A few years ago, I taught an undergraduate course on “Cons, Cults, and Conspiracies Theories, ” exploring the connections and parallels among those phenomena. OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.
A few years ago, I taught an undergraduate course on “Cons, Cults, and Conspiracy Theories,” exploring the connections and parallels among those phenomena. Many of my students had some experience with cons, often from work in the service industry. Several also had relatives who had been in cults of various ilks. However, students were overwhelmingly skeptical of conspiracies theories. As we explored the three c’s, I found myself struggling with the term “conspiracy theory.” The term “theory” lends a patina a of scientific thought and rigor that is often lacking in fabulist conspiracy narratives.
The term “conspiracy theory” has a long history. It is sometimes erroneously attributed to the US Central Intelligence Agency, but, according to Andrew McKenzie-McHarg, the term can be found in nineteenth-century press accounts of trials and in the coverage of the assassination of US President James Garfield.
In academic use, the term “conspiracy theory of society” was popularized by Karl Popper in a pair of papers delivered in 1948, and later in the second edition of his book The Open Society in 1952. Popper described it as
the view that an explanation of a social phenomenon consists in the discovery of the men or groups who are interested in the occurrence of this phenomenon (sometimes it is a hidden interest which has first to be revealed) and who have planned and conspired to bring it about
—Popper, The Open Society, 1952, 94
Popper’s discussions sparked spirited commentary among other philosophers, part of which hinged on the distinction between a particular account of something as due to a conspiracy (the 1969 moon landing, the Kennedy assassination, the September 11th attacks, the COVID pandemic, etc.) and the more general tendency of looking for cabals of hidden conspirators behind all sorts of historical events.
As my students and I talked though the distinction and poked at it in various ways, we started to use the term conspiracism to refer to the tendency to believe in conspiracy theories. Some studies, such as those of Stephen Lewandowsky and colleagues, refer to this as “conspiracy ideation,” and scholars have studied the attitudes and mindset that go along with it. I found myself preferring “conspiracism” to “conspiracy ideation” because it is more concise and is parallel with other -isms—and because it suggests the self-deluding aspect of many believers in conspiracy theories. “Ideation,” like “theory,” feels academic and reasoned.
In addition, the term “conspiracy theory” itself is problematic in other ways, as scholars such as Jesse Walker (and my undergraduates) have noted. The term is loaded with negative connotations as well as positive ones. Today, “conspiracy theory” and “conspiracy theorist” suggest tinfoil-hat beliefs in the wildest counter-factual narratives and the fuzziest thinking. And to make matters even more complicated, there are actual conspiracies in the world—political, criminal, business—and before they are confirmed as actual conspiracies, there might be “theories” about what happened. Once the conspiracy is confirmed, we tend not to refer to it with the word “theory.” No one talks about the conspiracy theory of Watergate, for example. Rhetorically, there are conspiracies, theories about conspiracies (which are subject to evidence constraints), and “conspiracy theories” (which are not if you are a conspiracist).
A friend of mine once suggested that such unfalsifiable “conspiracy theories” be treated as fan-fiction about history and current event. That’s a bit unwieldy and does a disservice to fan-fiction, I think. But the notion underscores the way in which conspiracy theories typically have key fabulists and promoters and a dedicated fan base of believers. Maybe we should start referring to them as “conspiracy fiction.”
As a linguist, I know that I can’t control usage other than by example, but I’m going to start referring to “conspiracy fiction” and “conspiracism.” Maybe the terms will catch on.
It sometimes seems that the greater the exposure of a body part, the greater the chance of its having an ancient (truly ancient!) name. This rule works for foot, partly for eye and ear, and also for heart (even though the heart isn’t typically open to direct observation), but it breaks down for finger, toe, and leg. In any case, beards cannot easily be hidden, even with our passion for masks. Moreover, through millennia, beards have played a role far in excess of their importance, and beard is indeed a very old word. A beard used to manifest virility and strength in an almost mystical way. We remember the story of Samson: once deprived of his beard, he became a weakling and had to wait until the hair grew again on his chin, to wreak vengeance on his enemies. The earliest example of clean-shaven in The Oxford EnglishDictionary (OED online) goes back to 1863 (in a poem by Longfellow!), while beardless was usually applied to boy and young man.
