French is known as the language of romance, a reputation that, whatever cultural support it enjoys, would be difficult to defend on purely linguistic grounds. But it wouldn’t be controversial in the least to call it a Romance language, which simply refers to its descent from the Latin spoken across the Roman Empire. In that category, however, French doesn’t come out on top: its 77 million speakers put it above Romanian (24 million) and Italian (67 million), but below Spanish (489 million) and Portuguese (283 million). If you know any one of these languages, you can understand at least a little of all the others, but French stands out for its relative lack of family resemblance.
“Why is acqua just eau?” asks Joshua Rudder, creator of the Youtube channel NativLang. “How are cambiar and casa related to change and chez?” He addresses the causes of these differences between modern-day French, Spanish, and Italian in the video above, which presents the historical-linguistic explanation in the form of a long and tricky recipe.
“Start preparing your ingredients 2000 years ago. Take a base of Latin,” ideally at least three centuries old. “Combine traces of Gaulish, because Celtic words will become sources of change.” Then, “gradually incorporate sound shifts, not uniformly: work them in to form a nice continuum, where the edges look distinct, but locally, it’s similar from place to place.”
This cooking session soon becomes a dinner party. Its most important attendees are the Franks next door, who come not empty-handed but bearing a few hundred Germanic words. In the fullness of time, “you might think that the sound of French would come from a single dialect in Paris. Instead, observe as it arises from social changes and urbanization, bringing together people who speak many varieties of oïl” — an old word for what Francophones now know as oui, and which now refers to the dialects spoken in the north of the country (as opposed to oc in the south) back then. Even this far into the process, we’ve come only to the point of making Middle French.
Modern French involves “a thick ganache of kingdom and colonization” spread far and wide. Subsequent “periods of revolution and Napoleon” put more touches on the languages, none of them finishing. Students of French today find themselves seated at an elaborate feast of unfamiliar sounds and rules governing those sounds, many of which may at first seem unpalatable or even indigestible. Yet some of those students will develop a taste for such linguistic fare, and even come to prefer it to the other Romance languages that go down easier. French continues to change in the twenty-first century, not least through its incorporation of askew anglicisms, yet somehow continues to remain a language apart. Therein, perhaps, lies the true meaning of vive la difference.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Helen Keller achieved notoriety not only as an individual success story, but also as a prolific essayist, activist, and fierce advocate for poor and marginalized people. She “was a lifelong radical,” writes Peter Dreier at Yes! magazine, whose “investigation into the causes of blindness” eventually led her to “embrace socialism, feminism, and pacifism.” Keller supported the NAACP and ACLU, and protested strongly against patronizing calls for her to “confine my activities to social service and the blind.” Her critics, she wrote, mischaracterized her ideas as “a Utopian dream, and one who seriously contemplates its realization indeed must be deaf, dumb, and blind.”
Twenty years later she found a different set of readers treating her ideas with contempt. This time, however, the critics were in Nazi Germany, and instead of simply disagreeing with her, they added her collection of essays, How I Became a Socialist, to a list of “degenerate” books to be burned on May 10, 1933. Such was the date chosen by Hitler for “a nationwide ‘Action Against the Un-German Spirit,’” writes Rafael Medoff, to take place at German Universities—“a series of public burnings of the banned books” that “differed from the Nazis’ perspective on political, social, or cultural matters, as well as all books by Jewish authors.”
Books burned included works by Einstein and Freud, H.G. Wells, Hemingway, and Jack London, Students hauled books out of the libraries as part of the spectacle. “The largest of the 34 book-burning rallies, held in Berlin,” Medoff notes, “was attended by an estimated 40,000 people.”
Not only were these demonstrations of anti-Semitism, but their contempt for ideas appealed broadly to the Nazi philosophy of “Blood and Soil,” a nationalist caricature of rural values over a supposedly “degenerate,” polyglot urbanism. “The soul of the German people can again express itself,” declared Joseph Goebbels ominously at the Berlin rally. “These flames not only illuminate the final end of an old era; they also light up the new.”
“Some American editorial responses” before and after the burnings, “made light of the event,” remarks the United States Holocaust Museum, calling it “silly” and “infantile.” Others foresaw much worse to come. In one very explicit expression of the terrible possibilities, artist and political cartoonist Jacob Burck drew the image above, evoking the observation of 19th century German writer Heinrich Heine: “Where one burns books, one will soon burn people.” Newsweek described the events as “’a holocaust of books’… one of the first instances in which the term ‘holocaust’ (an ancient Greek word meaning a burnt offering to a deity) was used in connection with the Nazis.”
