#19 - William James Sidis - The Doubt

Originally published December 2011. This one is part of the Billy Sidis series, and not the first one. This is Part II. It is, however, far and away the most-visited.  I don't understand why.  This post was notable for an argument in the comments.

There have been a number of folks who maintained that William Sidis (1898-1944) was the most intelligent person who ever lived.  I spent an entire series on that, and eventually concluded that he was very intelligent, but not in the category of the very best ever.  Wikipedia and other websites do not give as complete information as I do here, so if you are interested in Sidis, this is probably your best stop. In the posts and comments, we also discuss many issues about IQ, accomplishment, genius, what is intelligence, and changes in education.  It could keep you busy for a while, but I think it is entertaining as well as profitable.  I provide links to the rest of the series at the bottom of this essay.

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There are solid bits of evidence that might support the claim that William Sidis was a child prodigy, but each has its own weakness as well. He did enter Harvard at age 11 – but his father, a psychiatrist and professor, had been pressing for this for years. Harvard had taken on a few other prodigies, including Buckminster Fuller and Norbert Weiner, and Boris Sidis pressured them into it. Billy did indeed give a lecture on four-dimensional bodies to the mathematics society at age 11, and Weiner, who was present, states it would have done credit to a first year graduate student. But it was not new information, as has often been claimed and was reported then. It was available elsewhere – Weiner simply doubted that William Sidis had access to it, and gave him credit for thinking it out himself. Yet it was not impossible that such material came his way, especially with a father determined to show the world his son was a genius (and his methods thus correct).

Boris Sidis made claims throughout his son’s childhood for his genius – that he read the NY Times at 18 months; taught himself Greek and Latin from 3-5 years old; mastered other tongues before age 8. William did indeed know English, French, Greek, and Latin at age 8 – but we do not know how well. It was claimed he had taught himself Turkish and Armenian. Which of his schoolteachers, pray, could evaluate that? Even if called out on it if someone pulled a passing Turk out to test him, Sidis could claim that he read the language, not spoke it, and the handwriting of natives in a language tends not to look like the printed matter, so he could dodge there as well. Among the Amerind languages he used to pad his total, some were extinct, existing only in a few manuscripts. I suppose he might maintain he knew them as well as anyone did, but my suspicions are running high at this point. Boris stated that William wrote a book on anatomy at age 5. No one seems to have ever seen even a portion of such a manuscript. William did graduate cum laude from Harvard. But entrance and even excelling then were not the accomplishment they would be now. It was fun to reread again, even for me, and the comments are exceptional throughout.

Here’s a bit about Boris’s career. He ran a sanitarium in Portsmouth NH  at what had been the Frank Jones Mansion. The link will give you a flavor. In addition to educational theories, he specialized in hypnosis, dreams, and dissociation, and opposed Freud.

It is hard to be fair to Sidis from this distance. His book The Tribes and The States,  about the 100,000-year history of American Indians, is insanely wrong. He gets their genetics, languages, and government badly wrong. But I am not certain what knowledge was available to him in the early 20th C. Though his theories did not turn out to be true, he may have had ideas worth exploring – no worse than the theories of other experts – based on what was known. I suspect not. He also believed in Atlantis, which figures prominently in his discussion, and reads into the known historical record with great certainty things that even then would have been highly speculative. He insists that “farthest Thule,” where Phoenicians and others raided for slaves was Newfoundland. There is simply no evidence this is so.

I have asked James of “I Don’t Know But…” (sidebar) to evaluate his treatise on reversible universes, and parts of our universe where the Second Law of Thermodynamics runs in reverse, The Animate and the Inanimate.  It seems like a 70’s physics undergrad on weed, frankly. But then, most physics beyond Einstein’s Special Relativity sounds like that to me anyway, so I’m no judge. Perhaps it’s brilliant.

