Making it weird

In honour of the 400th anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare, and his weird sisters, this week’s video looks at the history of the word weird:

The word for this video was chosen by popular vote after I asked for feedback in a previous video over the summer, so thanks to everyone for voting and giving me your feedback. “Weird” was the clear winner, and it certainly made it easy on me as it intersected with my dissertation topic from my grad school days, which looked at the conceptualisation of futurity in Old English. In my dissertation I looked at the nascent constructions for expressing future time in Old English, which didn’t have a regularized future tense. It started off with the question of how Anglo-Saxon translators handled Latin with its future tense, particularly with all the Christian texts which often dealt so explicitly with the future and the afterlife, and then expanded from there into a broader question of what language and language change can tell us about cultural concepts about time and the future. So wyrd in its original sense of fate was an element in that work. I’ve also blogged before about my ongoing interests about time, cognition, and language, so if you’re interested in reading more on the topic, you can see here and here.

The timing also fit well with the Shakespearean anniversary, and as an extra tie-in you can also have a listen to our Shakespeare film podcast episode on the recent film adaptation of Macbeth featuring Michael Fassbender. The great similarities and significant differences between Shakespeare’s treatment of the Weird Sisters and what he found in his source, Holinsed’s Chronicles, are interesting and instructive, and I’ll quote Holinshed’s version of the entire encounter at the end of this blog post below, but in his passage the three women are referred to as being “in strange and wild apparell, resembling creatures of elder world” and are referred to as “either the weird sisters, that is (as ye would say) the goddesses of destinie, or else some nymphs or feiries, indued with knowledge of prophesie by their necromanticall science”. 

It’s a curious thing that the word ‘weird’ owes its reintroduction to the language pretty much entirely to Shakespeare’s play, and even more curious because it was a misunderstanding of the sense of the word. It really does seem to be the Romantic poets, particularly Percy Shelley, as well as John Keats, who popularised the new sense of the word. It’s in Shelley’s 1816 poem Alastor that we see the first glimpse of this new sense in the lines “ In lone and silent hours, / When night makes a weird sound of its own stillness” and “the woven leaves / make net-work of the dark blue light of day, / And the night’s noontide clearness, mutable / As shapes in the weird clouds.” Then a few years later John Keats seems to pick up on his friend’s unusual word in the 1820 poem Lamia: “I took compassion on her, bade her steep / Her hair in weïrd syrops, that would keep / Her loveliness invisible, yet free / To wander as she loves, in liberty.” Given that the word was somewhat recherché to begin with, only known through Shakespeare and in Scots English, it’s perhaps not too surprising that we owe such a now seemingly common and even slangy word to the pens of Romantic poets. Interestingly the word doesn’t really seem to pick up until the latter half of the 19th century, and even suffers something of a decline in the first half of the 20th, only gaining in popularity again around 1980 (see the chart below for the for the frequency of weird and some of its close synonyms). As the citations in the OED suggest, the word was picked up by such potboiler writers as Charles Dickens and Edward Bulwer-Lytton (about whom I’ve spoken earlier in “Beef”), which might explain the mid-19th century uptick. As for the 1980s I suppose we can look to the pop culture references like the ones I mentioned in the video (Weird Al Yankovic and the movie Weird Science). It does seem to be in fairly contemporary usage that the word has reached its peak.

Now a few words about the Proto-Indo-European root. From the base *wer- derives a number of other PIE roots which then lead to a variety of English words through different routes. The main one from the video is *wert- which gives us not only weird and the various words ending in -ward but also worth, and the universe of words from the versatile Latin word vertere (including of course universe and versatile). The derived root *wreit- (also meaning “turn”) gives us wreath and wrath (think twisted with anger), and the root *wergh- gives us words such as wring, worry, and wrong. The root *werg- gives us wrench and wrinkle, *wreik- leads to wry, wrigle, and wrist, *werb- gives us reverberate, and *werp- gives us wrap. And of course as mentioned in the video, *wrmi- gives us worm, as well as vermicelli — think about that the next time you eat noodles. So as you can see this is a very large collection of cognates, and enough turning words to make your head spin.

