Words, words, words!

Here's my latest Endless Knot video, all about the origin and history of the word "album":

So first of all, a programming note: we're taking a break this week from the "ways of knowing" mini-series, which was the focus of the last two videos. We'll come back to that soon with upcoming videos about metaphor and narrative. But this week, I wanted to launch what will be the ongoing series of videos you'll see on my channel, videos that cover the often surprising origins and histories of words. This week's word is album.

The idea here is to look for the hidden connections with words. Words that are etymologically connected even if they don't look like it. Words with particular historical and cultural connections that are made the richer by knowing the formation and history of the word itself. The word and its origin are a jumping off point to then explore the related history and culture, and I hope by rooting the word in its context and connecting the history to language, both become more memorable. In a lot of ways, this is where the real idea for this channel started, since it was something I could do on an ongoing basis, and since at heart I'm a real word nerd.

This particular video was inspired by noticing that the White Album was a redundantly repetitive name, and everything else followed from there. It's also a bit of a "get off my lawn, you youngsters" moment for me as I lament the diminution of album art, but actually I like electronic albums as much as the next guy and mostly listen to music on my iPhone anyway. Still, it's a nice bit of historical circularity that the signing of record albums brings it back to the album amicorum.

Now there are number of different ways to track down these sorts of connections. Of course there is the well-known and authoritative Oxford English Dictionary (OED), which is excellent for tracking the changes in words and how they are used over the course of English history. It doesn't, however, always give the deeper etymologies and more distantly related words. For that, one of the best bets is American Heritage Dictionary (AHD), and in particular the excellent Indo-European Roots appendix by Calvert Watkins. This appendix lists all the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) roots that make their way into English, through a variety of intermediary languages and in a variety forms, so it's a good way of finding distantly related words. Also useful on the Indo-European front is the Indo-European Lexicon from the University of Texas at Austin, which lists the derivative words found in many languages that come from PIE roots, and it's nicely cross-indexed in a number of different ways (by PIE root, by derivative language, by semantic field), and both this website and the Calvert Watkins appendix give cross indexes to the older, very authoritative work on PIE vocabulary by Julius Pokorny, Indogermanisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch. (Trivia fans: Pokorny is apparently mentioned in James Joyce's Ulysses!) Another excellent tool for tracking down surprisingly related words is John Ayto's excellent Dictionary of Word Origins. It's by no means comprehensive, but has interesting discussions and useful cross references.

Other etymological resources I use frequently are the excellent Online Etymology Dictionary by Douglas Harper, The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology by C.T. Onions, and Webster's Dictionary of Word Origins. And for names, there's Behind the Name. For specific specific stages of English there are the older Old English dictionaries by J.R. Clark Hall and by Bosworth & Toller, and the still-in-progress Dictionary of Old English (where I worked as a research assistant while I was a graduate student), and the Middle English Dictionary. For other languages, there are the Old Norse dictionaries by Zoëga and Cleasby & Vigfusson, and for Latin and Greek the Logeion website (and handy iOS app) which contains a variety of Greek and Latin dictionaries, including the authoritative Lewis & Short Latin and Liddell & Scott Greek dictionaries.

And of course there are many other popular word history books, such as Word Histories and Mysteries from the AHD, David Crystal's The Story of English in 100 Words, Mark Forsyth's Etymologicon (and blog), and many, many others. Also influential to me in the past was the entertaining Podictionary podcast by Charles Hodgson, but it's now sadly discontinued.

In keeping with the album theme of this video, I've uploaded some of the music I've created for the channel to SoundCloud as a kind of "album release" (get it?), so if you're into listening to background/theme music you can find that here. I've had a lot of fun recording music (another hobby of mine), and put a lot of effort into these recordings which in the end can't really be heard that clearly over my talking, so I figured it would be a good idea to do something else with them as well.

And finally, I didn't actually mention all the English words related to album in the video -- there are a few others, some more obscure and some more common. So my question to you, dear readers, is, can you think of any others? Answers in the comment section if you care to!