His later writing on freedoms and rights seems to be mere rambling. His sister claimed that Billy could speak all the languages in the world, others more modestly put his total at fifty, and Boris’s at 27. How do we know this? Who could tell? This sister, Helena, is also the source for his IQ being in the range of 250-300 – that he had tested on a civil service exam at 254 later in life. Actually, he had finished 254th in the country that year, according to another report. A creditable accomplishment, but not genius by any stretch.

The discussion from the first part about whether someone gets the adjective intelligent without some body of accomplishment is interesting, and I will not neglect it. The idea that Sidis was HFA/Asperger-y also deserves some consideration and may explain his thinking at least as well as the genius/fraud continuum. Yet I am hesitant to go there, as dishonest puffery does not tend to be associated with the Autism spectrum. It’s not unknown, but being offended by minor deviations from the truth is more common.

 And Another One Bites The Dust - Part One
Prodigy (Sidis Part Three)
About That 1869 Harvard Entrance Exam (Part 3A)
Smart, Wealthy, Athletic - What It Means To Be Intelligent. A Digression On IQ.
But If It's True...

Talk-Like-A-Pilgrim Day

Talk like a pilgrim, according to the experts at Plimouth Plantation.

Actually, we talked like this a lot in the AVI household.  Ben still says "Huzzah" in entirely appropriate context.  If you consider any use of "huzzah" in the 21st C appropriate, that is. Part of the trick is to think how they must have actually said it in the flesh. If you think of it as huZZAHH! like a drunk at a basketball game you might be closer than our usual Shakespearean actor, stressing the second syllable only a bit more.

And I would quibble with Plimouth's usage just a touch.

Bunǎ Dimineaţa

The song title means "Good Morning."  It is a family joke, as Jonathan uses it as his universal Romanian phrase - not only a greeting, but ordering from a menu, giving directions, telling people his name...mostly because it annoys me, or used to.

The name of the band means Hospital Emergency (you can see that if you take it apart), or idiomatically, The Emergency Room.  Language note:  The ul at the end of the first word is the definite article in Romanian, comparable to el, la, or le in other Romance languages.  Getting stuffed at the end, instead of preceding the word, is how they do it in Slavic languages.  When something is common to diverse languages in an area, it is called Sprachbund, and the postposition of the definite article is a Sprachbund in the Balkans.

Search words

One of the search terms that brought up my site last week was  ზურაბ წერეთელი

Yeah, I looked it up and see the connection.  Still pretty funny, though.  The script is Georgian, or more specifically, Kartvelian (which I used to get confused with Karelian and thought was one of those weird distant language relationships.)

Grammar Rule

Which is correct, to say "Everyone except me," "Everyone, excepting me," "Everyone except I," or "Everyone, I excepted."  Or is there some other formulation that is best?

Answer in the first comment.

Etymology At Dawn

A witty etymology site Bradshaw of the Future, has a negative eval of Ryan and Jetha's Sex At Dawn: the Prehistory Origins of Modern Sexuality. The book quotes a non-expert on his opinion of how much American slang comes from African languages, such as boogie coming from mbugi, a Ki-Kongo word for "devilishly good." These just-so stories of where words come from pop up all the time, and they usually have about as much value as the urban legends of where phrases like "rule of thumb" or "get your goat" come from. He goes on to mention another bad example, Daniel Cassidy's "There's a Sach Ur Born Every Minute," which I also wrote about with some irritation in 2007. Short version: A clever person can easily make up a plausible-sounding etymology. The trick is to find evidence in the historical record that the word did develop the way you claim it does.

The blogger is annoyed that the authors of a (reportedly) well-researched book would quote something so tenuous so readily, when a relatively modest investment of time could fact-check it. That reminded me of Bill James's irritation with David Halberstam's getting the facts wrong in Summer of '49, which I also commented on about the same time. James wonders if DH's Vietnam reporting was as sloppy. I have since learned that it's even worse. Halberstam's main source for his writing was a North Vietnamese spy.

The internet: fact-checking your ass for years.  If you want to be credible in the difficult things, you must prove trustworthy on the simple ones.

I ran across Bradshaw of the Future through an older post, about the etymology of "checkmate."

