In 1970 the group Santana released an album called Abraxas. One of the hit songs was Black Magic Woman. I didn’t know until I looked it up that the word abraxas is thought to be a particularly ancient word with magical powers. Evidently by some association of Greek letters with numbers the Greek form of abraxas adds up to 365, which is of course the number of days in a year and this somehow imparts mystical energies to the word. I couldn’t quite figure it out, but I guess it’s appropriate for an album with a song on it about magic.

However ancient it is abraxas only turned up in English in 1738, while our main magic word for the day appeared 42 years earlier in 1696. I only make the connection because Brewers Dictionary of Phrase and Fable says abracadabra is probably a related word to abraxas.

I’d always assumed that abracadabra was a kind of fabricated word used by magicians, but it turns out its pedigree is at least 1500 years older than our use of it in English. The first known citation was in Latin and it appeared in a kind of medical poem as an instruction for curing the sick magically. But instead of chanting this magic word the secret was in wearing it around your neck. The theory is that you wrote out the whole word, then below that you wrote out the word missing the final letter, and so on until the writing formed an inverted pyramid with an A at the bottom.

abracadabra
abracadabr
abracadab
abracada
abracad
abraca
abrac
abra
abr
ab
a

This caused your sickness to diminish and disappear just as the word did. Michael Quinion of worldwidewords.org pretty much agrees with my other sources on this, but also provides a few more theories as to where the word might have come from before that. He says it might be from an Aramaic phrase avra kehdabra, that meant “I will create as I speak”. Alternatively it could be from Hebrew ab ben ruach acadosch meaning “father-son-holy spirit” or from abrasax, another form of abraxas I mentioned earlier, which was evidently a name for God among an early Christian sect. And finally, one that seems to line up with the medical prescription, the possibility that it came from words in a language known as Chaldean abbada ke dabra that translates as “perish like the word.”

Here’s a timely quote about censorship. General William Westmoreland said:

“Vietnam was the first war ever fought without censorship. Without censorship, things can get terribly confused in the public mind.”

I guess he thought that censorship was a good thing. I don’t think the public mind is confused about censorship. In general I’d say the thinking is censorship is a bad thing.

Although the first citation for the word censorship in English is more than 400 years ago, it was less than 200 years ago that it took on the meaning we think of today; that is the repression of information. What’s more, the etymological roots of censorship are tied to what I think most people think of as a good thing; or at least a practical thing.

Of course the person who undertakes to impose censorship is a censor. This word isn’t much older in English, but it does have far more ancient roots. The Oxford English Dictionary tells me that the word was adopted because it was the Latin name given to two magistrates in ancient Rome. The American Heritage Dictionary goes further and says their title derives from an Indo-European word kens that meant to “proclaim” or “speak solemnly.”

It was the job of these two guys to decide who was a citizen of Rome and what tribe they fit into. The list they made was called a census. That’s the thing I thought most people would consider a good thing. Not that people like filling in the forms and all that need to be submitted for a census, but the information it provides is supposed to inform better government decision-making. So if you think the government makes bad decisions, think of how much worse they’d be if they didn’t have census data to go on.

Of course back in ancient Rome the censors did more than build a census. They had the power to decide if someone was a citizen or not. The OED says they had the role of supervising public morals and the Routledge Who’s Who in the Roman World says that they also supervised the Senate and got rid of the bad apples. So it’s this power to regulate that is applied in our word censorship.

George Bernard Shaw said:

“Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.”

Perhaps the most famous assassination in ancient Rome was the death of Julius Caesar, but there’s a twist here since in Caesar’s case it was he himself who had the official title of censor.

To underline our modern distaste with censorship I note that Urbandictionary has 32 submissions with hundreds of votes for this word. There is a strong current against censorship. Unfortunately few of those entries are very quotable, but here’s one that seems to fit the tone of Urbandictionary

“Censorship is the BLEEP BLEEP BLEEP. It’s so BLEEP BLEEP.

It seemed to me that the word dynamite meaning “excellent” came to prominence during the days of disco. But looking at the Oxford English Dictionary I see that the first citation for this usage runs back to the days of Irving Berlin and Bing Crosby, that’s 1942. By that time the word dynamite had been part of the English language for 75 years and had already morphed into another meaning.

But let’s start at the beginning.

Dynamite is one of those words that was invented by one guy and just caught on. In this case it caught on because it was the name of a new product that was safer to use if you wanted to blow things to smithereens. The guy who thought up the name, the same guy who invented the explosive, got tremendously rich.

