common.

HORTA, a Real World inertial navigation system used in mines (where GPS is useless) to provide location information for vehicles and devices such as drills

I have no words.

For what it’s worth, I pronounce North & South hamptons just like I do with-hold.

“You’re calling him John?? Every Tom, Dick, and Harry is named John!”

“Waitron” always strikes me as unacceptable because it’s obviously not epicene but neuter. Trouble is, kids these days don’t do Greek.

Come to think of it “actron” has something of a ring to it, though. I’m sure Tom Cruise is an actron.

Étienne mentioned this earlier but it is both interesting and amusing to hear about these goings-on at the Académie from the perspective of Canadian French where “Madame la Ministre” and feminine titles like “écrivaine”, “professeure” and indeed “Gouverneure générale du Canada” have been the norm for quite some time now.

OK — BU Teen Hospitalized After Drinking at Frat

This leaves BU in the headline. I’m still not convinced that the person’s school is so essential that it needs to be put in the headline, but even though I’ve never been affiliated with any of the many institutions of higher learning in the Greater Boston area, I know how much people identify with their school, and that they have various firm opinions about rival ones — though the idea that a BU man would never drink in an MIT frat is new to me — so I can see how an MIT school newspaper editor might want to make it clear right off the top that the person who drank too much was from BU. — But the example here had to do with gender and language, and how hard it is to fight with language in dealing with it — even to the level of being an editor with a deadline fighting with point-size —

Separately — American (and other Anglophone?) actors, restaurant servers, and flight attendants are dealing with issues of gender by finding gender-neutral vocabulary. That’s a much heavier lift in German or French, so women there seem to be emphasizing gender distinctions to emphasize parity. Is there a clearer example of how the structures of languages can lead to different strategies to achieve a common social goal?

And — does it make a difference in game-play if it’s an evil demigod rather than a demigoddess who comes to your aid?

// When I was very small — four? five? — I got to visit my much older cousin at her college. When we got to her women’s dorm, my mother and aunt went upstairs to her floor, but I had to wait in the vestibule because males were not allowed inside. I would not remember the visit except for that. “Boy Waits Bored in Co-Ed Dorm Lobby” would have been the headline in the school paper the next day.

> A salient enough detail — probably salient, but the frat was getting into trouble because of her age, not her sex. In the headline it might have been better to stress what led to that issue being discussed in the narrative of the article. If the article had stressed the culture of getting women drunk, and if the MIT administration had been more concerned about that particular issue, then “Woman Hospitalized” would be appropriate.

Maybe taking what the authorities said at face value the drunk BU chick’s sex was irrelevant (I think “chick” is less archaic than “coed” but YMMV and frankly I’ve been away from undergraduate culture long enough that my native-speaker intuitions may not be useful), but if you really take what authorities say at face value, you probably shouldn’t be doing journalism, even engineering-school student journalism. But this is a difference of perspective, and who’s to say who’s right? That is, to try to shift the discussion back towards linguistics, one of the recurrent problems here. Even if we were to have a new social norm that language should not specify or otherwise implicitly call attention to a person’s sex (or gender, or what have you) unless it’s specifically relevant/salient to the situation being discussed, it turns out that we will not always have consensus on when it is or isn’t relevant/salient. And we are maybe from lack of charity sometimes more likely to think the other person in the discussion is gratuitously violating that norm than we are to think that we and the other person just have differing empirical judgments about the salience/relevance question that the norm is supposed to explicitly take into account.

One further point. Headlinese, not least because of the recurrent need (at least in the old hard-copy days) for super-short words that would not be used in other prose genres, often ends up being in an informal register. Sometimes an informal register is just informal; other times, especially in politically-loaded contexts, an informal tone may be interpreted by some as a disrespectful tone.

I never knew Donald Duck had a middle name.

@J.W. Brewer: With regard to the question of believing what we are told by figures in authority, there was another ongoing problem at MIT at the time that issue came out. In fact, in the issue I posted, there was an editorial about the suvject. Rereading the editorial now, I can still determine pretty easily which parts I wrote and which were written, in what I thought was a rather mealy-mouthed tone, by the editor-in-chief and opinion editor.

As noted in the 1A story, erlier that year, a pledge had died at Phi Gamma Delta. They apparently watched Animal House, and then each pledge had been encouraged to chug a whole fifth of spiced rum. I was also the news editor on duty the night he died, and I remember we stayed late, holding the issue until we knew whether or not he would make it through the night.

This death naturally brought the Boston and Cambridge authorities down on MIT, and the fraternity system in particular (I refuse to call it the “Greek system,” out of respect for the actual Greek people), like a ton of bricks. Honestly, this was needed, as the alcohol in the system was totally out of control. One of The Tech‘s reporters got the former president of the Interfraternity Council on the record, saying that expecting to have a fraternity system “not based on alcohol” was simply unrealistic. Previously, the frats were more worried about being penalized by the IFC for serving alcohol to freshmen during Rush Week than they were about serving minors being illegal.

When suddenly there were lots of law enforcement actions at the MIT frats, another simmering issue with the campus police came to the fore. The campus police were supposed to publish yearly crime statistics, according to federal law. However, they claimed that the fraternities were not legally “on campus,” which was false. That on its own might have been a genuine (albeit self-serving) mistake. However, the campus police also routinely claimed that various crimes (including, the previous year, a shooting) just happened to occur on sections of sidewalk that were owned by MIT but not technically “on campus.” Again, this was not consistent with the definition they were supposed to use.

