ytterbium

Samples of ytterbium

6 December 2024

Ytterbium is a chemical element with atomic number 70 and the symbol Yb. It is a soft, malleable, and ductile metal that is yellow or golden in color. It has a few specialized uses: its radioactive isotopes are used as sources of gamma rays and in atomic clocks; it is sometimes used to improve the physical properties of stainless-steel alloys; and it is used as the trapped-ion qubit in quantum computing.

It is one of four elements named for their original source mine in Ytterby, Sweden, the others being yttrium, terbium, and erbium. It was discovered by chemist Jean Charles Galissard de Marignac in a sample of gadolinite in 1878. Marignac dubbed it ytterbine (ytterbium in English):

L’autre est une base nouvelle, appartenant au même groupe, et pour laquelle je propose le nom d’ytterbine, qui rappellera sa présence dans le minéral d’Ytterby, et ses analogies avec l’yttria, d’un côte, par son absence de coloration, avec l’erbine, de l’autre.

(The other is a new base, belonging to the same group, and for which I propose the name ytterbium, which will recall its presence in the mineral from Ytterby, and its analogies with yttria, on the one hand, by its absence of coloration, with erbine, on the other.)

In 1907, Georges Urbain separated Marignac’s sample into two elements, Marignac’s ytterbium, which he dubbed neoytterbium, and lutetium, While the latter name was generally accepted, the name neoytterbium eventually went by the wayside, and by the 1920s ytterbium was again the generally used name for the element.

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Sources:

de Marignac, Jean Charles Galissard. “Sur l’ytterbine, nouvelle terre continue dans la gadolinite.” Comptes Rendus Hebdomadaires des Séances de l’Académie des Sciences, 88.17, 22 October 1878, 578–81 at 579–80. Bibliothéque Nationale de France: Gallica.

Miśkowiec, Pawel. “Name Game: The Naming History of the Chemical Elements: Part 2—Turbulent Nineteenth Century.” Foundations of Chemistry, 8 December 2022. DOI: 10.1007/s10698-022-09451-w.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. ytterbium, n.

Photo credit: W. Oelen, 2007. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

eggnog

4 December 2024

Whence comes the name for the drink we know as eggnog? The egg is easy enough—it is made with eggs, but the nog is a stumper for most casual observers of the language.

In an older entry, the Oxford English Dictionary dates eggnog to 1825, but the term has been antedated since that entry was written, and the term may date to before 1775. Jonathan Boucher, an English clergyman who resided in Virginia and Maryland from 1762–75, is supposed to have written a poem which incorporates dialectal words from Maryland while he was resident in the colonies. But the poem was not published until 1833, several decades after Boucher’s death, so its date of composition is not certain. It reads, in part:

Fog-drams i’ th’ morn, or (better still) egg-nogg,
At night hot-suppings, and at mid-day, grogg,
My palate can regale.

The glossary accompanying the 1833 publication contains a gloss of the term, probably written by the volume’s editors, Joseph Hunter and Joseph Stevenson:

Egg-nogg; a heavy and unwholesome, but not unpalatable, strong drink, made of rum beaten up with the yolks of raw eggs.

The earliest unassailable date of the appearance of eggnog was turned up by Yale law librarian Fred Shapiro and is from 1788, when the New Jersey Journal recorded the following on 26 March:

A young man with a cormerant [sic] appetite, voraciously devoured, last week, at Connecticut farms, thirty raw eggs, a glass of egg nog, and another of brandy sling.

On 29 June 1790, Hugh Williamson, a U. S. Representative from North Carolina made a speech in which he describes the stereotype of an old, sea captain spending his remaining days on shore. The old man’s diet is reminiscent of Boucher’s observation:

Egg-nog is his favourite liquor in the morning—grog at eleven o’clock—and such wine as he can afford after dinner, which generally consists of salt pork and pease, with sea biscuit instead of bread.

So we have eggnog appearing in the American colonies or the United States in the latter half of the eighteenth century. But these early citations don’t provide us with a clue as to the origin.

The OED gives the proximate origin of the second element in eggnog as the East Anglian dialectal word nog, referring to a strong variety of beer brewed in Norfolk. This East Anglian nog has been dated to 1693, but the trail ends there. Where this nog comes from is uncertain.

One likely source is noggin, a term for a mug or cup, and hence for a drink of liquor. (It also gives us the boxing slang for head, a sense which dates to 1769.) Noggin as container dates to 1588 and as a measure of spirits to 1648. But the origin of noggin is itself unknown. (The Gaelic noigean and Irish noigín, sometimes proffered as possibilities, are borrowed from English.) It may be from knag, a Scottish term for a small cask or barrel that dates to sometime before 1585, but origin this word is also unknown.

