What Are We Commencing at Commencement?

Why do we call a graduation ceremony “commencement” when commence means "to begin" and the event marks the end of college?

Someone asked "Grammar Girl", Mignon Fogarty, that question and she gave two possible, but somewhat unsatisfying, answers.

One explanation is in the "every end is a beginning" category - commencement marks the beginning of a student's new professional/adult life.

The other explanation goes back to those medieval universities when a student entered as an "apprentice" and at the end of that apprenticeship could officially commence in a profession as a master or doctor.

She references The Founding of Harvard College that says that a person needed a license to lecture/teach and that entry into this masters of arts guild included a ceremony called commencement (Latin inceptio which is where we get "inception").

People - well, some people - do like to argue about word origins and this page suggests a theory that it had to do with your dinner seating.

I'll tell you why graduation is called Commencement (and no, it's not because it's the beginning of your "real life"). In the large halls where students and faculty ate, the faculty used to eat at table on a raised platform at one end of the long line of tables at which the students sat. When the students finished their course of study and graduated, they became fully-fledged members of the University and equals of the faculty. Consequently, at the grand banquet with which they celebrated their graduation, faculty and former students (both the newly-graduated and alumni) ate together as equals. They shared tables, or, in the Latin of the time, they ate at a commensa, a common table for all. This is why, not so long ago, Commencement and Reunion took place at the same time and why the University Dinner was the high point of the graduation events.

That also sounds farfetched and commenters seem to feel that lacking more evidence we should go with the tradition of the inceptio ceremony of initiation for the new scholars into the fellowship of university teachers in medieval Europe.

Now, when did tossing your graduation cap come about and why is it called a mortar board?  That's another post to come...

Chapters

We have all read books with chapters and probably not given any thought to the word or the origin of the word and the practice of dividing up a text. It has been used for over two millennia. Cato the Elder’s “De Agri Cultura” (“On Farming”), from the second century B.C.E., was organized in numbered units with titles.

A piece in The New Yorker brought the word and origin to my attention through the story of a historian and scriptural scholar dying in a monastery in 735 AD.

In that English monastery, known as Jarrow, that scholar, known as the Venerable Bede, was dying. With only his young scribe, Wilbert, to help him, he was determined to complete his Anglo-Saxon translation of the Gospel of John. Bede worked in the most important scriptorium of his era.

The scribe told Bede that “one chapter still remained” and Bede, knowing he was close to finishing, dictated the remaining words and then died.

The Latin word Wilbert used in telling his master that only a portion remained was capitulum. Bede's work was to produce capitula which were divisions of scriptural texts with the inclusion of headings or summaries.

The word went into many languages: Spanish capítulo, French chapitre, Czech kapitola, German Kapitel, Romanian capitol, Italian capitolo,and eventually the English chapter.

Once the concept was accepted and expected, texts such as the Biblical Gospels needed divisions in their previously continuous text.

An elaborate system of small sections cross-indexed among the different Gospels was used well into the Middle Ages, but it was hardly easy to use. There were over 300 sections in Matthew and Luke each. And deciding where to divide turned out to be also a kind of editorial  interpretation.

From this we get the phrase "chapter and verse," meaning an exact reference or authority, as in "She can give chapter and verse on current legislation." Though used for many things that have no connection to the Bible, this usage is based on the idea that proof of an idea can be found in the Bible, and cited by its chapter and verse.

A story from the 13th century, perhaps apocryphal, credits a an English member of the theological faculty, Stephen Langton, with trying to create a simpler chaptering of the student Bible with fewer divisions of a more consistent size. These "Langton chapters" gave the Bible a more narrative style.

Some editors, such as the printer William Caxton in 1485, divided texts like Thomas Malory’s King Arthur tales, “Morte d’Arthur,” into chapters.

The novelist Henry Fielding  (Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews compared "those little Spaces between our Chapters” as being like “an Inn or Resting-Place, where he may stop and take a Glass, or any other Refreshment, as it pleases him.” The titles for the chapter were then comparable to the inscriptions over the inn's door telling us what we would find inside.

Today we just expect chapters to break up our reading in fiction and non-fiction.

Some chapters have become phrases in themselves. Most people who are not trained in the law are still aware that "Chapter 7" means bankruptcy and that "Chapter 11" is the section of the code that gives a company protection from creditors for a limited period to allow it to reorganize.


We also use "chapter" figuratively, as in "starting a new chapter in her life."