This was in the background as we were reporting on further alcohol incidents at the frats. It did not so much affect the headlines, but we at The Tech were making sure to get certain facts published, to see how the campus police would respond. So our articles at this point served a secondary purpose of helping to pressure the Institute to provide accurate on-campus crime stats.

each pledge had been encouraged to chug a whole fifth of spiced rum

750 ml of 35% alcohol?

Drinking this over several hours with healthy amounts of food should have been perfectly safe.

But I guess these youngsters had no idea how to drink safely.

But I guess these youngsters had no idea how to drink safely.

There’s no way to tell. The whole idea of the ritual was to drink unsafely on a dare: “chug” means “drink nonstop”.

Henry Samuel reports

The real news here is that the dictionary is now online.

But as ever, the British press is to be commended for its assiduous reporting of developments in French style guidance. catering no doubt to a readership proficient in French and eager to keep up with the latest language etiquette across the channel.

The reporter fails his public though by omitting to mention that in France (as in Canada) the proper mode of address for female office-holders has been settled for many years now and that what the “Immortals” prescribe is neither a sword nor even a shield, as demonstrated in the case of Vaucluse deputy Julien Aubert.

South of the Pyrenees, meanwhile, Spain is grappling with the same issue and the Real Academia has been asked by the (now outgoing) government of the left to consider how the language of the 1978 constitution might be made more inclusive. Going by the initial response, any such changes will be over the dead bodies of Spanish Immortals.

@Lazar
Lizzy is referred to as “Duke”, not “Duchess”, in the Channel Islands
And addressed in the other official language as Madame le Duc? The Immortals at Debrett’s are silent on the matter.

“sexy coeds”
That link’s not working.

In English you have to call it an airlock, which I hate because it’s describing a volume of air rather than a space or place (I come to this through architecture). There’s a word in Norway sluse, but English sluice can’t be used for the airlock only for the water channel.

I’ve been drawing this to the world’s attention for years but despite the duplication of so many words in English no one has come up with a word for Schleuse the airlock.

Vestibule is good but limited because it doesn’t describe what it does (exclude cold or polluted air). So it works for your apt building but not for, say, the Scheuse between a parking garage and the public spaces of an office building.

Do you really use airlock that way? The main usage the OED…

I do. It’s not abnormal. You’re looking in the wrong place. It’s under lock:

lock, n.2
10.II.10 Engineering. More fully {air-lock}. An ante-chamber giving access to a chamber in which work is carried on in compressed air; also, a similar chamber used between air at atmospheric pressure and either water (e.g. outside a submarine) or a vacuum (e.g. outside a spacecraft).
1874 Knight Dict. Mech. I. 49 Air-lock.    Ibid. 421 s.v. Caisson.    1894 Westm. Gaz. 16 Oct. 3/1 Entrance is obtained by means of a couple of ‘locks’, tubular chambers about 6 ft. in diameter.    1899 Allbutt’s Syst. Med. VII. 41 Perhaps the most frequent exciting cause [of caisson disease] is too rapid a reduction of the pressure in ‘locking out’, that is, in passing from the caisson to the open air through the lock or ante-chamber.    1914 S. F. Walker Submarine Engin. iii. 35 The air lock‥is a chamber with doors at each end, arranged so that only a small quantity of air or water can enter each time the lock is opened.    1959 ‘Wyndham’ & Parker Outward Urge ii. 66 The duty-man operated the lock, and presently Troon was outside.    1961 E. Leyland Crash Dive viii. 91 Taking the place of the Twill Trunk‥came the Escape Chamber method, a permanent chamber or lock entered by way of a watertight door.

Revolving doors provide the same function in an air-conditioned office building. They limit the amount of costly cold air that escapes and warm, sweaty air that enters.

I think vestibule is the best suggestion so far. Anteroom might work for the rest. Mudroom is a very good American domestic word but it’s not suitable for public buildings. I don’t know why it’s not used in the British Isles. They’re familiar with mud.

It looks like we are in violent agreement about airlock: it’s a chamber with two doors separating different environments, whether warm/cold, high/low pressure, air/water, air/vacuum, or whatever (oxygen-breather/chlorine-breather air?)

I had never heard mudroom until my wife used it as something Florida houses have (she lived there for a decade or so). When I heard it, I thought of a room with a mud bath in it, but no. My family’s house in New Jersey definitely had a vestibule, though muddy or snowy boots were indeed left there.

No. She may be spoken of as notre Duc, especially in the loyal toast (if anyone is so retro as to give it) but her titles are “The Queen in the right of Guernsey/Jersey” (there is no legal connection between the two). The Queen’s predecessors surrendered the title “Duke of Normandy” forever in 1259.

By the way, the UK Supreme Court said in 2014 that the UK Parliament has power to legislate for the islands, but the remark is obviously dictum, and I continue to disbelieve it, if by power is meant legitimate power. In any case, as Lady Hale continues, “Acts of Parliament do not extend to the Islands automatically, but only by express mention or necessary implication. The more common practice is for an Act of Parliament to give power to extend its application to the Islands by Order in Council. It is the practice to consult the Islands before any UK legislation is extended to them.”

Such Orders in Council usually say that registration by the Guernsey or Jersey legislature, as the case may be, is not necessary for it to come into effect, but as of 2010 at least the matter was still open in the view of the States of Jersey. “It is sufficient to say,” as Sir William Anson said over a hundred years ago, “that the rights of the Crown are asserted, and that they are contested except as regards the prerogative of mercy.” And of course if the Crown cannot legislate for the Bailiwicks without their consent, how much less so the UK Parliament?

Re “Vestibule” —

In New York State, at least, “a space within an apartment or suite of rooms used as an entrance hall directly from a public hall” is technically a “foyer” — NYS Multiple Dwelling Law, Sec. 4.20.