Since deep down he was more interested in the good of society than blowing things to smithereens he established a fund to give out prizes to the smartest and most peaceful people in the world. Those prizes are of course the Nobel prizes and the guy of course was Alfred Nobel.

It is common currency to point out the irony that the Nobel Peace Prize—only one of the now six prizes awarded annually—was started by a guy who did so much to improve bomb making.

According to Encyclopedia Britannica Alfred Nobel was interested in explosives even as a child, but then what little boy isn’t. In Alfred’s case though this interest begat a factory supplying the Russians with bomb material for the Crimean War. Business slumped at the outbreak of peace and so Alfred cast around for a better kind of explosive. He came up with nitroglycerine. Nitroglycerine has a reputation for being a little unstable and blowing things to smithereens when you least expect it. Clearly this wasn’t the best material to build a career on, especially when it first blew Alfred’s brother to smithereens and then his entire German factory.

Alfred Nobel decided something safer was needed and as his first action in making things safe he built himself a new chemistry lab and floated it in the middle of the river so that if he blew himself to smithereens only a few fish would suffer. Out there on the water he finally figured out that mixing nitroglycerine with what amounts to the one of the main ingredients in kitty litter gave him a much more stable and manageable explosive that took the form of a powder. This he first called safety powder and then dynamite based on the Greek word dynamis meaning “power.”

So then he made his millions.

Dynamite was popular not only with demolition experts and military personnel who didn’t want to blow themselves to smithereens as part of their job, but also with terrorists. And this is what lead to that interim meaning of the word dynamite I hinted at earlier. By 1880 we see citations for such phrases as “the dynamite affair” the “dynamite outrage” and “the dynamite conspiracy.” By 1922 this had crystallized into a meaning of “something dangerous.”

The Devil’s Dictionary was published in book form in 1911, but it had actually been a column written by Ambrose Bierce beginning in 1881. So Bierce would have been experiencing this transition of meaning when he penned his definition for coronation. I don’t know for sure, but I’d guess he was prompted to write this definition by the succession of Edward VII who took over from Queen Victoria in 1901. The Devil’s Dictionary defines a coronation as

The ceremony of investing a sovereign with the outward and visible signs of his divine right to be blown skyhigh with a dynamite bomb.

If you were out for dinner and someone told the waiter they’d have the dish you were planning to order, you might say “ditto.”

Of course ditto means “the same.” This is a meaning that has evolved within English because it doesn’t mean that in Italian, the language that we get ditto from. In Latin dictus means “said” or “spoken.” That’s actually where we get dictionary from, in a roundabout way a dictionary tells you how to say things. So the word ditto is an Italian dialect evolution from the Latin dictus and meant “said.”

In Italian ditto was used to avoid repeating yourself, especially if you were rhyming off a list of dates. So instead of saying:

“I’ll be there on January 6th and I might stay until the 10th of January,”

the style back around Shakespeare’s time was to say something along the lines of

“I’ll be there on January 6th and I might stay until the 10th of said month.”

But it was even more stylish to say “ditto” instead of “said month” so it would come out as

“I’ll be there on January 6th and I might stay until the 10th ditto.”

Pretty quickly, certainly in less than 100 years English speakers had extended the meaning of ditto from “said,” to “same.” The first citation for this was in an early dictionary The New World of English Words by Edward Phillips.

This gives me a good segue into a little history of freedom of the press. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography says that for this dictionary Edward Phillips plundered an earlier dictionary by Thomas Blount. That’s the word they used plundered. So although Phillips’s dictionary was the first to have ditto in it, it evidently was largely a ditto of Thomas Blount’s.

There is more irony in that Thomas Blount had a brother Charles Blount who must have used the ditto method of authorship because of him I read that he was

“one of the most unscrupulous plagiarists that ever lived.”

But my interest in him today is that he was an actor in making the free press free in England. In the latter part of the 1600s political and religious tensions were high in England and several waves of opposing governing groups thought it was a great idea to control people’s minds by controlling what could be printed. Hence a chief censor was established with the official title of Licensor of the Press. These guys seemed universally to approve the printing of any book or pamphlet sympathetic to their political masters’ cause, and universally to deny any critical documents. Of course printing things without permission was illegal at a time when such transgressions were sometimes fatal.

This guy Charles Blount may have been a plagiarist, but he was a sneaky guy with a plan because what he did was to produce two opposing works, both of which he produced anonymously. One strongly criticized the muzzling of the press and was of course printed illegally but yet widely read and admired. The other was strongly supportive of the reigning William and Mary but designed only so as to delight the Licensor of the Press, who gave it quick approval.