Five years ago, I discussed, among other things, the origin of the idiom to go to Jericho, roughly synonymous with to go to hell. Judging by what turns up on the Internet, today, the origin of the phrase is known to those who are interested in etymology, but Walter W. Skeat (1835-1912) claimed that he could not find any explanation for it and referred to the Old Testament (2 Sam. X. 5 and 1 Chron. X. 5). He appears to have been the first to explain the phrase.
The story runs as follows: after the death of the king of the Ammonites, David sent his envoys to Hanun, the son of the deceased king, to comfort him. But Hanun’s counselors suspected treason, seized the envoys, had half of their beards cut off, and sent the men back. This incautious move resulted in a protracted war and the defeat of the Ammonites. When David’s envoys, deeply humiliated and almost beardless, returned home, David advised them to “tarry at Jericho till their beards were grown.” In their present shape, they were “emasculated” and could not be seen in public.
This is all that remains of Jericho today. Photo by Bukvoed. CC-BY-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
The Scandinavian god Thorr. Image: Thor, Hymir, and the Midgard Serpent, 1906. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
Reference to the absence of a beard is familiar from various sources. Thus, Njál, the protagonist of the most famous Icelandic saga, was wise and virile but had almost no hair on his chin, and this defect became an object of obscene jokes. By contrast, the great Scandinavian god Thor (Þórr) did have a huge beard. More about the Scandinavians will be said below.
English beard has a few immediately recognizable cognates in Germanic, such as Dutch baard and German Bart. The Slavic and Baltic words sound nearly the same. Latin barba, despite some inconsistency in the correspondence between the final consonants, seems to belong here too. But barbarian does not. Barbarian was a Greek coinage (the Greek name for beard is quite different) and referred to foreigners and their incomprehensible babbling. Those people did say something (barabara), but who could understand them, and who cared? Perhaps it should be added that the Old Celtic name for the poet (bard) has nothing to do with beards either.
As usual, a list of cognates may not tell us anything about the ultimate origin of the word (in this case, beard), and as happens so often, we find ourselves in a linguistic desert. It is not for nothing that while discussing beard, our best dictionaries list several related forms and stop. There was indeed the Old Icelandic noun barð “edge, verge, rim” (ð has the value of th in English the), but whether it is cognate with beard is unclear. It may be: the affinity between “beard” and “edge” is obvious. If so, the association that gave rise to the coining of beard stops being obscure. (Though Icelandic barð “beard” also existed, it might be a later loan from German.)
The only other Germanic name of the beard occurred just in Icelandic, and its cognates continue into Modern Scandinavian. The word was skegg, related to Old Englishsceacga “rough hair or wool.” Its modern reflexshag still exists, but most will remember only the adjective shaggy, related to Old English sceaga “thicket of underwood and small trees; coppice, copse,” almost a doublet of sceacga, cited above.” (In my experience, no one recognizes the word coppice, and even the spellchecker does not know copse; hence my long gloss.) We have seen that in some societies, a beardless man was not really considered to be a true male, and in light of this fact we are not surprised to find that Old Icelandic skeggi meant “man” (boys of course waited for the time when they became men). Yet the famous Romans (as far as we can judge by the extant statues) were beardless, while the Greeks had sizable beards. No custom is or was universal.
George Bernard Shaw saved the word shaw from oblivion. Image: Shaw, 1911. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
Coppice and copse are almost dead words in Modern English, and the same holds for shaw “thicket,” the modern reflex of sceacga, though still common in dialects and place names. The word owes its fame to GeorgeBernard Shaw. No need to feel surprised at the existence of such a surname: don’t all of us know the family name Wood?