“Vestibule” is used for various public areas, such as the area required facing elevators. Some vestibules are required for fire-stopping reasons, so some of the Schleusen described by AJP might be called vestibules here — e.g. the space required between parking areas and the rest of a building. I’ll quote a portion of Sec. 60.2.d. of the same Multiple Dwelling Law just so readers who normally might have no occasion to read such documents can appreciate its style:

“Such storage space” (they mean parking) “shall have no opening into any other part of the dwelling except through a fireproof vestibule. Any such vestibule shall have a minimum superficial floor area of fifty square feet and its maximum area shall not exceed seventy-five square feet. It shall be enclosed with incombustible partitions having a fire-resistive rating of three hours. The floor and ceiling of such vestibule shall also be of incombustible material having a fire-resistive rating of at least three hours. There shall be two doors to provide access from the dwelling to the car storage space. Each such door shall have a fire-resistive rating of one and one-half hours and shall be provided with a device to prevent the opening of one door until the other door is entirely closed. One of these doors shall swing into the vestibule from the dwelling and the other shall swing from the vestibule into the car storage space.”

I don’t think anyone in New York State who has no occasion to read such documents would maintain this distinction between foyer and vestibule.

That would reflect a building with an actual lobby, not just a bare space 3 by 5 feet between the two doors and the stairs only about 10-15 feet past the inner door (there are ground-floor apartment doors on both sides of the hall leading to the stairs). Foyer would be impossibly grand for either of those spaces. Certainly none of our apartments have any sort of internal foyer either: the apartment doors open directly into the main room.

No. She may be spoken of as

The question was “addressed as”. It was not an entirely serious question…

> Certainly none of our apartments have any sort of internal foyer either: the apartment doors open directly into the main room.

This was one thing I always noticed in American TV shows like Cosby, Roseanne or Family Ties when I was a kid. The front door opens right into the living room. That would have been pretty much unthinkable in Denmark or Japan, which were the countries I was familiar with. I think I associated it partly with the culture of wearing shoes indoors (so you have less need for a room for shoe boxes etc). I might also have wondered if it had something to do with warmer temperatures, although I do remember watching episodes where the door opened and there would be a snowstorm outside.

>Schleuse

Being more of a cyclist than a sailor, I mostly associate the Danish word ‘sluse’ with an arrangement designed to slow cyclists down by being just wide enough to allow the bicycle through, but forcing one to follow an S-like path.

in American TV shows the front door opens right into the living room

The 1960s “Honey, I’m home!” moment. To me it would be horrible-scary, but except for lofts & apartments (eg in Friends and Seinfeld) it has more to do with television & stage design than with real houses. Notice also how the armchairs & sofas are all turned to face the fourth wall instead of the usual focus (coffee table plus opposite-facing seating, or the fireplace or a television).

it has more to do with television & stage design than with real houses

My country house (admittedly designed by my mother, not a professional) has a sliding glass door opening into the living room. The other door on that level (there is also a basement door, as the house is built on a hill with one end of the basement at ground level and the other end underground) opens directly into the corner of an L-shaped corridor with the kitchen at one end and the living room at the other. You can walk round and round the house, living room to dining room to kitchen to hall to living room, without ever encountering a door. (The bedrooms are on the outside of this loop, the bathroom on the inside; both have doors.)

Sounds great, John! Do you have pics?

I have lived over the course of my life-to-date in three different freestanding houses in the US (excluding periods of my life when I lived in various dorm rooms, apartments, and condos …). One of the three had the front door opening directly into the living room; the other two had it opening into more of a … well a little entrance hallway kind of thingie, although I can’t say we ever called it a “foyer” or “vestibule” or anything like that. The entrance area in both instances did not actually have a second door you needed to open in order to get into the rest of the house. FWIW even on an inflation-adjusted basis the house where the front door went straight into the living room was the least expensive of the three (bought by my parents when I was a newborn and sold the summer I turned 12). It was a classic mid-1950’s suburban house of the sort where an erstwhile cornfield had been turned into a “subdivision” and all built out by the developer in one fell swoop with houses that all had essentially the same floorplan with only minor variations. So maybe the lack of an entrance area was a corner-cutting sign of cheapness or efficiency, or was just more in vogue at some time periods than others. I do agree fwiw that the ubiquity of that sort of frontdoor on sitcoms has to do with camera angles rather than being true to life — but it’s maybe significant that it’s true enough to life, i.e. it’s not a thing that you would never expect in an actual house.

I should perhaps amend my prior comment to note that my boyhood house where the front door opened directly into the living room did have what you might call a micro-vestibule. Just a little bit (probably at least 3 or 4 inches but no more than 6 or 8?) past the opening-inwards front door was a storm door (spring-loaded to close by itself if not held open), swapped out in summertime for a screen door. There wasn’t enough space for a human, even a child, in between the two if they were both fully closed, but e.g. the paperboy would stick the newspaper in between the two around sunrise, so when you awoke and came downstairs you could open the front door to retrieve it w/o letting in (depending on the season) cold air or bugs.

Screen doors are VERY important.

If I remember right the Dick van Dyke Show and other ’60s shows made use of sunken living rooms to vary the scenery a bit. That was in style at the time. I’m not sure we ever saw a kitchen. Nowadays, well, Friends etc, I guess that’s the ’90s, they have loftlike arrangements with a combined open kitchen and living space and doors to the stairs and to bedrooms leading off the set. Perhaps in a couple of decades we’ll get to see a toilet.

@AJP, sorry, I missed that you were talking about translation, for some reason I thought it was some sort of folk etymology that claimed a connection to barley seeds. Where did you see the translation? I am still confused.

I din’t know that bislag could be translated with ‘porch’. The ones I’ve known have been small side buildings leaning on to the main building.