Pinker and Anti-Pinker

I am a fan of Steven Pinker's thinking and writing.  Well, the first third of every chapter of his writing, I should say.  I don't know what happens to him, but he starts off beautifully and then becomes boring.

Pinker is in agreement with Chomsky that a good deal of the structure of language is embedded in us at birth (The Language Instinct, 1994).  There is not universal agreement with this among linguists, cognitive scientists, and others who study this, but I think the evidence is pretty strong.  Extending this idea, Pinker wrote The Blank Slate about ten years ago - it is actually a refutation of the blank slate theories of Rousseau - and did a wonderful job, really, of showing how much of human behavior is not learned but comes pre-loaded.

Now comes his The Better Angels Of Our Nature.  I haven't read it, only read his NYT article and excerpts from the considerable discussion about it at the moment.  But the argument seems to be that the dramatic decline in war, murder, and violence over the last few centuries, especially the last 60 years has been the result of ideas that have become more common.  Worse, the ideas he thinks are doing much of this good work are Enlightenment ideas - rather the heartland of blank slate thinking.

So which is it?  There can be balancing, mediating effects, and subtlety in all large ideas, of course.  We need not insist that a thinker taking a side in a discussion be always required to be at the extreme of that side, granting no sensibleness to his opponents.  But if he is going to largely switch sides, we want him to at least notice this, so he can explain his change.  Pinker doesn't seem to.  He thinks he's not very far from where he was two, or ten, or twenty years ago.  I don't get it.

Here is some of what I think is behind it.  Pinker is devoutly secularist, and believes that the Enlightenment comes from the application of nonreligious, humanist, scientific ideas to understanding humans.  Well, he's rooting for his side, whether he sees it or not.  Confirmation bias is powerful in history.  Let me root for my side, just for a bit.  I think a better case can be made that these Good Ideas can be seen growing, century by century, in every place that Christianity sits down and influences the culture.  The murder rate started dropping long before not only the Enlightenment, but even the Renaissance. 

We can't replay history and measure what would have happened if Christianity had not come to Europe.  But we can say that the growth of science, the rights of man, tolerance, and all the good stuff we take for granted in the modern world seems to have slowly grown up like this precisely once in human history, other regions falling back after progress.

Secondly, the violence of the French, Russian, and Chinese Revolutions are left off the ledger.  They are not left out of his book, but they are absent from the calculation of the ideas affecting the world.

It's curious.

Evolution - Creationism Series

Reposted from July 2010. Nothing new to see here, but folks might like the review.

Creationism and Politics
There are some interesting practical considerations, however, and that might be fun. (For me, that’s who.) Volokh Conspiracy recently had a thread about a 7D creationist running for political office, and whether that should be an automatic disqualifier. As an evangelical and an evolutionist, the question interests me.

Thought Experiment: Genesis and Science
If the first eleven chapters had somehow gone missing for centuries and were only recently rediscovered, it would be academics telling Christians they should accept them gladly, and the fundamentalists who would resist this most strongly.

Evolution and Young-Earth Creationism
Impressions Versus Science

If you bing, google, or yahoo up “first humans” you get a collection of estimates of upright figures who lived somewhere further than 2 million years ago. Artistic images from the Olduvai and Laetoli discoveries likewise show bipedal creatures, a bit hairier than us, heads a little different, but clearly meant to emphasise their similarity to us. They hold hands. They look off to the horizon. I will call this the National Geographic impression, as that is the popular-culture representative of the textbooks and educational videos which teach that view.

Evolution and Young-Earth Creationism 1A
Journal entries for grad student assigned to watch earth develop.
2,100,000 years. No change to report. This batch got smarter than the other apes and then stopped dead. I think we should drop humans as a study.

2,200,000 years. There might be some hints of progress here, but I'm probably imagining things because I want to see it. Hope springs eternal in the Martian gazorninplat and all that.

Evolution and Young Earth Creationism 2
It was pretty clear what I was driving at with the contrast between the National Geographic 2M+ years impression of the origin of humanity versus the Genesis impression. For 97% of that 2,300,000 years, those creatures didn’t have sophisticated language as we know it.