Now for a bit more about the Norns. By some accounts there were actually many other Norns, who attended the birth of every child, but Urðr, Verðandi, and Skuld were the chief ones. Here’s the description in Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda: “There stands a fair hall under the ash, by the well, and out of this hall there come three maidens, who are called Urd, Verdandi and Skuld. These maidens shape the lives of men; we call them Norns. But there are other Norns who visit every child that is born, to shape its life, and they are descended from the Æsir, others still are descended from the Elves, and a third kind from the race of Dwarfs … good Norns, from a noble line, shape good lives, but wicked Norns are to blame for those whose lives are miserable.” This may be echoed in the idea of good and wicked fairy godmothers in fairy tales like Sleeping Beauty. The name Skuld also appears as a name of one of the Valkyrie, but these two groups of women seem to have been conflated somewhat in some traditions. The forest maidens mentioned in Saxo Grammaticus’s Gesta Danorum (“Deeds of the Danes”) are indeed a striking parallel with the Weird Sisters and come across as something like the Norns, but are also similar to the Valkyrie: “About this time Hother chanced, while hunting, to be led astray by a mist, and he came on a certain lodge in which were wood-maidens; and when they greeted him by his own name, he asked who they were. They declared that it was their guidance and government that mainly determined the fortunes of war. For they often invisibly took part in battles, and by their secret assistance won for their friends the coveted victories.” And like Shakespeare’s Weird Sisters, they appear to Hother again later to render him further assistance.

And finally some more senses of “weird”. In the video I focussed mainly on the noun and adjective uses of “weird” but it can also appear as a verb, from the Middle English period in the sense of “to assign a fate” or in the passive voice meaning “to be destined”. When Frank Herbert used the word “weirding” in his novel Dune, he was drawing both on the supernatural or magical sense of the word that developed later and on its earlier fate-related elements. But perhaps the most familiar use of the verb today is in the expression “to weird out” as in “to make someone feel uncomfortable”. In mathematics there’s also a concept called “weird numbers” which are explained in Wikipedia: “ the sum of the proper divisors (divisors including 1 but not itself) of the number is greater than the number, but no subset of those divisors sums to the number itself.” So for instance 70 whose “divisors are 1, 2, 5, 7, 10, 14, and 35; these sum to 74, but no subset of these sums to 70.” There’s also an acronym WEIRD, “western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic” used in psychology to refer to the statistical bias that often occurs in psychological studies that are, as is often the case, based on a sampling of the easily available undergraduate students, who therefore might not represent the population at large. So I suppose in a certain sense what seems normal might actually be weird. (And again, as Professor Elemental tells us, "There's no such thing as normal, everybody's weird!")

Here’s the full passage from Holinshed:

Shortlie after happened a strange and vncouth woonder, which afterward was the cause of much trouble in the realme of Scotland, as ye shall after heare. It fortuned as Makbeth and Banquho iournied towards Fores, where the king then laie, they went sporting by the waie togither without other companie, saue onelie themselues, passing thorough the woods and fields, when suddenlie in the middest of a laund, there met them thrée women in strange and wild apparell, resembling creatures of elder world, whome when they attentiuelie beheld, woondering much at the sight, the first of them spake and said; "All haile Makbeth, thane of Glammis" (for he had latelie entered into that dignitie and office by the death of his father Sinell.) The second of them said; "Haile Makbeth thane of Cawder." But the third said; "All haile Makbeth that héerafter shalt be king of Scotland."

Then Banquho; "What manner of women (saith he) are you, that séeme so little fauourable vnto me, whereas to my fellow heere, besides high offices, ye assigne also the kingdome, appointing foorth nothing for me at all?" "Yes (saith the first of them) we promise greater benefits vnto thée, than vnto him, for he shall reigne in déed, but with an vnluckie end: neither shall he leaue anie issue behind him to succéed in his place, where contrarilie thou in déed shalt not reigne at all, but of thée those shall be borne which shall gouerne the Scotish kingdome by long order of continuall descent." Herewith the foresaid women vanished immediatlie out of their sight. This was reputed at the first but some vaine fantasticall illusion by Mackbeth and Banquho, insomuch that Banquho would call Mackbeth in iest, king of Scotland; and Mackbeth againe would call him in sport likewise, the father of manie kings. But afterwards the common opinion was, that these women were either the weird sisters, that is (as ye would say) the goddesses of destinie, or else some nymphs or feiries, indued with knowledge of prophesie by their necromanticall science, bicause euerie thing came to passe as they had spoken. For shortlie after, the thane of Cawder being condemned at Fores of treason against the king committed; his lands, liuings, and offices were giuen of the kings liberalitie to Mackbeth.