That makes sense of the *bei- part of *Beischlag – a word and concept I did not know; for “porch” I only know Veranda, and porches are not common hereabouts.

I like the swords.

If anybody is out there abusing the French language, the Immortals with swords will make them sorry.

> I don’t understand this obsession with […] the idea of guardianship of language […].

I think there’s a value to having standards. Not as in “everything else is inferior” but as in “let’s agree on something reasonable”.

> Let people write what they want and read what they want

Unfortunately, we see far too often that “no rules” means “the strongest ones decide the rules”. Not thereby to say that a self-electing body of elites should decide. But I think there are languages out there that have reasonable Language Councils.

@Lars: Yeah, $10,000 to $15,000, or even $20,000 for something as voluminous as a set of robes is plausible, but not $50,000. The markup on these kinds of ultra-high-end goods is really remarkable, and it is typically even greater for women’s dresses than for men’s suits. I wonder whether the maker of the Academy robes charges extra for making them in a women’s cut.

Found another weird Massachusetts quadruplet – four neighboring towns named Westborough, Southborough, Northborough and Marlborough.

Strangely enough, Westborough is located in the south, Southborough in the east, Northborough in the west and Marlborough in the north.

I want to know what happened to Eastborough and how Marlborough got there and why there is such perfect chaos in geographical positioning of these towns.

OK, WP explained how it came about.

First there was town of Marlborough and then some of the town inhabitants settled nearby in the “west borough” of Marlborough to form town of Westborough.

Then another group split off from Marlborough and formed Southborough.

Finally, the last group in the “north borough” of Westborough became town of Northborough.

There was no Eastborough because Marlborough was settled from the east and there was simply no space there.

That neatly explains everything – Northborough is north, because initially was just a northern part of Westborough and Southborough is south, because it’s south to the town of Marlborough, not to Westborough or Northborough.

{thinking} logically, all the confusion could be avoided if the towns were named Marlborough, Northwest Marlborough, West Marlborough and South Marlborough.

Obviously, Essex County, New York was settled by East Saxons and Middlesex County, Virginia by Middle Saxons.

And Kent county, Delaware was colonized by the Jutes.

On gendered professions in Danish:

Back in the day (late seventies, maybe) a law was passed that employers could absolve themselves of the charge of gender bias in job adverts by adding m/k (mand/kvinde) after the job title. (And also that they were not allowed to discriminate based on gender when choosing candidates, which was harder to enforce). That was followed diligently for a number of years and then sort of disappeared, but now the public perception is that the problem was fixed once and for all and we don’t need to worry. (“Happy Danes” syndrome). And curiously I don’t think k/m was ever an option, at least I don’t remember ever seeing it.

Before that, when marital status was felt to be an important fact about women, formal address for the wife of Doktor Hansen was Fru Doktor Hansen, while Doktor Fru Hansen was used for the doctor who was the wife of Hr Hansen. (Note that Doktor Hansen didn’t need to have Hr shoved into his form of address. Obviously). Now-a-days you just add the first name of a person if their gender is felt to be important and the old Hr/Fru/Frk system is disappearing fast — I basically only have to choose one when using a localized version of a German or American booking/shopping system, Danish sites leave it out. (Except for air travel booking sites, I guess there is an IATA rule about it).

The “Now-a-days you just add the first name of a person if their gender is felt to be important” approach requires first names, perhaps including common nickname variants, to be unambiguously gender-specific (both in speech and in writing), innit? Which is probably truer of some cultures than others (and trickier as more places get multi-cultural), and which immediately gets even trickier if you think there are more than two potential gender categories.

waitron

Can’t recall having ever encountered it before, but if I did I would probably have assumed it meant a mechanical waiter.

The OED‘s first citation for meson is from a 1939 letter to Nature by Homi K. Bhabha.* “Meson” appears in both the title and the first body sentence, where it is footnoted:

The name ‘mesotron’ has been suggested by Anderson and Neddermeyer (NATURE, 142, 874 ; 1938) for the new particle found in cosmic radiation with a mass intermediate between that of the electron and proton. It is felt that the ‘tr’ in this word is redundant, since it does not belong to the Greek root ‘meso’ for middle ; the ‘tr’ in neutron and electron belong, of course, to the roots “neutr” and “electra”. In these circumstances, it seems better to follow the suggestion of Bohr and to use electron to denote particles of electronic mass independently of their charge, and negaton and positon to differentiate between the sign of the charge. It would therefore be more logical and also shorter to call the new particle a meson instead of a mesotron.

The name mesotron was only a few months old at that time. The letter to Nature by Carl Anderson and Seth Neddermeyer (a post-doc working for Anderson at the time**) proposing it the previous year is short (and interesting) enough to quote in its entirety.

Mesotron (Intermediate Particle) as a Name for the New Particles of Intermediate Mass

THE existence of particles intermediate in mass between protons and electrons has been shown in experiments on the cosmic radiation [uninteresting footnote ommitted]. Since at present so little is known concerning the properties of these particles, for example, the exact value of the mass, the laws governing their production, their stability against disintegration, etc., it may yet be too early to assign to them a name. But inasmuch as several names have already been suggested, namely, dynatron, penetron, barytron, heavy electron, yukon and x-particle, it may be wise to consider the matter at this time.

The property which so far serves to distinguish the new particles from the other two types of particles which carry the same magnitude of electric charge, namely, the proton and the electron, seems to be the magnitude of their mass. Although from the experiments so far performed, it is not possible to say definitely whether the new particles exist with a unique mass only, or whether they occur with a range of masses, it does appear quite certain that the mass, whether unique or not, is greater than that of an electron and less than that of a proton. One must consider then three types of particles all carrying electric charges of equal magnitude : electrons, the new particles and protons. We should like to suggest therefore the word ‘mesotron’ (intermediate particle) as a name for the new particles. It appears quite likely that the appropriateness of this name will not be lost, whatever new facts concerning these particles may be learned in the future.

