… the largely unempirical and abstract nature of Greek natural philosophy and the fact that it was generally socially divorced from the practical arts of engineering and architecture meant that most Greek and Roman scientists did little to advance technology, and the idea that the Great Library would have been filled with men excitedly sketching flying machines or submarines is, once again, a fantasy. When all this is pointed out some New Atheists try to invoke counter-evidence. They often claim, for example, that Hero of Alexandria worked at the Great Library and that he invented the steam engine. Even a scientist who has not studied history past high school (i.e. most of them) will have dim memories of the history of the Industrial Revolution and would therefore know it had something to do with the invention of steam engines, so surely Hero brought the ancient world to the brink of industrial transformation. Well, actually, no.
Hero does seem to have been another exception to the rule when it comes to philosophers tinkering with gadgets and it’s possible (though far from certain) that he worked in the Mouseion. But the practical applications of his study of pneumatics and dynamics were more toys and curiosities than any great leaps forward in technology. He famously made an aeolipile, though he didn’t actually invent it, given that it had already been described by the Roman engineer and architect Vitruvius, but this can only be called a “steam engine” in the loosest sense of the term. Hero’s little device was not capable of doing anything more than spinning in place and Roman technology lacked the high tensile metallurgy, the mathematics or the precision tooling that would be required to make a true steam engine. The other technological wonder that is often invoked here is the Antikythera mechanism. Exactly how this intricate mechanical orrery based on a geocentric model is supposed to indicate some nascent Industrial or Scientific Revolution is never made clear, but not only did it have no connection to the Great Library, it was a kind of instrument known since the third century BC. If it is evidence that the Greco-Roman world was on the brink of a technological revolution and was only stymied by the rise of Christianity, one has to wonder what kept them from achieving this wondrous thing for the 600 years between its invention and the conversion of Constantine.
The New Atheist mythic conception of the “Great Library of Alexandria” bears very little resemblance to any historical actuality. It was a shrine with scholars attached to it, not a secular university. Its scholars were far more concerned with poetry, textual analysis, grammar, lexicography and rhetoric than anything we would see as “science”. The proto-science they did do was mainly of a highly abstract and often metaphysical nature rather than anything like modern science. And it was also generally divorced from technical innovation and what little practical application it was given did not much at all to advance technology. The idea that if the Great Library had not been burned down by wicked Christians we’d all be living in gleaming space cities on Europa or Callisto is, therefore, a silly fantasy. And not least because the Great Library … wasn’t burned down by wicked Christians.
Tim O’Neill, “The Great Myths 5: The Destruction Of The Great Library Of Alexandria”, History for Atheists, 2017-07-02.
August 12, 2019
QotD: The “lost technological developments” of the Great Library
August 11, 2019
QotD: Deconstructing “Minoan Crete”
Perhaps the most prominent high priestess of the Great Goddess was Lithuanian archaeologist Marija Gimbutas (1921-1994). During the 1950s and 60s Gimbutas developed her so-called “Kurgan Thesis;” basically the idea that the archaeological marker of the arrival in Europe of Indo-European-speakers was to be found in the Bronze Age Kurgan mound burials of the Pontic Steppe, a vast region incorporating most of present-day Ukraine, southern Russia and northern Kazakhstan. Controversially, Gimbutas further claimed that these nomadic Indo-Europeans brought with them a warrior-culture dominated by male sky-gods, which supplanted earlier matriarchal and goddess-worshipping cultures. In this, she echoed ideas already expressed at great length by Robert Graves in his 1948 book The White Goddess. Over the next three decades Gimbutas developed her ideas further in a series of books, articles and lectures delivered at campuses throughout America and Europe, where she was immensely influential amongst the burgeoning women’s movement. Three major works, The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe (1974), The Language of the Goddess (1989), and The Civilization of the Goddess (1991), presented an overview of her conclusions regarding what she saw as Europe’s primeval matriarchy.
The importance of Gimbutas in the development of the matriarchal myth, and also by extension in the development of modern radical feminism, cannot be overstated. Her archaeological experience and expertise, together with her wide knowledge of linguistics and anthropology, seemed to give academic credibility to the romantic and poetic ramblings of Arthur Evans and Robert Graves. Yet in retrospect it is hard to imagine why anyone with even a modicum of common sense could have been taken in.