Spirit of the Age

In honour of April Fool’s Day, this week’s video looks at the classic cocktail the “Tom Collins”:

The name Tom, by the way, is a biblical name from a semitic root meaning “twin”, and the name Collins is a diminutive of Nicholas, which comes from Greek meaning “victory people”, the first element being Nike, the goddess of victory, who of course lends her name appropriately to the sportswear company. The inspiration for this video came from the story of the “Tom Collins” hoax, which presented the opportunity to cover a number of historical hoaxes, many of which I knew about because I’d been reading Justin Pollard’s entertaining book Secret Britain. The obvious timing for such a video was April Fool’s Day, so I could also include a bit about the history of that tradition as well. I should also draw special attention to the website of The Museum of Hoaxes, which provided much useful research, and is excellently well documented. (See the show notes page for all the sources used.) There’s also a timely footnote to this video in the recent rediscovery of that book Houdini hired H.P. Lovecraft (and co-writer C.M. Eddy) to write. You can read about the recovery of the manuscript of The Cancer of Superstition here.

The underlying theme behind this video, beyond the cocktail and the hoaxes and practical jokes themselves, is the way hoaxes tend to capture the spirit of the age they’re from. This is a bit similar to myth and urban legend, as I discussed in the video “The Story of Narrative”. When a hoax captures the public imagination, it sometimes does so because it is in tune with the zeitgeist, and reflects the preoccupations of the time. In this blog post I’ll have another look at some of the hoaxes mentioned in the video, as well as some others, in their historical context, to track this phenomenon.

But first a few more details about the origins of April Fool’s Day. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest English use of the phrase April Fool is from 1629 in Edmund Lechmere’s A Disputation of the Church wherein the Old Religion is Maintained: “For my part, I was not willing at the sight of yours (which I espied by meere chaunce, and neuer sawe but once) to be made an Aprill foole, and therefore would not be so farre at your commaund.” So the tradition has been in England since at least that time. John Aubrey’s reference mentioned in the video is somewhat later in 1686. Though it isn’t a clear reference to April Fool’s Day itself, the earliest use of the French phrase poisson d’avril is apparently from 1508 in the poem “Le livre de la deablerie” by French composer Eloy d’Amerval: “maquereau infâme de maint homme et de mainte femme, poisson d'avril.”

Now as for Geoffrey Chaucer, he establishes the date for the story "The Nun's Priest's Tale" in a rather roundabout and perhaps intentionally foolish way: “whan that the month in which the world bigan, that highte March, whan God first maked man, was complet, and passed were also, sin March bigan, thritty dayes and two” (3187-90). (You can hear me reading out the full passage here, if you wish). Thirty two days since March began would be April 1st, but the following passage gives complex astrological indications that are more in keeping with a date in May: “Bifel that Chauntecleer, in al his pryde, his seven wyves walking by his syde, caste up his eyen to the brighte sonne, that in the signe of Taurus hadde y-ronne twenty degrees and oon, and somwhat more; and knew by kynde, and by noon other lore, that it was pryme, and crew with blisful stevene.” (3191-97). Now apparently, this information, if you account for the 12 days offset because of the change from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar, would yield a date of May 3rd, so many editors emend the text to “sin March was gon thritty dayes and two” making the date instead May 3rd there as well, a date Chaucer mentions quite often in other contexts as well and so is often referred to as his favourite date. What I wonder, though, is how much would this be off because of orbital precession in the 600-plus years since Chaucer’s time? At a rough guess I figure it would be out by over a week. Perhaps someone with more astronomical knowledge than I have can work this out. And in any case, all the manuscripts seem to agree on the reading “sin March bigan” so I’m inclined not to emend to “sin March was gon” and to try to make sense of the text as we have it. Since the tale contains a rooster and a chicken debating the philosophy of predestination and prophetic dreams, perhaps this dating is supposed to be inconsistent. In any case, take it as you will, but it may be of some small interest that Valentine’s Day also may owe its origin to a confused date in a Geoffrey Chaucer poem, The Parliament of Fowls, as I discussed in my video “Cuckold”. Or maybe Chaucer is just pranking us! (For more information, you can read The Museum’s detailed analysis of the Chaucer question here.)

