Beat at my own game!

Last December, I posted a piece on how I found a use of the word “y’all” in 1858, a full half-century before the esteemed Oxford English Dictionary’s first citation.

Yesterday, Languagehat, a wonderful linguistics blog, linked to my posting, which means a lot of people who know a lot about words finally read it. Ben Zimmer, an editor for Oxford University Press’s American dictionaries, left a comment: “Barry Popik has found citations for y'all dating to 1856-57, from Alfred W. Arrington's novel The Rangers and Regulators of the Tanaha, or Life Among the Lawless: A Tale of the Republic of Texas.” I checked, and sure enough, Ben and Barry are right.

Here are the relevant sentences from Arrington’s book:

"Why, heern as how the regerlators wur guine to cotch y' all and swing y' up to dry, us thought we'd better heave to, and gin y' a lift; but when we fotch up in the dead man's grove, as them call it, and I guess as how 'twill bar a wusser name herearter, all in a twinkling, quicker nor y' could say Jack Robison, the bushes all blazed like a burnin' prairie, and the rifles roared behind every tree, and our boys dropped like pigeon-shootin'; and then the rest on 'em squalled fur mercy, and wur tooke alive” (p. 206).

He then made a small opening, and inquired, "ar y'all alive and kickin' in thar?" (p. 355).

Barry Popik, I salute you, sir!

And thanks, Ben, for passing this on.

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It’s a crazy, mixed-up world out there

From the Cartersville Daily Tribune News:

A Bartow County couple will go before a magistrate judge today to see if they will be arrested for allegedly stalking a Kennesaw police officer by installing cameras to track neighborhood speeders.

Lee and Teresa Sipple spent $1,200 mounting three video cameras and a radar speed unit outside their home, which is at the bottom of a hill. They have said they did so in hopes of convincing neighbors to slow down to create a safe environment for their son.

The Sipples allegedly caught Kennesaw police officer Richard Perrone speeding up to 17 mph over the speed limit. Perrone alerted Bartow authorities, who in turn visited the Sipples' home to tell them Perrone intended to press charges against them for stalking.

Something ain’t right here….

UPDATE: Seems like everybody already knew about this but me. I mentioned it to a couple of students today-- "Oh, yeah, I heard about that," etc. Apparently it was all over the radio and TV. If anyone is interested in a fuller story--and it's pretty interesting-- see here or here.

UPDATE II: World returns to normal; rogue cop agrees to drop charges.

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Me, a "thinking blogger"?

Will you look at that-- I've just been given a Thinking Blogger Award! Unexpected, perhaps undeserved, but there it is-- thanks to Brian, at Primordial Blog. Now, according to the rules, I have to nominate five bloggers whose postings make me think. Let's see, there are so many....

Here are my choices:

Bitch Ph.D.

Confessions of a Community College Dean

Boston 1775

History Is Elementary

Clio Bluestocking Tales

There they are: Five blogs that I find not only interesting but insightful and thought-provoking.

Congratulations, folks. You're my Thinking Bloggers!

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Parti Gras!

Parades! Beads! Booze! Boobs! Costumes! Birthday Suits! Kids! Toys! Boys!

Yes there is a little bit of everything here in New Orleans during Mardi Gras. And this year, we were all a part of it. My brother came to visit, along with Lil John (from Costa Mesa), Big Jon (from Beantown) and Rachel (Nashville), who is a permanent "guest" of ours.

What did we do? We saw a lot of parades, each very cool, with great floats, marching bands and lots of loot. Our favorites: Muses, Baccus and Zulu. We drank a lot of booze, but that just can't be helped..it is Mardi Gras! We showed our boobs to everone passing by...Just kidding! Only Doyle did that... We got TONS of beads...what do you do with them all when it is all over? I have enough beads to kill a small horse. Or should I say "FILL" a small horse. We went to the Maringy, the French Quarter, Uptown, Downtown and all around...

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Day 73: I am Not Dead Yet!

…And it keeps getting easier. Last Friday, we ran 11 miles. The week before that, we ran 10 miles. After that 13 is just another drop in the bucket.