There were warning signals everywhere. Right from the beginning, for example, many historians were critical of Evans’ interpretation of Minoan Crete, and a devastating blow was delivered in 1974 when German author Hans Georg Wunderlich published his Wohin der Stier Europa trug? (Where did the Bull carry Europa? published in English in 1975 as The Secret of Crete). Here Wunderlich, a trained geologist, examined the structure of the “palace” of Knossos in Crete in detail and came to the conclusion that the building could never have been a palace for the living. It was, instead, a charnel house, a massive necropolis which doubled as an arena for human sacrifice. For the happy-go-lucky “bull vaulting game”, said Wunderlich, was nothing of the sort: it was a ferocious form of human sacrifice which involved young men and women being gored and trampled to death by a sacred bull. This, said Wunderlich, was the origin of the legend of the Minotaur. Since Wunderlich’s time human sacrifice has been confirmed as an integral part of Cretan religious practice, whilst the supposed “pacifism” which Evans and others had imagined, was exposed as nonsensical.
Emmet Scott, “The Myth of the Primeval Matriarchy”, The Gates of Vienna, 2016-07-13.
August 10, 2019
QotD: Progressives and spontaneous order
Conduct an on-going experiment: whenever well-meaning “Progressives” (of which there are very many) propose this government intervention or oppose that policy of reducing government’s role in the economy, ask if these “Progressives'” stated reasons can be understood to be nothing more than a reflection of a failure to understand the power and range of spontaneous-ordering forces in private-property settings. The answer will almost always be “yes.” Very often, no further explanation for “Progressives'” policy stances is necessary.
“Progressives” simply don’t “get” spontaneous order in human society. They see a problem and leap to the only conclusion that for them is sensible – namely, that that problem’s only realistic “solution” is that it be directly addressed by government officials. Indeed, even “Progressives'” frequent misdiagnoses of the results of trade-offs as being “problems” (or “market failures”) reflect a failure to understand spontaneous-ordering processes. Many phenomena and patterns that “Progressives” assume to be problems – for example, increasing inequality of monetary incomes – are often the benign results of the countless and nuanced individual trade-offs made by individuals. For “Progressives,” though, these “outcomes” are often assumed to be the consequence of sinister designs.
Don Boudreaux, “Bonus Quotation of the Day…”, Café Hayek, 2017-06-24.
August 9, 2019
QotD: Early milestones in aviation
A couple of weeks later, on July 6th 1919 the first east-west transatlantic flight landed at Mineola on Long Island. The RAF airship R34 had left East Fortune in Scotland four days earlier, having been hastily converted to hold passengers, and with a plate welded to an engine exhaust pipe to enable it to cook and serve hot food, which is more trouble than most airlines would go to today. A tabby kitten called Wopsie who served as the crew’s mascot stowed away on the flight, and because nobody at the Long Island end knew anything about landing large airships Major E M Pritchard parachuted out a little early, and became the first man to land on North American soil by air from Europe.
These briefly famous men did not get to savor their celebrity for long: Major Pritchard died in 1921 when the R38 airship exploded over the Humber estuary; his body was never found. Captain Alcock, just six months after his triumph and being knighted by George V, died at Rouen in Normandy in December 1919 when his new Vickers Viking crashed en route to the Paris air show.
Mark Steyn, “Come, Josephine, in My Flying Machine”, SteynOnline, 2019-07-07.
August 8, 2019
QotD: Austrians – strudel-eating surrender monkeys
The Austrians (or rather the Habsburgs) built up a moderately large empire by persuading the Magyars that they could be sort of equal partners in the empire in an unequal sort of way, expert politicking and setting one lot of Slavs against another in the Balkans and central Europe, and marrying into the right ducal families in bits of what was later to become Italy. They never quite managed to sort out the Serbs, however, who felt that fighting nobly against the Turks was their speciality, and they were forced out of Switzerland early on by a small boy with an apple on his head.
The year 1683 may reasonably be considered a turning point for Western Christendom. Over the preceding century or so the Turkish Ottoman Empire had steadily advanced up the Balkan peninsula and after being balked, as it were, for many years by Macedonians, Bulgars, Albanians, Serbs, Bosnians, Croats, Slovenians, Slavonians and some I’ve probably forgotten, finally got as far as the Habsburg capital, Vienna, to which they laid siege. The siege failed, and the Turks were repelled, never again to return. Why? Because Austria was rescued by the Poles under Jan III Sobieski.