Funnily enough, the OED‘s last reference to a “mesotron” (apart from those using it in a historical context) is from (FTF) Arthur Koestler in 1949, who apparently didn’t do a good job keeping up on physics terminology.

I find it a bit amusing that the muon, the first particle which (purely because of its intermediate mass) was called a meson (muon is a shortening of mu-meson) is no longer referred to that way. The term meson is reserved for strongly-interacting particles containing a quark and an antiquark, regardless of whether they are actually lighter than the nucleon. Strongly-interacting particles with three quarks are (again, regardless of their masses) called baryons. All the strongly interacting particles are hadrons—although whether that includes further composites like nuclei is not actually consistent. I would say that an Pb-208 nucleus is the heaviest stable hadron,*** but other people might disagree with that terminology.

Later, in 1953, the term hyperon was coined, for a particle (or perhaps a specifically strongly interacting particle) intermediate in mass between a nucleon and the lightest compound nucleus, deuterium. While this term still gets occasional use to refer to certain particles containing strange quarks, it is no longer in common usage the way meson is.

* Bhabha is best known among today’s particle physicists for calculating the cross section for electron-positron scattering, which turns out to be trickier than electron-electron scattering. When dealing with particle processes involving multiple representatives of the same underlying field (and the negaton and positon, as Bhabha would have them, are both aspects of the electron field), there are lots of minus signs lurking around, and Bhabha identified a new such minus sign in his evaluation of Bhabha scattering.

Bhabha’s Wikipedia page lists, among the things he is known for, “theoretical prediction of the muon,” but there is no elaboration on this claim anywhere else on the page, and I have never heard of such a prediction. I. I. Rabi famously quipped, upon learning that the muon appeared to be exactly the same as the electron, only heavier (and not, as had been hoped, Hideki Yukawa’s predicted mediator of the strong interaction between nucleons; finding that particle, the pion, took another ten years), “Who ordered that?”

** Neddermeyer had also done his doctoral work under Anderson at Caltech, when Anderson had discovered positrons in cosmic ray showers a few years earlier. For the discovery of the muon in those same showers, they are now typically given equal credit. The muon discovery could have been worth a Nobel Prize, but Anderson had already won (the same year they identified the muon), and the Nobel Prize in physics was frequently not awarded to post-docs who ought to have shared equally with their laboratory heads. (Cesar Lattes, who was a post-doc working for Cecil Powell when they discovered the pion, did not a get a share of the 1950 prize.)

The other thing Neddermeyer is known for is his work on the Manhattan Project. After Richard Tolman suggested the implosion method for creating plutonium bombs (to overcome problems caused by Pu-240 contamination in the Pu-239 fuel), Neddermeyer did the first technical analysis to show that the implosion method would work.

*** Technically speaking, Pb-208 is not actually stable. Beyond a certain point in the periodic table, all isotopes become theoretically unstable to spontaneous fission. However, when the energy that would be released is small enough, the actually fission lifetimes for such nuclides can be many, many nepers longer than the lifetime of the cosmos.

Ядерная Физика; 58: No. 4, 768(1995):

The authors report results of an experiment to measure the half life of lead 208 against fission. The impetus for this work is earlier work in the case of fermium isotopes, where it was found that addition of two neutrons to fermium, producing isotopes which could decay to fragments with near magic numbers, resulted in tremendous decreases in fission lifetimes. The authors had assumed the same effect could be seen in lead 208. This experiment has put a lower bound of [2e19 years] on this decay in lead 208.

(This is actually about the same as the alpha-decay half-life of Bi-209, but it looks like spontaneous fission just happens to be energetically favorable at mass number 208. Lower isotopes should have “tremendously” longer half-lives for that process).

But with strange aeons, even Cobalt might decay.

While I was reading up some more about Seth Neddermeyer’s role at Los Alamos, I discovered another claim of linguistic interest. The usual unit of cross section for a scattering process* is the barn, an area of 10⁻²⁸ m². I think that when most people first encounter this unit, they tend to assume that it is named after somebody—presumably a pioneer in scattering experiments. However, the name actually arose because because 1 b is a really large cross section in subatomic physics, like hitting the broad side of a barn. The geometrical cross sections for hitting large nuclei are of the order of a barn, and so is the Thomson cross section for scattering of a photon off an electron.

It is reasonably well known among physicists that the barn was first defined and used by Manhattan Project scientists during the war and that it technically remained classified for a few years afterwards. Several names were proposed for the unit at the time, including some based on the names of prominent scientists. However, barn won out. What I uncovered just today was a claim (which also appears on the Wikipedia page for the barn) that the name was chosen, in part, to be intentionally opaque—that barn was, in effect, a code name, selected so that it would be possible to have conversations about cross sections without necessarily revealing that the underlying topic was nuclear physics. So far as I can tell, all instances of that claim that I found online track back to this short article from Fermilab, but there is no indication where the author, Doreen Wackeroth, got the information. I may e-mail her to ask, but I suspect it was just physics community folklore that she picked up somewhere.

* Since the cross section represents the likelihood of a reaction occurring during a beam experiment, it has become standard to refer to the time-integrated beam luminosity for a collider in units of inverse cross section. The integrated luminosity for the Large Hadron Collider’s main detectors is now in the hundreds of fb⁻¹, meaning that a reaction process with a cross section of 1 fb** will have occurred hundreds of times.