The day before the burnings, Keller also displayed a keen sense for the gravity of book burnings, as well as a “notable… early concern,” notes Rebecca Onion at Slate—outside the Jewish community, that is—for what she called the “barbarities to the Jews.” On May 9, 1933, Keller published a short but pointed open letter to the Nazi students in TheNew York Times and elsewhere, abjuring them to stop the proposed burnings. She wrote in a religious idiom, invoking the “judgment” of God and paraphrasing the Bible. (Not a traditional Christian, she belonged to a mystical sect called Swedenborgianism.) At the top of the post, you can see the typescript of her letter, with corrections and annotations by Polly Thompson, one of her primary aides. Read the full transcript below:
To the student body of Germany:
History has taught you nothing if you think you can kill ideas. Tyrants have tried to do that often before, and the ideas have risen up in their might and destroyed them.
You can burn my books and the books of the best minds in Europe, but the ideas in them have seeped through a million channels and will continue to quicken other minds. I gave all the royalties of my books for all time to the German soldiers blinded in the World War with no thought in my heart but love and compassion for the German people.
I acknowledge the grievous complications that have led to your intolerance; all the more do I deplore the injustice and unwisdom of passing on to unborn generations the stigma of your deeds.
Do not imagine that your barbarities to the Jews are unknown here. God sleepeth not, and He will visit His judgment upon you. Better were it for you to have a mill-stone hung around your neck and sink into the sea than to be hated and despised of all men.
Keller added the penultimate paragraph of the published text later. (See the handwritten addition at the bottom of the typed draft.) Her concern for the “grievous complications” of the German people was certainly genuine. The expression also seems like a targeted rhetorical move for a student audience, conceding the situation as “complex,” and appealing in more philosophical language to “justice” and “wisdom.” The Nazis ignored her protest, as they did the “massive street demonstrations” that took place on the 10th “in dozens of American cities,” the Holocaust Museum writes, “skillfully organized by the American Jewish Congress” and sparking “the largest demonstration in New York City history up to that date.”
Five years later, however, another planned book burning—this time in Austria before its annexation—was prevented by students at Williams College, Yale, and other universities in the U.S., where pro- and anti-Nazi partisans fought each other on several American campuses. U.S. students were able to push the Austrian National Library to lock the books away rather than burn them. Keller “is not known to have commented specifically” on these student protests, writes Medoff, “but one may assume she was deeply proud that at a time when too many Americans did not want to be bothered with Europe’s problems, these young men and women understood the message of her 1933 letter—that the principles under attack by the Nazis were something that should matter to all mankind.”
Note: This post originally appeared on our site in 2017.
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Henry James, perhaps the most famous American expatriate novelist of the nineteenth century, won a great deal of his fame with The Portrait of a Lady. John Singer Sargent, perhaps the most famous American expatriate painter of the nineteenth century, won a great deal of his fame with a portrait of a lady — but not before it seemed to kill his illustrious career at a stroke. When it was first shown to the public at the Paris Salon of 1884, Sargent’s Portrait of Madame X drew a range of reactions from bitter dismissal to near-violent anger. But today, as Great Art Explained host James Payne says in the new video above, “it is genuinely hard to see what the fuss was about.”
“Twenty years before, in 1865, Manet had shown Olympia at the Salon, to a scandalized Paris. So why the shock now? The difference was that Manet’s Olympia was a prostitute, like the women in Toulouse-Lautrec’s painting also on display in 1884. But Madame X was part of French high society.” She was, all those first viewers would have known, the socialite, banker’s wife, and “professional beauty” Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau. Her rumored penchant for infidelities wouldn’t have been unusual for her particular place and time, but her background as the New Orleans-born daughter of a European Creole family certainly would have.
Beholding Madame X, “Parisians were forced to confront their own decadence, which they preferred not to acknowledge, and this was where Sargent went wrong. The salons were a sacrosanct part of French culture, and he, a foreigner, was flaunting immorality in their faces with a painting of another foreigner, an exotic one at that.” He’d already stirred up a certain amount of controversy three years earlier with Dr. Pozzi at Home, another full-length portrait that portrayed its subject – the highly accomplished and notoriously handsome gynecologist Samuel-Jean Pozzi — in a manner whose sheer informality verges on the concupiscent.