In fact it’s second design was to stir up the opposition, it was so slavishly obsequious to authority. Sure enough within 4 days of publication the heat was on so high that the Licensor of the Press was hauled before the House of Commons to give an account of himself. He basically had a nervous breakdown and was removed from his job. After the offending officially approved documents were burned in a public place to calm the citizenry, no one was appointed as a new Licensor of the Press. And thus ended the great idea of controlling people’s minds by controlling what could be printed.

Nowadays there are subtler ways.

The word library entered English in the 1300s, of course from French where it came from Latin. In English we think of a library as sort of a source for books that is a cost-free alternative to a book store. But in most of the languages that evolved out of Latin a library is a bookstore.

The Latin root liber meant “book” but is thought to have earlier meant “bark,” as from a tree. Etymonline goes so far as to connect it with an Indo-European root meaning “to peel.”

Whatever the case, libraries are fairly old, but since written language isn’t as old as spoken language, libraries can’t be quite as old as some of those mysterious Indo-European roots. Still, about 2300 years ago there arose what was considered one of the great libraries of history at Alexandria. This is also thought to be one of the first libraries in European antiquity. The place was the temple of the muses and as I explained in the episode on museum, this is where our word museum came from. But this library was not to last. There are several tales of its demise but the one that appears most likely to be true was that Julius Caesar set some of his own ships on fire as a protective military move, and that the fire spread and eventually consumed the Alexandrian library.

Another reputedly splendid library that went up in smoke was owned by a guy named William Murray, Lord Mansfield. His library certainly wasn’t on a par with the one n Alexandria, but he is a little closer to us in time—his big fire happened in 1780—and the reason for his fire was pretty important to our world today. William Murray was an English Judge and a highly respected expert on English law. He was a pretty strong believer in what we now call the rule of law. Many people these days feel that rule of law is what makes good government work. You can’t have political leaders going off willy-nilly making decisions that are against the law, just because they were given the responsibility of governing.

I guess William Murray is the exception that makes the rule. He had his library burned down because one of the laws of his day discriminated against Catholics, but he ruled that another law took precedence to protected religious freedom. An anti-Catholic mob disagreed since their careful study of the law showed that in such a case the presiding judge needed to be taught a lesson.

Now this event in itself hardly changed the world, but it is in character with an earlier event that did change the world. As such a respected legal authority William Murray was called upon by the King and British government to help them understand the laws as related to such things as the taxation of America without elected representation.

Although there were political opponents who saw the writing on the wall and urged flexibility in dealing with the American colonies, Murray supported what seemed convenient to the King and Prime Minister of the day by telling them that it was all strictly legal—there it was in black and white in the law books. As would later happen with his library, an angry mob of colonials objected to this reading of the law and deprived England of a major portion of the western wing of their Empire—now known as the US of A.

You win some, you lose some.

But on the whole Murray’s intentions were good I suppose, and he was pretty accomplished and even though England lost the USA Murray was still rewarded for his services with various peerages and earldoms. Sort of like those corporations whose share values go up in smoke but who’s CEOs still seem to be worth millions.

That never seems to happen to librarians.

Although there was a gang of people tromping around the Mediterranean 1600 years ago called the Vandals, it wasn’t until about 200 years ago that vandalism appeared in English. To be sure the name of the old Germanic tribe was in English before that, but only by a few hundred years. Vandalism is defined by the New Oxford American Dictionary as:

deliberate destruction of or damage to public or private property

By this definition it is legitimate to call graffiti vandalism, especially when city governments or property owners spend money to have the graffiti removed. But this is a slightly broader meaning of vandalism than the one it entered English with. And since some graffiti is quite artistically accomplished there is some irony in the meaning too. The original English meaning of vandalism was intentional damage specifically to artistic and cultural works or even to things that were just plain beautiful. By that definition some of the work to remove graffiti might be called vandalism.

The main reason that all this defacement of beauty is blamed on that old Germanic tribe is that they were ballsy enough to take over Rome in the year 455 and carry off all sorts of treasures. But although vandals today are thought of as mindless louts, and this was likely how the Romans felt too, those original Vandals were only doing what came naturally and this fact is reflected in the deeper etymology of their tribal name. The Vandals had in fact been ousted from their tribal homelands by the Huns about 1700 years ago and it’s thought by some that Vandal is a Germanic word related to our word wander—although the name may predate the Hun-forced wanderings. As they invaded here and there around Europe to find a place of their own, they had already been in conflict with the Roman Empire and so the sacking of Rome was sort of a payback incident.

