Search Results for: Wedgwood

Brat.

As a quondam embassy brat I was amused by Katie Lange’s DoD News piece on the phrase “military brat” (more familiar to me as “army brat,” which is what I generally heard growing up in Tokyo). She writes:

It pertains to those children who grew up in military families. “Brats” wear the name like a badge of honor, often because of the moves, stressors and cultural experiences that make them more resilient than their civilian counterparts. But outside of the military, the word brat is often considered derogatory. So it made me wonder – where did the term “military brat” originate?

To find out, I reached out to the folks at National Defense University Libraries, who did some research for me. It turns out the origin of the term is still pretty unclear, but there are a lot of interesting theories behind it, and most of them originate in Britain.

The first “theory,” that “BRAT could be an acronym for British Regiment Attached Traveler,” is obviously absurd, but it demonstrates people’s ineradicable love for acronymic origin stories. The third, that it is a contraction for “barrack rat,” is just as silly but a little more inventive. In the middle, there is a passage of actual information:

Dr. Grace Clifton, a professor at Open University in the UK, has done research with the U.S. Army’s Dr. Becky Powell into the origins of the term. Clifton found reference to a song written in 1707 for a satirical play called “The Recruiting Officer” that described soldier life and that of their dependents. Back then, married soldiers were divided into two categories: the lucky few who were allowed to have their families live in the barracks and be taken care of by regimental funds, and those whose families had to live outside the barracks. The song referenced the latter as being “brats and wives.”

The lyrics may have been the first reference to brat in relation to military families. But it also may have referred to any children. So, that’s still a bit of a mystery.

I mean, no, it’s not a mystery at all: the brats of members of the military are by definition military brats. The actual mystery is the origin of the word brat itself. The OED, in an ancient (from 1888) entry, says: “Of uncertain origin: Wedgwood, E. Müller, and Skeat think it the same word as the brat n.¹ [“A cloth used as an over-garment, esp. of a coarse or makeshift character”], but evidence of the transition of sense has not been found.” (First cite ?a1513 W. Dunbar Flyting “Iersche brybour baird, wyle beggar with thy brattis.”) The AHD says “Possibly from brat, coarse garment, from Middle English, from Old English bratt, of Celtic origin.” And that’s all that can be said on the subject without resorting to flights of fancy. (Thanks, Trevor!)

SUBJECTA BELLIGERANTIA.

I’m almost finished reading Wedgwood’s The Thirty Years War (discussed here), and in discussing the painfully slow process that eventually led to the Peace of Westphalia she says (on page 462 of my edition) “The congress had been sitting for nearly a year when the delegates found that they were still in doubt as to the subjecta belligerantia.” The phrase in italics clearly meant something like “the subjects of the war” or “the reasons everyone was fighting,” but it wasn’t in my reasonably comprehensive Dictionary of Foreign Words and Phrases, so I googled it… and, to my astonishment, got exactly one hit: to this very book. I tried Google Book Search and got a few more hits, all of them in German and all of them, so far as I can tell (from the gottverdammt Auszug [snippet] view), referring to this very peace congress. Is it not odd that this reasonably normal-looking Latin phrase should occur only in this one context?

PALATIA GERMANORUM.

I’ve been reading C. V. Wedgwood‘s classic history The Thirty Years War in an attempt to understand a very messy period of European history, and am finally, among many other things, getting a handle on who was Calvinist and who was Lutheran and why so many Catholic powers (including the Pope) opposed the ultra-Catholic Habsburgs. Wedgwood is one of those gifted storytellers who can lead the reader on a reasonably clear path through a dark forest, in this case the mind-boggling complexity of the Holy Roman Empire—quite literally, in the way she shows how the position of the Palatinate athwart the route the Habsburgs needed to take to resupply their troops in the Spanish Netherlands made it central to events at the beginning of the war.

But I’m not here to talk about the war (“Don’t mention the war!“), I want to discuss the many German words descended from Latin palātium ‘palace’ (originally the Palatine Hill). I vaguely knew that the Count or Elector Palatine (an older equivalent is palsgrave), the ruler of the Palatinate, was so called (in the OED’s words) “as exercising the sovereign’s authority in certain matters, or as having a jurisdiction within a given territory such as elsewhere belongs to the sovereign alone,” and I knew that the German equivalent of Palatinate was Pfalz; what I didn’t know was that Pfalz is also an old term for a palace, which makes perfect sense given its etymology (MHG pfalz(e), pfallaz, phal(e)nze, OHG phalanza, phalnze, from post-classical Latin palantia, an alteration of palatia, a feminine singular arising from reinterpretation of the plural of classical Latin palātium). Knowing that the normal word for ‘palace’ is Palast, I looked that up in my trusty Lutz Mackensen and discovered that the -t is secondary; the earlier form Palas is still in use for some sort of lordly building (there’s no English Wikipedia entry, and it’s not in my unabridged German-English dictionary, so I don’t know how to translate it). Furthermore, there’s a borrowing from French of the same word, Palais. That seems like more descendants of palātium than any language really needs.

Q.PHEEVR ON ‘BUTTERFLY.’

As a followup to my earlier post on words for ‘butterfly,’ I offer you the funny and erudite reflections of Q. Pheevr on the English word:

Still, butterfly is a funny thing to call a butterfly, isn’t it? It’s also not obvious exactly what the compound means—okay, so it’s probably right-headed, and therefore refers to some sort of flying insect. But what, exactly, is the relation between the ‘butter’ part and the ‘fly’ part? (OED sez: “The reason of the name is unknown,” but offers some speculation, to which I return below.) There are several possibilities. I hope that the Language Loggers will forgive me for saying this, but Sanskrit has at least four words for ‘compound’, and I intend to use them here to illustrate the multiplicity of possible meanings of butterfly.

And so he does; I’ll quote here my favorite:

Butterfly could be a tatpurusha compound, in which the relation is one of interaction rather than resemblance. For example, a butterfly could be an insect that eats butter, in which case one would have to wonder, as Alice did of the bread-and-butter fly, how it could possibly survive without human intervention. Or it could be quite the reverse—an insect that shits butter, as suggested by the OED: “Wedgwood points out a Dutch synonym boterschijte in Kilian, which suggests that the insect was so called from the appearance of its excrement.” Trouble is, as A World for Butterflies points out, butterflies don’t shit. (Caterpillars do, though, and apparently there is one species that, thanks to a diet of yellow flowers, does emit appropriately coloured frass. (Yes, caterpillar shit is called frass, and yes, it’s derived from fressen. The OED defines frass as “the excrement of larvæ; also, the refuse left behind by boring insects,” and although I’m sure Nabokov (whose birthday was Earth Day) would have insisted that there are no boring insects, I will not.))

Now, there’s a man who knows how to parenthesize (and yes, that is a word; Southey wrote (in his “unfinished and, indeed, unfinishable” The Doctor, which sounds quite intriguing from this description and which includes the first published version of “The Story of the Three Bears”): “Sir Kenelm Digby observes… that ‘it is a common speech (but’, he parenthesizes, ‘only amongst the unlearned sort) ubi tres medici duo athei’.”).

(Via Mark Liberman at Language Log.)

Update (Mar. 2023). I’ve provided an archived version of “The Story of the Three Bears,” but the bartleby.school.aol.com URL linked at “this description” has not been saved by the Wayback Machine. Bah.