One of the curiosities of English is the verb beard “to oppose,” remembered, if at all, only from the idiom “to beard the lion in his den.” Is the implication “to face the enemy (beard to beard)” or “to catch the opponent by the beard”? An example of this phrase also occurs in the Authorized Version of the Bible, and again in connection with David. Beards, it appears, were famous, but they had to be cut and trimmed. Thorr was an obvious exception (but in the figurine that has come down to us, his beard merges with his male organ and emphasizes his potency, which is fair: an ancient thunder god was responsible for fertility). Having paid reference to shaggy males, let us also remember barbers. Today, a barber more often cuts hair than trims beards, but the etymology of barber is obvious. The Barber of Seville immortalized the profession. Long live Beaumarchais and Rossini!
Featured image: the Florida Grand Opera presents The Barber of Seville. CC-BY-2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
Allow me to introduce a group of seemingly ill-assorted words. Each member of this group occupies a secure place in the vocabulary of English, but no one knows for sure whether they belong together. My pair of distinguished guests is hint and hunt. They look very much alike and, in a way, their meanings are not incompatible: both presuppose the existence of a searched-for target. One wonders whether they aren’t even variants of the same verb or at least related.
A hunt? A hint? The stolen kiss by Jean-Honoré Fragonard. The Hermitage Museum. CC0 via Wikimedia Commons.
It is the third time that I am returning to the origin of English hunt. See especially the post forFebruary 12, 2020, and the comments. There will be some overlap between that essay and the one I am offering today, but now that several years have passed, I think I have partly solved the riddle (for myself) and decided to return to that intractable word.
Like some older authors, I suspect that hint and hunt are related. They even resemble non-identical twins. Mark Twain wrote a little-remembered but very funny tale “The Siamese Twins.” In the final sentence, it informs the reader that the ages of the brothers were respectively fifty-one and fifty-three. The author apologized for not mentioning this fact earlier. I decided to avoid his mistake and to make things clear right away. Hunt (the verb) has been known since the days of Old English, that is, for more than twelve centuries. By contrast, hint (the noun) first surfaced in texts by Shakespeare.
Though hint is a relatively recent word without a respectable pedigree, it looks like it belongs with hunt and hand (we use the hand for seizing things; hence an association with hunting). As expected, opinions on their relationship differ. Hunt is a typical English verb for “chasing game.” It lacks obvious cognates, but in many other languages, words meaning “hunt” are also obscure. For example, German has jagen, about whose origin nothing definite is known either.
There may be a good reason for this seemingly unexpected opaqueness—unexpected, because hunting is such a common and seemingly transparent occupation. For millennia, hunting sustained early communities, and people’s survival depended on the success of the chase. Danger lurked everywhere: the hunter might get lost, killed by his prey, or return empty-handed. Words designating such situations often fell victim to taboo, just as, for example, many animal names did. Call the bear by its name, and it will come and destroy you. But if you speak about the bear as a honey-lover (that is what they do in Russian) or the brown one (that is the case in Germanic: from a historical point of view, bear means “brown”), the beast will be duped and stay away. (Talk of the Devil, and he will appear! Right?) The same practice prevailed for the names of several wild animals, body parts, and diseases. (My apology: taboo was also made much of in the earlier post.)
Common words were distorted, and today we usually have no way of guessing what the original form was. Yet we sometimes know the idea behind the euphemism: for example, not the Devil but the Evil One (or Flibbertigibbet, for variety’s sake); not the bear, but the honey-eater or the brown one. The main Latin verb meaning “to hunt” was vēnārī, related to Venus. The idea must have been “to do something with a will, full of desire.” (A digression: the most often hunted animal was the deer, so much so that Tier, the German cognate of deer, means simply “animal.” Deer is a Germanic word, but those who have read the anthologized opening chapter in Walter Scott’sIvanhoe know that it was the Anglo-Saxons who killed deer, while the meat went to the table of the French barons. Hence venison, related to the Latin verb, cited above.)
The same seems to hold for Russian okhota (with cognates elsewhere in Slavic; stress on the second syllable): the root khot– means “to wish, desire.” The English verb hunt should probably be “deciphered” as “to catch, seize.” Perhaps, it was a vague taboo word, like its Latin and Slavic synonyms. If hint really appeared so late, it cannot be related to hunt, which, though devoid of relatives (and thus “local”), was already old even in Old English.