Rapid Language Development
There are lots of genetic and cultural foundations to language that likely developed in spurts over time. Yet some final genetic piece seems to have been a tipping point that sent communication from primitive to complex very rapidly

Founding Population
We pulled the beginning of behaviorally modern humans from over 2 million years ago down to something like 50,000 - perhaps even 10,000 years ago. But there are other objections to the Genesis account. It narrows the founding population to two people, Adam and Eve, for example

Location, Location, Location
When we compared anatomically modern humans (minimum 2M years ago) to behaviorally modern humans (max 60K years ago), I gave a hint that even stricter definitions of behaviorally modern humans might bring our definition even closer than the important dividing line of the emergence of language. Because Ice Ages forced the widely-spread peoples into now-tropical areas, we seemed to learn to interact more peacefully about 18,000 years ago.

Impossible Things
We change our thinking not because we find one impossible thing in our old beliefs, but because we find too many


To Correct Impressions
As historian Paul Johnson notes, both the Wellhausen (Critical Method, Documentary Hypothesis) followers and the fundamentalists had a comforting simplicity to their ideas: The fundamentalists that the Bible was always literally true word for word, the scholars that it never was.

Suitable For Linking

Here we go again.

Those of you complaining about Rick Perry's pronunciation of nuclear hope, by drawing attention to it, to illustrate how dumb he is. Actually, you are only drawing attention to how dumb you are. If you had studied linguistics you would know that. Physicists with PhD's - even working at Oak Ridge, NASA, prestigious universities - might use the southern regional pronunciation if they are from the south. It makes you cringe because you are a regional snob, not because they are stupid, and thou, smart.

I know you were taught in fifth grade to go over to the dictionary to look up the correct pronunciation, and that was that. The first pronunciation was considered the best, because it was most common. But the preeminence of one accent in a language is now recognised for the accident that it is. If a native speaker uses it, it's acceptable. Merriam-Webster, for example:

Though disapproved of by many, pronunciations ending in \-kyə-lər\ have been found in widespread use among educated speakers including scientists, lawyers, professors, congressmen, United States cabinet members, and at least two United States presidents and one vice president. While most common in the United States, these pronunciations have also been heard from British and Canadian speakers.

But, but, you protest, look at the way it's spelled. The pronunciation should be...

Let me introduce you to the pronunciations envelope/onvelope, or often/offen. Let me introduce you, in fact, to the entire flippin' English language. Pronunciations and usages have cultural indicators attached to them, and I, as a snob, make sure that mine reflect my educated New England background, and taught them to my first two children. I understand where the feeling comes from. My teachers and family sniffed and looked down their noses too. But they were dead wrong, and when we learn better we should act on it.

Unless, of course, being a bigot was your original goal. Absent that, you mark yourself as someone who cares more about reading status than reading books.

A Year And A Day

In English Common Law, you couldn't be tried for a homicide if the person died more than a year and a day after you injured him. A reasonable general rule at the time. The idea has continued on to the present, but in the last few decades, states have repealed or overturned that, because we can keep people alive in vegetative state much longer.

In Welsh mythology, Pwyll trades places with Arawn, Lord of the Underworld, for a year and a day. That may go back well before 1000 AD. (Yes, you Lloyd Alexander fans will be recognising many of the names in that.)

In Chaucer's "Wife of Bath's Tale" the knight is given a year and a day to complete a quest. 14th C.

The Dunmow Flitch was a side of bacon that any couple could claim if they could swear they had not argued for a year and a day. Over 7 centuries, about a half-dozen accomplished this. 1100 AD.

There may be older uses. You will notice that the formula prevents people from being too approximate, thinking they have got "about a year" to serve, or be punished, or married. It makes the longish period of time nonetheless definite.