We began to do this after looking at a map and realizing that from the office to our hotel was roughly 10 miles. We have since switched hotels and now it is 11 miles to our new destination, which is even better. It is a nice run too – from the office, we run along the levee for about 5 miles, then cut over to the park, run along the park for about half a mile, then cut over to the street and run up St. Charles Ave the rest of the way. St. Charles Ave is where the streetcar used to run along before the hurricane and so now there is a nice area right in the middle that is not being used and is a perfect running trail.

Last Friday, everyone was getting ready for the Mardi Gras parades, so it was quite an adventure. People with BBQs, kids, booze, food, chairs, tents and dogs were setting up all over the place. There were cops everywhere; in fact I think the average was about 5 cops for one block. I did not know that there were that many cops in New Orleans! I think they must bus them in from Disneyland or something.

We arrived at the hotel in about 1 hour and 50 minutes, which is consistent with our 10 minute per mile pace. I think we are ready for a full 13 miles!

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Happy Birthday, Darwin and Lincoln!

Happy birthday to you,
Happy birthday to you,
Happy birthday, Abe and Charlie,
Happy birthday to you!

Today is the birthday of both Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln. Both were born on the same day of the same year: Feb. 12, 1809. Quite a coincidence, ranking up there with Thomas Jefferson and John Adams both dying on July 4, 1826. (Actually that's a neater coincidence, being the 50th anniversary of the approval of the Declaration of Independence.)

Has anyone done a Lincoln/Darwin parallel thing, like what we used to see for Lincoln and Kennedy? You know: Abraham Lincoln was elected to Congress in 1846; John F. Kennedy in 1946. Lincoln was elected President in 1860; Kennedy in 1960. The names Lincoln and Kennedy each contain seven letters. Both were particularly concerned with civil rights. Both wives lost a child while living in the White House. Both Presidents were shot on a Friday, and both were shot in the head. Both assassins, John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald, were known by their three names. Both names are composed of fifteen letters. Both Presidents were assassinated by Southerners. Both were succeeded by Southerners named Johnson. And so on. (And on and on.... Some of these lists have dozens of “parallels.”)

Students sometimes ask me about that. Pretty spooky, huh? Well, No. John Allen Paulos, author of A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper, wrote that these lists of parallels are really meaningless coincidences. Paulos told how John Leavy, a computer programmer, constructed a similar list for two other assassinated presidents, William McKinley and James Garfield. “Both of these presidents were Republicans who were born and bred in Ohio. They were both Civil War veterans, and both served in the House of Representatives. Both were ardent supporters of protective tariffs and the gold standard, and both of their last names contained eight letters. After their assassinations they were replaced with their vice presidents, Theodore Roosevelt and Chester Alan Arthur, who were both from New York City, who both sported mustaches, and who both had names containing seven letters. Both presidents were slain during the first September of their respective terms by assassins, Charles Guiteau and Leon Czolgosz, who had foreign-sounding names.”

Such lists invite parody. Someone came up with the parallels between Elvis and Jesus. Jesus said “Love thy neighbor”; Elvis said “Don’t be cruel.” Jesus is the Lord’s shepherd; Elvis dated Cybill Shepherd. Jesus was part of the Trinity; Elvis’s first band was a trio. Jesus walked on water; Elvis surfed. Both were Capricorns (December 25 and January 8). Jesus was called “King of Israel”; Elvis was called “King of Rock ’n’ Roll.” Both had five letters in their names. (For some reason, these people put a lot of stock in how many letters are in a name.) Jesus lived in a state of grace in a near-eastern land; Elvis lived in Graceland in a nearly eastern state. In good taste or not, these sorts of connections (coincidences) abound.

Well, if someone can do Elvis and Jesus, why can't we do Lincoln and Darwin? You know, Darwin sailed on the Beagle, Lincoln had a beagle, that sort of thing. It's too late for this year, but let me know if you think of anything; I’ll save them and post them on Feb. 12, 2008. That will help us all get ready for the big double bicentennial the following year!

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Moving On

Current Location: Southport, Gold Coast, Australia
Current Position: 27º56.81' S 153º25.39' E
Next Destination: Mooloolaba

Well, our weekly BLOG hasn’t been so weekly. I guess we’ve just been too busy; yes, I know what you are thinking … how could two people without jobs or any real commitments ever be too busy! So I won’t bother to try and explain. However, instead of writing our BLOGs we have been working on a catch-up web update. This will be posted in the next few days (www.neoscape.com/billabong). You can go their for the latest fun stuff; dating all the way back to Noumea and including our travels in Australia through January.

