22 Feb, 2010
Once upon a time you bought your fish from a fishmonger, your hardware from an ironmonger, and your apples from a costermonger (a coster was an old variety of apple). This was as long ago as eight hundred years.
Monger evolved from the Old English word mangere, which meant a dealer or trader. As time went by, it started to take on an overtone of being petty and disreputable (probably because of its connection with street peddlers) and became used most often in a derogatory sense. It has had a very keen usage in this insulting sense for four hundred years. New usages are invented in all ages.
Spenser used warmonger in his poem the Faerie Queene (completed in 1596). A warmonger is someone who encourages war. Fashionmonger was used about the same time (equivalent to our modern fashionista, someone overly devoted to fashion), as was meritmonger, which referred to a do-gooder. There was even wordmonger for a writer who uses words pretentiously or without regard for their meanings.
Scaremonger (and also fearmonger) comes from the late 19th century. Scaremongering when used in advertising is called shockvertising where it is often used in an attempt to change undesirable behaviours such as binge drinking or smoking by showing their worst effects. The 19th century also had the first uses of rumourmonger and gossipmonger.
The latest of the mongers is ecomonger. It is a derisory term used to describe greenies who push an extreme environmental agenda. In the great climate change debate the against side is represented by climate change sceptics and the for side by the ecomongers. The rest of us sit somewhere in between, hoping that the apocalypse is exaggerated and that the politicians really can do something to encourage consumers to reduce their energy use.
12 Feb, 2010
In North Yorkshire (where I was born), if you dance nine times counterclockwise around a ring of toadstools it was believed you will come under the spell of the fairies. I remember this story from my childhood although it was a ring of mushrooms of which we needed to be wary.
In the ancient folklore of pagan Britain, to go widdershins (widershins or withershins), was to walk around an object counter-clockwise. In a magical sense it was to walk against the light, or in the opposite way to the movement of the sun, making it an act contrary to God (in the Northern Hemisphere at least). To go widdershins while reading prayers backwards was considered to be a way of connecting with the devil.
In religious senses walking around an object for sacred purposes is called circumambulation. It is very much a part of modern religions, in Islam pilgrims circle the Kaaba in Mecca; Hindus circle shrines as a form of prayer, and in Judaism the priests will circle the altar in one direction. However, the direction and number of times vary between religions.
The Victorian’s, in 19th century England, revived a lot of the pagan myths and folk stories as so-called fairy tales (and thus we assume avoided the ire of the church). One folklorist was Joseph Jacobs (an Australian-born Jewish scholar educated at Sydney Grammar and Sydney University). One of Jacobs’ best known fairy tales is Childe Rowland that clearly explains the consequences of going widdershins.
Rowland and his elder brothers lose their sister, Burd Ellen, when she disappears after chasing their football around a church. Rowland seeking an explanation goes to the “Warlock Merlin” who tells him that she:
… must have been carried off by the fairies, because she went round the church “wider shins”–the opposite way to the sun.
Childe Rowland, after both his brothers fail, rescues his sister. The story ends with:
And they reached home, and the good queen, their mother, and Burd Ellen never went round a church widershins again.
Which is good sense, considering all the trouble everyone had gone to.
In Scotland there were many forms of pagan circumambulation being practised up until about 150 years ago. Among them were circling the fields with torches at Halloween to ensure fertility the following year; circling a patient three times before administering cures; or circling to approach a grave during a funeral. These rituals involved circuiting deisual (or making the deasil), which meant in the direction of the sun, which was therefore sacred. This is the opposite to widdershins.
4 Feb, 2010
Avatar is a word from the ancient, cultured, Sanskrit language of India. Sanskrit is part of the Indo-European family of languages, which includes Greek, Latin and, of course, English.
Avatar has a long history in Sanskrit literature having been used in the works of Pāṇini, the world’s first grammarian who wrote the Ashtadhyayi (the eight chapters), a book of Sanskrit grammar in the 4th century BC.
The Oxford Dictionary defines avatar as the form a deity takes when descending to earth in an incarnate form (that is embodied in flesh). Although it is translated into English as incarnation, it is perhaps better described as a manifestation. In Sanskrit avatar means descent; it comes from ava meaning off, away, down and tar to pass over.
Avatar is most commonly used to refer to the forms that Vishnu (one of Hinduism’s major gods) took when he appeared on Earth. The ten most famous incarnations of Vishnu are known as the Dashavatara (they are the fish, tortoise, boar, half-man/half-lion, dwarf, Rama-of-the-axe, Lord Rama, Krishna, Buddha and Kalki).
An early Christian gnostic sect, the Docetae (from the Greek dokesis, meaning appearance or semblance), also known as the Illusionists, believed that Christ did not come to earth in the form of a man but only inhabited the semblance of a body, a concept similar to that of an avatar. This concept the Catholic church considers heretical.
The concept of the avatar has been picked up in the information age by Internet users to describe their online representations. It can be any visual representation from a simple, logo-like picture to the complex animated figures used to inhabit the virtual communities or gaming environments of the web. The animated online avatars come in many forms but can be divided into three main types: the combat avatar used in shoot-em-up games such as World of Warcraft; the social avatar that provide the opportunity for social interaction; and the commercial avatar (known as a bot), used by an organization to interact with its customers.
The recent film, Avatar, combines both concepts: the hero lives in another world by using the avatar, a flesh and blood alien representation of his body which he controls by computerised mind control. On one hand it is a real world manifestation of the man but on the other it is a virtual body controlled by a computer interface.
It is unusual for the language of information technologists to have such a conceptual and spiritual basis. There are various suggestions as to who first used avatar to refer to the online personality or manifestation of a person. However, considering that avatar originally described the earthly manifestation of a heavenly god and that an online animated character represents the manifestation of a real person, it is more difficult to understand why you wouldn’t use this most appropriate word.
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