Strunk & White & Ted & Alice

Geoffrey Pullum states beautifully what I have long thought about The Elements of Style in his Chronicle of Higher Education article, Fifty Years of Stupid Grammar Advice. I was assigned the book at William and Mary in 1974, and believed it for fifteen-twenty years after. Perhaps I should blame everything on that.

A sample of Pullum's takedown.

The book's toxic mix of purism, atavism, and personal eccentricity is not underpinned by a proper grounding in English grammar. It is often so misguided that the authors appear not to notice their own egregious flouting of its own rules. They can't help it, because they don't know how to identify what they condemn.

"Put statements in positive form," they stipulate, in a section that seeks to prevent "not" from being used as "a means of evasion."

"Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs," they insist. (The motivation of this mysterious decree remains unclear to me.)

And then, in the very next sentence, comes a negative passive clause containing three adjectives: "The adjective hasn't been built that can pull a weak or inaccurate noun out of a tight place."

That's actually not just three strikes, it's four, because in addition to contravening "positive form" and "active voice" and "nouns and verbs," it has a relative clause ("that can pull") removed from what it belongs with (the adjective), which violates another edict: "Keep related words together."

I was always more partial to Richard Mitchell, the Underground Grammarian. All his books are available online for free now. I read the first two, and especially loved Less Than Words Can Say (better advice, but the anecdotes in the The Graves of Academe are better.) I don't recall reading the other two. I should.

Commenter Erin (who is an English teacher) put me on to this and also sent this video. There is an American version as well, but I like this better.

Learning Languages - Weak Arguments

Kenneth Anderson of Volokh has linked to an essay on the importance of Americans learning foreign languages. I disagree with that more each year. I think some Americans who are good at it should learn foreign languages and the rest of us just get a flavoring for the idea that foreign languages are well, different. Learning a language is supposed to improve the brain, but there's not evidence for that; it is supposed to broaden the mind but I don't see evidence for that either. People who have put a lot of effort into learning a language subjectively feel that it is valuable, but other learnings requiring effort might have been equally valuable, or more.

Certainly, if you intend to live somewhere else, it pays to learn the language as young as possible - which everyone has known for a century but schools still don't do.

Berman is the current president of the Modern Language Association, reminding me of the guys who would come up to the band and say "you guys could really use a harmonica." Yeah, really? And say, you don't happen to play the harmonica, do you you? Who'da thought it? Yet even aside from that, if this is the best one can put forward in praise of learning languages, then there's barely any need to attack the idea.

Monolingualism, he said, "is a disadvantage in the global economy. If you get off the plane in Germany and take a cab, you can't count on the driver speaking English," said Berman. "I would call that a disadvantage."

As would speaking fluent French or Japanese equally be a disadvantage. Unless the idea is to learn them all?

She (MLA Executive Director Rosemary Feal) pointed out that virtually all other industrialized countries require second or third language study in the school system: "The United States should be a leader in this global competency and not be seen as lagging behind."

Why? Isn't that the point you are attempting to prove? What if it's wasted time? Shouldn't the US then be a leader in abandoning it?

People with traditional, and especially classical educations believe in the learning of languages, especially Latin, because they are associated with that package. They know the whole they received is better than the current offerings of education, and thus conclude that the parts must all be an important part of this. First, I challenge the idea that the traditional or classical education is better (and my minor was in medieval literature, remember); second even if it is better, that is no evidence that a,language is a necessary part of it.

A Stunning Postmodernist Achievement

I have had my own sendups of postmodern and deconstructionist thought, but nothing of the quality of this site. Each time you visit, it gives you a different, randomly generated pomo essay.

Context

Part of what has impressed and worried me about Watson winning at Jeopardy is how difficult context must be to program. A coworker said "Meredith is Genesis" to the intern yesterday. Only about half the people present, all of whom work in the NH mental health system, understood what was being said.

If you play with it, you could find a dozen possible meanings for the reference, but would likely be wrong. (Michael and Retriever might pull it out.) The full meaning of the phrase is "The town of Meredith, NH is in the service region of the community mental health center Genesis Behavioral Health in Laconia."

