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Tuesday, September 5th, 2017
| Time | Event |
| 2:00p | The Earliest Known Appearance of the F-Word, in a Bizarre Court Record Entry from 1310
Photo by Paul Booth You value decorum, propriety, eloquence, you treasure le mot juste and agonize over diction as you compose polite but strongly-worded letters to the editor. But alas, my literate friend, you have the misfortune of living in the age of Twitter, Tumblr, et al., where the favored means of communication consists of readymade mimetic words and phrases, photos, videos, and animated gifs. World leaders trade insults like 5th graders—some of them do not know how to spell. Respected scientists and journalists debate anonymous strangers with cartoon avatars and work-unsafe pseudonyms. Some of them are robots. What to do? Embrace it. Insert well-placed profanities into your communiqués. Indulge in bawdiness and ribaldry. You may notice that you are doing no more than writers have done for centuries, from Rabelais to Shakespeare to Voltaire. Profanity has evolved right alongside, not apart from, literary history. T.S. Eliot, for example, knew how to go lowbrow with the best of them, and gets credit for the first recorded use of the word “bullshit.” As for another, even more frequently used epithet in 24-hour online commentary?—well, the word “F*ck” has a far longer history, granting its apt public use recently by seismologist Steven Gibbons an added authority. Not long ago we alerted you to the first known use of the versatile obscenity in a 1528 marginal note scribbled in Cicero’s De Officiis by a monk cursing his abbot. Not long after this discovery, notes Medievalists.net, another scholar found the word in a 1475 poem called Flen flyys. This was thought to be the earliest appearance of “f*ck” as a purely sexual reference until medieval historian Paul Booth of Keele University discovered an instance dating over a hundred years earlier. Rather than within, or next to, a work of literature, however, the word appears in a set of 1310 English court records. And no, it is decidedly not a legal term. The documents concern the case of “a man named Roger Fuckebythenavele.” Used three times in the record, the name, says Booth, is probably not a joke made by the scribe but some kind of bizarre nickname, though one hopes not a description of the crime. “Either it refers to an inexperienced copulator, referring to someone trying to have sex with a navel,” says Booth, stating the obvious, “or it’s a rather extravagant explanation for a dimwit, someone so stupid they think that this is the way to have sex.” Our medieval gent had other problems as well. He was called to court three times within a year before being pronounced “outlawed,” which The Independent’s Loulla-Mae Eleftheriou-Smith suggests execution but probably refers to banishment. For the word to have such casually hilarious or insulting currency in the early 14th century, it must have come from an even earlier time. Indeed, “f*ck is a word of German origin,” notes Jesse Sheidlower, author of an etymological history called The F Word, “related to words in several other Germanic languages, such as Dutch, German, and Swedish, that have sexual meanings as well as meaning such as ‘to strike’ or ‘to move back and forth’” (naturally). So, in other words, it’s just a word. But in this case it might have also been a weapon, Booth speculates, wielded “by a revengeful former girlfriend. Fourteenth-century revenge porn perhaps…” If that's not evidence for you that the present may not be unlike the past, then maybe take note of the appearance of the word “twerk” in 1820. Related Content: Steven Pinker Explains the Neuroscience of Swearing (NSFW) Stephen Fry, Language Enthusiast, Defends The “Unnecessary” Art Of Swearing Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness The Earliest Known Appearance of the F-Word, in a Bizarre Court Record Entry from 1310 is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.  |
| 3:27p | The 38 States of America: Geography Professor Creates a Bold Modern Map of America (1973)
Unless you belong to an older generation, you probably can't remember the last time the map of the United States underwent any major change. For decades, the boundaries have remained pretty fixed. And yet the map, as we know it, shouldn't necessarily be considered set in stone. If billionaire Tim Draper has his way, California voters will decide in 2018 whether California, the home to nearly 40 million people, should be divided into three states called "Northern California," "Southern California," and plain "California." His argument being that California has become too large to govern, and that power should be moved toward smaller, more locally governed entities. Meanwhile, on a parallel track, another group is pushing for California to leave the union altogether. Right there, we have two initiatives that could change the map as we know it. And then there was the time when, back in 1973, George Etzel Pearcy, a California State University geography professor, proposed re-drawing the map of the nation, reducing the number of states to 38, and giving each state a different name. In his creative reworking of things, California would be split into two states--"El Dorado" and "San Gabriel". Texas would divide into "Alamo" and also "Shawnee" (along with remnants of Oklahoma). And the Dakotas would fuse into one big "Dakota." In case you're wondering, Pearcy chose the names by polling geography students. The logic behind the new map was explained in a 1975 edition of The People's Almanac.
According to Rob Lammle, writing in Mental Floss, Pearcy initially got support from "economists, geographers, and even a few politicians." But the proposal--mainly outlined in a book called A 38 State U.S.A.--eventually withered in Washington, the place where ideas, both good and bad, go to die. Below you can watch an animation showing how US map has changed in 200 years.