Tomorrow we finally pull anchor and leave Southport. It has been nice being in one location for so long, we’ve truly gotten familiar with the place and it has been terrific to be settled for a bit. We’ll spend the next week or two heading back north, to Mooloolaba, where we will leave Billabong for six weeks to do some land travel.

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Can't see the family forest for the trees

Today I read a press release from Family Forest (a play on the term "family tree," I guess; the company sells genealogical resources) announcing "its discovery that presidential hopeful Senator Barack Obama's . . . mother, Ann Dunham, [has] a number of her ancestral pathways leading back to early colonial Virginia and New England." Obama's ancestors include his "12th great grandfather--the Hon. Laurence Washington, who built Sulgrave Manor in Northamptonshire, England. Over the course of five centuries, according to recorded history, he became the ancestor of President George Washington, General George S. Patton, Governor Adlai Stevenson, President Jimmy Carter, and Quincy Jones, Jr."

Wow.

Three years ago, Family Forest traced the family connections of George W. Bush and John Kerry, the two presidential candidates in 2004. According to that press release, Kerry and Bush are 16th cousins, three times removed. This means that the great (times 15) grandfather of one was the great (times 18) grandfather of the other. How far do we have to go to find this common ancestor? Probably to the early 1500s, probably somewhere in Europe.

This is amazing. I’ll bet not one person in a hundred today could tell you the name of one of his sixteen great-great-grandparents, and yet here are two families that can trace at least one of their lines back four centuries. (Actually, much further, as both Bush and Kerry can claim Marc Anthony as their 55th great-grandfather.)

Turns out that Bush and Kerry are related to a lot of people besides each other. The web site lists over sixty famous people, from Marilyn Monroe and Humphrey Bogart to Henry David Thoreau and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and their relationship to Kerry and Bush (usually both). Mormon leader Brigham Young was distantly related to Kerry (11th cousin 4 times removed), but more closely to Bush (5th cousin 6 times removed). On the other hand, Kerry is closer to Obama kinsman General George Patton (13th cousin once removed) than is Bush (17th cousin twice removed). Both are Charles Darwin's cousin: Kerry, 11th, 4 times removed; Bush, 14th, 5 times removed.

Between the two of them, they are related to 24 American presidents. They’re both related to 22; Bush is also distant cousin to another two. Abraham Lincoln was Kerry’s 20th cousin, Bush’s 7th (no longer bothering with the "removeds"); George Washington (another Obama kinsman) was Bush’s 11th cousin, Kerry’s 8th.

Some of these numbers, upon just a moment’s reflection, boggle the mind. Brooke Shields is Kerry’s 22st cousin, Bush’s 11th. Ernest Hemingway was Kerry’s 20th, Bush’s 22nd. Agatha Christie was Kerry’s 18th cousin, Bush’s 20th.

How many 20th cousins does a person have? The number varies, of course, depending on how many children your great (19 times) grandparents had, and how many children those children had, and so on. Let’s assume that each couple on the family tree had three children who grew up to have three of their own, etc. Historically, this is a conservative figure. In colonial times, the birth rate was double that or more. But let’s use three children per couple for our example.

With those numbers, one set of your grandparents will give you 6 first cousins. Your child will have 18 second cousins, then the next generation will have 54 third cousins, and so forth. By the time you get down to seventeenth cousins, the number would be 258 million, almost as many people as there are in the United States (just over 300 million.) Add three more generations, to twentieth cousins, and the number is nearly 7 billion, a little over the population of the whole planet today (6.6 billion).

Isn’t that amazing? We have more twentieth cousins than there are people in the world.

But there’s more. Those 7 billion are through just one set of common ancestors. You have two sets of first cousins, one through your mother’s parents and another through your father’s, and four sets of second cousins, and so on. Theoretically (it never works out this smoothly in real life), you would have over a million different sets of twentieth cousins, each set consisting of 7 billion people.

No wonder Bush and Kerry (and Obama) are related to so many people. I guess we all are.