Fortunately, the situation is not hopeless. Hint, first recorded as a noun, meant “opportunity; slight indication or suggestion”; thus, just a dab, as it were. It was a mere reshaping (or an alternate form) of the now obsolete old verb hent “get, receive”! The desired time bridge has thus been restored. We can proceed with our chase, and while looking around, we notice the already mentioned hand, a Common Germanic word again (!) of uncertain origin, to quote some dictionaries (elsewhere in Indo-European, this extremity has quite different names.)
Could hand also be a taboo word for something like manus (manus is Latin for “hand”)? Indeed, it could. As just noted, the names of body parts are often products of taboo. Hand is an instrument of catching, grasping, “handling” things. It is an ideal member of our ill-assorted family. The scholarly literature on hunt and especially hand is huge, and many (but not all) language historians defend the ideas mentioned above. The bridge exists. Though it rests on unsafe supports, it may sustain the construction rather well.
The final actor in our drama is the Gothic verb fra-hinþan “to take captive” (fra– is a prefix; þ has the value of English th in thin). Gothic, a Germanic language (now dead), was recorded in the fourth century. Some of the Old Germanic words, related to –hinþan, mean “to reach” and “booty.” Though –hinþan and hand have often been compared, þ and d don’t match, and a reliable reconstruction depends on exact sound correspondences. Once such correspondences fail, etymologists are in trouble. However, here we seem to be dealing with a “special” taboo word, and it would be unrealistic to expect great precision in the coining of its forms. Obviously, I am pleading for special dispensation.
Taking captives. Wood engraving by John Philip Newman, 1876. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
As usual, I refuse to press my point, but I also refuse to concede defeat. It sems that a special taboo word with the sense “grasp, seize, catch,” sharing the root hent/hint ~ hunt ~ hand did exist in Germanic, and its reflexes are still discernible today. Hinþan was a strong verb (that is, a verb, whose root vowels alternated by ablaut, as, for instance, in English bind ~ bound or run ~ ran). The nouns, related to it, were like English bend and band. If this conclusion deserves credence, hint (from hent), hunt, and hand are modern reflexes of that ancient taboo word. Let me repeat that numerous researchers think so, but the most cautious critics prefer to sit on the fence. This is fine. The fence is as good a support as any other.
The etymologist as a hunter. Leopard stalking by Greg Willis. CC-By-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
A while ago, a reader pointed me to a comment on another writer’s OUPblog piece. The comment complained about a caption on a photo, an image of the painting “Adam and Eve in Paradise” by the seventeenth-century Flemish painter David Teniers the Younger. The original caption read “The world was also young one day,” and the comment read
The caption to Adam and Eve pic “the world was also young one day” should be “the world was also young once”. “One day” is only for indeterminate future time.
The reader who pointed this out to me wondered whether the claim that “One day” is only for indeterminate future time” was a legitimate correction or, as he put it “nonsense.” I responded that I was pretty sure that “one day” was not only for future tense. The blog editors didn’t get into the grammatical issue, but changed the caption to “Adam and Eve in Paradise. The age of innocence.”
The whole exchange got me curious about the expression “one day.” The original caption “The world was also young one day” does seem a bit odd, but certainly there are plenty examples of “one day” in the past sense, for example:
One day I was out walking, and passed by the calaboose; I saw a crowd about the gate, and heard a child’s voice…
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin
One day I was drawing a picture merely to fill in a blank space in the daily cartoon.
Rube Goldberg, The American Magazine, Jan 1922, 64
One day I was down on my knees polishing a man’s shoes on State Street when I happened to look up, and there was my teacher just passing.
Eddie Foy, “Clowning Through Life,” Colliers, Dec. 18, 1926, 7
In the examples, the one day signals something that that happened in the past. Try substituting once or one time and you’ll get a different, less specific narrative effect. One day is like Once upon a time, but without the fairy-tale feel.