Follow Open Culture on Facebook and Twitter and share intelligent media with your friends. Or better yet, sign up for our daily email and get a daily dose of Open Culture in your inbox. If you'd like to support Open Culture and our mission, please consider making a donation to our site. It's hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us provide the best free cultural and educational materials. Related Content: Download 67,000 Historic Maps (in High Resolution) from the Wonderful David Rumsey Map Collection The History of Cartography, the “Most Ambitious Overview of Map Making Ever,” Now Free Online New York Public Library Puts 20,000 Hi-Res Maps Online & Makes Them Free to Download and Use The 38 States of America: Geography Professor Creates a Bold Modern Map of America (1973) is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
| 5:29p | Learn the Untold History of the Chinese Community in the Mississippi Delta
The word “nativist” always sounds odd to me given that most of those to whom it applies descend from people who arrived in North America one or two hundred years ago to find people who had been on the continent for many thousands of years. But if we were, in defiance of history, to confer native status upon the many waves of European immigrants who populated the country before and after the Civil War, then we must also grant such status to the many Chinese immigrants who did so, building railroads and businesses all over the U.S., including on the western frontier in Mississippi. Chinese immigrants first arrived in the Mississippi Delta after the end of slavery, responding to cotton planters’ need for a newly exploitable workforce. Chinese laborers, says the narrator in the Al Jazeera video above, “were cheap, disposable, and politically voiceless.” But they were, at least, paid for their work, and free to leave it, as most of them did when they could, to build their own economic means—largely businesses “serving the black community when the white community wouldn’t.” In an NPR profile of the Delta Chinese community, Melissa Block interviewed Raymond Wong, whose family arrived somewhat later, in the 1930s. “We were in-between,” he tells her, “We’re not black, we’re not white. So that by itself gives you some isolation.”
Photo by Marion Post Wolcott/Library of Congress That in-between-ness also grants a good deal of invisibility to communities that don’t fit into the binary patterns of thinking in Southern culture and history or the oversimplifications of U.S. demographic history in general. As historian David Reimers demonstrates in his book Other Immigrants, in addition to native Amerindians, Europeans, and enslaved African people, the country has been inhabited by free Black, Caribbean, Asian, and Latin American communities since the 16th century and up to, and after, the harsh exclusion acts of the 19th century. The U.S. would not be recognizable without such communities. As far back as the eighteenth century, he writes, “Pennsylvania and New York City, with their ethnically diverse populations, became models for the American future, a pluralist society.” In the South, non-European immigrant communities have been smaller minorities, like the Delta Chinese. Nonetheless, as Mississippi resident Frieda Quon recalls of growing up in segregated Mississippi, the Chinese immigrants who settled from Memphis to Vicksburg “really filled a particular need”—first for labor then for services—“because nobody else wanted to do it.” Even after the community endured many years of bigotry and legal discrimination during the exclusion acts, several men distinguished themselves among the 13,000 Chinese Americans who served in the U.S. armed forces during World War II.
The 10-minute trailer above for Honor and Duty, a three part documentary series about the Mississippi Delta Chinese community, begins with a brief profile of the almost two hundred Chinese American soldiers, marines, sailors, and airmen from the region. Director E. Samantha Cheng made the film as part of her larger mission to tell Asian-American history, which few Americans of any descent know very much about. In fact, she took on her mission after recovering from the shock of learning as an adult about the U.S.'s Japanese internment camps during the war, something she had never been taught in New York City public schools. Cheng was surprised during her filming to meet so many Chinese-Americans with molasses-thick Southern accents. “Even their Chinese accent has a Southern twang to it,” she tells NBC. That's because, though accent alone does not a “native” make, the Chinese communities in the Mississippi Delta are, as much as anyone else in the region, Southerners. The AJ video is part of a series on 150 years of Chinese culture and cuisine in the U.S. See Part One, on San Francisco, here, and the Part Two, covers Los Angeles, here. Related Content: Albert Einstein Gives a Speech Praising Diversity & Immigrants’ Contributions to America (1939) Ian McKellen Reads a Passionate Speech by William Shakespeare, Written in Defense of Immigrants Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Learn the Untold History of the Chinese Community in the Mississippi Delta is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
| 7:00p | Gustav Klimt’s Haunting Paintings Get Re-Created in Photographs, Featuring Live Models, Ornate Props & Real Gold
Image by Inge Prader Gustav Klimt painted a glittering, erotic, haunting reality of his own, distinctive even by the standards of his artistically abundant environment of late 19th- and early 20th-century Vienna. "Whoever wants to know something about me," he once wrote in a commentary on the self-portrait he never painted, "ought to look carefully at my pictures." Given the level of scrutiny with which she's no doubt had to look at his pictures, Klimt's countrywoman Inge Prader must therefore know everything about the painter there is to know.
Image by Inge Prader A photographer with a wide variety of corporate clients, Prader has drawn a good deal of attention by shooting recreations of Klimt's canvasses made for Vienna's Life Ball, an AIDS charity event, using real models, real costumes, and real gold. That last has a particular importance, given Prader's focus on paintings from the "Golden Phase" that Klimt entered after becoming a success. "In 1903 Klimt visited Venice, Ravenne and Florence," writes Konbini's Donnia Ghezlane-Lala. "It was his visit to the San Vitale basilica in Ravenne that struck him the most. Fascinated by Byzantine mosaics, he decided to integrate the colour gold into his work using gold paper and gold leaf. Also, fun fact, Klimt was the son of a goldsmith."
Image by Inge Prader Prader's "carefully posed models and intricately crafted props duplicate some of Klimt’s most iconic masterworks like Death and Life and Beethoven Frieze, mirroring the gold hued, highly decorative and erotic aesthetic the Austrian artist became best known for," writes Designboom's Nina Azzarello. "Richly ornamented costumes clothing warriors and women alike are situated alongside semi-nude figures and set against detailed mosaic backdrops." These "paradise-like conditions" on the canvas transfer surprisingly well to photography, especially with the eye Prader has developed in fashion and advertising, two realms guaranteed to instill anybody with a positively Klimt-like appreciation for striking compositions, luxurious materials, and beautiful women. You can see more of Prader's Klimt recreations at Konbini and Designboom. Related Content: Flashmob Recreates Rembrandt’s “The Night Watch” in a Dutch Shopping Mall Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. Gustav Klimt’s Haunting Paintings Get Re-Created in Photographs, Featuring Live Models, Ornate Props & Real Gold is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
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