Mar 02 2012

Book Review: The Etymologicon by Mark Forsyth

The Etymologicon by Mark Forsyth

The Etymologicon by Mark Forsyth

“The Etymologicon” by Mark Forsyth is a book of the origin of words, of their etymology. It’s based on the author’s blog, the Inky Fool, it reads very much as a sequence of blog posts strung together. This isn’t necessarily bad but does sometime make it feel like a a unrelenting, whirlwind tour of the origins of English words.

Although English was never my strongest subject at school this combination of history and language has always fascinated me. I thought I’d pluck out and summarise a few little gems that caught my eye:

Romany people have received a range of names, based on the mistaken assumptions of their origins. The term “gypsy” arises from those that thought they came from Egypt, most bizarrely the Spanish at one point seemed to believe they come from Flemish Belgium, hence the word “Flamenco”. The Roma ultimately come from India, their language having its roots in Hindi and Sanskrit.

Wamblecropt, meaning “afflicted by nausea” appeared in Cawdrey’s Table Alphabetical of 1604 which Forsyth cites as the first dictionary not directed to the aid of translators. He also highlights that the fame of Dr Johnson’s dictionary is not in its novelty as a type of book but in Johnson’s fame as a learned man. I feel there is a need to randomly reintroduce such words to the language, to see if their time has returned. “I am often wamblecropt on the train into work”.

I’d always assumed that Nazi was a a contraction of Nationalsozialistiche Deutsche Arbeitpartei, which it is but it was also a pre-existing term of abuse relating to Bavarian peasants who were the butt of jokes in Germany in the early 20th century. Nazi is a contraction of Ignatius, a common Bavarian name.

“Terrorism”, it seems was coined in English after the French Revolution to describe a system of government based on terror.

Rather romantically, the ring finger is so-named because early medicine held that the ring finger was directly connected to the heart and could be treated as a proxy for the treatment of heart problems, and so when we marry we put a ring on our ring finger. My wedding ring is the only jewellery I wear. Somewhat insensitively, when choosing a ring for Mrs SomeBeans at which point the issue of a ring for me was first raised, I exclaimed that I wasn’t particularly interested if it cost as much as hers did. I relented fairly soon afterwards, having saved on an engagement ring which Mrs SomeBeans wouldn’t have been able to wear as at the time she worked in the food industry.

You’ll be pleased to know that there was a “gorm” to go with “gormless”, gorm was a 12th century Scandinavian word meaning sense or understanding. Similarly, there were once also “feck” and “reck”, now only found in “feckless” and “reckless”. Happily there was also a “gruntle”, which is now only found in “disgruntled”. To gruntle is to grunt often, as pigs might do, in this instance dis- prefix is an intensifier.

Obviously I could go on, but it would be repetitive.

It’s difficult to know with a book like this the level of referencing which is desirable, it is light on references but the author acknowledges this at the end of the book, providing a brief bibliography and some more detailed references as an example.

Books similar to this include, Lynne Truss’s “Eats, shoots and leaves” and David Crystal’s “The Cambridge Encyclopedia of The English Language“. The most useful part of my library membership is online access to the Oxford English Dictionary, which is also a goldmine for etymologists.

All in all an entertaining read, and compatible with the stresses of new parenthood.

Feb 24 2012

I am Dr Faustus

Ananyo Bhattacharya writes in the Guardian that “Scientists have sold their souls – and basic research – to business“. I wish, respectfully, to dispute this statement.

The article is built around the assertion that basic research in the UK has been corrupted by the idea that it must demonstrate a degree of usefulness, in particular to commercial interests.

Bhattacharya says:

“it is worth noting that the overwhelming majority of game-changing ideas and inventions have not come about as a result of scientists addressing the needs of business.

This is utter cobblers, have you heard of the Industrial Revolution? Do you know that that power is measured in Watts, after the steam engine designer James Watt or that the units of energy, Joules, are named for James Joule a brewer at the forefront of technological improvements for his brewery. What about the transistor, invented at Bell Labs? How about Lavoiser and the foundations of chemistry?  These people may well have appeared to do their research as what we would describe as a “hobby” but they were strongly motivated by the businesses in which they worked at a time when the corporate research laboratory simply didn’t exist nor did the university research department. Even the work that Isaac Newton did was very relevant to commercial interests in his time, the motions of the moon and planets which can be derived from his laws of gravitation were important to navigation, and therefore trade. His work on the telescope can be seen in a similar light. The weaker version of this argument is that single causes for scientific discoveries simply do not exist, they arise from a combination of factors including straightforward curiosity, commercial interests, dependent discoveries, national prestige amongst other things.

Science has also been part of the entertainment business, it still is. Robert Hooke was employed by the Royal Society to provide scientific demonstrations to its members, similarly Michael Faraday was employed at the Royal Institution and long before electricity was used to do anything useful it was a part of the repertoire of travelling lecturers.

In common with many scientists, much of my work in academia was funded at least in part by industry including Courtaulds, Nestle and Unilever for whom I now work. There’s only a subset of scientist who work in areas which attract no direct industrial funding.  Frankly, it is insulting for the rest of us to be told that our work is devalued because of those contacts we have had with industry. Industry is valuable to research because it asks interesting questions, and demands interesting things. How do I make a computer out of plastic? What must a drug that cures Alzheimer’s Disease do? What properties must my avalanche defence barrier have?