Curious, I checked what dictionaries had to say. The Oxford English Dictionary is clear, telling us that one day means refers to “On a certain (but unspecified) day in the past.” It gives examples from Daniel Defoe and George Bernard Shaw, among others:
One Day walking with my Gun in my Hand by the Sea-side, I was very pensive upon the Subject of my present Condition.
Robinson Crusoe, 1881
I moralized and starved until one day I swore that I would be a full-fed free man at all costs.
Major Barbara, 1907
The OED notes as well that one day can refer to something occurring “On an unspecified day in the future” like the expression someday, as in this example from Tennessee Williams’s Twenty-seven Wagons Full of Cotton:
One day I will look in the mirror and I will see that my hair is beginning to turn grey.
The key feature, past or future, seems to be the idea of an unspecified day. The OED also contrasts one day with one of these days. The latter is described as also indicating an unspecified day in the future but as often “implying a more proximate or immediate future than the equivalent use of one day.” The OED gives an example from David Lodge’s 2009 Deaf Sentence:
It wouldn’t surprise me if we both turn up lightly disguised in a campus novel one of these days.
Try substituting one day or someday here and you’ll see contribution that one of these makes.
I didn’t find entries on one day in Garner’s Modern American Usage, Merriam Webster’s Guide to English Usage, The Chicago Manual of Style, in Websters Second or Third dictionaries or in the Random House Unabridged, all of which suggests that it is not a very contested bit of grammar.
Oddly though, the Cambridge Online Dictionary gives one day only as “at some time on the future,” citing the Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary & Thesaurus and the Cambridge Academic Content Dictionary.Collins Dictionary also gives one day “at some time in the future,” with no mention of the past.
Merriam Webster’s online dictionary treats one day as an idiom (perhaps to distinguish it from the literal sense of one day as “a single day”). Like the OED, Merriam gives both definitions: “at some time in the future” and “on a day in the past.”
The positioning of one day can also be a factor. When I looked through the full list of Merriam-Webster citations, I was struck by this quote from college football player Justin Dedich “My old soccer coach became the coach of pole vaulting and asked me to try out one day.” Here it is possible to associate the one day with the asking (an unspecified days in the past) or with the trying out (an unspecified day in the future, relative to the asking). The context makes it clear which is intended.
One day can refer to past or future events, and is part of a host of temporal settings phrases like once, one time, once upon a time, someday, and one of these days. Each has its own nuance.
We know that in English words beginning with kn– and gn– the first letter is mute. Even in English spelling, which is full of the most bizarre rules, this one causes surprise. But no less puzzling is the rule’s historical basis. At one time, know, knock, gnaw, and their likes were pronounced as they still are in related Germanic languages, that is, with k– and g- in the onset. What happened to those k- and g- sounds? The groups are hardly tongue twisters and give no one trouble in the middle of acne, acknowledge, magnet, and ignite. To be sure, in acne and their likes, k/g and n belong to different syllables, but one sometimes hears canoeing, pronounced as c’noeing, and the first consonant survives. Nor is the group kn endangered in the coda, as in taken and spoken. (Yet King Knut has become Canute: don’t expect justice from language!)
According to the evidence of contemporary observers, the destruction of k and g before n happened about five centuries ago, that is, shortly before and in Shakespeare’s time. Why did it? True, sounds undergo modification in the process of speech. For instance, most people pronounce a group like hisshoes as hishshooz (this process is called assimilation), but kn– and gn– are word-initial groups, and no neighbors threaten k- and g-. As a most general rule, the cause of a systemic sound change is another major sound change. Obviously, this is not the case with initial kn– and gn– in English: no previous event triggered the loss of k and g before n.
A few analogs of the change in English have been found in German Bavarian dialects, but nothing even remotely resembling the loss of k and g before n has happened elsewhere in Germanic. In the remote past, many words began with hl– and hn-. Thus, listen and neck were at one time hlysta and hnecca, but h is a perishable sound, and “dropping” it causes little surprise. By contrast, k and g are sturdy. Our best books on the history of English describe in detail the loss of k and g before n but are silent on the causes.