The Story Behind "A Detective Story"

Here it is, the second episode of The Endless Knot YouTube series, and the second part of the "Ways of Knowing" miniseries that starts off my new channel:

This video has a long history for me. I first wrote this up as a blog post on my old blog -- you can now read it here on my new blog. The text of the video is pretty much the same with only some minor revisions and additions. But the idea started years before that in a course I was teaching aimed at first-year university students which focused on literature in the context of the arts and humanities. (It was intended for students who were not English majors.) I decided to take the approach of trying to demonstrate the cultural network that underlies all of western literature, that nothing existed in a vacuum, and that all of history, art, culture, philosophy, and science are inextricably linked. In order to understand the literary texts in the course, we have to examine the world that produced them in all its interconnected complexity. As it turns out, two of the works I decided to include in this course were the 14th century Arthurian romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Sherlock Holmes short story “A Scandal in Bohemia”. In my final, half-improvised lecture to my students, I outlined this connection, which touched on several of the texts and historical contexts we had examined in the course. The point was (and is) that all these things are connected one way or another and to study any one of them inevitably leads to an unending trail of connections.

For those unfamiliar with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Gawain is one of the knight's of King Arthur's Round Table, and also Arthur's nephew. While Gawain was one of the most important knight's and instrumental in the denouement of the Arthurian story, this particular poem was, as far as we know, obscure in its own day, existing in only one manuscript, and only came to wider attention in more recent times. It's now highly celebrated as one of the finest Arthurian poems of its kind.

In any case, it's from this Gawain connection that I get that I get the name the Endless Knot, and the image I use in the logo. I saw this endless knot image from Gawain as an idea expression of the interconnectedness of things, and it was also a nice parallel with heptagram which which shows the interconnected elements of cognitive science:

I liked this idea of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as a detective story (not original to me), and wanted to push it to its limits, and furthermore try and connect it with Sherlock Holmes, who is also notable for his interconnected thinking. Here's the fuller passage from the story "A Scandal in Bohemia" which I quote at the beginning of the video:

"Wedlock suits you," he remarked. "I think, Watson, that you have put on seven and a half pounds since I saw you."

"Seven!" I answered.

"Indeed, I should have thought a little more. Just a trifle more, I fancy, Watson. And in practice again, I observe. You did not tell me that you intended to go into harness."

"Then, how do you know?"

"I see it, I deduce it. How do I know that you have been getting yourself very wet lately, and that you have a most clumsy and careless servant girl?"

"My dear Holmes," said I, "this is too much. You would certainly have been burned, had you lived a few centuries ago. It is true that I had a country walk on Thursday and came home in a dreadful mess, but as I have changed my clothes I can't imagine how you deduce it. As to Mary Jane, she is incorrigible, and my wife has given her notice, but there, again, I fail to see how you work it out."

He chuckled to himself and rubbed his long, nervous hands together.

"It is simplicity itself," said he; "my eyes tell me that on the inside of your left shoe, just where the firelight strikes it, the leather is scored by six almost parallel cuts. Obviously they have been caused by someone who has very carelessly scraped round the edges of the sole in order to remove crusted mud from it. Hence, you see, my double deduction that you had been out in vile weather, and that you had a particularly malignant bootslitting specimen of the London slavey. As to your practice, if a gentleman walks into my rooms smelling of iodoform, with a black mark of nitrate of silver upon his right forefinger, and a bulge on the right side of his top-hat to show where he has secreted his stethoscope, I must be dull, indeed, if I do not pronounce him to be an active member of the medical profession."

I could not help laughing at the ease with which he explained his process of deduction. "When I hear you give your reasons," I remarked, "the thing always appears to me to be so ridiculously simple that I could easily do it myself, though at each successive instance of your reasoning I am baffled until you explain your process. And yet I believe that my eyes are as good as yours."