It is some form of arrogance to demand money from the public purse whilst simultaneously exclaiming that you can’t possibly describe how you will usefully spend that money; that the fruits of your labour are simply impossible to evaluate. Can you imagine a school or a hospital running this way, let alone a business?

The article also references the “unmeasureability” of basic research impacts, I think there is a degree of truth in this in particular the idea that an impact statement can be written for each and every grant and that the detail of that research proposal can be meaningfully given an “impact value”. However, this approach misses out the critical element of every research project: people.

Most of the people doing research in our university departments will leave them to do other work elsewhere. Trained people are the measurable impact of every research project; their training in basic research skills; their education in specific research skills around their core topic and only finally their knowledge in the very specific area they were taken on to research. As I mentioned earlier several companies spent moderate amounts of money on me through my academic research career what they got from that was not the publication output, I’m confident that my scientific impact in terms of citations will be largely forgotten in a few years time, the important thing was me!

 

Feb 17 2012

Childcare for scientists

Thomas - tired by feeding

Thomas - tired by feeding

Clearly childrearing is primarily a biology experiment but there are elements of physical sciences which are helpful.

 In my past I have done experiments at central facilities like the Rutherford Appleton neutron source, and the x-ray synchrotron sources at Warrington and Grenoble. The deal with these systems is you get a custom-built specialised instrument for a solid block of time and because it is scarce you use it 24 hours per day. Some people, technically called “lucky bastards”, have either highly automated instruments or samples which require long runtimes. I didn’t. So a small team goes off to do the experiment, tending the instrument at 2-3 hour intervals. As the experiments stretch into the small hours skills required for baby care come into play. The group needs to establish an appropriate shift pattern, novices often fall into the trap of refusing to go to bed first. Whilst more senior scientists might take the group to the pub for a couple of pints before buggering off to bed with the words “I’m too old for this”. Experiments like this require a range of tasks to be completed, and in a bleary state this is best done with a system which requires as close to zero thought as possible, make things ready again once you’ve completed a task rather than turning up at the bench to discover you left it in a complete mess. Also record clearly what you are doing so your fellow experimenters can pick it up in your absence (corporal or mental), this includes you. Advanced users have more exciting things to do, such as handling hydrofluoric acid or piranha etch at 2am, there is a clear parallel here with baby poo.

A second area of interest is in temperature-control. Haake water baths are to scientists and temperature control as Marshall amplifiers are to musicians and guitars – other brands are available but they just don’t have the cachet. These devices will maintain water (and samples) at a fixed temperature. It turns out that the description “lukewarm”, used to specify the required temperature for baby feed, has been in use in English since the 14th century, distressingly for a scientist the OED does not provide an actual temperature in SI units corresponding to “lukewarm” (or in any other units for that matter). There is a clear gap in the market here for an espresso-style baby feeding machine which takes as inputs unsterilised gear, expressed breast milk and formula milk and dispenses the required aliquots of “lukewarm” milk – a baby weighing scale could usefully be incorporated into the top of the device. In principle it may be possible to get it to carry out the feeding, although in practice robots struggle with handling soft, squishy, shrieking things.

Finally, one is pretty much forced into preparing a baby feeding spreadsheet. It pains me to be forced to this, I have a “what would chimps do?” attitude to baby-rearing. But these days babies are set feeding targets (150-200 ml per kg per 24 hours), and woebetide any parents failing to meet those targets – they are threatened with a return to hospital by a brigade of midwives whose advice on achieving the target varies greatly but waking the baby up at 3 hourly intervals for a feeding, day and night, is a fixed point. Force-feeding a baby at 3am is quite challenging, changing the nappy first is a good waker-upper for both parties but once feeding the baby gradually slips back to sleep – as illustrated at the top of this post.

The midwife seemed unimpressed by my describing this as being akin to preparing baby foie gras.

Feb 13 2012

Bad at games

A little while back I was sitting down with colleagues for coffee, we were bemoaning the grim time we had at school in PE (physical education) lessons. My colleagues and I are all scientists, we excelled in other areas at school. For much of my school life I abhorred “games” lessons, if there were teams to be picked then I would be second to last to be selected – just before the fat kid in the class. I have a clear memory of members of my own team attacking me on the rugby pitch. These experiences were common to my colleagues. It isn’t even that I am particularly unfit, it was simply that I didn’t get on with organised team sports or activities; I couldn’t see the point.

My revelation was that there are no doubt a multitude of parallel groups that said the same of their maths lessons, physics lessons, English lessons… They did not excel at the activities with which they were presented, they couldn’t see the point of them and ultimately they have found they have little relevance to their vocations but they needed to get something from those lessons.

For me finding the way is simply to go to the gym three times a week at the crack of dawn, engaging in a variety of slightly pointless activities whilst listening to radio 4’s Today program and watching soundless “Heartbeat”. I wish my PE lessons had given me this 30 years ago.

Feb 07 2012

Arrival…

Thomas Samuel was born 5:39am on Saturday 4th February 2012, weighing 6lb 2oz (imperial being the SI unit of measure for babies), the birth was by caesarean section. Baby and mum are both doing well. Here he is only a couple of minutes old:

CIMG1474

And now, on the 7th February:

CIMG1483

 

I don’t want to write about the details of the labour, it feels like an invasion of privacy, all I can say is that I now consider women to be heroes and scarily superhuman! I am a very proud dad.

More pictures here.