There’s another connection here to Chaucer and my video “Cuckold”, in which I talk about the cuckoo bird. In the Wise Men of Gotham story we hear about the foolish attempt to fence in a cuckoo bird. Also, the cuckoo makes another appearance in the Scottish tradition, where April 1st was (and perhaps still is?) known as Hunt the Gowk day, gowk being the Scottish and northern English word for the bird, related to Old English geac. In the Scottish tradition the celebration continued with April 2nd being Tail day, when you stick a paper tail on people’s back, reminiscent of the French paper fish prank. So there does seem to be cluster of connections here, for what it’s worth.

In addition to the King John Gotham story, a number of historical events have been connected with April Fool’s Day over the years, such as the Dutch capture of Den Briel from Spanish forces on April 1, 1572, but none of these connections seem entirely convincing either. Now it’s possible that the tradition reaches back to some misrule festival which often takes place in the spring, such as the Roman festival of Hilaria, though there is little direct evidence for such links, but it’s been argued by Ronald Hutton (see show notes page) that as the misrule elements traditionally associated with Christmas faded, greater emphasis came to be placed on the spring equinox and April Fool’s Day. For more on the many and varied theories on the origins of April Fool tradition, see the Museum of Hoaxes very detailed page on the topic.

The Dreadnought hoax (about which you can read in full here) actually had a precursor. While studying at Cambridge, Horace de Vere Cole became friends with Adrian Stephen (Virginia Woolf’s brother), and the two started to get up to a number of minor pranks to entertain themselves. Their most elaborate was to pose as dignitaries from Zanzibar and enjoy an official reception from the mayor of Cambridge. It was years later that they decided to pull off a more elaborate version of the same prank, this time with some other confederates involved. The stunt seems to have been responsible for launching into public attention the loose collective of artists, writers, and other intellectuals known as the Bloomsbury group, which most famously included Virgina Woolf, and was in keeping with their pacifism and rejection of Victorian values.

There’s an interesting backstory to the Cock Lane Ghost affair. William Kent and Fanny Lynes were not legally able to be married as she was the sister of his now-deceased wife, and by law that was considered incest. They had thus moved from Norfolk to London to take advantage of the relative anonymity of the big city, where they could pose as a married couple. While staying at the house of Richard Parsons, Fanny would hear an otherworldly scratching noise, which she took to be her sister’s warning from beyond the grave of some great danger. This backstory and the mayhem of the Berners Street hoax (about which you can read more fully here), highlight the dramatic demographic changes going on in England in the 18th and 19th centuries, with the staggering shift in population from the countryside to the urban areas. From the 18th century onwards there was a dramatic overall rise in the English population, and following a trend already beginning in that century, at the start of the 19th century something like one-fifth of the population lived in cities, but by the end of the 19th century it was more than three-quarters, while the rural populations dropped.

This alarming trend in demographics and the perceived threat of industrialisation is also one of the things that lies behind the celebration of nature and the countryside by the Romantic poets and artists. And it also explains their attraction to the medieval which they saw as a kind of golden age of a rural, pastoral world, with knights riding through the idyllic country on their chivalric quests. So they were ripe for the Ossian and Thomas Rowley medieval literary forgeries perpetrated by James Macpherson and Thomas Chatterton respectively.

Of course the science vs superstition tension also lies behind the Piltdown Man and Cottingly Fairies hoaxes. Photography was still relatively new by the beginning of the 20th century, so perhaps it’s not so surprising that people were fooled by photographs of cardboard cutout fairies. It’s interesting to note the impact that near ubiquitous camera phones have had on similar phenomena like UFOs and Bigfoot or Loch Ness Monster pictures. If one were to extrapolate from the frequency of such pictures before the camera phone, we should be flooded with evidence of the supernatural by now. Times change.

There are some other hoaxes that I didn’t have time to mention in the video, such as the 18th century rabbit babies of Mary Toft about which you can read the (disturbing) details here. What’s most notable about this hoax, which was accomplished by inserting rabbits (or parts of rabbits) into Mary Toft’s birth cavity after a miscarriage, is the number of highly respected physicians of the day who were fooled by it. This became the subject of scandal and satirical mockery, most notably by famous artist and pictorial satirist William Hogarth, who was critical of the gullibility of the so-called men of science in particular and of the general public more broadly, producing satirical cartoons about hoaxes of the day such as that of Mary Toft and Scratching Fanny. See for instance below, Hogarth's Cunicularii, or The Wise Men of Godliman in Consultation (1726) illustrating Mary Toft and her rabbit babies, and his Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism (1762) featuring references to both Mary Toft and Scratching Fanny, as well as other contemporary examples of secular and religious credulity.