"Quite so," he answered, lighting a cigarette, and throwing himself down into an armchair. "You see, but you do not observe. The distinction is clear. For example, you have frequently seen the steps which lead up from the hall to this room."

"Frequently."

"How often?"

"Well, some hundreds of times."

"Then how many are there?"

"How many? I don't know."

"Quite so! You have not observed. And yet you have seen. That is just my point. Now, I know that there are seventeen steps, because I have both seen and observed."

With only the start and end point it's hard to see the connections, which was the effect I was trying to create here. The other element of Sherlockian thinking that underlies all this is the mind palace technique, or as Holmes himself calls it the "brain-attic", a well-ordered mental storehouse. The recent BBC adaptation Sherlock makes much of this, with a visually compelling representation on screen.

This originally comes from an ancient Greek and Roman idea, also important during the middle ages, and is also known as the memory theatre or method of loci. Basically the idea is you associate the new things you want to remember with a place you already know well, such as your house. As you move through the familiar space in your mind's eye, you remember the associations more easily. You use your spatial cognition, which is a very fundamental human faculty, to help you think about more abstract and unfamiliar things. And that's also kind of what's going on here with this web of connections I've laid out in the video. For more on this sort of thing, have a look at Maria Konnikova's book Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes, which explores various aspects of Holmes's though process and psychology, or my own brief comments on the "doorway effect" on memory.

Here are a last few links for further reading if you feel so inclined. You can read Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade" here, or better yet you can listen to a wax cylinder recording of the poet himself reading it here. Amazing that we have a recording of Tennyson himself! You can read the Mary Seacole references from Punch magazine, including the poem "A Stir for Seacole" (to be sung to the tune of "Old King Cole"), here, and you can read Seacole's own autobiography here.

Comments and questions are most welcome and appreciated.

First Full Episode! - "The Endless Knot: An Introduction"

Here's the first full episode of the new web series:

In this video, I talk about the importance of connections, in particular how language, history, and thought are linked and interlinked. I also talk about interdisciplinarity, and why that's important. You can have a look at the show notes for links, image credits, and a full transcript.

This video was originally going to be a very short introduction, but I realised I needed to do a bit more to set the scene for the next few videos, especially episode 2 which comes out in a couple of weeks. You can see a quick glimpse of those videos as thumbnails towards the end of this intro video. Much of the ground I cover in this one I originally wrote about in the blog a while back, so if you want to see a slightly fuller account with lots of explanatory links you could read those. First is this one, in which I discuss the theoretical background to interconnectivity, and next this one on the importance of interdisciplinarity.

As I think is pretty evident, I've been deeply influenced by James Burke -- I remember watching his documentary series Connections and The Day the Universe Changed a long time ago, and I have since read his various books. I've also been delighted more recently to discover Stevyn Colgan and his very entertaining books Joined-Up Thinking and Constable Colgan's Connect-O-Scope, which also take a connective view of the world. In the video I mention Sebastian Seung's TEDTalk "I Am My Connectome", which is definitely worth a watch, and if you want to go further you can read his excellent book on this topic called Connectome. So the line of thinking that kicked this whole project off was putting together this connective principle on both the macro scale of history and culture and the micro scale of cognition, along with this linguistic idea of frame semantics which sees the meaning of words deriving not just from the words themselves but the way they interact with each other. By the way, the examples I used to describe frame sematics in the video are the standard textbook examples that I think many linguists use.

As for the interdisciplinarity stuff, well my graduate work was in a medieval studies department, which is an interdisciplinary programme that brings researchers together from many different fields (history, literature, religious studies, linguistics, music, art history, etc.) who all have an interest in the middle ages. So I'm very committed to the idea of crossing disciplinary boundaries, even if it means sometimes wandering away from your comfort zone and exploring someone else's turf. And that's kind of what I've done in this and my other videos to come. I'm bringing my background in historical linguistics and literature (primarily in medieval England) to a variety of other topics and places and times.

