Let Them Eat Cake

Right off, Marie-Antoinette didn’t say "Let them eat cake." But someone did.

Marie-Antoinette, born in Vienna in 1755 was the 15th child of Maria Theresa, the Hapsburg empress, and Emperor Francis I.

Her mother betrothed her to Louis-Auguste, grandson of King Louis XV, when she was 10 years old in order to strengthen the alliance between her Hapsburg relatives and the French Bourbons. She meet her future husband the day before they were married when she was 14 and Louis was 15.

The marriage, not surprisingly, was not great for the first years. The young couple had never consummated their marriage after the wedding. Louis XVI and his queen made the marriage official after 7 years together and the first of their four children was born the following year.

They were happy but completely different. He was indecisive, an introvert who preferred to spend his free time alone, reading or metalworking. She was a real queen - a vivacious extrovert she loved parties, gambling, theater and a big spender on amusements.

She had a miniature farm built at Versailles, not to have produce but so that she and her ladies could pretend to be shepherdesses and milkmaids. She would have 300 new gowns a year, and she loved extreme hairstyles.

France was in debt, partly because it was supporting the American Revolution. The monarchy and nobility paid almost no taxes. (Sounds familiar.) Commoners who were hit hard by crop failures and food shortages paid the state's bills.

She became a symbol of what was wrong with the government and everything that was wrong with France. Marie-Antoinette made secret arrangements for her family to flee in 1791, but the plans failed when revolutionaries captured the royal family as they were escaping and they became prisoners of the Revolutionary government.

In 1792, France was declared a republic and the monarchy was abolished. Louis was executed. Marie-Antoinette was accused and convicted of treason and the sexual abuse of her son, and she was beheaded in October 1793.

Marie-Antoinette never said, “Let them eat cake.” That was penned by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, years before Marie-Antoinette ever even came to France. He was describing a queen, but it was another foreign-born French queen, Marie-Therese of Spain, the wife of Louis XIV. But the attitude of that phrase did fit Marie-Antoinette.

catfishing , catfisting, and noodling

Catfishing is a type of deceptive activity where a person creates a sock puppet social networking presence, or fake identity on a social network account, usually targeting a specific victim for abuse, deception or fraud. (not to be confused with catfisting- see below)

Catfishing is often employed for romance scams on dating websites. Catfishing may be used for financial gain, to compromise a victim in some way, or simply as a form of trolling or wish fulfillment.

That sockpuppet online identity is used for purposes of deception. The term comes from a simple hand puppet made from a sock that is easily manipulated.

Although some sources state that the modern term originated from the 2010 American documentary Catfish, the term has actually been around in the English language for decades. It was used in Arthur Crudup's "My Momma Don't Allow Me" back in 1944.

But Catfish, the documentary film directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, definitely made the term common in popular culture.

The film follows a young man, Nev, who is being filmed by his brother and friend while he tries to build a romantic relationship with a young woman. Nev is using Facebook.

The film led to an MTV reality TV series, Catfish: The TV Show that centered on the lives of others who have been caught up in online relationships.

The focus of the film is Yaniv (Nev) Schulman who helps other people investigate possible catfish attempts and the motives behind the people who use fake identities to build relationships with online users

One unlikely origin for the term catfish is that fishermen would put sea catfish in with their catch of cod to nip at their tails and keep them active during overseas transport in order that the cod be fresher.

In the popular media, the case of the University of Notre Dame football star Manti Te'o in 2013, and the Rolling Stone article about a University of Virginia rape that turned out to be a hoax may have been an example of catfishing.

Catfisting (more commonly called noodling) may also be part of the origin of the catfishing con usage. This quite literal practice is fishing for catfish by using one's bare hands. It is more popular in the southern United States where catfish are more popular for eating and more common.

You put your hand inside a discovered catfish hole and wait for the aggressive catfish to grab hold of it, and then you pull it out of the water. Yes, it can be dangerous. I suppose there is a kind of deception in this technique. Do catfish think they have just grabbed some odd hand and arm fish?

Halloween

A cemetery set for All Hallows Day, which is religious - but looks quite Halloween creepy.

Everyone knows Halloween, the holiday, but I'm surprised how few people know the origin of the word (also written as Hallowe'en) which dates to about 1745. It is of Christian origin, though Christian churches often consider the holiday to be not holy at all and more of a pagan celebration.

To hallow is "to make holy or sacred, to sanctify or consecrate, to venerate".The adjective form is hallowed, which appears in "The Lord's Prayer" ("hallowed be thy name"), means holy, consecrated, sacred, or revered.

The noun form hallow, as used in Hallowtide, is a synonym of the word saint. The noun is from the Old English adjective hālig, "holy." The Gothic word for "holy" is either hailags or weihaba, weihs.

In modern English usage, the noun "hallow" appears mostly in the compounds Hallowtide Hallowmas and Halloween. Hallowtide and Hallowmas are lesser known. Hallowtide is a liturgical season that includes the days of Halloween and Hallowmas.

And now, the many variations to further confuse us.

Halloween/Hallowe'en is a shortened form of "All Hallow Even(ing)," meaning "All Hallows' Eve" or "All Saints' Eve."

Hallowmas is the day after Halloween and it is shortened from "Hallows' Mass," and is also known as "All Hallows' Day" or "All Saints' Day."

So, the word "Hallowe'en" means "Saints' evening" and it comes from a Scottish term for All Hallows' Eve. In Scots, the word "eve" is "even" and this is contracted to e'en or een.

Over time, (All) Hallow(s) E(v)en evolved into Hallowe'en.

Hapless

When I was teaching in a middle school and asked students to define words, I often received useless definitions. Asked to define "hapless," someone would inevitably say "without hap"

Hapless could be defined as "having no luck." 

"Does hap mean luck?" a student might then ask.

My hapless (unfortunate) students did not want to dig down into words, which was why I eventually began to teach etymologies for words I thought would be interesting to dissect.

Hapless literally does mean "without hap," and "hap" is another word for fortune or luck. Hap derives from an Old Norse word for "good luck." That word is also the source of our happen and happy.

There are other English words that might be more likely used to describe those lacking good fortune: ill-starred, ill-fated, unlucky, and luckless. My young students would probably prefer "luckless" which clearly means without luck.

"No one knows what a hap is," they would tell me.

"But now YOU know," I would reply. "Next word: smug."

The Cobra Effect

The "cobra effect" is the term used for when an attempted solution to a problem makes the problem worse. This unintended consequence is often is used to describe environmental, economic and political solutions that work in reverse.

The term "cobra effect" originated when there was still British rule in India. The British government wanted to reduce the number of dangerous, venomous cobra snakes in Delhi. They offered a bounty for every dead cobra. So, people were killing them and collecting the bounty. At first, the idea worked. But some enterprising people began to breed cobras to collect more bounties. The government became aware of this abuse and ended the reward program. The cobra breeders had no use for the snakes and released their stock (though it's not clear why people didn't just kill them while they had them in captivity) and as a result, the wild cobra population further increased.

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change tried an incentive scheme in 2005 in an effort to greenhouse gases. If a company disposed of polluting gases it would be rewarded with carbon credits that could be converted into cash. The price for the credits was based on how much damage the pollutant was to the environment. The highest credit price went to HFC-23, a byproduct of a common coolant. As with the cobras, companies began to produce more and more of this coolant so that they could destroy more of the HFC-23 byproduct waste gas and get additional credits

This RadioLab program gives many other examples.