** The choice of fb⁻¹, rather than pb⁻¹ or ab⁻¹, is mostly just to give the integrated luminosity numbers for modern detectors reasonable-looking numerical values. However, physicists may also like the femto- prefix more than some other SI prefixes. Most of the prefixes invented in relatively recent times,*** corresponding to exponents of ±9 or greater, are just nonsense disyllables.**** However, femto- is an exception, because 10⁻¹⁵ m was already known as 1 fermi. Like 1 angstrom is the typical site of an atom, 1 fermi is the typical size of a nucleon. So the first letter of the 10⁻¹⁵ prefix was chosen to make the abbreviation for 10⁻¹⁵ m “fm.”

*** Whenever it is deemed necessary to extend the SI prefix scale on the small end, it is also normal to extended it on the large end as well, even though, for example, atto- is a commonly used prefix for 10⁻¹⁸ now, but Exa- (10¹⁸) hardly ever appears.

**** After the addition of zepto-, the Annals of Improbable Research suggested that Marx Brothers names would provide a ready source of further prefixes. Since the process had started with zepto-, I think the article recommended ranking the names according to the brothers’ silliness—eventually culminating with the most absurd Marx of all, karlo-. (None of this would actually work, however, since chico-, harpo-, etc. could not be used to form valid new two-letter abbreviations.)

(None of this would actually work, however, since chico-, harpo-, etc. could not be used to form valid new two-letter abbreviations.)

Have we no diacritics to provide disambiguatification? We have many diacritics, and the entire Unicode character set. The prefix micro- already uses a Greek μ — precedent has been set. So on beyond zebra!

We can have čhico- and its counterpart čhica- (Č), ĥarpo- and ĥatca- (Ĥ), ḡroucho- and ḡrouchi- (Ḡ), and heck, why not ġummo- and ġumbi- (Ġ), and ƶeppo- and ƶippi- (Ƶ). Oh, and ḱarlo- and ḱarli-(Ḱ). Wave that flag acute, Ḱarl!

Hooray for Marxup Language!

[NB: Searching for information on the Marx Prefixes finds no hits in the Annals of Improbable Research, but rather a Usenet post by Morgan Burke.

Another link was to this page for big numbers, with names for everything up to 10⁵⁹⁹⁷ (a novenonagintanongentilliard). I guess he got bored after that, and who can blame him?]

it does in principle have a double-electron-capture decay

…doesn’t everything? 🙂

femto- and atto-

Wohl den Dänen und denen, denen die Dänen wohl sind.

The mass of the waitron is conveniently expressed in grouchograms (or in chicoelectronvolts, of course.)

@Brett, in re Exa-: Come to the dark side, i.e., IT. Petabyte and Exabyte storage capacities are well known, your 48 unit rack can hold 150 PB or so. Don’t ask me how much an actual network attached EiB will cost, but I probably know a few guys riding herd on systems like that if you count raw capacity.

milliHelen

It seems not, but Kan as a unit has been mentioned.

@Brett, do they plan on running it for less than 1000 (1024) days in all, or are they just not storing everything to tape? I worked at NBI from 2001 to 2005, had some contact with the guys planning how to implement the Danish part of GRID, including setting up routing so they could max out a fiber with TCP. (They probably did it from the NordUNet hub at the DIX in Lyngby, though).

(The “search for Higgs” run was more than 1000 days, wasn’t it? But probably generated less data, that PB is after the upgrade I assume).

I used to enjoy doing stuff like adding up the grocery bill in my head while queueing for the checkout, and getting it right (of course). But all is but vanity innit, and also they have a scanner so it’s easier for them (apart from half the items being price-marked only on the shelf these days and even with the booster shot my brain can’t access the price database using the barcode) — also also the fun part was to surprise the cashier by having correct change counted out in advance, and now I pay with a boring card.

This is simply the equivalent of the time-honoured theatrical practice of doing crowd or army scenes by having the same few actors recirculate backstage.

Possibly budgetary constraints were involved. This may be an argument for Gnosticism. Demiurges often lack fiscal competence, forward planning capacity etc.

@jack morava: Wheeler’s suggestion that there is only one electron doesn’t actually work, for several reasons. Firstly, it is possible to have an electron and positron created together and annihilated together, making the path of an electron moving forward in time, then turning around and going backward in time along a different spatial path to return to its origin point. In fact, it happens all the time, both for virtual pairs and real pairs. (The very existence of virtual pairs is a manifestation of the second problem, discussed below.) For an example of the latter case, the unstable positronium bound state consists of an electron and positron held together electrostatically. Eventually, they will annihilate into photons, but prior to that, they are virtually annihilating and re-separating constantly. Under Wheeler’s suggestion this is a single, closed-loop electron that cannot be “the same” as ones observed elsewhere.

Secondly, Schwinger would have criticized the idea for mistaking the particle lines in Feynman diagrams for the trajectories of actual quanta, rather than bookkeeping devices for understanding features of the underlying fields. This means, among other things, that it is not possible, even in a simple scattering process, to identify a physical outgoing electron (or positron) with a specific sequence of lines in the Feynman diagrams for the process. Many different diagram topologies contribute (and interfere) via coherent superposition of the probability amplitudes for the reaction. Wheeler, of course, must have known this, but I think the idea that, “There’s only one electron,” was simply too cute for him to stop repeating it.

deus otiosus ? see : uncertainty principle

How many particles are there in the box is a kind of indeterminate question: if you shine in a very bright flashlight…

Firstly, it is possible to have an electron and positron created together and annihilated together, making the path of an electron moving forward in time, then turning around and going backward in time along a different spatial path to return to its origin point. In fact, it happens all the time, both for virtual pairs and real pairs.