That degree of subtlety would be difficult to teach a computer. One can see how it could be programmed to know it is in a NH mental health context and thus assign certain meanings to words that have multiple referents. Or one could also program it to recognise "Meredith" as a girl's name or a surname, and "Genesis" as a rock band or a book of the Bible, but even that gets tricky. Meredith is also a lakeport here, and of course many things in the town are named after it.

Plus subtle mishearings. These things are so tricky, in fact, that human beings often get them wrong in conversation. Minimalist references are common in our speech and we get by them 90% of the time. But not all the time. (Does this happen more frequently to married couples, or is it just because there is more conversation about diverse topics, and thus more opportunity? Or because one is male and one female?)

I don't know how you teach a computer to sort through those many meanings, some of which have never been associated before in all of human speech.

Silly Sisters

I just got the joke, years later. Maddy Prior of Steeleye Span sometimes sings with June Tabor under the name "Silly Sisters." Steeleye Span was known for singing ballads and folk songs from the 16th-18th C* in modern arrangements, and Tabor liked to push that back even farther when she sang with Maddy.

The word silly has changed over the years, see below. It originally meant "happy," or "blessed," and that is the sense that these two Englishwomen are playing off, for those who might notice. Blessed Sisters, and the songs preserved from that era are often Christian. Maddy is clearly some kind of believer, June Tabor clearly not (which is why she doesn't show up in any of the videos here). Most of the others who have sung with Prior over the years don't give much evidence of Christian belief either, but she apparently can enforce her will often enough that they do marvelous versions of hymns and carols. The harmonies are quite intentionally of the raucous, barroom sort, though they do them well enough that one could only wish that an 18th C pub ever sounded so good.

I'm going off script for my Christmas carols here, because these are clearly performance. Yet they still capture much of what I hoped for singing along, especially if you love harmony.







Silly: Cognate with German selig, meaning happy, and goes back to Proto-Indo-European, of course, or I wouldn't mention it. Related to hilarious in that way.

O.E. gesælig "happy" (related to sæl "happiness"), from W.Gmc. *sæligas (cf. O.N. sæll "happy," Goth. sels "good, kindhearted," O.S. salig, M.Du. salich, O.H.G. salig, Ger. selig "blessed, happy, blissful"), from PIE base *sel- "happy" (cf. Gk. hilaros "gay, cheerful," L. solari "to comfort," salvus "whole, safe"). The word's considerable sense development moved from "blessed" to "pious," to "innocent" (c.1200), to "harmless," to "pitiable" (late 13c.), to "weak" (c.1300), to "feeble in mind, lacking in reason, foolish" (1570s).

Shakespeare's sense in "Two Gentleman of Verona" is somewhere between the the innocent and foolish meanings, I think. Do no outrages On silly women or poor passengers.

*They tried their hand at more modern songs - just to prove they could do it, I think - such as Rag Doll" and "Black Freighter."

Wicked Surprising

A linguistics post that even Jonathan and Ben will like. It had to happen eventually, just by law of averages. Michael too, as his wife figures in the end of the discussion.

It feeds my conceit when a group conversation comes to wonder where something comes from and others turn to me expectantly, believing I might know, or at a minimum, could find the origin. There is a significant downside to this, however, and I've got one here: when the question looks immediately to be vague and unsatisfying in answer, and I will have to come back empty-handed. However strongly I may suspect that the answer will be "no one really knows," I dare not say it at the outset, for someone present may come across an obviously spurious answer some months down the road, and it will be a poor show for me to correct that. Or worse, someone may encounter a very possible answer in the future, and I would be on record as having talked through my hat. So the research must be done. Fortunately, such searches often reveal interesting tangential information even when the search proper winds away into obscurity.

In discussing New England regionalisms, I was offered the challenge of finding out where the use of "wicked" as a synonym for "very" originates. No one really knows. (I knew that.) But we can't stop there, can we? We have to find collateral information to illustrate that no one really knows.