Gumshoe Detectives and Galoshes

You may have heard the term "gumshoe" became a nickname for a detective, particularly a private, rather than police department, detective or a "plainclothes" officer.

The word existed before its slang usage. Originally, gumshoe referred to a shoe with a rubber sole. Though it might refer to rain boots or galoshes (more on that later), in this context it refers to what we would call today sneakers. A gumshoe would be a private detective in the sense that a rubber-soled shoe would give the wearer the ability to walk stealthily.

At the turn of the century 20th century,  "to gumshoe" meant to sneak around quietly as if wearing gumshoes. It could be to rob or, conversely, to catch thieves.

Apparently, a "gumshoe man" was originally slang for a thief, but then around 1908 "gumshoe" seems to have meant a detective, as it has ever since. Some dictionaries list uses from 1908 as gum, gumfoot, gumboot, gumheel, gumshoe artist and gumshoer as also meaning a private detective.

That other gumshoe footwear, galoshes, is a word that comes through French and Latin from Greek and originally meant a shoemaker's last. This was the literal "wood" + "foot" that a shoemaker used to form the leather around as a form.

The original galoshes are not very similar to what you would be shown if you asked for them in a store today. They were once English style clogs with a wooden sole and fabric/leather) upper.  By 1572, the term also applied to "a Gallage or Patten" which was an overshoe with a shaped wooden base to raise the wearer's good shoes off the ground in wet weather. "Goloshes" appears to be the older spelling of galoshes used previously in Great Britain.

In modern usage, galoshes are outer shoes worn in inclement weather to protect the inner shoes and keep the feet dry and are almost universally made of rubber.

Some fashionable galoshes - via sharperliving.co.uk

Computer bugs and worms

The first known computer bug was a real bug. It was a moth that got stuck inside the enormous inner workings of an early computer in 1947.

On September 9, 1947,  Grace Murray Hopper recorded this first computer bug in her log book as she worked on the Harvard Mark II.

The problem was traced to a moth stuck between a relay in the machine. After "debugging" the computer, Hopper taped the moth into the Mark II's log book with the explanation: “First actual case of bug being found.”

The first computer worm was invented by John Brunner. It did not occur inside a computer program, but in his 1975 science fiction novel, The Shockwave Rider.

He called it a “tapeworm,” since it worked in a way similar to that fleshy parasite. It was the first description of a set of computer codes that moves from one computer to another on a network as a coherent entity.

A computer worm is a standalone malware computer program that replicates itself in order to spread to other computers. Often, it uses a computer network to spread itself, relying on security failures on the target computer to access it.

It differs from a computer virus, it does not need to attach itself to an existing program. Worms almost always cause at least some harm to the network, even if only by consuming bandwidth, whereas viruses almost always corrupt or modify files on a targeted computer. 

On November 2, 1988, Robert Tappan Morris, a Cornell University computer science graduate student, unleashed what became known as the Morris worm, disrupting a large number of computers then on the Internet, guessed at the time to be one-tenth of all those connected.

NIMBY

NIMBY is an acronym meaning "Not In My BackYard." It appears in stories about a neighborhood protesting the location of a new unwanted project in their area.

Many such "undesirable" projects are attached to its use. A list on Wikipedia includs: low cost housing development, skyscrapers, homeless shelters, oil wells, chemical plants, industrial parks, military bases, fracking, wind turbines, desalination plants, landfill sites, incinerators, power plants, quarries, prisons, pubs, adult entertainment clubs, firearms dealers, mobile phone masts, electricity pylons, abortion clinics, children's homes, nursing homes, youth hostels, sports stadiums, betelnut vendors, shopping malls, retail parks, railways, roads, airports, seaports, nuclear waste repositories, storage for weapons of mass destruction, and cannabis dispensaries and recreational cannabis shops.

Whether it is a new garbage dump or energy plant, this acronym is a pejorative characterization of opposition by residents. Often that opposition is not to the need for such facilities, but just that it should be further away from their neighborhood. The residents are often called Nimbies and their state of mind is called Nimbyism.

The NIMBY concept i sometimes also applied to people who advocate a proposal, such as budget cuts, but oppose implementing it in a way that might affect their lives or require any sacrifice on their part.

The acronym's earliest use is listed as being in 1980 in the Christian Science Monitor. However, the OED  notes that the term was already used in the hazardous waste industry. It is probable that people were using the phrase "Not in my backyard" much earlier than the acronym.