That’s how we get Hawking radiation, right?

It’s a little dicey discussing “how” Hawking radiation occurs. When I took General Relativity, the professor talked about Hawking radiation qualitatively as being the same as particle creation in any other strong field. An electric field will create charged particle-antiparticle pairs too, if it’s strong enough. I think this is right, physically speaking, but it’s tricky to make the comparison more precise, because the mathematical description of electromagnetic and gravitational fields are, at this stage, so different. I had already read Hawking’s original derivation of the Hawking radiation from a black hole,* and the description involved the structure not of two particle modes (like the electron and positron in electrical pair creation), but just a single Fourier mode of the field. Because of the infinite redshift of the black hole, the same mode looks like a particle escaping outside the event horizon, but looks like an antiparticle falling inward inside the horizon.

* Many other people had read it too. The pages were falling out of the bound volume containing his landmark paper in Communications in Mathematical Physics. I handed it over to the repair department at the library when I was done with it.

Hawking had actually set out to disprove Bekenstein’s early demonstration that black holes had entropy and temperature, by showing that they lacked a crucial trait of thermal bodies, the emission of thermal radiation. However, he quickly realized that they did glow, and that let him fill in the unknown O(1) constant in Bekenstein’s expression for the black hole temperature.

French feminized nouns and a masculinized counterpart

The opposite of feminization has also occurred.

For centuries there was a feminine noun la couturière ‘seamstress’, a derivative of la couture ‘seam, sewing’, used for a woman making women’s garments (men’s garments being made by le tailleur ‘tailor’ (a derivative of tailler ‘to cut (cloth)’. Around the beginning of the 20th century, women became more independent, fashions changed, and some tailors started to make women’s garments (for travelling or office work) using materials and techniques until them typical of men’s garments. A few men even started to make typically feminine garments, such as evening gowns made of light or expensive materials. The word tailleuir was felt to be inappropriate for such professionals, so one of them called himelf un couturier, a word that was adopted by the profession and has remained so. But while la couturière still reflects its working-class background (and the women in question are fewer, since most modern women buy their clothes ready-made), le couturier is a highly respected creative artist, able to charge extremely high prices for his designs – actualized by teams of very skilled couturières.

Couturier in English denotes a designer who makes specifically “haute couture”—meaning custom garments, for women (or, at least, I have never heard it refer to a designer of male clothes; although I suppose a single designer could work on both). However, most prominent couturiers today also have (high-end) “ready-to-wear” lines (“ready-to-wear” being—as I understand it—the terminology of the business, at least in English). The ready-to-wear market is just so much larger, it hardly makes economic sense to ignore it. Moreover, many couture houses have also branched out into other fields, like jewelry and perfume; it tends to be forgotten, for example, that Christian Dior’s original core business was couture ladies’ clothing.

The OED entry for couturier appears to have been created in 1972 and not touched since. It gives only the definition:

A male dressmaker or fashion designer. Also attributive.

However, I think the editors, even in the 1970s, may have relied too much on their own French fluency, since this definition is just calqued from the French and lacks the additional distinction that the designer must produce custom-made clothing. That this element—and the tricky economics of managing both couture and ready-to-wear lines—was already at the center of the significance of the couturier terminology can be seen from one of the OED own citations, from The Times of London, all the way back in 1957:

It has been asked several times recently whether it can reasonably be expected of any couturier that he should switch from couture to wholesale design and back again interminably.

That is true. But I never realized it… The Russian word for “tailor” is portnoi, literally an adjective from portý “trousers”. Mostly the word is dated, at least in Moscow. A Soviet Muscovite went to an atelier instead* (which is an interesting word too).
And yes, prêt-à-porter was another French phrase that many Russians learned in 90s.

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*the Soviet system interpreted a self-employed person as a micro-capitalist. Actually people who (in addition to their official job) took orders privately existed, from dentists to craftsmen. By I never met a tailor and I do not know how they were referred to and what was the self-designation.

DM: clothing techniques

You are right about some of the differences, but your examples are not “techniques”. If you compare suit jackets (probably technically the most difficult garments to make and to fit well), especially before they are finished and ready for the wearer, the men’s jackets have much heavier shoulders, due to local reinforcement using special types of cloth meant to remain invisible under a sleek lining and very loosely sewn to the parts covering the chest. Compare the outer clothes worn by European men and women in 18th or 19th century pictures: the men are wearing mostly tailored, tight-fitting clothes, while the women do not wear coats but capes or shawls over long, wide skirts, which completely hide the parts beween the waist and the ground. Sewing men’s tight pants as opposed to women’s huge skirts gathered only at the waist cannot be done with the same techniques.anymore than the same fabrics Women’s coats resembling men’s ones do not appear until the 20th C.

For a while in graduate school I had a freelancing job working with a guy at Bear Stearns (of blessed memory), across the street from the Old Statehouse and from Vinnie the Tailor, which seemed to be the most respected tailor shop in the metropolis. (It is entirely possible that the old-money Brahmins had their own guy, that we peons never heard about.) It terms of piece volume, the work Vinnie’s crew did had to have been overwhelmingly alterations. However, he certainly made custom-tailored suits as well.

So if it isn’t made by an approved French fashion house, it’s not officially a haute couture dress, but merely a sparkling evening gown?

Of course, there are self-described couturiers based outside of France (in Italy, for example, particularly around Milan and Rome). They are presumably not subject to any onerous Parisian regulations.

I was peripherally involved in fashion business ten years ago, and my understanding is that RTW is the market segment, while P-a-P is RTW when a French house does it.

John Cowan (February 22, 2019):

The OED says fisher is now archaic; the last non-poetic citation it has is 1758.