The OED claims it is L20, Late 20th Century, but that can't be right. Though that usage had reportedly fallen away in Manchester and Nashua (which explains why I did not use it as a child but was familiar with it from YMCA camp), I can guarantee it was in common use in the 1960's, which is M20, not L20. Still, that seems wicked recent. I would have thought it older. Not wicked old, but earlier than that.

Yet it's not recorded before 1960 anywhere I can find. It is not surprising that any slang term is greatly under-represented in print, no matter how hoary, but there are usually at least a few that slip through. The usage is more closely associated with Boston and with Maine in popular discussion, and much-used these days to give a flavor of authenticity to the New Englandness of this or that: LL Bean's Wicked Good Moccasins, Greenbush Wicked Good Soap, The Wicked Good Guide to Maine, and so forth. Tim Sample and Fritz Wetherbee both frequently use wicked as an intensifier in their dialect humor.

But you can't find it in Marshall Dodge's Bert 'n I. We'll come back to that. (If someone does find it in Dodge, let me know.) This is a good place to insert a fascinating link - well, fascinating to Anna and Sponge-headed Scienceman anyway - about the commodification of Maine's ruralness, with the premise that the emphasis on peripheral features of Maine culture were consciously used to create a tourist draw.


There is a seemingly related usage of wicked as "skillful," recorded in England and in E20 in America, notably F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise, written in 1920: "Tell 'em to play ‘Admiration’!’ shouted Sloane... ‘Phoebe and I are going to shake a wicked calf.’" And this in turn seems to be related to earlier senses of difficult, dangerous, or intense in a bad or evil sense, such as a wind or a curve in the road. Though Fitzgerald was not a New Englander - went to Princeton. Various comment sections also have entries farther afield, from Canada, the Midwest, and England, of people remembering its use as a simple intensifier in the 70's. But even those examples carry a whiff of the "skillful" or "dangerous" usages, such as "a wicked curveball."

It is a fairly automatic fantasy in folk linguistics, when something occurs both in England and in some rural area of the original 13 Colonies to leap to the conclusion that the word has come down on parallel tracks from some 17th C origin. These sometimes prove out in nonstandard verb tenses, such as swum or heered, but such parallelisms are rarer for nouns and adjectives. And it is almost inconceivable for slang, which changes at a far faster rate than standard speech. Slang is tightly bound up in the social solidarity of generations, and with wittiness, which requires a certain novelty.

Once one has even thought to question whether the conventional wisdom about anything is true, all previously-known data is seen in a new light. I have long accepted the CW that "wicked" as a simple intensifier has a long lineage in New England, especially in Boston and Maine. But my inability to illustrate that causes me to reverse field, and relook at the data I already had.


So, Marshall Dodge doesn't use it.

We did a comic bit about old Yankees when I was at a summer program in 1970 that drew highschoolers from all over the state, and "wicked" never figured in it. Many used it as their own slang - wicked fast, wicked late - but not attributed to old codgers. Nor did it appear in a paper I did in college for History of the English Language about the Eastern New England Dialect. I don't have a personal copy of Hans Kurath, but I would have read it in entirety then - no wickeds anywhere. Kurath published in 1939.

Mrs. Clark, who founded my son's Christian school, did not allow her children (who are my age) to use "wicked" as an intensifier. This is unlikely to be the case for slang one grows up with unless it is quite vulgar, and even less likely for words one grew up hearing adults use. To discourage slang in general is one thing, but drawing a line to resist the moral deterioration of a synonym for evil being used neutrally is more likely when the term first appears on the stage.

I don't recall adults using it when I was a child. It was used by people older than I, but not a generation older. My own family avoided slang anyway, and may not be a good example - but when you grow up and live in the same place, you have a wide variety of acquaintances, from lowlife to elegant, and my parents had both. I don't think I heard any of them use "wicked." It was kid slang. People need to ask their old Yankee parents about this, I think.

I don't believe I ever heard the phrase "wicked good" until I heard Tim Sample use it in the 1980's. I took his word for it that Maine'ah's traditionally said it, and it seemed a natural extension of the usage I had grown up with. Certainly, it would persist because of the irony once coined and spread rapidly, but that doesn't imply it would have been common five years before.