But I still sorta doubt those press releases.

This posting originally appeared, in a slightly different form, in the Cartersville Daily Tribune News, Feb. 22, 2004.

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Debunking Dade County's "secession"

Georgia on My Mind has a nice posting on Dade County, Georgia. Legend has it that, back in 1860, when the state didn't secede fast enough to suit some of the hot-blooded citizens of Dade, the county decided to secede from both Georgia and the Union.

According to a 1945 article in the Atlanta Constitution, “Folks in Dade were big slave-owners and rabid secessionists." Representative Bob Tatum made a fiery speech in the state legislature: “By the gods, gentlemen, if Georgia does not vote to secede immediately from the Union, Dade county will secede from the state and become the independent state of Dade.”

When the state refused to act, Tatum left Milledgeville (the capital at the time) and returned to Dade, where he conducted a public meeting on the courthouse square in the county seat of Trenton. Under his guidance, the people of Dade County voted to secede from Georgia and the nation. After the vote, according to the newspaper, “the impatient Tatum actually sent a secession proclamation to Washington.”

Although neither Georgia nor the United States recognized the act of secession, Dade kept its claim of independence until the summer of 1945 when, flush with patriotism and national pride over the coming victory in World War II, the people of the county voted to rejoin the state and the Union.

The 1945 "reunion" was covered widely by the press. Even the New York Times reported “Dade County Ends ‘Secession.’” President Harry Truman sent a telegram of congratulations from Washington, ending with “Welcome home, pilgrims.”

The story of the county’s secession and the resulting Independent State of Dade is still told and accepted. The problem is, it seems that it never happened.

Professor Ellis Merton Coulter, of the University of Georgia, published an article in the Georgia Historical Quarterly back in 1957 that convincingly refutes the story of Dade’s secession.



First of all, Coulter pointed out that the people of Dade were not “big slave-owners.” “Dade County in 1860 had only 300 slaves owned by 46 people out of a total white population of 2,765,” he wrote, “and of those slaveowners only an even dozen held more than ten and only two owned as many as thirty.”

Throughout the state, there was a correlation between slave ownership and support for secession. Perhaps the people of Dade bucked the trend? But Coulter pointed out that the county’s delegates to the secession convention of January 1861 voted against every secession measure, and those delegates had been elected by a popular vote that favored, by a margin of 9 to 1, the “cooperationist” (anti-secession) candidates.

This was very much an anti-secessionist section of the state. In neighboring Walker County, a man wrote a letter in Feb. 1861 to Governor Joseph E. Brown: “We, the people of Walker County and Dade County, Georgia, do not intend to submit to [the] decision of the secession movement. . . . If southern Georgia wants to leave the Union, let her go. But, we want to stay in the Union."

What about Tatum’s speech threatening the county’s secession if Georgia didn’t act? Coulter searched the major newspaper across the state and found “not the slightest indication of such a speech,” and surely such a speech in the General Assembly would have been reported.

The alleged secession proclamation sent to Washington has never been found.

Tatum himself served two more years in the Georgia House, something he would have been unlikely to do if he believed his county had left the state.

According to Coulter, no one has been able to produce a single contemporary account of the county’s secession.

Ironically, the phrase “the state of Dade” was used even before the Civil War, referring to the county's geographical isolation. Because of the presence of Lookout Mountain, there was no way to drive into the county from Georgia until the late 1930s; one had to leave the state and enter Dade from Alabama or Tennessee.

source: George Cram Railroad and County Map of Georgia (1885), available from the Historical Atlas of Georgia Counties

The New Georgia Encyclopedia has a good article on Dade County history.

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Primordial Blog

Recommended by both Ed at Millard Fillmore's Bathtub and PZ at Pharyngula, a new blog, and it's a good one: Primordial Blog ("Life at the Intersection of Science, Religion, Politics and Culture").

Posted yesterday-- The Most Disgusting Creation Story:

The most disgusting (and my personal favourite) creation story comes from the annals of Egyptian Mythology. The story is narrated by the creator god Neb-er-tcher himself. Listen to how he does it: ....

Thus endeth the quotation. You're going to have to check out Promordial Blog for the next sentence.

Keep up the good work, Brian!

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