Under the noted and renowned Empress Maria Theresa, a War of the Austrian Succession was held. In keeping with tradition, it was mainly fought between the French and the English in Belgium (the French, opposed to Austria, won), except for an unimportant sideshow which appears to have been between the French and the Indians in Saratoga. The upshot was naturally that the Austrians let the Prussians have Silesia. Twice, to be on the safe side. A few years later the Seven Years War, largely fought between the English and the French in Belgium (the English, opposed to the Austrians, won) confirmed the result.
When it came to the French revolutionary and the Napoleonic wars, the Habsburgs were naturally on the side of the divine right of kings (well, Marie-Antoinette was a Habsburg herself) and against mob rule, liberty, fraternity, and most certainly equality. In furtherance of this cause, the Austrians fought the French at such places as Marengo, Austerlitz, and Wagram – among other names listed on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. By 1812 the Austrians decided to try being on the same side as Napoleon for a change. Napoleon promptly invaded Russia, with predictable results. Following Napoleon’s final defeat at a battle in Belgium which the Austrians fortunately weren’t in time to get to, they regained most of their possessions in Italy at the peace talks due to diplomatic manoeuvrings by the master of the art, Metternich, but lost influence in Germany.
In the 1850s Austria failed to back her treaty partner Russia when the latter was invaded by the Turks, French and English in the Crimean war. Sardinia/Savoy/Piedmont, the leading state in the Italian peninsula, fought with the Allies, gaining international favour when it came to removing the Austrian influence during the subsequent wars of the Italian unification. Austria lost battles at places like Magenta and Solferino, and with them most of its Italian possessions except Venice.
In 1864 the Austrians did actually win a battle, a small naval engagement near Heligoland in the North Sea, against the Danes, against whom they were fighting in support of the Prussians over the Schleswig-Holstein question, of course. Emboldened by this masterstroke, they promptly came to blows with their erstwhile allies and were soundly whipped at the battle of Sadowa-Königgratz. The Italians got most of the rest of their country back in the resulting confusion.
The Austrians managed to stay out of trouble for another few decades after that, building up a national economy based on cheap dance music and diplomatic manoeuvrings in the Balkans. Unfortunately they got out of their depth in this respect; in 1914 the foreign minister [actually Chief of the General Staff] Conrad von Hötzendorff, believing himself to be the reincarnation of Metternich, decided to start the First World War to impress a woman he fancied. It could reasonably be argued that all the countries involved lost the First World War, even the winners, but Austria, after some Pyrrhic successes against the Serbs, a certain amount of back-and-forth against the Russians in Galicia and a cheap and ultimately futile win at Caporetto after the Russians had pulled out and the Germans had sent rather a lot of extra troops, ended up losing its entire empire, its monarchy, access to the sea and any self-respect whatsoever. It also managed to export Adolf Hitler to Germany during this period, which was singularly unfortunate; he absorbed Austria into a Greater Germany and then lost a rather big war in the most spectacular of fashions, as you are probably aware. This ended the military involvement of Austria in world affairs, at least for the moment.
I rest my case.
Albert Herring, “Why neither the French nor the Italians are the worst military nation”, Everything2, 2002-01-07.
August 7, 2019
QotD: “Great” “Art”
How do we know it’s true art? And before you start making gestures and sputtering, to finally come back with “knowledgeable people know that,” let me cut through the fog. The answer is, we don’t. No, not even experts. If everyone knew what great art was, investment in art wouldn’t be such a risky business. Great art, great literature, any form of “greatness” in creative expression is ultimately “What future generations think is great.” And, like all speculation about the future, it’s difficult, if not impossible. In visual art, what is often the acclaimed taste of an era is the laughable, ridiculous pastiche of a later era. In literature … Do me a favor, let your fingers do the walking through Gutenberg, then look up the biographies of some of those authors. Many of the people who make you say “who?” and who in fact would make anyone but an expert in the literature of their time go “who?” were literary lions in their times, acclaimed by all and pronounced “the next Shakespeare.” (Who, like “the next Heinlein,” used to rise every generation until people got tired of it.)
If the art is so great, how come no one is buying it? Besides the artist who is spending way too much time with absinthe and way too little time with quill and paper, or brushes and canvas, that is?
Oh. I see. Because the general public is too stupid to appreciate the greatness of the artist. Because the artist is “ahead” of the public.
Yeah, if you believe that you probably also think that history comes with an arrow since obviously art does. That is, art moves from “primitive” to “exquisite and advanced.” If you truly believe this, I invite you to go through any local art museum and move through it from, say, Roman times till now. And then I invite you to think. The Denver Museum of Art has an installation that consists of a bunch of twisted-together kitchen implements, something that often happens in my house due to the habit of overfilling drawers and my tendency – pre-coffee – to think there is no problem brute force can’t solve.
