This day in history: December 29

On this day in 2005, Air Force Brigadier General C.D. Alston reported that "insurgents in Iraq are showing little capacity to keep up numerous and persistent attacks." The U.S. State Department, in its release of the general's assessment, noted that with this improvement in the situation, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had announced that "the United States would reduce the number of combat troops [in Iraq] by approximately 7,000 in 2006."

A year later, neither of those reports has proven true, and President George W. Bush is said to be considering an increase in the number of American troops in Iraq.

Former president Gerald Ford told the Washington Post's Bob Woodward a couple years ago that he disagreed with Bush’s decision to invade Iraq. In the interview, which was not released until Ford's death earlier this week, Ford was also critical of Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, who served three decades ago in his own administration, for their role in the current war.

At the end of his story on the interview, Woodward noted that "Ford was often labeled the only American president to lose a war," after Presidents Johnson and Nixon had kept the United States in Vietnam for almost a decade. "The label always rankled."

And now another president is facing that same label. As Gary Schmitt, of the American Enterprise Institute, said the other day, "No president wants to be remembered as the guy who lost a war," so we can't leave Iraq. And after the 2006 elections, we can't simply "stay the course." As Josh Marshall points out, "That leaves escalation as the only alternative."

Hence, a year after reports that the war was all but over, President Bush considers a "surge"--to avoid that rankled feeling.

Thanks to Chris Bray for the suggestion!

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Presidential religions

Classes start in just over a week, so I'm starting to think about getting ready for them. One of my Spring classes is on the history of American religious life, and this semester I'm having my students read David L. Holmes's new book, The Faiths of the Founding Fathers.

The innovative thing about Holmes's book is that he looks not only at the words of the Founding Fathers, but at their actions as well. George Washington, for example, was an Anglican (Episcopalian), but after the American Revolution, when he no longer attended church with his mother, he "avoided the sacrament of Holy Communion." His habit was to leave after the regular service, then send the carriage back to pick up his wife, Martha. When the minister preached a sermon in which he lamented "the unhappy tendency of . . . those in elevated stations who invariably turned their backs upon the celebration of the Lord's Supper," Washington simply quit going to church on "Sacrament Sundays."

Of the nine Founding Fathers that Holmes discusses, five--Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe--were also presidents. In class, we sometimes talk about presidential religions, in part using information from the Adherents.com website. Of the 42 presidents (George W. Bush is number 43, but Grover Cleveland gets counted twice), half were Episcopalian or Presbyterian, denominations that today count fewer than 5% of Americans among their members--a ratio of roughly 10 to 1. Methodists, the third largest presidential religion, are also over-represented, but not by nearly so large a margin: 12% of presidents compared to 8% of the population.

Here's an interesting question: Which presidential religions are most over-represented? Answer: Unitarians (four presidents, or 9.5%, compared to .2% of the population) and, the biggest surprise, Dutch Reformed (two, 4.8%, versus .1%). Today, the Reformed Church in America (formerly Dutch Reformed) has only about 300,000 members, but keep in mind that New York, before the English took over, was a Dutch colony, and the Dutch influence was still strong enough to account for Martin Van Buren and Theodore Roosevelt. (TR later attended Christ [Episcopal] Church in Oyster Bay with his wife).

Catholics are the most under-represented: a quarter of the American population, and just one president (John F. Kennedy).

John Adams was the first Unitarian president. According to one biographer, "Adams was raised a Congregationalist, but ultimately rejected many fundamental doctrines of conventional Christianity, such as the Trinity and the divinity of Jesus, becoming a Unitarian." Could such a person be elected president today? I don't think so, despite the recent election of Muslim Keith Ellison to the House of Representatives--or, I should say because of the backlash to Ellison's election.

A look at these tables of presidents' religious affiliations shows why studies like Holmes's are so important. Jefferson is often listed as an Episcopalian, but his views on Christianity were far from mainstream. Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson, among others, also pose certain problems of categorization.

One more interesting president: Dwight Eisenhower's parents were members of the River Brethren, a small Mennonite group, but they joined the WatchTower Society (Jehovah's Witness) when he was a boy. Ike, who took the presidental oath of office with his hand on a WatchTower bible, joined a Presbyterian congregation during his first term as president.

Incidentally, the River Brethren, a foot-washing church, split in the nineteenth century over an important theological question: Should the same person who washes the feet also dry them? Or should those responsibilities be handled by two different people? Hence was created the One-Mode River Brethren (one person handles both jobs) and the Two-Mode. I don't know to which group Eisenhower belonged as a boy.

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Died on Christmas Day

James Brown, the Godfather of Soul, the hardest-working man in show business, died yesterday, December 25.