Nor can I offer an airtight argument about why that process occurred, but I decided to look at the origin of the affected words and risk putting forward a hypothesis. Though knee and know have secure Indo-Europeancognates, most other items on the list are limited to Germanic. As usual, cognates shed little light on the prehistory of the words that interest us unless their senses diverge radically. In this case, they do not. Here are two instances. Knack: perhaps borrowed from Low German or Dutch; of imitative origin, because knack “sharp blow” exists, and in English (knack), we may be dealing with the same word. (German Knacks means “crack.”) Likewise, knapsack was taken over from the same sources, with knap perhaps being related to German knappen “to snap, crush”; thus, knap is a doublet of snap and snatch, both possibly sound-imitative.
The latest (cautious and conservative) German etymological dictionary says bluntly that kn– is a sound-symbolic group denoting pressure. The statement looks correct, but it is doomed to remain guesswork: since many words with initial kn– refer to pressure, we conclude that such is the nature of this group. The vicious circle in this reasoning (begging thequestion) is obvious. We are on safer ground with knell: all over Germanic, knell-, knoll-, and their look-alikes and synonyms are probably indeed sound-imitative.
Knitting implies increase. Photo by Adam Jones. CC-by-2.0, via Flickr.
Knot and knit perhaps make us think of some increase in size. Both evoke clear visual images and are thus in some way “expressive.” Knob and its near-synonym knub (both mean “a small lump”) align themselves rather easily with the rest of kn-words. The same holds for knop “a round protuberance.” The idea that Germanic kn– is expressive (whether sound-imitative or sound symbolic) is old, and I hope the suggestion I am about to advance has some merit. Couldn’t the semantics of kn-words, their constant use under emphasis, contribute to the simplification of kn-?
Every sound change has a cause, but none is necessary. The same words retained their initial kn– in Frisian, Dutch, and Scandinavian. Languages and dialects go their different ways. It is the system’s business to ignore and suppress or make use of the stimulus. The same is true of every change. For instance, some societies resolve crises peacefully, while others are famous for continual revolutions.
If my guess has any merit, it follows that once the group kn– lost its k, the non-symbolic knife (or is it sound-symbolic?!), knee, and know remained in isolation and followed suit under the pressure of the system. It would be interesting to observe whether they were indeed the last to succumb. But we cannot relive the past in such detail, and our spelling makes us blind to the change: we still write kn-, long after its loss of k. Kn- probably did not become n– as an instantaneous act: more likely, it went through the stage of initial hn-, and some kn- ~ hn– doublets indeed existed in Old Norse.
The English gn– group is tiny: gnarled, gnash, gnat, gnaw, and a few bookish loan words: gneiss “a kind of rock,” gnome “a legendary creature,” gnosis (as recognizable in agnostic), and gnu “an African quadruped.” Gnarled is a misbegotten word, whose cognates begin with kn-. German Knorren means “knot, gnarl.” In any case, gnarled is from the historical point of view another kn-word. For the verb gnaw (Old Icelandic gnaga, German nagen) an ancient Indo-European root has been reconstructed, because similar words occur outside Germanic, but more probably, we are again dealing with a sound-imitative verb, and the same is true of gnash. It is curious that Old Icelandic gnat meant “noise.” The same is true of many Scandinavian words beginning with gn-.
Incidentally, n- in the verb neigh goes back to Old Englishhn-, and we witness a curious set of variants: Old Icelandic gneggja, Modern Icelandic hneggja, and Swedish gnägga versus Swedish regional knäja. This unexpected variation perhaps confirms my guess that however English kn– may have lost its k, it went through the stage hn-. At present, English has retained initial h before a consonant only in the speech of those who distinguish between witch and which, but hn-, hl, and hr– are the norm in Modern Icelandic.
If some students of the history of English sounds happen to read this blog, it would be interesting to know their opinion about my hypothesis. Here it is in a nutshell: English words with kn– and gn– lost their k/g under emphasis, because nearly all of them had a strong expressive character.
Editor’s Note: We’re taking next week off, but Anatoly will be back the following week with a new post!
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