One last note for the curious and technically minded. As I indicate in the video, the core of the visual presentation I'll be using is based on the idea of the concept map, with a web of interconnected nodes to demonstrate the way words, concepts, and history are interconnected. I've played around with a number of different concept mapping and mind mapping softwares, but settled on TheBrain to keep track of all my research. TheBrain is an excellent research tool and I highly recommend it. The heart of The Endless Knot itself is a database of interconnected etymological and historical information I've been building using TheBrain software -- a sort of etymological dictionary grafted onto an encyclopedia. To visually represent this in the videos I use Inkscape to create concept-map-style collages of public domain and creative commons images to illustrate what I'm talking about. As you'll see in future videos, these collages can get quite visually elaborate. And to animate them for the videos I use the Sozi extension for Inkscape. Oh and the font I use is Daniel Midgley's Du Bellay, particularly appropriate since Daniel is a linguist and co-host of the excellent Talk the Talk radio show and podcast.

Well I'd love to hear what you think about all this, so feel free to leave a comment!

Welcome!

Welcome to the new Endless Knot Blog! Here you can read posts that accompany my YouTube videos, with extra comments and links, as well as posts on other topics. The channel and the blog will cover topics in language, history, and thought, and the way they are connected.

I've transferred the posts from my old WordPress blog over to here, so you can go back and read them all in one place, but I'm also leaving the old blog up in case anyone has links to those posts.

Several of the early videos you'll see on my channel are based on blog posts I've written in the past. It occurred to me that I could get the ideas across more clearly and entertainingly if I simply spoke them, along with illustrative images, and since there didn't seem to be anyone making videos on these topics, I decided to set myself the task of learning to do them myself. It's been a steep learning curve, but it's finally ready for launch. Here's the one-minute promo trailer:

Introducing a new series of videos about language, thought, and history. Website: http://www.alliterative.net/ Blog: http://www.alliterative.net/blog Twitter: https://twitter.com/alliterative Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/alliterativeendlessknot Google Plus: https://plus.google.com/115113245513532543153/about

So welcome to the new channel and the new blog! I welcome any comments or questions, and I hope you'll find something here to interest you!

Clip show: Links to links part 2

Following on from my last post, here are some more links to some interesting online content that is related to the topics I write about here, along with some commentary from me. First of all, have a look once again at the blogroll in the sidebar -- I've added some more blogs, including Whats in a brain? which has a recent post on linguistic relativity and time. Now in today's post I've got some longer lecture-type items, mostly by academics but aimed at a broad non-specialist audience. Wherever possible I'll try to include links to both video and audio versions for you to choose from.

First of all is a talk by James Burke titled "Admiral Shovel and the Toilet Roll" (also available in iTunes). In addition to his usual connections approach, this is an excellent argument for the importance of the interdisciplinary approach. It's also very witty and entertaining, as usual for Burke.

At the end of the last post I linked to some basic introductory linguistics videos, and here is another very good introduction to the basics of linguistics, "Linguistics as a Window to Understanding the Brain" by Steven Pinker. This lecture is part of the Floating University initiative, and in it Pinker does a pretty good job of not only presenting basic linguistic concepts but also introducing and giving a balanced treatment of some controversial issues such as language universals and linguistic relativity, subjects that he has fairly strong views on. Here is the lecture on YouTube:

Steven Pinker - Psychologist, Cognitive Scientist, and Linguist at Harvard University How did humans acquire language? In this lecture, best-selling author Steven Pinker introduces you to linguistics, the evolution of spoken language, and the debate over the existence of an innate universal grammar.

Related to the subject of language universals is Daniel Everett's Long Now lecture "Endangered languages, lost knowledge and the future" (the audio is also available in iTunes and the video can be watched on Fora.tv). Based on his observations of the Pirahã language, Everett argues against the Chomskyan notion of  an innate universal grammar, and instead suggests that language is a cultural tool invented by humans to serve a social function.