They were only in town for two weeks, there was definitely a purpose to their looting—they wanted valuable stuff—and there are even some accounts that the honoured an agreement not to put Roman residents to death; all of which makes me wonder if the original Vandals got a bum rap with our current definition.

The word chastise means “to punish” as does its related word castigate. Does this mean that chastity is a punishment? Here are a few quotes that seem to hold chastity in low regard:

From Voltaire – “It is amusing that a virtue is made of the vice of chastity.”

According to Aldous Huxley “chastity is the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions.”

But no, the roots of the word chastity are not in punishment. To chastise someone is to punish them but only so that they will correct themselves and become chaste. The word chaste is just slightly older in English than chastity—both of them showing up around 750 years ago—but when they arrived in English they had slightly different meanings, as I guess they do today. To be chaste was then to be pure, while chastity was celibacy or virginity. The subtlety of difference is that to be chaste didn’t have a sexual aspect until about the time of Shakespeare’s birth, a little more than 400 years ago.

Of course the arrival of both of these words in the written record a century or two after the Norman invasion is consistent with their roots in French and Latin. Ultimately the roots run back to Indo-European and a word kes that meant “to cut.”

But this cutting didn’t relate to injury for punishment sake but instead to the division of people and things into their so-called “pure” groupings. In this the word chastity is related to the word caste, as in the caste system in India. The idea is that chaste people have been cut off from sin and that the various castes in a society are divided up into their pure groupings. I don’t need to tell you that this thinking runs a bit counter to that line from the American Declaration of Independence “that all men are created equal.”

But back to chastity. Here’s an unlikely quote from a revered saint of the Catholic Church

“Give me chastity and continency—but not yet!”

That was Saint Augustine. Continency means “self restraint.” He did actually write that down, although in Latin, and they still did make him a Saint, and in fact he’s considered one of the more important figures in the establishment of Christianity. The reason he wrote “give me chastity, but not yet” was that he was thinking back to his younger days. When he wrote it I guess the “not yet” part was over because he’d already had a kid with a gal he didn’t marry, and had dedicated himself to the boy’s upbringing, until he unfortunately died and Augustine reluctantly found his way to the church.

The reason he’s a historically big-shot saint is due to two factors. First of all he wrote a lot. Five million words of his output survive, and he was scribbling away on the fringes of a failing Roman empire back 1600 years ago. Secondly he was lucky enough to choose the winning side. Just as now, back then there were a number of religious factions around who each thought that their way was the one true religion. Augustine owes his Sainthood to the fact that he allied himself with the Church of Rome. But he was born a pagan in the backwoods of North Africa and could literally walk out over the border beyond the influence of the Roman Empire. He spent the first half of his life striving to be an intellectual and a teacher within the non-Christian establishment of the Roman Empire before taking up a role within Christianity. While his academic ambitions had taken him to the core of the Empire, his failure there, and the needs of his son, pulled him back into the hinterland. Which also likely contributed to his lofty status, since out there in nowheresville his writings stood out all the more.

I was reading a book written in England and the dialog included numerous examples of characters calling something crap when I would have said crappy instead.

Hugh Rawson’s book Wicked Words asserts that crap is a more polite alternative to the s-word, although still kind of rude.

This is a word that may have many roots; some of the going back thousands of years. However, the meaning that makes people think crap is rude is only one that’s been applied to the word for something over 100 years.

If I told you I was suffering from crapulence you might think I had some kind of lower digestive tract disorder. But in fact the word crapulence means that I’ve been drinking too much. The ancient Greeks used this word to mean a hangover, and the Romans adopted the word. But they must have done it in a drunken stupor since they didn’t apply the meaning of “hangover” to crapulent, instead, to them it meant “drunk.” Both meanings can be found in the Oxford English Dictionary for crapulent as an English word.

But this appears to be an unrelated word to crap. The first citation for crap appears some 600 years ago with a meaning of “discarded husks of grain.” One of the sources I saw connected the word crap to the word crop although I don’t see much of that elsewhere. Crap and words like it meaning “non-valuable stuff left over” seems to have had a wide range of usage in several European languages. But not the meaning of what you flush down the toilet. That is first cited in 1898.

