BLATHERSKITE

A noisy talker of blatant rubbish; foolish talk or nonsense.

This is actually a Scots word, really a pair of words, known from the seventeenth century on. These days, though, it’s more American than either British or Scots. That came about through one of those curious accidents of linguistic history that make the study of etymology such fun.

Both halves of the word seem to be from Old Norse. Blether is a Scots word meaning loquacious claptrap, which comes from Old Norse blathra, to talk nonsense; it exists in various forms now, such as blather or blither (if you call someone a blithering idiot, as people in Britain often did in my youth, you’re using the same word, though most of the meaning had by then been leached out of it). Skate (skite, as Australians and New Zealanders will know it) is more problematic, but is the Scots word for a person held in contempt because of his boasting, which may derive from an Old Norse word meaning to shoot (and, if true, is probably the origin of the American skeet, as in skeet shooting, so that phrase actually means “shoot shooting”).

Blatherskite is first recorded in an old Scots ballad called Maggie Lauder, attributed to Francis Sempill (or Semple) and dated about 1643, still well known today. There are various transcriptions of the first verse, one being:

Wha wadnae be in love
wi’ bonnie Maggie Lauder?
A piper met her gaun tae Fife
and speirt what was’t they ca’d her.
Right dauntingly she answered him,
“Begone ye hallanshaker.
Jog on your gate ye blether skyte,
my name is Maggie Lauder”.

A rough translation into modern English is:

Who wouldn't be in love
with beautiful Maggie Lauder?
A piper met her going to Fife
and asked what people called her.
Discouragingly she answered him,
“Go away, you vagabond!
Be on your way, you talkative boaster,
my name is Maggie Lauder”.

The song was pleasantly risqué (the piper, for instance, explains how all the girls swoon when he blows his chanter) and was very popular with the American side in the War of Independence. This introduced bletherskate, later blatherskite, to the American vocabulary, where it has remained ever since, albeit hardly on everyone’s lips daily.

LEECHCRAFT

The art of healing.

Leeches have in earlier times been widely used in medicine as a way to remove “bad blood” from patients and to restore the balance of the humours or bodily fluids. After a century and a half in which they fell almost totally out of use, they are returning in some specialised areas, a practice called hirudotherapy, a term formed from hirudo, the Latin name for the little beasts.

So it would be reasonable to assume that that’s where leechcraft comes from. But this is a case where language trips us up. There have been two meanings for leech in English. The other one, long defunct, refers to a doctor or healer, from Old English læce, of Germanic origin.

Though it’s hardly an everyday word, you stand a good chance of coming across it in modern works of fantasy, to which it lends the necessary feeling of ancientness or otherworldliness, as in the late André Norton’s Wizard’s World of 1989: “But she was renewed in mind and body, feeling as if some leechcraft had been at work during her rest, banishing all ills.”

At one time a dog-leech was a vet, though that term could also serve as a pejorative name for a quack doctor. The ring finger was once called the leech-finger (also the medical finger and physic finger), a translation of Latin digitus medicus. We’re not sure how it got that name, though some writers say it was because the vein in it was believed to communicate directly with the heart and so gave that finger healing properties, for example in mixing ointments. Engagement and wedding rings are traditionally put on that finger of the left hand for the same reason, which is why the vein became known as the vena amoris, literally “vein of love”.

Negative Numbers and Exponential

The birth of negative numbers
In the early days of algebra, negative numbers
weren’t an accepted entity. Mathematicians had
a hard time explaining exactly what the numbers
illustrated; it was too tough to come up with concrete
examples. One of the first mathematicians
to accept negative numbers was Fibonacci, an
Italian mathematician. When he was working on
a financial problem, he saw that he needed what
amounted to a negative number to finish the
problem. He described it as a loss and proclaimed,
“I have shown this to be insoluble
unless it is conceded that the man had a debt.”

Expounding on Exponential Rules
Several hundred years ago, mathematicians introduced powers of variables
and numbers called exponents. The use of exponents wasn’t immediately
popular, however. Scholars around the world had to be convinced; eventually,
the quick, slick notation of exponents won over, and we benefit from the
use today. Instead of writing xxxxxxxx, you use the exponent 8 by writing x8.
This form is easier to read and much quicker.
The expression an is an exponential expression with a base of a and an exponent
of n. The n tells you how many times you multiply the a times itself.
You use radicals to show roots. When you see sqrt(16), you know that you’re looking
for the number that multiplies itself to give you 16. The answer? Four, of
course. If you put a small superscript in front of the radical, you denote a cube
root, a fourth root, and so on. For instance, 4th root of 81 = 3, because the number 3
multiplied by itself four times is 81. You can also replace radicals with fractional
exponents — terms that make them easier to combine. This system of
exponents is very systematic and workable — thanks to the mathematicians
that came before us.

Classical Genetics Between 1900 and 1953

Johann Gregor Mendel


Classical Genetics Between
1900 and 1953
In 1906, the English biologist William Bateson
(1861–1926) proposed the term genetics for the
new biological field devoted to investigating
the rules governing heredity and variation.
Bateson referred to heredity and variation
when comparing the similarities and differences,
respectively, of genealogically related organisms,
two aspects of the same phenomenon.
Bateson clearly recognized the significance of
the Mendelian rules, which had been rediscovered
in 1900 by Correns, Tschermak, and
DeVries.
The Mendelian rules are named for the
Augustinian monk Gregor Mendel (1822–
1884), who conducted crossbreeding experiments
on garden peas in his monastery garden
in Brünn (Brno, Czech Republic)well over a century
ago. In 1866, Mendel wrote that heredity is
based on individual factors that are independent
independent
of each other (see Brink and Styles, 1965;
Mayr, 1982). Transmission of these factors to
the next plant generation, i.e., the distribution
of different traits among the offspring, occurred
in predictable proportions. Each factor was responsible
for a certain trait. The term gene for
such a heritable factor was introduced in 1909
by the Danish biologist Wilhelm Johannsen
(1857–1927).
Starting in 1902, Mendelian inheritance was
systematically analyzed in animals, plants, and
also in man. Some human diseases were recognized
as having a hereditary cause. A form of
brachydactyly (type A1, McKusick 112500) observed
in a large Pennsylvania sibship by W. C.
Farabee (PhD thesis, Harvard University, 1902)
was the first condition in man to be described as
being transmitted by autosomal dominant inheritance
(Haws and McKusick, 1963).
In 1909, Archibald Garrod (1857–1936), later
Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford University,
demonstrated that four congenital metabolic
diseases (albinism, alkaptonuria, cystinuria,
and pentosuria) are transmitted by autosomal
recessive inheritance (Garrod, 1909).
Garrod was the first to recognize that there are
biochemical differences among individuals that
do not lead to illness but that have a genetic basis