Another possibility is that nog comes from the Orkney and Shetland nugg or nugged ale, a drink warmed with a hot poker. That term may come from knagg, a Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish word for a peg. The OED also suggests that nog could be related to the verb to nudge, although the dictionary doesn’t make clear why this might be so. The phonetics are similar, but there is no apparent semantic link.

So we have a number of proximate possibilities for where the nog comes from, but the ultimate origin remains a total mystery.

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Sources:

Boucher, Jonathan. Boucher’s Glossary. Joseph Hunter and Joseph Stevenson, eds. London: Black, Young, and Young, 1833, l. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

“Elizabeth-Town, March 26.” New-Jersey Journal (Elizabeth), 26 March 1788, 2/3. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2003. s. v. nog, n.2, noggin, n.; nudge, v.; second edition, 1989. s. v. eggnog, n; knag, n.2.

Williamson, Hugh. Speech, 29 June 1790. The American Museum, or, Universal Magazine, September 1790, 140–142 at 142/2. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Zimmer, Ben. “The Origins of ‘Eggnog,’ Holiday Grog.” Word Routes. Vocabulary.com. 24 December 2009.

Photo credit: Didriks, 2011. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

juke / jukebox

2 December 2024

A jukebox is a coin-operated machine that plays selected musical recordings. The box part of the word is understood easily enough, but where does juke come from? Juke is actually two distinct words in English. The one that forms jukebox is recorded from the first half of the twentieth century in Black slang.

That juke is from the Gullah juke or joog, meaning disorderly or wicked. Gullah is an African-American community from coastal South Carolina and Georgia and a creole language spoken by them. The Gullah juke is probably from the Wolof dzug, meaning to live wickedly. Wolof is a language of the Senegambia region of West Africa.

The original sense of juke in Black slang is that of a roadhouse or dance hall, in full the term is jook house. It’s first recorded in the Black newspaper the Kansas City Call on 25 July 1930:

Bear Creek camp has no jook house—dance hall and gambling dive—but the crowd always finds a floo[r] where it can dance to the tunes made by Henry Robinson’s fiddle and Sam Markham’s banjo.

But juke could also be a verb meaning to dance. That sense is found in the title of a 1933 piano solo piece, Jookit, by Walter Roland.

Zora Neale Hurston wrote about juke in two of her essays. In her 1934 Characteristics of Negro Expression she had this to say:

Jook is the word for a Negro pleasure house. It may mean a bawdy house. It may mean a house set apart on public works where the men and women dance, drink and gamble. Often it is a combination of these.

[…]

Musically speaking, the Jook is the most important place in America. For in its smelly, shoddy confines has been born the secular music known as blues, and on blues has been founded jazz. The singing and playing in the true Negro style is called “jooking.”

And the following year she wrote in Mules and Men:

The little drama of religion over, the “job” reverted to the business of amusing itself. Everybody making it to the jook hurriedly or slowly as the spirit moved.

[…]

The jook was in full play when we walked in. The piano was throbbing like a stringed drum and the couples slow-dragging about the floor were urging the player on to new lows. “Jook, Johnnie, Ah know you kin spank dat old peanner.” “Jook it Johnnie!”¹ “Throw it in de alley!”²

The notes read:

¹Play the piano in the manner of the jook or “blues.”
²Get low down.

Another early use in print is in another Black newspaper, Topeka, Kansas’s Capitol Plaindealer of 21 February 1937 in an article about how white musicians would often attend juke sessions of Black musicians but in many locations could not play with them:

The “white brethren” would been glad to have sat in on the “juke session” to have lent a hand in the “torment” at the slightest urge. The “slightest urge” is not quite permissible down here in Gawgaw as yet, but I’ve seen it happen in places that boasted just as much prejudice and taboo…..Funny thing, but “swing sessions” are piercing the south and and [sic] that means more toleration in the arts

[…]

All of which says (this is not a “for social equality adventure) that the stage and show biz is putting a “new realization” into the American social and economic scheme and that good “juke” (plain playing for pleasure to see how much will come out of the instrument) sessions attract everybody, blue, brown, red, white or black and they forget the echoing “don’t”.