Some contend that the word crap derives from the name of a guy who invented the toilet. A guy named Crapper. The sources I have consulted confirm that there was indeed a guy named Thomas Crapper and he indeed was a plumber. Some go so far as to report that in the 1870s or ‘80s Thomas Crapper developed a new kind toilet that didn’t need the water flowing all the time. But none of the sources I consulted concede that this is where our word crap comes from. That piece of Hugh Rawson’s in Wicked Words suggests that people were calling privies cropping kens or cropping cases back in the 1600s, so centuries before Thomas Crapper came along.

So it appears that it was just the slow evolution of the word crap that meant farm waste, into crap that means human waste, dragging along in the evolution, meanings of “nonsense,” and “lousy,” etc. If someone tells you a story and you think it’s full of crap, that means it’s nonsense. If you see a crappy movie it isn’t a documentary about toilet design, it’s just not a very good movie (although that might be true of the documentary also).

The first citation for crap meaning “poo” was documented by a rather interesting guy named Joseph Wright in his English Dialect Dictionary. Some people feel that as an Oxford professor Wright had an influence on JRR Tolkien, and by the accounts I read of Wright I’d guess he’d have a good influence on anyone. He was born so poor that he is reported to have been in the workhouse with his mother as a boy and to have asked, as Oliver Twist did, for more bread. Instead of getting beaten he got some bread.

Without any formal education he rose to be an Oxford professor with degrees from half a dozen other universities and honors from as many learned societies; and all this because he loved languages and spread his love around. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography says:

The impressive thing about Joseph Wright was not only that he rose to this scholarly eminence from ragged illiteracy, but that he never allowed academic interests to obscure his origins, and enjoyed nothing better than to be able to use his native Yorkshire speech, which, like all dialects, he regarded as an authentic language, with every right to be taken seriously.

And I say, no crap.

I once had a book that gave ideas for romantic meals. The one that sticks in my mind advised me to choose a good picnic spot and the day before the event to go there and bury a bottle of champagne, so as to dramatically unearth it on the day. This I never did, perhaps from laziness, perhaps from fear that someone else would dramatically dig it up before I got there.

In any case the idea of a picnic needing a place to dig a hole is consistent with our current understanding of the word picnic applying to a meal taken outdoors. This was not always the case.

The word came to English most likely from French, although there seems to have been some German influence in there somewhere. Yet it didn’t come all those centuries ago with so many other French based words. This one seems to have been in use in Europe during the 1600 and 1700s with a meaning of a kind of potluck party. This was neither outside, nor casual, as a potluck might be today. Instead it was a very fashionable affair but one where all the guests contributed.

The pic part of picnic really does mean “pick” because the idea is, as with a potluck, there was a large variety of foods to choose from so one could pick their favorites.

The nic part of picnic isn’t quite so clear cut. There is suspicion that it is a kind of reduplication of the pic sound. But there was also an obsolete French word nique that meant “something insubstantial” although this word root may have already died out by the time picnic began to emerge as a word.

If we do accept that the meaning is literally “picking at nothing at all” then I can imagine two interpretations. One is that guests are free to pick at the food since the cost of putting the meal together is minimal; and the other is that they are free to pick at it because leaving something uneaten is a kind of anonymous offense, the supplier of the dish not necessarily known and the non-eater similarly unidentified. But I may be stretching the point here.

The very first reference to a picnic in English is contained in a 1748 letter from Philip Stanhope, the 4th Earl of Chesterfield to his illegitimate son, then residing in Germany. The context of the letter itself doesn’t make it clear, but from the European meanings of the word at the time, and the implication that Chesterfield’s son was playing cards at the picnic, we can assume that this was one of those fashionable parties, not digging up bottles from a hillside. It takes perhaps another 50 to 100 years before the word is in common use in English, so that’d make it the early 1800s, and after that it begins to take on its current outdoors meaning.

A few points are raised by the fact that Lord Chesterfield used the word. One is that he clearly was not the first to do so in English. He is responding to a letter from his son and it seems pretty obvious that it was his son who first used the word in his letter. So this is one of those cases where the guy who gets the credit is dependent on the loss of earlier evidence.