I recently wrote about people who were born on Christmas Day. In honor of James Brown, here's a partial list of people who died on that day.

Linus Yale, Jr. (d. 1868) perfected the cylinder lock

Karel Čapek (d. 1938), Czech writer, popularized the word "robot" with his play R.U.R.Rossum's Universal Robots)

Charlie Chaplin (d. 1977), cinematic genius

Joan Blondell (d. 1979), actress

Billy Martin (d. 1989), frequent Yankees manager

Nicolae and Elena Ceauşescu (d. 1989), Mr. and Mrs. Romanian dictator

Dean Martin (d. 1995), singer/actor

Denver Pyle (d. 1997), actor

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More than y'all wanted to know about "y'all"

This morning I came across a posting on a site called Redneck's Revenge (don't ask--I have no recollection of how I got there) titled Merry Christmas, Ya'll. It consisted mainly of an illustration, a take-off of Norman Rockwell's famous "Freedom from Want" (click here for Rockwell's original), except the woman is smoking a cigarette, she's serving a bucket of KFC chicken rather than a turkey, and the man behind her is in a t-shirt instead of a suit. Oh, and there are cans of Budweiser on the table.

Now, I'm a sucker for Rockwell parodies, but the posting's title bothered me: Merry Christmas, Ya'll.

You all. Take out the "o" and the "u, put an apostrophe in their place, and then squish everything together: y'all. Not ya'll. Y'all.

Simple, but apparently hard for some people to understand. In 1996, when the Olympic games brought the world to Atlanta, there was a billboard on the interstate just before the South Carolina border: "Ya'll come back to see us." The message showed that we in Georgia can be mighty hospitable--and mighty ignorant of spelling rules.

The publicists on Atlanta's Olympic committee aren't the only ones who misspell the word. A Google search turns up 3,680,000 instances of "y'all" on the web and 2,180,000 of "ya'll," so the misspelling is widespread. Maybe people are thinking of "we'll," the contraction for "we will," which is quite a different thing.

Anyway, seeing that title this morning reminded me of a couple years ago, when I came across "ya'll" in a John Grisham novel. Grisham, who lives near Oxford, Mississippi (home of William Faulkner, another great southern writer), has an ear for dialogue and uses "y'all" well and frequently. But several times in The Brethren, "y'all" had become "ya'll" (a misspelling I attributed to an overzealous but ignorant copyeditor). This got me curious about that fine southern pronoun, and I started reading up on it.

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is generally considered the definitive authority to English usage. It cites, for every sense of every word, at least one example taken from the literary record. In fact, the OED tries to offer the earliest use of the word, followed by other examples from later years.

According to the OED, the first appearance of "y'all" was in 1909, much later than I expected. I couldn't believe the word hadn't appeared in print long before that. A quick check of the New York Times, from its first publication in 1851 to the present (not nearly as big a deal as it sounds; the Times was recently digitized, creating a searchable database that allows a researcher to type any word and within seconds have a citation to every mention of that word in the newspaper's history), uncovered "y'all" in 1886, in a rather rude article titled "Odd Southernisms": "'You all,' or, as it should be abbreviated, 'y'all,' is one of the most ridiculous of all the Southernisms I can call to mind." There it was, over twenty years earlier than the OED's first citation.

But I wasn't satisfied. Another new resource, American Periodicals Series, is a searchable database of over a thousand American magazines published between 1740 and 1900. Again, with just a few seconds' work, I came across a citation to the Southern Literary Messenger from 1858. The piece was written by "Mozis Addums," penname of George William Bagby, one of the humorists of the mid-nineteenth century who thought spelling everything phonetically was funny. Mozis described the crowded conditions in the boarding house where he was living: "Packin uv pork in a meet house, which you should be keerful it don't git hot at the bone, and prizin uv tobakker, which y'all's Winstun nose how to do it, givs you a parshil idee, but only parshil."

Well, I'm not exactly sure what it means, either, but there it is, over half a century before the esteemed OED caught it--and not just "y'all" itself, but the possessive, "y'all's," with two glorious apostrophes!

Linguist Michael Montgomery claims that "y'all" goes back to the Scots-Irish phrase "ye aw," and he offers as evidence a letter written in 1737 by an Irish immigrant in New York to a friend back home: "Now I beg of ye aw to come over here." As I understand Montgomery's hypothesis, "ye aw" was Americanized into "y'all," which is indeed a contraction of "you all" but would not have come into being without the influence of the Scots-Irish phrase.