This is an “installation” worth 2 million and if you believe it is superior to Leonardo da Vinci’s Virgin of the Rocks, you should stop hitting the absinthe. No, wait. Have another cup. I have this installation …
Sarah Hoyt, “What Happens When the Artist Chides His Audience?”, PJ Media, 2017-07-13.
August 6, 2019
QotD: Sheep and goats
It’s the little things like this that point to the mindset under them. Or as Pratchett memorably put it in Small Gods: “Sheep are stupid and have to be driven. But goats are intelligent, and need to be led.” European nations treat their people like sheep. The USA treats its people more like goats, although the would-be shepherds keep pushing. Pratchett did not add that trying to drive goats will often earn the would-be driver a kick in the nadgers, but it’s worth remembering. Because Americans are goats. We can be led by the right people for the right reasons. Try to drive us, and you will find your family jewels suffering.
Kate Paulk, “The Difference Between Citizens And Subjects”, Kate Paulk, 2017-07-17.
August 5, 2019
QotD: Depictions of Heaven
Orwell’s press card portrait, 1943
Attempts at describing a definitely other-worldly happiness have been no more successful. Heaven is as great a flop as Utopia though Hell occupies a respectable place in literature, and has often been described most minutely and convincingly.
It is a commonplace that the Christian Heaven, as usually portrayed, would attract nobody. Almost all Christian writers dealing with Heaven either say frankly that it is indescribable or conjure up a vague picture of gold, precious stones, and the endless singing of hymns. This has, it is true, inspired some of the best poems in the world:
Thy walls are of chalcedony,
Thy bulwarks diamonds square,
Thy gates are of right orient pearl
Exceeding rich and rare!But what it could not do was to describe a condition in which the ordinary human being actively wanted to be. Many a revivalist minister, many a Jesuit priest (see, for instance, the terrific sermon in James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist) has frightened his congregation almost out of their skins with his word-pictures of Hell. But as soon as it comes to Heaven, there is a prompt falling-back on words like ‘ecstasy’ and ‘bliss’, with little attempt to say what they consist in. Perhaps the most vital bit of writing on this subject is the famous passage in which Tertullian explains that one of the chief joys of Heaven is watching the tortures of the damned.
The pagan versions of Paradise are little better, if at all. One has the feeling it is always twilight in the Elysian fields. Olympus, where the gods lived, with their nectar and ambrosia, and their nymphs and Hebes, the ‘immortal tarts’ as D.H. Lawrence called them, might be a bit more homelike than the Christian Heaven, but you would not want to spend a long time there. As for the Muslim Paradise, with its 77 houris per man, all presumably clamouring for attention at the same moment, it is just a nightmare. Nor are the spiritualists, though constantly assuring us that ‘all is bright and beautiful’, able to describe any next-world activity which a thinking person would find endurable, let alone attractive.
George Orwell (writing as “John Freeman”), “Can Socialists Be Happy?”, Tribune, 1943-12-20.
August 4, 2019
QotD: The post-WW2 American army
They were not half so good soldiers as the bronzed men who followed Rommel in the desert, or the veterans who slashed down toward Bastogne.
They were well armed, but their weapons were no better than those of United States design, if as good.
But the American soldier of 1950, though the same breed of man, was not half so good as the battalions that had absorbed Rommel’s bloody lessons, or stood like steel in the Ardennes.
The weapons his nation had were not in his hands, and those that were were old and worn.
Since the end of World War II ground weapons had been developed, but none had been procured. There were plenty of the old arms around, and it has always been a Yankee habit to make do. The Army was told to make do.
In 1950 its vehicles in many cases would not run. Radiators were clogged, engines gone. When ordered to Korea, some units towed their transport down to the LST’s, because there was no other way to get it to the boat. Tires and tubes had a few miles left in them, and were kept — until they came apart on Korean roads.
In Japan, where the divisions were supposedly guarding our former enemies, most of the small arms had been reported combat unserviceable. Rifle barrels were worn smooth. Mortar mounts were broken, and there were no longer any spare barrels for machine guns.
Radios were short, and those that were available would not work.
Ammunition, except small arms, was “hava-no.”
These things had been reported. The Senate knew them; the people heard them. But usually the Army was told, “Next year.”
Even a rich society cannot afford nuclear bombs, supercarriers, foreign aid, five million new cars a year, long-range bombers, the highest standard of living in the world, and a million new rifles.