Another thing is that this letter gives me a chance to explore this Chesterfield character a bit. To some extent he got savaged by our old buddy Samuel Johnston. Johnston had been seeking funding for his dictionary project and to grease the wheels with Chesterfield—who liked to be thought of as a guy who supported literature and men of letters—he addressed his original plan, effectively his open letter of proposal, to Chesterfield. According to Boswell, Johnston’s biographer, this was a high complement that should have pleased Chesterfield. As it turns out Chesterfield did contribute to the fund, but it was only a small to middling amount. There is a story that Johnston went to a meeting with Chesterfield and was made to wait outside for hours while Chesterfield yacked it up with someone else, and that this was the reason that Johnston decided Chesterfield was a jerk. But according to Boswell, Johnston denied the incident saying it was the fact that Chesterfield didn’t give a hoot about the dictionary during the long labors it took to produce. Johnston claimed this caused him, not so much to dislike Chesterfield, as to discount him. But the rub was yet to come, because as the project neared publication who arose again from the shadows but Chesterfield. Whatever Chesterfield’s motivations, now Johnston thought of him as a jerk who hadn’t supported him all along but now, at the finish line, wanted some of the glory. Chesterfield wrote two complementary pieces in the newspaper and for his troubles he was rewarded by Johnston writing back to him. Listen to this:

Is not a Patron, my Lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and, when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help? The notice which you have been pleased to take of my labours, had it been early, had been kind; but it has been delayed till I am indifferent, and cannot enjoy it…till I am known, and do not want it.

It didn’t end there; of those very letters Chesterfield sent to his son, Johnston said QUOTE

“They teach the morals of a whore, and the manners of a dancing-master.”

Charles Dickens lived about a century later but he picked up the song and used this unflattering image of Chesterfield for one of his characters.

So old Lord Chesterfield seems to have gotten it from both sides, because even though people reading his letters to his son nowadays quite often see it as good advice, not only did he get publicly grilled for his efforts, his son didn’t seem to take his advice, and then on top of it all he went and died at 36.

I guess life’s not always a picnic.

Before I go, now that my book is out, I’d like to invite anyone who has had a chance to read the book to go to one of the online bookstores and write a little book review. Thanks.

Links to the relevant pages are:

• Amazon
• Barnes & Noble
• Powell’s
• Books-a-Million
• Chapters

Political corruption is the downfall of any government in a good democracy. Where corruption is deeply ingrained even democracy might not help you.

Political corruption and police corruption are the two phrases that jump to mind for me when I hear the word corruption. And I see that if I pop the word corrupt into the search engine of the New York Times, the first five hits that come up have to with government corruption.

That’s why I was a little surprised to find that the words political or government don’t even appear in the Oxford English Dictionary definitions for corrupt or corruption. Of course we are still talking about the entry from the OED second edition, but it has had a 2004 addition drafted, but that concerns data corruption.

The connection between some government official who’s on the take and your computer file that won’t open because it’s been corrupted is that both are not as good as they once were. They are broken down. And that is the root of the word corrupt. Back in Latin the word roots go back to com-rumpere. The rumpere part means “to break” and the American Heritage Dictionary says it comes from an Indo-European root word reup that meant “to snatch” and somehow this makes it related to the word rip.

It’s not that corrupt hasn’t been recognized as a word describing a dishonest person by the OED; they have citations from the 1300s with that sense. Perhaps it’s just that in centuries past people gave more focus to religious matters and so that’s why so many of the earliest citations have a kind of fire and brimstone usage to their use of the word corruption. Also for ages in English the government and the aristocracy were one and the same. So corruption was, about 500 years ago, much associated with the bloodlines of noblemen. Or rather the interruption of the inheritance of titles because some nobleman had been foolish enough to “corrupt” his own blood by doing something that the king didn’t approve of. This meant that the king was so pissed off that he claimed the titles and lands back so he could hand them out to someone else, instead of letting the sons of the former Duke or Earl inherit the title.

Bad nobleman! Bad!

Most of us in the western world live under systems of government where corruption, or the lack of it, matters. So I punched the word corrupt into Oxford’s database of many of its other dictionaries and was glad to see that the second and third entries of 32 that came up were indeed related to politics and law. But what surprised me more is that there was a law passed (presumably in England) in 1889 called the Public Bodies Corrupt Practices Act. That was before the Oxford English Dictionary first edition was even finished.

But here in the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics I see that we have all been thinking of political corruption in the wrong terms. I’ve rearranged these two sentences, but I quote them verbatim:

Nowadays scholars have abandoned the classic view of corruption as the degradation of an individual’s ethical sense, or lack of moral integrity. Corruption is neither a property of a social system or an institution, nor a trait of an individual’s character, but rather an illegal exchange.

I recently read a blog post where a family was stopped by police and asked to pay a bribe. They refused. According to this definition there was no corruption in that scenario.

Hmm…

Seems to me that descriptive mandate of dictionaries, that is that they report how language is used, is somehow missing from these entries.

I wonder who paid them off.