Finally, we get jukebox by 15 April 1939, when it appears in Sunflower Petals, the student newspaper of the Sunflower Junior College and Agricultural High School in Moorhead, Mississippi. The school was a white school:

We may soon have an automat instead of a store—if the present trend toward nickel-in-the-slot machines continues. For some months we’ve had the familiar “jook-box,” and now we can get cokes from the huge metal clerk on the Canteen porch.

That’s the juke in jukebox. The other one, usually spelled jouk or jook, is much older. It means to duck or to bend so as to evade, and it appears in Scots in the early sixteenth century. It’s origin is unknown, first recorded in a Gavin Douglas’s Eneados, a Scots translation of Virgil’s Aeneid:

Syne hynt Eneas, ane Perrellus lance in hand
And it addressis fer furth, on the land
To ane magus that subtell, was and sle
And Iowkit in, vnder the spere as he
The schaft schakand flew furth, about his hede

(Thereupon Aeneas grasped a perilous lance in his hand and aimed it far forth across the ground to slay Magus, who was skillful and juked in and under the spear as the shaft quivering flew forth over his head.)

Despite both words having the same pronunciation and a semantic association with movement, they are not etymologically related.

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Sources:

Billings, Eye G. “Pay-Day Is Play Day at this Colorful Turpentine Camp.” Kansas City Call (Missouri), 25 July 1930, 7B/4. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. [The scan of this page is bad. A clearer example of this same article can be found at Billings, Eye G. “Pay-Day Is Play Day at this Colorful Turpentine Camp.” Kansas City Call (Missouri), 26 July 1930, 5/4. Library of Congress: Chronicling America.]

“Canteen Gets a Coke Vendor.” Sunflower Petals (Sunflower Junior College and Agricultural High School, Moorhead, Mississippi), 15 April 1939, 4/2. Archive.org.

Fowkles, William. “Seeing and Saying.” Capitol Plaindealer (Topeka, Kansas), 21 February 1937, 6/5–6. Readex: African American Newspapers.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., s.v. juke, n.1, juke, v.1, juke, v.3.

Hurston, Zora Neale. Characteristics of Negro Expression (1934). In Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings. New York: Library of America, 1995, 841. Archive.org.

———. Mules and Men (1935). In Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings. New York: Library of America, 1995, 140. Archive.org.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, July 2023, s.v. jukebox, n.; second edition, 1989, s.v. juke, n.1, juke, v., jouk | jook, v.2.

Virgil. The XIII Bukes of Eneados, Gavin Douglas, trans. (1513). London: William Copeland, 1553, 10.9, 269. ProQuest: Early English Books Online.

Photo credit: Daderot, 2017. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

anticipatory obedience

Joseph Stalin, 1943

1 December 2024

Anticipatory obedience is exactly what one would think, actions taken to obey what one perceives to be the wishes of a superior before being commanded to do so. The phrase is a relatively common in political science literature in reference to subjects’ compliance with the will of a totalitarian regime, but its origins are older and theological. The coinage of the term is often credited to Yale historian Timothy Snyder, but he did not originate it.

The term appears in an 1898 theological analysis of the New Testament letter to the Colossians by Handley Moule. He uses the term to refer to compliance with God’s will:

I touch it again only to point out how it suggests to us the intended intimacy and endearment of the relation of wish and will between the believer and the Lord. We are meant, in the light of this transfigured word, ἀρέσκεια, to think of His will as an affectionateI servant thinks of the wishes (not merely of the spoken or written-down orders) of the master, or the mistress, who has made the house of service a genuine home, and has almost hidden authority away in friendship. Even such an illustration scarcely satisfies the case. This “anticipatory obedience” is rather to be that of a devoted son to a parent, to a loving and beloved parent, to whom perhaps the son has not been always dutiful. How can he now do enough to undo that lamented past? How can he too much try, and delight, to obliterate the scars of past neglect by a present and studious and watchful “meeting of the wishes.”?

It appears in political discourse by 1975. Whether the political usage was influenced by the earlier theological one, or whether it is an independent coinage, is unknown. From a paper by New York University political scientist Kalman H. Silvert written for the U.S. Department of State on the governments of Latin American states:

Thus, on a rough set of guesses concerning degrees of national integration, cohesion, and citizenship, derived from economic statistics, urbanization, literacy, mobility patterns, cultural and racial homogeneity, extent and complexity and completeness of social services, and hunches concerning citizenry loyalty and anticipatory obedience to law, let us range the Latin countries on an approximate scale of national community.