I mentioned a couple of hoaxes that Edgar Allan Poe was involved in, but in fact the Museum of Hoaxes documents a number of others here. As it turns out Poe was quite interested in hoaxes, not only perpetrating them but debunking them, as he attempted to do with the famous chess-playing Turk automaton, which appeared to be a mechanical device that could play and win against living opponents. Of course, as Poe suspected, there was an expert chess player hidden inside the machine (though not as he imagined in the body of the Turk itself, but in the mechanism beneath it) who was making the actual moves by means of a pantograph-like connection to the Turkish automaton above his head. The Mechanical Turk came with the Industrial Revolution, when machines were beginning to replace the labour of people. The idea of an actual thinking machine therefore played into the fears people might have of being replaced by machines.

The Mechanical Turk was invented by one Wolfgang von Kempelen who designed the speaking machine that Charles Wheatstone constructed and improved on that I mentioned in the “Erasmus Darwin” video. Interestingly, Poe used the name von Kempelen in another of his hoaxes. He published a newspaper article claiming that a German chemist named Baron von Kempelen had discovered an alchemical process to transform lead into gold, in the hopes of dissuading the inevitable gold rush that was about to ensue after reports of gold in California. One might imagine this was also a swipe at the creator of the Mechanical Turk as well.

One of my favourite hoaxes is the fictitious theologian Franz Bibfeldt. It began as a invented footnote in a student term paper, and eventually grew into an enormous in-joke. Academics and their senses of humour!

Speaking of academics, some scholars believe that Marco Polo’s Travels were a hoax, and that he never actually visited China, but instead based the book on second-hand accounts, due to omissions and inconsistencies in his record. There is much debate on this text, and ultimately it’s probably unprovable one way or the other. Of course the medieval period was full of faked holy relics — you can imagine how easy it would be to fake the finger bone of a saint or some such, and how lucrative it would be for the church donation box to have such relics. I mentioned perhaps the most amusing example of this in the Holy Prepuce, the supposed foreskin of Christ, in the Christmas video “The Twelve Days of Christmas”.

Of course sometimes writers can be taken in by hoaxes, as in the famous case of The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown, who seems to have been taken in by a kind of crazy pseudo-history book about the supposed continued bloodline of Christ, co-written by Doctor Who scriptwriter Henry Lincoln, if that gives you any sense of the level of fantasy involved here, called The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, which was itself based on ‘evidence’ created by a surrealist hoax perpetrated by one Pierre Plantard and his confederates in the 1960’s. According to both books, the secret society known as the Priory of Sion, and the the Knights Templar preserved the Holy Grail, which was not the cup of Christ, but actually the secret bloodline of Christ and Mary Magdalen, which ran through the Merovingian royal family and right up to the present day, with secret messages and clues to its existence hidden in the art and architecture of the middle ages and renaissance. At least the convolutedness of Dan Brown’s plot lives up to the convolutedness of the trail of this hoax!

Apparently Plantard was trying to fabricate a connection between himself and the medieval French Merovingian royal family (and denounced the whole thing as fiction once the holy bloodline business had been introduced by Lincoln and his co-writers), and this is an interesting parallel with the hoax of the Vestiarium Scoticum, a supposedly old manuscript that established the provenance of the clan tartans in Scotland. This hoax was perpetrated by John and Charles Allen who were trying to claim they were the grandsons of Bonnie Prince Charlie. Unfortunately, though it was all made up, many of the tartan patterns are still considered as genuinely old and therefore official. As with the Da Vinci Code, which generated considerable tourist traffic to sites mentioned in the book, sometimes hoaxes get out of hand and take on a life of their own.

And it seems that the spirit of our current age is such that we want to believe in ancient or secret origins to things, and the easy availability of vast amounts of information appears (perhaps surprisingly) to make it easier to spread misinformation — so that we’re often taken in by conspiracy theories or other such hoaxes. If only our gullibility were just the result of too many Tom Collinses!