But I don't think it has a long history. I think "wicked" as an intensifier is postwar. And "wicked good," advertised as a charming ruralism of old salts and venerable backwoodsmen, is more recent still. Those salts may be old now, in 2010, but they didn't learn that phrasing from their own grandfathers. They learned it on the school playground in the 1940's.

Update: Sponge-headed Scienceman wrote to Tim Sample and got this reply. I don't know that it helps much, but it's interesting.

Hi Dennis,
Thanks for your email. I was born in northern Aroostook County in 1951 and grew up on the coast. I did in fact hear the word "wicked" used quite frequently both as a modifier ( wicked good, wicked cold, etc. ) and an exclamation ie; Wicked! , a term used not unlike how Awesome! would be used today. So it goes back at least to coastal Maine the 1950's based on my first hand my experience. I've also noted an interesting linguistic phenomenon in that the only other place I hear and see the word used as it is in Maine is in the Caribbean islands I've visited. Here's an unscientific guess about that. I think that the true origins of wicked are likely to be found ( like so many other shards of New England dialect ) in the British Isles. 18th and 19th Century British traders did a brisk business in that part of the world and there were major trade routes between the Maine coast and Puerto Rico in the age of sail. Who knows but that's my guess.
All my best,
Tim Sample

Onomastics

Just a list of boy names that have become girl names. As you can see, this has been going on for some time. Each new one always sounds strange and inappropriate to me, but apparently we get used to it fast enough.

And no, they never go in the other direction. What the baby-name pages call androgynous or unisex names are merely names switching from male to female.

Leslie
Terry
Tracy
Beverly
Kelly
Shirley
Ashley
Dana
Jordan
Jamie,
Casey
Whitney
Sydney
Florence
Lindsey
Hillary

There's a strong tendency for the -y and -ly names to switch over for girl use. It is clearly more acceptable for a girl to have a boyish name than a boy to have a girlish one. There are a few possible explanations, but I lean toward the idea that masculine names often have higher status in terms of strength and solidity.

Eastern Dialects

Hans Kurath did the initial work on a linguistic atlas of the United States in the 1930's. It turned out to be much more involved than expected, and he only finished the section from the Appalachian Mountains eastward. He recorded not only pronunciation - do you say aunt or ant, pecahn or pecan -but word-frequency: whether people said "cellar" or "basement" or used both, observing a distinction between the two. Whether one says "firefly" or "lightning bug." This is how it looked in 1939.

The back-tracing to the 19th C involve a lot of guesswork, but suggest something similar.  Language and dialect are always changing, especially as immigrants are moving in from one continent, and people born in a place are moving west in search of land, but this was likely approximately the same.

 This is how the whole country looks today. If you go to professional linguist and Christian missionary Rick Aschmann's site you use this map in interactive form.  This is is hobby of decades, and it is quite remarkable. 



One can see the settlement pattern of Americans from the eastern regions moving pretty much WSW across half the country, until it all fragments around the Mississippi River, becoming less distinct.

My personal favorite is bubbler, the eastern New England word for a water fountain. It is not used in the rest of the country, except one small patch of Wisconsin. I have no idea why. Make up your own theory on that.

Ofen and Often

The "t" sound is coming back to often after being away for 300 years. When I was younger, I don't think anyone used the pronunciation of often-with-the-t. I noticed it a few years ago and researched it to try and understand what was happening. I wondered at first if my pronunciation ofen was more of a New England pronunciation, gradually vanishing as it was exposed to a national tendency to keep the t. This did not turn out to be true.

Pronouncing the "t" is an overcorrection, used by frequent readers who suddenly worried about 20 years ago whether they had been saying it wrongly all their lives. They hadn't. Ofen was the only correct pronunciation until recently. But the reemergence of the "t" has been explosive, and at least 25% of the population uses it now. I will hazard a guess that it is people who have more exposure to the archaic word oft that are leading the change.