Admittedly, somewhere you have to cut and choose.
But guns are hardware, and man, not hardware, is the ultimate weapon. In 1950 there were not enough men, either — less than 600,000 to carry worldwide responsibilities, including recruiting; for service in the ranks has never been on the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company’s preferred list of occupations.
T.R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness, 1963.
August 3, 2019
QotD: The 1968 election and the schizoid break of the American media
Fortunately for the Democrats, what The Media wanted and what the Democratic Party wanted were in the same ballpark for most of the next three decades. But then Bill Clinton happened, as my students would write. He played The Media’s Messiah fantasies for all they were worth, such that every bobblehead in the country was still defending him as Liberalism’s avatar even as he was governing (in the few odd moments he bothered) as Newt Gingrich’s mini-me and acting like a frat boy on nickel beer night at the strip club.
You just don’t get over something like that.
Which brings us to the elections of 2000 and 2004. Boy do these look different in hindsight! […] I knew The Media was all-in on the Democrat, like they always are. But at the time, I thought that was a tactical decision. That is, I really believed that their attacks on W. were calculated political moves, designed to drag Gore and especially Kerry over the finish line. I thought that only the Mother Jones types were delusional, Iranian mullah-style fanatics.
Nope. The Media — ALL of them — really did see W. as the antichrist, the Twelfth Invisible Hitler (as the Z Man likes to put it) come to destroy the world. So when despite all their sacrifices to Moloch the Chimperor won, The Media went full retard. Like UFO cultists who keep the faith by telling themselves only their fervent prayers staved off the apocalypse, The Media convinced themselves that only more Social Justice would do …
Severian, “The Spirit of ’68”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-07-01.
August 2, 2019
QotD: What we mean by “civilization”
Which is when the dime dropped and I realized you guys immediately translated civilization to “as good as we have or better.” Which, of course, made me giggle. Because I’d have liked you to tell a Roman, with their world-bestriding empire that they weren’t civilized. Or, before that a classical Greek.
Understand I am not imagining others before us had the internal combustion engine, or steam, or trains, or … Sure, they might have, but that’s a heck of a coincidence, since those things usually come about by an individual stroke of genius, and even when they do they often aren’t used the way we did (Romans and their mechanical toys.)
To imagine other civilizations of which we’ve forgotten every trace followed exactly the same route we did to the same place we’re at requires believing that inventing steam and the internal combustion engine and harnessing electricity is as natural to humans as dams to beavers.
Now, maybe that’s true. It would certainly make for a very good science fiction story. (Short story, I think. Too much of a punchline thing for a novel.) BUT the odds defy rationality.
I was imagining, you know “builds houses of wood or stone. Domesticated SOME animals. Has villages and cities. Might have trade over long routes. MIGHT have had wheeled vehicles.” (The last, as we know, one can have quite sophisticated civilizations without.)
Look, it’s not your fault. Since the seventies, we’ve been bombarded by crazy BS about superior aliens or superior lost civilizations. (And before that, there was a trickle of it, too, going back I think to the eighteenth century, just couched in different terms.) You’ll get stuff about how the pyramids were built of stones that floated at the sound of a certain note. (A C note, or the equivalent, I bet. “Listen, Mac, you take this stone to the top of the pyramid, I give you a C Note. A hundred Amontheps in your pocket, bucko. Buys a lot of fish and falafel.”)
Part of this, and part of the reason it intensified since the seventies were the “unilateral disarmament people.” You know, those jokers who wanted us to get rid of our own nukes and stand disarmed in front of the USSR, who would then realize we were peaceful, and not attack, and everyone would live in peace and harmony with rainbows and farting unicorns. Yes, it was a stupid and crazy idea since the continued survival of the USSR depended on plunder and conquest. But I’ll remind you our last president still believes that bag of moonshine. All of it, including the unicorn farts.
Sarah Hoyt, “We Are The Superior Civilization”, According to Hoyt, 2017-05-15.
August 1, 2019
QotD: Small government provides little scope for special interest lobbying
The growth of government, in turn, raises the payoff available to special interest groups. With a higher payoff to special interest groups, this encourages the formation of new special interest groups to share in the payoff. A larger government can support a larger number of special interest groups. Thus, as government grows, more special interest groups form. The formation of special interest groups in turn increases the demand for special interest legislation, cause a further growth in government spending.
Randy Holcombe, An Economic Analysis of Democracy, 1985.