Application of anticipatory obedience to authoritarian regimes dates to at least 1980, when Columbia University professor Seweryn Bialer applied to Stalin’s Soviet Union:

Participation in the rule of terror was not confined to its direct administrators, nor was it restricted to obeying direct commands from above. The members of the political bureaucracy were actively engaged, if not physically involved, in the terror; they were guilty en masse of initiating terroristic acts. They displayed what can be described as “preemptive obedience,” the anticipation of what they considered to be their bosses' wishes and whims. It was an anticipatory obedience encouraged by their superiors and characterized favorably as “vigilance.”

In October 2024, the phrase began to be applied in the context of a second Trump administration when the owner of the Los Angeles Times, Patrick Soon-Shiong, prevented his editorial staff from publishing an endorsement of Kamala Harris and Jeff Bezos, owner of the Washington Post, was considering deciding (and eventually did decide) to not endorse any candidate in the election. Both Soon-Shiong and Bezos had significant business interests that could be adversely affected should Trump fulfill his promise to wreak vengeance upon those who opposed his candidacy. An article in the Columbia Journalism Review by Ian Bassin and Maximillian Potter, both affiliated with the non-profit organization Protect Democracy, used the phrase:

This, it seems to us, is what Timothy Snyder, the Levin Professor of History at Yale University, calls “anticipatory obedience.” In his book On Tyranny, Snyder, who is also an adviser to our organization, writes: “Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.”

Other journalists picked up the phrase. For instance, NPR’s media correspondent David Folkenflik wrote on 24 October:

“Outlets from the Los Angeles Times to perhaps even the Washington Post are engaging in what the historian Timothy Snyder has called anticipatory obedience—pulling back from their obligation to tell the truth in order to placate the tyrant so he doesn't come after them,” Protect Democracy's Bassin says.

The backlash against the two newspapers was substantial; the Washington Post lost a quarter million subscribers, some ten percent of its subscriber base. Bassin and Potter’s quoting of Snyder also resulted in other reporters, such as Folkenflik, incorrectly implying that Snyder was the coiner of the phrase.

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Sources:

Bassin, Ian and Maximillian Potter. “On Anticipatory Obedience and the Media.” Columbia Journalism Review, 8 October 2024.

Bialer, Seweryn. Stalin’s Successors: Leadership, Stability, and Change in the Soviet Union. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1980, 11. Archive.org.

Folkenflik, David. “Did the ‘L.A. Times’ and Other News Outlets Pull Punches to Appease Trump?” NPR: All Things Considered, 24 October 2024.

Moule, Handley C. G. Colossian and Philemon Studies. London: Pickering & Inglis, 1898, 60. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Silvert, Kalman H. “The Changing Dynamics of Hemispheric Politics.” Selected Mid-Term Problems in U.S. Foreign Policy. Hanover, NH: Public Affairs Center Dartmouth College, 1975, 503–37 at 525. Archive.org.

Photo credit: US government photo, 1943, Wikimedia Commons, public domain photo

xenon

27 November 2024

Xenon is a chemical element with atomic number 54 and the symbol Xe. At standard temperature and pressure it is a dense, colorless, odorless, noble gas. It is used in flash and arc lamps and as a general anesthetic.

The name is a transliteration of the Greek ξένον, a neuter singular form of ξένος (xenos), meaning stranger or guest, presumably because of its rarity in the earth’s atmosphere. It was discovered and named by chemists William Ramsay and Morris Travers in 1898, who suggested the name:

The last fractions of liquefied argon show the presence of three new gases. These are krypton, a gas first separated from atmospheric air, and characterised by two very brilliant lines, one in the yellow and one in the green, besides fainter lines in the red and orange; metargon, a gas which shows a spectrum very closely resembling that of carbon monoxide, but characterised by its inertness, for it is not changed by sparking with oxygen in presence of caustic potash; and a still heavier gas, which we have not hitherto described, which we propose to name “xenon.” Xenon is very easily separated, for it possesses a much higher boiling-point, and remains behind after the others have evaporated.

(Metargon was later shown to be contamination of the sample with carbon.)

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Sources:

Miśkowiec, Pawel. “Name Game: The Naming History of the Chemical Elements: Part 2—Turbulent Nineteenth Century.” Foundations of Chemistry, 8 December 2022. DOI: 10.1007/s10698-022-09451-w.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. xenon, n.

Ramsay, William and Morris W. Travers. “On the Extraction from Air of the Companions of Argon and Neon.” Report of the Sixty-Eighth Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science Held at Bristol in September 1898. London: John Murray, 1899, 828–30 at 830. HathiTrust Digital Archive.