Payne thus regards Dr. Pozzi and Madame X as “male-female versions of the same type. They are both flamboyant peacock figures, with a streak of vanity and a knack for seduction. There is something in the way they are posed which is unconventional. They have an indirect gaze, and they both have supreme confidence verging on arrogance.” That only Sargent could have — or, at least, would have — captured and transmitted those qualities with such directness wasn’t appreciated quite so much at the time. Ostracized in Paris, where he’d been a sought-after portraitist to the wealthy, he packed up MadameX and set off for London, where he soon rebuilt his career. The advice to do so came from none other than Henry James, who knew a thing or two about advantageous relocation.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Though Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band holds something of an honorary cultural position as “the first concept album,” the Beatles themselves didn’t hear it that way. The term “concept album,” as defined by Polyphonic host Noah Lefevre in his new video above, denotes “a set of tracks which hold a larger meaning when together than apart, usually achieved through adherence to a central theme.” Despite being one of the finest collections of songs committed to a single vinyl disc in the nineteen-sixties, Sgt. Pepper’s does — apart from its opening and closing tracks — reflect few pains taken to assure a thematic unity.
Other contenders for the first concept album, in Lefevre’s telling, include Woody Guthrie’s 1940 Dust Bowl Ballads, Frank Sinatra’s 1955 In the Wee Small Hours, Johnny Cash’s 1959 Songs of Our Soil, and The Ventures’ 1964 The Ventures in Space. Part of the question of designation has to do with technology: we associate the album with the twelve-inch long-playing record, which didn’t come on the market until 1948. (Dust Bowl Ballads had to sprawl across two 78 rpm three-disc sets.)
And even then, it was almost two decades before the LP “caught on as the default format for musical releases, allowing musicians to have more scope and vision for their albums” — that, thanks to expansive gatefold sleeves, could literally be made visible. There began what I’ve come to think of as the heroic era of the album as an art form.
This era was marked by releases like The Mothers of Invention’s Freak Out!, The Who’s Tommy, Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon and later The Wall. “The seventies were a golden age for the concept album,” Lefevre adds. “It was a time when musicians had the space and budget to experiment, and when new technologies were pushing music into entirely unexpected places.” Partially demolished by punk and majestically revived by hip-hop, the concept album remains a viable form today, essayed by major twenty-first century pop artists from The Weeknd and Kendrick Lamar to Taylor Swift and BTS — none of whom have quite managed to capture the entire zeitgeist in the manner of Sgt. Pepper’s, granted, but certainly not for lack of trying.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Even the most ardent shipwreck enthusiasts among us must make peace with the fact that, in all probability, we’ll never get to see the Titanic for ourselves. But now, at least, we have a substitute in the form of the ship’s “digital twin,” based on more than 700,000 images collected underwater over 200 hours.“It provides a unique 3D view of the entire ship, enabling it to be seen as if the water has been drained away,” report BBC News’ Rebecca Morelle and Alison Francis. “The scan was carried out in summer 2022 by Magellan Ltd, a deep-sea mapping company, and Atlantic Productions, who are making a documentary about the project.”
You can catch a glimpse of how the scan looks in the clip from the Times at the top of the post, but it only hints at its true level of detail. “The joint mission by Magellan and Atlantic Productions deployed two submersibles nicknamed Romeo and Juliet to map every millimeter of the wreck, including the debris field spanning some three miles,” writes Ars Techica’s Jennifer Ouellette.
“The result was a whopping 16 terabytes of data, along with over 715,000 still images and 4K video footage. That raw data was then processed to create the 3D digital twin. The resolution is so good, one can make out part of the serial number on one of the propellers.”
“The bow, now covered in stalactites of rust, is still instantly recognizable even 100 years after the ship was lost,” write Morelle and Francis. “Sitting on top is the boat deck, where a gaping hole provides a glimpse into a void where the grand staircase once stood.” As one might expect, the Titanic has come through twelve decades at the bottom of the North Atlantic ocean somewhat worse for wear, and getting worse all the time. “Microbes are eating away at it and parts are disintegrating. Historians are well aware that time is running out to fully understand the maritime disaster.” Indeed, there will come a day when the remains of the Titanic will have vanished completely. But even then, its digital twin — or, perhaps, digital ghost — will have more to teach us.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Late though it may be in the age of print, we still envision ransom or other threatening notes in the same way we have for generations, with their demands incongruously spelled out with individual letters, each one a different size and font, taken from the pages of newspapers and magazines. This classic cut-and-paste method of ransom note construction presumably emerged as means of evading minds like that of Trista Ginsberg, a document analyst specializing in handwriting at the Secret Service. She appears in the Great Big Story above, which comes to focus on one facility at the Service’s headquarters in particular: the International Ink Library.
“The Secret Service has the largest ink library in the world,” says the video’s narrator. Its more than 12,000 samples of different inks include “pens, bottled ink, and printer cartridges.” These come in handy when, say, “someone writes a threatening letter to the president.”
A document analyst like Irina Geiman samples the letter’s ink, and then, by comparing it to the inks in the library, “she can figure out what kind of ink was used, and, hopefully, it can help solve the case.” Geiman also explains a less dramatic type of case that comes across her desk rather more often: at-home inkjet counterfeiting of $20 bills.