July 31, 2019
QotD: Foreshadowing Nuremberg
Orwell’s press card portrait, 1943
Mussolini, in “Cassius’s” book, after calling his witnesses, enters the box himself. He sticks to his Machiavellian creed: Might is Right, vae victis! He is guilty of the only crime that matters, the crime of failure, and he admits that his adversaries have a right to kill him — but not, he insists, a right to blame him. Their conduct has been similar to his own, and their moral condemnations are all hypocrisy. But thereafter come the other three witnesses, the Abyssinian, the Spaniard and the Italian, who are morally upon a different plane, since they have never temporized with Fascism nor had a chance to play at power politics; and all three of them demand the death penalty.
Would they demand it in real life? Will any such thing ever happen? It is not very likely, even if the people who have a real right to try Mussolini should somehow get him into their hands. The Tories, of course, though they would shrink from a real inquest into the origins of the war, are not sorry to have the chance of pushing the whole blame onto a few notorious individuals like Mussolini and Hitler. In this way the Darlan-Badoglio manoeuvre is made easier. Mussolini is a good scapegoat while he is at large, though he would be an awkward one in captivity. But how about the common people? Would they kill their tyrants, in cold blood and with the forms of law if they had the chance?
It is a fact that there have been very few such executions in history. At the end of the last war an election was won partly on the slogan “Hang the Kaiser”, and yet if any such thing had been attempted the conscience of the nation would probably have revolted. When tyrants are put to death, it should be by their own subjects; those who are punished by a foreign authority, like Napoleon, are simply made into martyrs and legends.
What is important is not that these political gangsters should be made to suffer, but that they should be made to discredit themselves. Fortunately they do do so in many cases, for to a surprising extent the war-lords in shining armour, the apostles of the martial virtues, tend not to die fighting when the time comes. History is full of ignominious getaways by the great and famous. Napoleon surrendered to the English in order to get protection from the Prussians, the Empress Eugénie fled in a hansom cab with an American dentist, Ludendorff resorted to blue spectacles, one of the more unprintable Roman emperors tried to escape assassination by locking himself in the lavatory, and during the early days of the Spanish Civil War one leading Fascist made his escape from Barcelona, with exquisite fitness, through a sewer.
It is some such exit that one would wish for Mussolini, and if he is left to himself perhaps he will achieve it. Possibly Hitler also. It used to be said of Hitler that when his time came he would never fly or surrender, but would perish in some operatic manner, by suicide at the very least. But that was when Hitler was successful; during the last year, since things began to go wrong, it is difficult to feel that he has behaved with dignity or courage. “Cassius” ends his book with the judge’s summing-up, and leaves the verdict open, seeming to invite a decision from his readers. Well, if it were left to me, my verdict on both Hitler and Mussolini would be: not death, unless in is inflicted in some hurried unspectacular way. If the Germans and Italians feel like giving them a summary court-martial and then a firing-squad, let them do it. Or better still, let the pair of them escape with a suitcaseful of bearer securities and settle down as the accredited bores of some Swiss pension. But no martyrizing, no St Helena business. And, above all, no solemn hypocritical “trial of war criminals”, with all the slow cruel pageantry of the law, which after a lapse of time has so strange a way of focusing a romantic light on the accused and turning a scoundrel into a hero.
George Orwell, “Who are the War Criminals?”, Tribune, 1943-10-22.
July 30, 2019
QotD: Business versus economics
Erwin Rommel, edited by B.H. Liddell Hart in The Rommel Papers, 1953.
July 29, 2019
QotD: Put up your dukes!
Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington (1769–1852) by Thomas Lawrence, circa 1815-1816.
Wikimedia Commons.The phrase “duke it out”, meaning “fight”, appears to derive ultimately from a nickname of one of the Great Captains, the Duke of Wellington (1769-1852).
It seems that the Duke had a rather prominent nose, so distinctive, in fact, that his troops often referred to him as “Old Nosey”. So the word “duke” soon became a synonym for “nose” in working class English slang, attested during Wellington’s own lifetime. That, in turn, led to the rise of the threat “bust your duke”, meaning “punch your nose”, and thus to “duke buster” as slang for “fist”, which was soon shortened to “duke”.
By further evolution, the phrase “put up your dukes” developed as an invitation to fight and “duke it out” became slang for “fight”.
While some etymologists apparently do not agree with this derivation, it’s worth noting that there is in London a mini-monument to the ducal proboscis, suggesting how notable it was.
Al Nofi, “Al Nofi’s CIC, Issue 472”, Strategy Page, 2019-06-01.
