Lexicographers are persistent creatures. Never content, they scour each newly published edition of a hitherto unprinted text for antedatings, or a sighting of a word in the wild that predates the current first citation in the dictionary. Last year, their diligence provided a new entry in the Middle English Dictionary for the word ‘gibberish’ that, though once thought to be an invention of the mid-16th century, actually makes its first appearance around 1450. A religious guide to vices and virtues warns its readers that to mutter prayers inattentively or without proper piety is to utter ‘giberisshe too Godde’ (talk gibberish to God). The writer assumes that gibberish is equivalent to foolishness and insincerity. But what should we think about this strange part of human language-making?
Though its arrival in English has been redated, the etymological origins of ‘gibberish’ remain a little mysterious. Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755) popularised a folk-etymology connecting ‘gibberish’ with ‘chymical cant’, technical terms of alchemy and science as used by ‘Geber’, the Westernised name of Jābir ibn Ḥayyān, not so much one author but an identity to which much medieval Arabic scholarship was attributed. The truth is much more ordinary: ‘gibberish’ probably comes from ‘gibber’, one of a clutch of verbs such as ‘gobble’, ‘gabber’, ‘jabber’ and ‘gab’ that onomatopoeically imitate the sound of unintelligible babbling. However, the first instance of ‘gibber’ – in William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet where the ‘sheeted dead’, corpses risen from their graves, are imagined to ‘squeak and gibber’ ominously in the streets of Rome – comes much later than ‘gibberish’.
Time has been strange lately. The spatial bounds of my world are narrow—grocery store, neighborhood walk, cluttered desk—but time keeps passing, albeit with new distortions. Days feel at once brief and interminable; a week ends without my realizing. On a Friday that might as well have been a Monday, I revisited some poems by Czeslaw Milosz. His work explores the disorientation of time, the pain of dislocation, and the porous border between community and solitude. He writes with awe and bemusement about both small moments and large expanses of time. He evokes eternity in everyday encounters between people, and as a result, his poems feel at once lonely and communal, metaphysical and down-to-earth.
The question asked whether the Conway knot — a snarl discovered more than half a century ago by the legendary mathematician John Horton Conway — is a slice of a higher-dimensional knot. “Sliceness” is one of the first natural questions knot theorists ask about knots in higher-dimensional spaces, and mathematicians had been able to answer it for all of the thousands of knots with 12 or fewer crossings — except one. The Conway knot, which has 11 crossings, had thumbed its nose at mathematicians for decades.
Before the week was out, Piccirillo had an answer: The Conway knot is not “slice.” A few days later, she met with Cameron Gordon, a professor at UT Austin, and casually mentioned her solution.
“I said, ‘What?? That’s going to the Annals right now!’” Gordon said, referring to Annals of Mathematics, one of the discipline’s top journals.
“He started yelling, ‘Why aren’t you more excited?’” said Piccirillo, now a postdoctoral fellow at Brandeis University. “He sort of freaked out.”
Thirty years ago, “just for a laugh”, actor Peter Gordon wrote a poem for his wife Alison, and left it under her pillow. She liked it, and so he carried on, every day for 25 years. To this day, Gordon continues to add to the thousands of poems he had written for Alison, even after her death four years ago.
Certain landlocked cities have lighthouses. On such rivers as the Rhine, the Seine, and the Saint Lawrence, lighthouses gave warning of dangerous areas. In London, the Trinity Buoy Wharf light is still in existence. This hexagonal, pale-brown brick structure is located in an area known as Container City. I remember my father telling me about these buildings when I was a child. To my ears, accustomed to the Spanish language, the word container, which I never completely understood, sounded warlike; I imagined gigantic metal constructions, improbably conical or spherical in shape. It never occurred to me that they would be like shoeboxes.
There is a certain grim irony in Patrick Barkham’s book coming out during lockdown. His quiet but compelling arguments about the importance of kids getting out more and connecting to nature might appear slightly surreal at a time when children the world over have been so long stuck indoors. Barkham tells us how much the area over which children roam has shrunk over three generations; little can he have imagined when he wrote Wild Child how much more constrained their lives were about to become.
But precisely because of these extreme conditions, Wild Child is a book that deserves to flourish.