Whatever its origin, the word serves an important function in English. We have separate singular and plural first person pronouns ("I" and "we") and third person pronouns ("he"/"she" and "they"), but there is no distinction in the second person; "you" is both singular and plural. The distinction between the French "tu" (singular) and "vous" (plural) doesn't exist in English. It did until a few centuries ago: "thou" was singular, "you" plural. But by the time the American colonies won their independence, "thou" had practically disappeared and "you" was serving a double function. It's almost as if we're missing a pronoun now, and "y’all" admirably fills the second person plural position.

And through most of the South, it is plural. Unless someone is intentionally misusing it for effect, "y'all" seldom refers to just one person. The problem is, lots of folks have intentionally misused it, from the makers of movies and television shows with exaggerated southern characters (often for purposes of ridicule) to the writers of those ubiquitous little books with titles like "Advice for Yankees Moving South": "Remember, 'y'all' is singular. 'All y'all' is plural. 'All y'all's' is plural possessive."

Here's how Lewis Grizzard handled the situation: "For some unknown reason, Northerners think Southerners use 'y'all' and 'you all' in the singular sense. Northerners will giggle and ask, 'So where are you all from?' I answer by saying, 'I all is from Atlanta.'"

Anyway, I wrote up a brief article about the two examples I had found that pre-dated the OED's earliest citation and got it published in American Speech, probably the biggest journal for American linguistics. (Hey, publish or perish, you know.) Not bad for a few minutes' work.

And now y'all know all you need to know about "y'all."

UPDATE: see Beat at my own game!

Expelled

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Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me!

Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me! (NPR's weekly news quiz show) was especially funny this morning. In one segment, contestants have to identify a quotation from the week's news. One of the quotations was "We're not winning, we're not losing," and the answer, of course, was President Bush speaking on the war in Iraq. To this, panelist Roy Blount, Jr., one of the funniest writers in America today, said, "So the war in Iraq is like kissing your sister."

You know, maybe this isn't as funny if you don't know the old adage about ties in football--they're like kissing your sister. Here's something I didn't know. According to Wikipedia (I wanted to be able to attribute this properly): "The earliest known use of the phrase was by Navy football coach Eddie Erdelatz after a scoreless tie against Duke in 1953."

And then (back to Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me), a question about Time naming "You" the 2006 "Person of the Year." Panelist Charlie Pierce said something about people putting that on a job résumé--"Time Magazine's Person of the Year (2006)."

Well, why not? That'd be more honest that George Deutsch, the Bush-appointed editor in NASA's public affairs office, who lied on his résumé about having graduated from college, or Todd Shriber, staffer for Rep. Denny Rehberg (Montana), who hired a couple of hackers to break into the computer files at Texas Christian University and change his college grades.

I missed the rest of the show. I was listening to the radio in the car, on the way to get a hair cut, and I got there, darn it.

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Today in history: Dunder and Blixem?

On December 23, 1823, the Troy Sentinel (a New York newspaper) published an anonymous poem titled "Account of a Visit from St. Nicholas," better known today as "The Night before Christmas."

Clement C. Moore is generally credited with the poem, but literary scholar Don Foster has pretty convincingly shown that the probable author was Henry Livingston, Jr., another New York poet.

Whoever wrote it, the poem shaped much of what we now "know" about Christmas and Santa Claus--he was a fat, jolly man, for example, and eight reindeer pulled his sleigh.

But the original 1823 poem is a little different from the way we know it:

Now! Dasher, now! Dancer, now! Prancer, and Vixen,
On! Comet, on! Cupid, on! Dunder and Blixem.

Read the above, paying close attention to the commas and exclamation points. The emphasis is all wrong. The more familiar pattern didn't appear for seven years:

Now, Dasher! now, Dancer! now, Prancer! now, Vixen!
On, Comet! on, Cupid! on, Dunder and Blixem!

And look at the names of the last two reindeer! They didn't become Donder and Blixen until 1837. (Rudolph showed up in 1939.)

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Today in history: America's most famous Christmas present

On December 22, 1864, General William T. Sherman completed his "March to the Sea" through Georgia and sent President Abraham Lincoln a telegram: "I beg to present you as a Christmas gift the city of Savannah."

Lincoln received the telegram on Christmas Eve. He was reportedly very pleased, having worried that he would get nothing but a t-shirt and a "Someone visited Savannah and all I got was this lousy mug" coffee cup.

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Rudolph the Parasitically-Infected Reindeer

Just in case you were wondering why Rudolph's nose is red....

an abstract from PubMed

Epidemiology of reindeer parasites. Halvorsen O. Parasitol Today. 1986 Dec;2(12):334-9.