Though that may not be the highest example of the counterfeiter’s art, the art itself motivated the creation of the Secret Service in 1865 as a branch of the U.S. Treasury Department. “Following the Civil War,” says the Secret Service’s FAQ, “it was estimated that one-third to one-half of the currency in circulation was counterfeit.” It was in 1901, after the McKinley assassination, that “the Secret Service was first tasked with its second mission: the protection of the president.” Hence the cultural currency of the image of the would-be president assassin evading governmental pursuit while laboriously assembling his missives one letter at a time — surely reason enough for the Secret Service to have put together a top-secret International Glue Library.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
We’ve all, at one time or another, been asked to say the first thing that pops into our heads in response to a certain word or phrase. It may have happened to us in school, in a market research group, or perhaps in a job interview at a company that regards itself as somewhat outside-the-box. Most such exercises, and the theories supporting their efficacy as a tool for revealing the speaker’s inner self, originate with the work of the Swiss psychiatrist-psychoanalyst and then-protégé of Sigmund Freud Carl Jung.
Jung published his description of this “association method” in the American Journal of Psychology in 1910, and you can see the story of its creation — animated in the usual Monty Python-esque paper-cutout style — told in the new School of Life video above. In his word-association test, says narrator Alain de Botton, “doctor and patient were to sit facing one another, and the doctor would read out a list of one hundred words. On hearing each of these, the patient was to say the first thing that came into their head.” The patient must “try never to delay speaking and that they strive to be extremely honest in reporting whatever they were thinking of, however embarrassing, strange, or random it might seem.”
Trial runs convinced Jung and his colleagues that “they had hit upon an extremely simple yet highly effective method for revealing parts of the mind that were normally relegated to the unconscious. Patients who in ordinary conversation would make no allusions to certain topics or concerns would, in a word association session, quickly let slip critical aspects of their true selves.” The idea is that, under pressure to respond as quickly and “unthinkingly” as possible, the patient would deliver up contents from the instinct-driven subconscious mind rather than the more deliberate conscious mind.
Jung used 100 words in particular to provoke these deep-seated reactions, the full list of which you can see below. While some of these words may sound fairly charged — angry, abuse, dead — most could hardly seem more ordinary, even innocuous: salt, window, head. “When the experiment is finished I first look over the general course of the reaction times,” Jung writes in the original paper. “Prolonged times” mean that “the patient can only adjust himself with difficulty, that his psychological functions proceed with marked internal frictions, with resistances.” He found, as de Botton puts it, that “it was precisely where there were the longest silences that the deepest conflicts and neuroses lay.” In Jung’s worldview, there were the quick, and there were the neurotic: a drastic simplification, to be sure, but as he showed us, sometimes the simplest language goes straight to the heart of the matter.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Thanks to James Brown’s official YouTube channel, you can now watch a remastered and restored version of a historic concert. The channel prefaces the concert with these words:
On April 5th 1968, James Brown gave a free concert at The Boston Garden which became a thing of legend. Only 24 hours earlier civil rights activist Dr Martin Luther King had been assassinated resulting in widespread violence across the United States. The mayor of Boston was persuaded to let the concert go ahead and it was broadcast live across the city by WGBH-TV. Featuring inspiring speeches and legendary performances, James Brown’s concert is said to have contributed majorly to maintaining calm and peace throughout the city that night.
The setlist, complete with time stamps, appears below:
00:00 Intro
01:57 If I Ruled The World
05:40 James Brown Speech
12:55 Tom Atkins Speech
17:45 Kevin White Speech
20:59 That’s Life
24:22 Kansas City
28:45 Soul Man (Bobby Byrd)
31:08 You’ve Got To Change Your Mind (feat. Bobby Byrd)
35:51 I’m In Love (Bobby Byrd)
38:22 Sweet Soul Music (Bobby Byrd)
40:23 Mustang Sally (Bobby Byrd)
43:36 Medley: It’s A Man’s Man’s Man’s World / Lost Someone / Bewildered
57:30 Tell Mama (Marva Whitney)
59:36 Check Yourself (Marva Whitney)
01:05:02 Chain Of Fools (Marva Whitney)
01:07:38 I Heard It Through The Grapevine (Marva Whitney)
01:10:24 Maceo Parker Comedy Routine
01:20:20 Get It Together
01:27:30 There Was A Time
01:38:40 I Got The Feelin’
01:42:40 Try Me
01:45:35 Medley: Cold Sweat / Ride The Pony / Cold Sweat
01:57:20 Maybe The Last Time
02:01:32 I Got You (I Feel Good)
02:02:04 Please, Please, Please
02:04:34 I Can’t Stand Myself (When You Touch Me)
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