That was unrevised from 1896. The revision of March 2024 removed that label and replaced it with a note: “Sometimes as a gender-neutral alternative to fisherman n. 1 and fisherwoman n.; cf. fisherperson n.” There are non-poetic citations from the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. All other current dictionaries also have fisher ‘person who catches fish’ with no label.

It is still current as the name of Pekania pennanti, a kind of weasel native to North America.

That animal has been moved to a separate entry, fisher n.2, because it does not eat fish, and has a different etymology: “Probably < Dutch †visse, variant of vis polecat (see fitch n.1), apparently so called on account of its physical resemblance to a polecat.”

By contrast, the Big Dict first finds fisherman in the Tyndale Bible.

Antedated via the Middle English Dictionary to the 1400s in legal documents.

Both terms are sometimes used for fishing boats rather than their occupants, and Henry David Thoreau uses fisher for a boat in 1862. The only citation for this sense the OED has.

The revision keeps Thoreau and adds five more quotations for this sense, two earlier and three later. But the boat sense of fisherman is now labeled obsolete, with a last citation from 1927, in a glossary of sea terms.

Keith Ivey: “fishers of men” is a separate sub-sense in the OED, in Bible translations since Old English, and with allusion to the Bible since Middle English.

…and is not to be confused with the fishing cat, an actual cat that not only fishes, but swims a lot.

From drasvi 2022: The Russian word for “tailor” is portnoi, literally an adjective from portý “trousers”.

Portnoy’s Complaint was about tailor bunions ?? I do remember something about friction damage.

“Also, one case that’s always puzzled me is fisherman: if German makes do just fine with Fischer.”

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What is the function of -mann in German family names such as Bauermann and Schneidermann?

Is it possible to say in Spanish ‘Susan is the best of all our teachers’ if ‘all our teachers’ includes all of them, no matter their sex or gender?

I had thought that ‘Susana es la mejor de todos nuestros maestros’ would be the best translation (because the Spanish masculine plural is said to have among its functions that of being gender-neuter) but everyone I’ve asked says that it must be ‘todas nuestras maestras’ even though that wording seems to mean ‘of all our female teachers’.

Wikipedia’s list of languages tells me that “Fisher (animal)” is fiskermår “fisher(man) marten” in Norwegian, fiskmård in Swedish, Fischermarder in German, vismarter in Dutch, and marta pescadora in Portuguese and Catalan. Also Hungarian, South and West Slavic, and Baltic languages seem to use a calque of “fisher marten”. Taking the bother to open some Wiki articles name Pekania pennanti, I can add Spanish marta pescadora, French martre pêcheuse, and Italian martora pescatrice. The main exceptions in European languages are East Slavic and Estonian with ~ilka, Finnish with kanadannäätä “Canadian marten (though also kalastajanäätä), and Danish with virginsk mår “Virginian marten”. That’s how far I bothered to check.

What is the etymological fallacy when the etymology is false?

@M
Heintze “Die deutschen Familiennamen” (Halle an der Saale, 1903) has
—
-mann auslautend häufiger als jedes andere Wort und aus den verschiedensten Perioden :

a) 1: Germann. Hermann. Volkmann.

Willmann. — Fredermann — an Sproßformen angehängt: Götzmann.

b) 2: Kloßmann. Petermann.

c) 3: Handwerks- und Standesnamen bildend : Schumann. Klostermann. Lehmann — auch an Ortsbezeichnungen angehängt: Eichmann — Münstermann. Tangemann (= van Tange). Brüggemann. Soestmann. Wesel
Eigenschaften-— insbesondere aber gehören hierher manche Zusammensetzungen mit Mann: Biedermann, Großmann;

His 1,2, and 3 is a historical classification:
1. alteinheimische, ursprünglich heidnische Personennamen, d. h. nicht forterbende Benennungen einzelner Personen (z. B. Albrecht und Arnold)]

2. später dazugekommene fremde Personennamen aus christlicher Zeit (z. B. Peter und Paul).

Beide Klassen haben das gemein, daß sie von Hause aus Personen oder Einzelnamen gewesen sind und auch nach ihrem Festwerden (als Familiennamen) großenteils noch daneben als Personen-, d. h. nunmehr Vornamen, verwendet werden. Zu ihnen gesellt sich nun aber

3. eine dritte Klasse von Bezeichnungen, ursprünglich nur unterscheidende Zusätze zu den Personennamen der beiden ersten Schichten: Namen jüngster Periode (z. B. Weber und Wittenberg),
—
He is saying -mann can be stuck arbitrarily (he does not quite go so far as to use the word ‘arbitrarily’) on to (in his classification)
– names made from pagan firstnames or name elements;
– names made from Christian firstnames;
– names made as adjuncts to firstnames, denoting physical qualities, association with place or profession, etc.

https://archive.org/details/diedeutschenfam00unkngoog

I think the DFA Bd. 3 “Morphologie” may provide more detail (if you have access to a University Library, it is not cheap).

I’m Popeye the sailor man!

Hat: “американский хорек” (Мельников 7, 203). Вероятно, из нж.-нем. ilk “хорек”, ср.-нж.-нем. ilke, illike, которое проникло также в сканд. языки; см. Фальк–Торп 1, 461.

That’s classic trade word behavior, then.

@Hans. The -s in Bauersmann, Rittersmann, and similar names suggests that the person so called was subordinate in some way to a farmer, knight, and so forth.

“Son of a Preacher Man”

@M: What DM said. As far as I can see, there’s nothing in the attested usage of the words that would bear out that suggestion.

like salts through a widow woman.

There is the AAVE compound widow man, in which both components actually do matter.