Every Christmas we sing about Rudolph the red-nosed Reindeer, but do we give much thought to why his nose is red? The general consensus is that Rudolf has caught a cold, but as far as I know no proper diagnosis has been made of his abnormal condition. I think that, rather than having a cold, Rudolf is suffering from a parasitic infection of his respiratory system. To some this may seem a bit far-fetched as one would not expect an animal living with Santa Claus at the North Pole to be plagued by parasites, but I shall show otherwise.

(as posted on The World's Fair)

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Robert Barnwell Rhett

Today is the birthday of Robert Barnwell Rhett, born December 21, 1800, in Beaufort, South Carolina. Rhett was one of the most extreme "fire-eaters," a term for pro-secessionist southerners. He was upset when South Carolinians accepted the Compromise of 1850, which defused sectional tensions for a decade--he was ready to leave the Union then--and he spent the rest of the 1850s pushing for southern separation. (He is sometimes called "the father of secession.")

When others in S.C. caught up with his sentiments and voted to secede after the election of Abraham Lincoln, Rhett wrote the "Address of the People of South Carolina to the Southern States," inviting them to join S.C. in a confederacy of the slaveholding states. In this document, Rhett compared the northern states to Great Britain a century earlier, exercising a growing despotism over the American colonies. He concluded with the following:

We rejoice, that other nations should be satisfied with their institutions. Contentment, is a great element of happiness, with nations as with individuals. We, are satisfied with ours. If they prefer a system of industry, in which capital and labor are in perpetual conflict--and chronic starvation keeps dow, the natural increase of population--and a man is worked out in eight years--and the law ordains, that children shall be worked only ten hours a day--and the sabre and bayonet are the instruments of order--be it so. It is their affair, not ours.

We prefer, however, our system of industry, by which labor and capital are identified in interest, and capital, therefore, protects labor--by which our population doubles every twenty years--by which starvation is unknown, and abundance crowns the land--by which order is preserved by an unpaid police, and many fertile regions of the earth, where the white man cannot labor, are brought into usefulness, by the labor of the African, and the whole world is blessed by our own productions. All we demand of other peoples is, to be let alone to work out our own high destinies. United together, and we must be the most independent, as we are among the most important, of the nations of the world. United together, and we require no other instrument to conquer peace, than our beneficent productions. United together, and we must be a great, free and prosperous people, whose renown must spread throughout the civilized world, and pass down, we trust, to the remotest ages.

(from A Fire-Eater Remembers: The Confederate Memoir of Robert Barnwell Rhett, ed. by William C. Davis)

Rhett died in Louisiana in 1876 and was returned to South Carolina for burial in Charleston's Magnolia Cemetery.

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Stranded!

I am still here. Stuck in New Orleans. Not that I don't like this place, but I really had my heart set on going home today, hanging out with my buddy Kara and seeing the roommates at the house. I had a flight out for today at 2 pm. But I don't anymore. This is a classic example of "do as I say, not as I do". I told Lea when she was buying her ticket - DO NOT go through Denver!!! She listened to me. But somehow, when I went to buy my ticket, I was caught up in the greed of finding the shortest flight, the flight that arrived just when someone could pick me up and the flight that allowed me to get some work done in the morning and see my friends in the evening. And guess where that flight connected at? DENVER! I have been banging my head against the wall all morning just thinking about what a hypocrite (and see where it got me!) I am.

Actually, I have not been banging my head against the wall all morning. I have been running around like a mad woman. After sitting on the phone yesterday for hours wading through the monotonous automated voice that is the United "help" line and finally getting put through to an agent only to get the busy signal (about 487 times!), I finally decided that the way to figure this out was to go to the airport. So this morning at 4:45, I went to the airport and stood in the premier line (which is supposedly faster) behind (of course!) a lady with about 400 large bags which all had to be weighed and checked (hello santa!), a relative in a wheelchair and then, lo and behold, about 4 other relatives who cut in line with her at the last minute.

I finally got to the counter only to be told by the lady that there are "abosolutely NO flights today or tomorrow". Tears sprung from my eyes for a second before I swallowed them back and asked her again about getting to San Francisco. "Oh...San Francisco. I thought you meant Denver." WHEW! But still, there were no flights even to San Francisco unless I wanted to wait standby all day. Luckily, after about 20 minutes of searching, she found a flight early tomorrow morning (thank you lady!), and after being ticketed, I turned around and walked out. As I was walking out, a lady in the premier line cheered. I thought that it was pretty weird that she cheered, until I realized I didn't care why she was cheering. I felt like cheering too... I am going home! Come hell or high water or a crazy winter blizzard... I am going home!

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