Lera Boroditsky gives an excellent introduction to recent research on the subject of linguistic relativity in her Long Now lecture "How Language Shapes Thought" (the audio is also available in iTunes and the video can be watched on Fora.tv). In particular, Boroditsky many of the language and time issues I've written about recently. Here is the lecture on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPGpZp1pfQQ&w=560&h=315

On the subject of time, here is Claudia Hammond's RSA talk "Time Warped" based on her book of the same name (the full audio of the talk is also available in iTunes). Hammond discusses many interesting issues about time perception. Here is a YouTube video of the edited highlights of this talk:

Acclaimed writer and broadcaster Claudia Hammond draws on the latest research to shed light on the mysteries of time perception. Listen to the podcast of the full event including audience Q&A: http://www.thersa.org/events/audio-and-past-events/2012/time-warped Our events are made possible with the support of our Fellowship. Support us by donating or applying to become a Fellow.

Cognitive scientist David Eagleman also works on time perception (as well as a variety of other topics). Here are two lectures of his from The Up Experience. In the first, he gives good summary of his work on how we perceive time and how our sense of time is largely a construction by the brain:

The UP Experience--Unique Perspectives from Unique People--is pleased to welcome back Dr. David Eagleman, neuroscientist, best-selling author, and UP Master of Ceremonies for the fourth year in a row. Eagleman holds joint appointments in the Departments of Neuroscience and Psychiatry at Baylor College of Medicine.

In this second Eagleman talk, he discusses, among other things, the relationship between the present self and the future self, drawing on a story of Odysseus and the sirens from the ancient Greek epic The Odyssey to describe what he calls the Odysseus contract:

The fields of study of prolific and influential neuroscientist David Eagleman have taken him from time perception and synesthesia to the intersection of neuroscience and the legal system. Oh, and in his free time, he writes internationally bestselling fiction. Eagleman so enthralled last year's audience, we've asked him back for his second UP appearance in October.

Economist M. Keith Chen also draws on the idea of future discounting, which Eagleman refers to in that last video, in his highly controversial connection between how languages handle the future tense and future planning (which I've discussed before here and here). Here is his TED talk presenting this theory:

Keith Chen is an Associate Professor of Economics at the Yale School of Management. His research blurs traditional boundaries in both subject and methodology, bringing unorthodox tools to bear on problems at the intersection of Economics, Psychology, and Biology. Professor Chen's most recent work focuses on how people's economic choices and attitudes are influenced by their language.

Psychologist Philip Zimbardo talks about our orientation to time, that is being past, present, or future oriented, and what this means to the way we approach life, also touching large scale cultural differences, in his RSA talk "The Secret Powers of Time". Here are the YouTube videos of both the full lecture and the excellent 10-minute RSA Animate video excerpted from it:

Professor Philip Zimbardo reveals how our individual perspective on time affects our work, health and well-being. Watch the RSA Animate of this talk: http://youtu.be/A3oIiH7BLmg Follow the RSA on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/thersaorg Like the RSA on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/thersaorg

Renowned psychologist Professor Philip Zimbardo explains how our individual perspectives of time affect our work, health and well-being. Watch the full lecture here: http://www.thersa.org/events/video/archive/philip-zimbardo-the-secret-powers-of-time This RSA Animate was taken from a lecture given as part of the RSA's free public events programme.

And finally, since I started this post with James Burke's kind of connections, I'll end with neuroscientist Sebastian Seung's TED talk "I am my connectome", in which he discusses his connectome project of mapping the brain's neuronal connections, and related book Connectome: How the Brain's Wiring Makes Us Who We Are:

http://www.ted.com Sebastian Seung is mapping a massively ambitious new model of the brain that focuses on the connections between each neuron. He calls it our "connectome," and it's as individual as our genome -- and understanding it could open a new way to understand our brains and our minds.

I'll hopefully be able to get back to more substantive blogging later on in August, but for now good watching/listening!